24. The Well-Timed Assassination That Relieved the Allies of a Headache
Admiral Francois Darlan (1881-1942) was commander in chief of the French Navy at the start of WWII. After France’s defeat in 1940, he served in the collaborationist Vichy regime, rising to become its deputy leader. He was in French North Africa when the Allies invaded in 1942, and they cut a deal with him to get him to order the forces under his command to lay down their arms. In exchange, the Allies allowed Darlan to govern French North Africa and West Africa under Vichy’s policies.
That agreement became a diplomatic and public relations embarrassment for the Allies. The agreement set up Darlan, with his pro-Nazi record, as a rival of the Free French under Charles de Gaulle, who had never stopped fighting the Nazis. The embarrassment was finally lifted by a fortuitous assassination, when Darlan was killed on Christmas Eve, 1942 by an odd duck named Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle.
