Prof. Greg Jackson

Guns arrive without ammunition.

Truly, some of these landings are, to use a soon-to-emerge military term, fubar.

Commander-in-Chief Dwight D. Eisenhower and Deputy Commander Major General Mark W. Clark are desperate to find a French commander who can stand down their Nazi-aligned Vichy countrymen.

With neither Winston Churchill nor FDR being fond of Charles de Gaulle, Ike turns to General Henri Giraud.

Henri, or Henry, is promising, but he arrives at Gibraltar from France with a penchant for speaking in the third person and a briefcase full of his own plans for defeating Germany.

He believes he'll be the supreme Allied commander in North Africa.

After hours of unproductive conversation with Ike and others, the Frenchman departs, stating, in the third person, naturally, Ike is not heartbroken.

Not after that waste of a breath of a conversation.

In fact, he found Henri Giraud so difficult, the cans and darkly jokes that they should arrange, quote, a little airplane accident, close quote, for the Frenchman.

Again, he's kidding.

Mostly kidding.

Anyhow, on to option two.

A man in Algiers purely by coincidence on a visit to his sixth son.

Vichy's admiral of the fleet, Jean-Louis-Xavier-François Dallon.

Yes, we met this admiral amid and after the British attack at Merse-et-Cabir.

The naval officer has no love for the Brits, but with the Allies closing in, he's willing to play ball now.

And that's just what Ike needs, a ball player.

The American commander desperately wants to end French opposition so he can get on with marching toward the French protectorate of Tunisia to hit Erwin Rommel's forces, already contending with the British out of Egypt.

So, in the name of pragmatism, Ike strikes a deal with the Vichy Admiral on November 22nd.

Francois Darlan orders a ceasefire and in return is recognized as the supreme French authority in French North and West Africa under the title High Commissioner.