Anfa had set French rearmament at eleven army divisions on a US model, as well as a French air force, and a refurbished French navy, all of which would prove difficult to accomplish with purely imperial manpower, so that a growing resistance on the French mainland might fill the manpower gap and bolster French clout in the alliance. This concept received a trial run with the September 1943 liberation of Corsica, a campaign which allowed de Gaulle to oust Giraud from the CFLN, while revealing both the military ineffectiveness of the resistance and the political agenda of the communists. As a consequence, de Gaulle began to put a structure in place to control events upon liberation of the hexagon, while beginning a purge of former Vichy elements in AFN, a task that would prove divisive in the middle of a war. The benefits of the Italian campaign for the French were two. First, the removal of much of l’armée d’Afrique from AFN allowed de Gaulle’s consolidation of power there. Second, the Juin-orchestrated May 1944 breakthrough at Monte Cassino allowed l’armée d’Afrique to recover its combat laurels in a very tough military environment. Unfortunately, the rapes carried out by some members of the CEF following the breakthrough on the Garigliano called into question the command climate and tacit complicity of the CEF hierarchy, while the fallout momentarily poisoned relations between the French and Italian governments.

Operation Torch, the 8 November 1942 Anglo-American landings in French North Africa (AFN), strengthened and ballooned the Mediterranean into a major “Second Front” and put the Anglo-Americans on the strategic offensive until the war’s end. Torch also crystallized the contradictions of Vichy’s wartime posture, and dispelled all ambiguity of “the order to defend against whomever.” The collapse of the Vichy formula of a French Army surviving within a sovereign, neutral France, an open invitation to Axis forces to enter Tunisia and Constantine, and the scuttling of the French High Seas Fleet at Toulon confirmed France’s descent to the status of a second-, if not third-tier power. Going forward, Torch removed any incentive for the Germans to cease to meddle in French internal politics, and ironically accelerated Vichy collaboration. Torch became the first instance in which resistance was integrated into operational planning. The Darlan deal alienated the resistance in France and drove them into the arms of de Gaulle, making it virtually impossible for the Allies to jettison the nettlesome French Leader. AFN supplied both a geopolitical “trampoline” to advance the Allies’ strategic agenda and a fragile venue for France’s resurrection. The French reaction to the Anglo-American invasion was undermined in part by confused command arrangements in AFN, made more complex by Darlan’s fortuitous presence in Algiers. This chapter traces the tortuous hesitations of the French command in Algiers and Rabat, which allowed Axis forces to gain a foothold in Tunisia. The so-called “Darlan deal” struck between Darlan and Eisenhower to cease French resistance in AFN was to have far-reaching consequences. In the wake of Torch, all the accouterments of Vichy independence disappeared – the zone libre, the empire, the armistice army, and the fleet.