We are now moving towards the conclusion of a world process which began 60 years ago, when the British submarine HMS Seraph landed the American general Mark Clark ashore at Oran, in Algeria. He was paddled ashore by Royal Marine Commandos, gold pieces heavy in his money belt.
The process of US world domination which is now coming to fruition in one Arab country was thus begun by the British, in another Arab country, that night in October, 1942.
Clark's arrival was the prelude for the invasion of French North Africa by Anglo-American forces; and by the time the campaign on that continent was over, the relationship had changed for ever, and so too should the relative positions around the hyphen. The Americans had become the greater force in the field. From then on, a proper term would be the Americo-British alliance.
If you want to know about American shortcomings, you can do no better than to look at events at that time If you want to know their virtues, look at those same events also. And if you are interested in this crucial but amazingly neglected period in world history, you will be well rewarded by buying a copy of the recently published An Army at Dawn (Little, Brown) by Rick Atkinson. It is a quite extraordinary, if sometimes slightly over-written work, drawing from about 1,000 books, interviews and articles as source material.
Mark Clark was typical of the US army officers of his generation: he was, almost above all else, fiercely anglophobic. America was then a very distant place indeed, often infantile in its view of the world, and both its children and its army officers were educated in the pure mythology of its glorious wars of independence: Bunker Hill and Valley Forge in one war, and New Orleans in another.
All Americans were raised to dislike and distrust Britain, to feel both inferior and superior to it - that classic post-colonial contradiction. Moreover, they had fed themselves on the fatuous untruth - still widely believed - that the Americans had won the first World War, though in fact its generals in 1918 had quite shamefully wasted thousands of good lives repeating the bloody lessons the British and the French had learnt from 1914 to 1917.
So Mark Clark and his generation thought they had nothing to learn from anybody, least of all the British, whom they hated. They loathed their manners, their style, their speech, their culture and their empire. As in 1918, they declined in 1942 to learn from the British experience; but unlike 1918, they soon discovered that they had no choice but to listen and learn. And though they didn't know it at the time, they were inheriting the British imperial mantle.
There was little indication of this then. British soldiers initially despised the GIs, referring to them as "Alice". The US army was really poor. Its culture was strong on violence, perhaps a relic of the murderous Indian and Filipino wars, but it was very low on organisational efficiency. A brainless machismo and an arrogant and wholly unmerited presumption of competence infused the officer corps. "My main anxiety is the poor fighting quality of the Americans," reported that patrician Ulsterman, General Alexander. "They simply do not know their job as soldiers, and this is true from the highest to the lowest."
The Americans were soon in for a very rude shock. It is now known as Kasserine Pass, where US troops were hammered by Rommel's Africa Korps. Not merely were some of their men shown to be cowards - so too were some of their senior officers, and incompetent to boot.
But the Americans had an uncanny ability to learn, embodied in the person of Dwight Eisenhower. He was a man of small accomplishment when he arrived. But as American reverses intensified, he grew into his job; and perhaps he was aided in this by his affair with his "British" woman driver, who is known to history as Kay Summersby, but who was in reality Kathleen McCarthy-Morrogh, born in Inish Beg, County Cork, and raised in Skibbereen.
It was not Ike alone who grew within himself. So too did the American soldiers and the American people. They quickly revealed their enormous natural talents: boundless energy, incurable optimism and indefatigable enterprise. As one British major wonderingly reported of them, "They are unlike anyone else in the speed with which they put things right, if and when they are ordered, persuaded or led to do so." On March 19th, 1943, 60 years ago to the very day that the present war to liberate Iraq began, American forces, who had learnt so quickly on the job, achieved their first unaccompanied victory in North Africa, and their first of many in the West.
Only a month after the defeat at Kasserene, in five brilliant days, US troops advanced 75 miles, took three towns, seized 2,000 square miles, and wiped out an entire German division, hitherto all-conquering veterans of the Eastern Front.
The Americans still had much to learn: but they were on their way to becoming the first and only world superpower. It was at a price. So the last word must go to a young GI, writing to his parents after he had helped beat off an German counter attack, 60 years ago this very week. "Well folks, we stopped the best they had," his letter began. Unfinished, it was later found beside his dead body: the price of empire, the fee for freedom.