End of an Expediency

The afternoon sun was streaking the white porticoes of the Palais d'Ete in Algiers. It was 3:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Before the pretentious entrance an official car drew up. Out of it stepped Admiral Jean Franc,ois Darlan, High Commissioner for French North and West Africa, followed by his orderly. Admiral Darlan mounted the steps of the palace and disappeared inside. He was walking to his death.

Through the dark corridors to his office the Admiral strode briskly. He approached the anteroom where visitors waited for interviews. The door opened; a young man stepped into the hall. He aimed a revolver at the Admiral's face and pressed the trigger. The Admiral staggered, lunged forward, blood spurting from his mouth. A second shot. He fell, and lay still.

Down the corridor the Admiral's orderly had just turned into his room. At the sound of the shots he whirled, rushed back to meet the assassin running toward him. At point-blank range the assassin fired twice again. The orderly fell, a bullet in his thigh. But others had arrived; the gunman was overpowered.

The small, stocky form of Admiral Darlan was lifted from the bloody floor. Outside his car still waited. He was carried into it, driven to a hospital. But it was too late. When he was taken from his car, Jean Francois Darlan, the turncoat collaborationist, was dead.

The Tangled Skein. Death came to the Admiral just six weeks after he had taken over the government of French

North and West Africa with the backing of the U.S. command. His swift change of allegiance was one of the war's greatest surprises.

In his brief career at the side of the anti-Axis powers he had wrought good and evil. Dakar had fallen to the Allies without a shot. The progress of the U.S. campaign had been sped. But Darlan's assumption of power had also unleashed a storm of anger and criticism among Allied peoples, widening dangerously the already existing split between the supporters of Vichy and De Gaulle. It had involved the U.S. in a tangled skein of international politics which was becoming more & more involved. Termed by President Roosevelt a "temporary expediency," the Darlan regime was gaining a firmer foothold with each day.

Now the assassin's bullet had brought the opportunity for a new beginning. In death Admiral Darlan opened the way for French unity, which he had rendered impossible as long as he had a voice in French affairs.

Unity at Last. There was one man on whom the Fighting French, the British and the U.S. could agree. General Henri Honore Giraud, the old escapist, had been picked for this role before the U.S. forces landed, but when he reached North Africa Darlan was there ahead of him and he had voluntarily yielded to Darlan. Now it was a question whether those North African leaders who had remained loyal to Darlan and Vichy would accept Giraud as their chief.

The man who swung the deal in favor of Giraud was the same man who six weeks ago had forced the acceptance of Admiral Darlan. Astute, pro-Vichy General Auguste Nogues, as Resident General of Morocco, held in his hands the power to keep quiet or arouse the Arab tribes. If he said the wrong words, 60.000 Allied soldiers might have to fight a major military campaign in Morocco's bleak and rocky hills. But Nogues said the right words again. He agreed to recognize General Giraud as the new authority.

Pierre Boisson, Governor of French West Africa (Dakar) and second most powerful figure in empire politics, came out immediately for Giraud. With these two men taking the lead--they were the only other logical successors--the other two members of the Imperial Council (Yves Chatel, Governor of Algeria, and General Jean Marie Joseph Bergeret, onetime Vichy Air Minister) fell in line.

The Council's meeting lasted only one hour. When the five men walked out of the sparsely furnished room in the Palais d'Ete it was announced that General Giraud had been elected unanimously (with Giraud apparently voting for himself). The new High Commissioner promptly issued an Order of the Day calling for unity "to assure the support of our Allies and the success of our armies." Said he: "Only one thing counts: France and her Empire. There is but one aim: Victory."

General Giraud was no politician, but, as a soldier, he could perhaps bring unity to France as no politician could. A Fighting French representative, General d'Astier de la Vigerie, second in command to De Gaulle, was already on the way to North Africa to confer with French and U.S. authorities there on steps to achieve unity between the French factions. The uncertainty which had at first characterized French reaction to the U.S. invasion was rapidly disappearing.

General Giraud's political stand was clear. In an interview granted just before Darlan's assassination he had promised French cooperation with the United Nations. "Most certainly," he said, would the French African Government cooperate, if not consolidate, with De Gaulle. For himself, he had renounced all political ambition, saying simply: "I am a soldier."

Plot or Pure Patriotism? Twenty-four hours after Admiral Darlan's death, the Imperial Council had held its first meeting to deliver judgment on the assassin. He stood before them, a 22-year-old French youth who had killed his man with a .25-caliber pistol. He had laid his plans with care, visiting Darlan's office in the morning to reconnoiter the ground. When informed that the Admiral was dead he had said only: "So much the better. You may kill me now."

Sentence was summarily delivered: death by firing squad. Next day it was announced that the sentence had been carried out at dawn in the midst of a German air raid, when the air was filled with the sound of ack-ack. Thus passed an anonymous killer, for those who knew the assassin's name were as scarce--and as mum--as those who had seen the execution.

If the assassination had been a conspiracy, no one said so either. President Roosevelt condemned the deed as "murder in the first degree." Axis propaganda was quick to accuse both Britain and the U.S. of its instigation on the ground that the Allies profited the most thereby. But there was just as much reason to think that Darlan had been killed by Axis instigation: his death might well have led to an upheaval in French Africa and the frustration, temporarily at least, of Allied plans. The official announcement said the murderer's mother was Italian and lives in Italy, but it added that there was no indication that she had anything to do with the assassination.

There was likewise the possibility that Darlan's assassination was an act of pure patriotism by a young Frenchman who hated collaboration. Said a Fighting French spokesman in a broadcast from Brazzaville: "Admiral Darlan's actions have finally caught up with him. . . . We can envisage thousands of reasons the assassin might have held as legitimate. ... He can say: 'I wanted to avenge my country of two years of treason and shame. ... I wanted to avenge so many of my comrades massacred at Dakar, Casablanca, Toulon. ... I wanted to avenge so many of my comrades killed on the battlefields of Syria . . . massacred at Madagascar. ... I wanted to avenge so many of my comrades who today live a convict's life in German factories, as a consequence of economic collaboration, the foundation of which was laid by Darlan.' "

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