Torch at Twenty Five—Eighty Years Later

A Flashback from the Archives: The all-star cast of Operation Torch, gussied up and together again, reunite and reminisce at a reunion to remember

All images courtesy of the Jacob Devers Collection, Box 57, York County Historical Center, York, Pennsylvania.

Fifty-five years ago in November 1967, twenty-three men filed into a small, private dining room at Washington D.C.’s Alibi Club, located at 1806 I St. NW.

The nondescript brick row house with its traditional green shutters and door was no stranger to such meetings.

Founded in 1884 by a group of “distinguished Washingtonians” and designed as a retreat from “the vicissitudes of domestic life and the rigors of business…in the pursuit of happiness in comfortable surroundings among convivial friends,” the anonymous three-story building was a haven for powerful socialites, diplomats, politicians, generals, and businessmen it counted among its members.

Of course, there were only fifty members in the Alibi Club — a number determined by the clubhouses’ compact dimensions; at 1400-square-feet, it was allegedly all the building could accommodate. Notably, per club regulations for a new member to join, another had to die.

The Alibi Club. (Wikimedia Commons)

The members tended “to be men of an age who no longer worry about what they’re going to be when they grow up,” one journalist observed in 1992. This included Supreme Court justices, secretaries of state, CIA directors, secretaries of war and defense, doctors, lawyers, and “innumerable supreme military commanders.”¹

It was this latter group of Alibi Club members — and their renowned acquaintances — who chose the venue for a memorable dinner on this day a just over a half-century ago.

It was a black tie affair. Dressed in tuxedos and bow-ties, the men filed into the building, winding past historic cannonballs and tiger skulls and cuneiform tablets and ceremonial swords and paintings of drunken sailors on display — “all those things our wives wouldn’t let us keep at home,” one member claimed — before entering the first-floor dining room.

Laid out like “a tavern of the 16th century,” the room’s dark wood paneling, fireplace, ornamental plates and other decorations surrounded a massive table with thirty Windsor chairs. The men found their seats, smiling and excited to catch up.

Twenty-five years earlier — to the day — each of the men seated around the table played some role in the Anglo-American invasion of Vichy French North Africa. When they met that evening to commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary, many of the details surrounding the event were still top secret.

At the center of the table, “grinning broadly and obviously delighted in the comradeship of old friends,” was former U.S. President General Dwight D. Eisenhower. As Supreme Allied Commander on November 8, 1942 when Allied forces went ashore in Morocco and Algeria, Eisenhower had been the principal figure in Operation Torch — a true baptism by fire in what ultimately became a remarkable career as an Allied commander.

Seven years after relinquishing the mantle of president and less than two before he would die of congestive heart failure, Eisenhower looked relaxed and excited to visit with his many friends and acquaintances — many of whom themselves enjoyed long, successful careers after the war.

Seated to Eisenhower’s left was Robert Murphy, a stoop-shouldered diplomat from Milwaukee who, as FDR’s primary representative in North Africa prior to Operation Torch, acted as a key intermediary between Allied forces and the French ashore.

For years prior to the November 8 landings, Murphy had built an extensive network of collaborators to try and facilitate the landings. He would later go on to play a crucial role as a civilian chief of the political affairs section at Eisenhower’s Mediterranean headquarters and beyond, eventually becoming Under Secretary of State after the war.

To Eisenhower’s right was General Jacob Devers, the second highest ranking American general to serve in Europe during World War II — second only to Eisenhower himself. Sporting a perennial smile that bespoke boundless charisma behind his humble personality, Devers would replace Eisenhower as a deputy Allied commander in the Mediterranean in early 1944 before commanding an army group in southern France and Germany by the end of the war.

Seated at the table was General Mark W. Clark, fresh off his presidency at the Citadel, a military school in South Carolina. Clark had been Eisenhower’s deputy commander-in-chief during Torch — a towering figure, literally, who eventually became commander of the U.S. Fifth Army in Italy and, after the war, commanded UN troops in Korea.

There was also General Lyman Lemnitzer, then-commanding NATO after serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During the war, Lemnitzer was a capable officer and operations planner on Eisenhower’s Allied staff, a man who, with Clark and several others at the table, had gone ashore in Algeria as part of a secret rendezvous to try and secure French assistance prior to the Torch landings — easily “one of the most bizarre episodes of World War II.”

Amazingly, Lemnitzer surprised the dinner party with his plus-one: Flying in from his NATO post in France, he brought with him a French farmer by the name of Jacques Tessier, the very man who had offered his home as the site of the secret underground meeting in October 1942 and who, when local gendarmes were alerted to strange behavior at his Algerian coastal home, had worked with Murphy to hide Clark, Lemnitzer, and their party in his wine cellar.

The dinner menu paid homage to the men who played leading roles in Torch. “Canapes Gaylord (for retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Bradley Gaylord), Potage Clark, boef Eisenhower, pommes de terre Murphy, legumes Lemnitzer, dessert Holmes, and vin ordinaire Wright.”

The man who took them ashore, a daring American submariner named Admiral Jerauld Wright, was also seated at the table. As a prominent Alibi Club member until his death in the 1990s, he was the reunion’s principal organizer. “Not a word was leaked about it,” Wright, the ex-Ambassador to Taiwan, later commented. “That’s how we wanted it,” remarked General Omar Bradley, Eisenhower’s close friend and faithful subordinate who went on to achieve five-star rank.

There were others present, too, exchanging laughs and making conversation. The list included Carter Burgess, a gifted staff officer at Eisenhower’s wartime headquarters who became Assistant Secretary of Defense; Sir Patrick Dean; Donald Gilpatric, economic advisor to allied forces in Algeria; Admiral John Hall, participant in the invasion of Casablanca; Major General Pierpont Hamilton; British Admiral Nigel Henderson; former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Ridgeway Knight; Major General Charles Saltzman; General Carl Spaatz; General Maxwell D. Taylor; Admiral Bernard Bieri; and General Elwood ‘Pete’ Quesada.

It is amazing today, now eighty-years removed from Operation Torch, to catch a glimpse of the event’s principal participants and organizers celebrating their own reunion twenty-five years on.

Rather than rehash their roles in that human drama, it seems most were just excited to be together again. “It was so top-secret only General Eisenhower had the whole story. And there was no need to rehash all that,” Bradley later told a reporter. “We simply had an evening of fellowship.”