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By Root 1107 0

Empire, though weak in modern equipment, contained large numbers of trained troops. There were several aspirants for the right to lead them, thereby bringing France back into the war and ranging her alongside the Allies. First there was de Gaulle, deliberately kept in the dark on the North African operation and shunted into the background by the Americans. De Gaulle was the one man who could claim to have been on the side of the angels from the very beginning, but he had no credit among the former Vichy officials. In his place the Americans flirted with General Henri Giraud, whom they initially liked better. But the man who had the support of the Vichyites was Admiral Darlan. It was a three-way standoff: de Gaulle was pure, but anathema to the Vichyites; Darlan was Vichy’s hero, but the Allies distrusted him; Giraud immediately proved utterly inept, so neither side wanted him.

Eventually, the Allies decided Darlan was their man, and Eisenhower, coming over to North Africa, agreed to recognize him as “head of the French state” in return for committing French troops to the war against the Germans. There was an immediate protest from the American and British publics against dealing with a man who had so openly connived with Germany, and Darlan began to be a considerable embarrassment. That embarrassment was removed on Christmas Eve when the admiral was shot by a young assassin. The assassin was captured and precipitately shot in his turn by the French authorities. In an incredibly confused welter of plot and counterplot, the assassin seemed to think he was acting on behalf of the Count of Paris, current claimant to the throne of France, who had been serving in the French Foreign Legion, as royal pretenders were not allowed to serve in the regular forces of the republic. Whatever the details, it was the Gaullists who profited by Darlan’s removal; de Gaulle quickly outmaneuvered Giraud and ended up the holder of the reins of French power.

All of that was but a sideshow. The primary problem was what the Germans would do. As usual, they reacted rapidly. The key to saving the situation in the Mediterranean was the control of Tunisia, which at its closest point is a mere hundred miles from Sicily. The French military commander in Tunisia, General Georges Barré, received a string of orders from both Pétain in France and Darlan in Algiers which not only flatly contradicted each other, but even contradicted themselves from one message to the next.

While the French dithered, the Germans acted, and on the 9th the first German units began arriving by air from Sicily. Barré’s outclassed forces pulled back out of Tunis and retreated westward to meet the British, frantically trying to leapfrog troops forward from Algiers. But Tunis is farther from Algiers than it is from Rome, and the Allies hardly had a firm operating base in the confusion of Algiers anyway. The Germans handily won the race and by the third week in November had created a thin line running along the mountain spine of Tunisia from Cape Serrat in the north about halfway down the country to El Guettar. The Allies managed to move the British along the coast, so that as they came up against this German line, they had the British 1st Army in the north, then a wide sector held by weak French patrols in the mountains, and then Americans coming into the line at the southern end.

Through November and into early December, the British made a try for Tunis, but German air superiority and then the advent of the winter rains stopped them. The Germans then launched attacks against the thin French patrols in the central sector, who had to be shored up by the diversion of arriving American armor. January was spent in sorting out the Allied forces on the one side, and in the arrival of Rommel’s remnants from Egypt on the other. By early February the Germans believed they had the situation in hand; their lines were secure, and they decided they could risk an attack. They chose the weak U. S. IInd Corps sector. The American public and leaders had wanted to get their troops in combat in the