Now Roosevelt, informed by Murphy, suddenly realized that, after only ten days, de Gaulle was close to assuming full control of the Committee. In what one Foreign Office diplomat described as a ‘hysterical diatribe’, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill on 17 June suggesting – again – that the time had come to break with de Gaulle entirely.115 Eisenhower was instructed to tell de Gaulle that French North Africa was occupied territory and the Americans would permit no weakening of Giraud’s authority. This was exactly the wrong tactic.
