North Africa Campaign

North Africa Campaign (1942–1943).Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa by American and British forces in November 1942, was the first major joint Allied offensive operation in World War II. It was the largest amphibious military operation undertaken until then. More than 500 American and British warships, troop transports, supply vessels, and landing craft took part. Over 100,000 troops, mostly Americans, sailed from the United States and Britain to Morocco and Algeria in the opening phase of the invasion.

The decision to invade North Africa ran counter to the U.S. War Department's desire to invade German‐occupied France across the English Channel in 1943. The Soviet Union also wanted the West to open a second front. The British feared that a cross‐Channel invasion would be premature and would lead to a slaughter on the beaches of France, while Allied control of the North African coast, the ultimate objective of Operation Torch, would expose what Winston Churchill called the “soft underbelly” of occupied Europe. Facing pressure from President Franklin D. Roosevelt for a bold, uncostly military move in the European area before November congressional elections, and British objections to an early cross‐Channel operation, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall reluctantly agreed to the invasion of Vichy French–held North Africa.

Marshall picked U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to be supreme commander, and British Adm. Sir Andrew Cunningham was chosen to be naval commander. They assembled forces, supplies, and naval and maritime support. Eisenhower also sent Gen. Mark Clark on a secret submarine mission to negotiate with local Vichy forces not to oppose the landings. Beginning on 8 November, four days after the British stopped German general Erwin Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt, the Anglo‐American landings commenced with commando port assaults and nighttime beach landings. The Allies aided Free French rebels and overwhelmed Vichy French resistance, which was relatively light. The Vichy military commander, Adm. François Darlan, visiting Algiers, was captured and persuaded on 11 November to order a cease‐fire. U.S. forces sustained 1,400 casualties, 526 of which were fatalities. As a result of the invasion, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ordered the German Army to occupy Vichy France and rushed troops to Tunisia before the Americans could conquer it. On 14 February 1943, the U.S. II Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall, was surprised in the Kasserine Pass by a German counterattack and temporarily thrown back. Fredendall was replaced by Maj. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., and his deputy, Maj. Gen. Omar Bradley, and they resumed the offensive. The U.S. First Army and Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery's British Eighth Army contained the Germans in Tunisia in April, and 250,000 German and Italian troops surrendered on 13 May 1943, marking the end of the North Africa Campaign. The U.S. casualities amounted to about 18,500.
[See also World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course.]

Bibliography

George F. Howe , Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West, 1957.
Carlo D'Este , World War II in the Mediterranean, 1942–1945, 1990.

Norman Gelb