Despite all the preparations at Gibraltar and elsewhere, and a need-to-know list numbering 800, somehow Torch achieved operational surprise. Both Vichy and the Abwehr assumed that such an attack was being considered, and the Italians even correctly predicted where it would land, but it was not spotted beforehand.65 Task Force 34 was lucky that a U-boat wolf-pack off the Moroccan coast had moved off to attack a British convoy sailing from Sierra Leone, although a total of twelve merchant ships were not.
In all there were nine Torch landings at three ports in Africa, which met differing levels of resistance from the Vichy French forces. Those at Casablanca were unopposed on the beaches, which was fortunate because they were the riskiest in terms of high surf and heavy tides. Nevertheless immediately afterwards they met the fiercest resistance of all three. Meanwhile, Major-General Lloyd R. Fredendall’s force attacked Oran over a 50-mile front, and met only ‘hesitant and uncertain’ resistance.66 The briefest resistance of the three was faced by Major-General Charles W. Ryder’s force at Algiers – the capital of the French Empire in North Africa – which attacked over a 25-mile front and suffered few casualties. The French Navy tended to be far more aggressive than the Army, recalling with undimmed fury the sinking of its fleet at Oran by the Royal Navy in July 1940. Yet its attempts at serious resistance collapsed after three days, once the sheer scale of the Allied offensive was revealed, especially at sea and in the air. Although Marshal Pétain issued orders for continued resistance against the Allies, the commander of all Vichy forces in Africa, Admiral Jean-Louis Darlan, whose great-grandfather had died at the hands of the British at the battle of Trafalgar and who Churchill said was ‘a bad man with a narrow outlook and a shifty eye’, nonetheless ordered a ceasefire on 10 November, just before Patton was about to storm Casablanca.67 Pétain’s actions were in part actuated by the knowledge that the Germans still had 1.5 million French soldiers in their POW camps. He did not save Vichy France, however, because the Germans invaded it that month, and soon afterwards Hitler congratulated Rundstedt, saying that he ‘took timely, improvised counter-measures to ensure the integrity and sovereignty of the Reich in face of French armed forces that had broken their word’.68 It seems that the French response to Torch satisfied neither the Allies nor the Axis. (As more Frenchmen bore arms for the Axis than for the Allies during the Second World War, it is unsurprising that there is still no official French history of the period.) 69
By the morning of 11 November, Casablanca, Oran and Algiers were all in Allied hands. The Americans fronted the operation both because they provided larger numbers and because the French were thought to hate the British more, so each British soldier sewed the Stars and Stripes on to his sleeve. ‘As long as it saves lives,’ said a British officer, ‘we don’t care if we wear the bloody Chinese flag.’70 Even after the success of Torch there continued to be gripes in Whitehall about various aspects of Eisenhower’s command – such as the fact that after its move from Gibraltar his headquarters in Algiers, which he originally envisaged numbering about 150 officers, eventually ballooned to 16,000 – but his victory in Africa put him in pole position for future supreme commanderships as they arose, assuming they were not given to either Brooke or Marshall.
The French Admiral Jean Laborde’s decision to scuttle three battleships, seven cruisers, twenty-nine destroyers, sixteen submarines and an aircraft carrier in Toulon on 27 November, rather than sail to Algiers, came as a serious blow to the Allies, as did the speed of the German response to Operation Torch. Two thousand troops were landed at Tunis as early as 9 November, and it soon became clear that Hitler intended to contest North Africa despite Rommel’s defeat 1,000 miles to the east. In retrospect it would have been better had Eisenhower stuck to his original plans for landings deep inside the Mediterranean as far east as Bône on the Tunisian border, even though it was out of reach of air cover from Gibraltar. Marshall feared that this might over-extend the American forces, however, and invite retaliation from the Luftwaffe in Sicily, or even a German counter-attack via Spain. Roosevelt therefore told Churchill on 30 August that he wanted to ‘emphasize that under any circumstances one of our landings must be on the Atlantic’.71 This meant that one-third of the task force would land 1,000 miles west of Tunis, the German capital in Africa and thus the ultimate objective, just in case the other two-thirds were sunk on their way to the Mediterranean or repulsed once ashore. ‘Caution prevailed and audacity stole away,’ rightly concludes a history of the campaign.72 Although the commander of the British First Army, Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson, was to reach Bône by land by 12 November, thereafter the winter rains set in and he found himself at the end of a long supply line fighting on too wide a front – at 50 miles – to be able to seize Tunis.73 Some units of the First Army got to within 15 miles of Tunis in early December, and 20 miles from Bizerta, but the Germans forced Anderson back with over a thousand casualties and the loss of seventy tanks. It was to take another six months for Tunis to fall.
Yet for two reasons it turned out to be fortunate for the Allies that the Germans in Africa did not collapse overnight in late 1942, and Eisenhower’s order to Anderson to give up the drive on Tunis proved correct, however much consternation it created in the British High Command at the time about the Supreme Commander’s fitness for the post. The first was that when they landed in Africa, as the American historian Rick Atkinson states, the soldiers of the US Army ‘were fine men, but not yet a good army’. To defeat the Germans in north-west France they would need to be both, and the campaign in North Africa proved the best possible training ground for this. As Patton admitted over his capture of Casablanca, there would have been ‘no victory to celebrate if his forces had been facing battle-hardened German defenders’.74 The second reason was that Hitler’s decision to continue to pour reinforcements into North Africa meant that the number of Axis troops captured – or ‘bagged’ in the British parlance of the day – was far higher than if he had ordered a withdrawal to Sicily immediately after Torch. Hitler actually sent far more men into Africa after Torch than Rommel had commanded in his initial struggle against Montgomery. In the campaigning after Torch, 8,500 Germans died, against around 10,000 Americans and 17,000 British killed, wounded and missing. Yet it was the 166,000 German and 64,000 Italian prisoners taken in Tunisia that puts that victory on a scale comparable with Stalingrad itself, a comparison that Goebbels himself privately made. And it was won at a fraction of the cost.
At a War Cabinet meeting on 16 November, Churchill said that Eisenhower had given a ‘convincing’ account of the political situation with regard to the French in North Africa, where after all they still had four divisions in Morocco, three in Algeria and one in Tunisia. Eisenhower’s negotiations with Admiral Darlan had secured the ceasefire, at the price of establishing the recently pro-German Anglophobe in power in Algiers. Churchill described Darlan as a ‘contemptible figure’, pointing out that ‘Whilst the French Navy was fighting, Darlan was negotiating.’ Yet Churchill equally despised Darlan’s rival, General Henri Giraud, who, he said: ‘1) signed a letter to Pétain saying he would behave, 2) then manoeuvred to get power for himself, 3) now he’s accepted a commission from Eisenhower to fight.’75 The discussion then moved on to American policy towards Darlan, which Eden said would outrage British public opinion; Churchill pointed out that Eisenhower was ‘not our Commander-in-Chief’ but added that the British ‘Can’t afford to upset Eisenhower just now… Eisenhower is our friend – grand fellow – don’t want to get across him.’ The Foreign Secretary said that nonetheless Washington should be told ‘fairly soon’ that the Darlan position should not be stabilized, and that ‘When [we] get [to] Tunis [we] ought to get rid of Darlan.’ He did not specify whether he meant this in a political or a physical sense.
The assassination of Admiral Darlan by a young French patriot in Algiers on Christmas Day 1942 threw the already volatile political situation into turmoil, but it helped to make possible a public reconciliation between the (British-backed) Free
French leader Charles de Gaulle and the (American-backed) Giraud. SIS involvement in the assassination has long been suspected, but never substantiated, although Lawrence Burgis’ verbatim notes of what Anthony Eden said at the War Cabinet meeting only six weeks before can only further encourage speculation. The cordial mutual loathing of de Gaulle and Giraud did not prevent them from shaking hands (albeit reluctantly) at a conference that was held in January 1943 between the British and American High Commands at Casablanca. It was there that Roosevelt announced that the Allies would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from the Axis, a decision that was agreed beforehand by the American Joint Chiefs of Staff and by the British War Cabinet. Although the President has been criticized for promulgating this position, as it was thought to strengthen the Nazis’ commitment to fight on to the death, it had the effect of calming Soviet fears that the Western Allies might make a separate peace with Germany. It was also at Casablanca that Roosevelt and Churchill conferred on where to attack once the Germans were expelled from Africa. After much tough negotiation, it was concluded that the Germans would have been able to remove their troops from Corsica or Sardinia, which were anyway further from the Allies’ African bases. So Sicily was chosen as the most direct route. Churchill had observed by 11 February that Hitler had a possibly fatal strategic blind spot, in that he was psychologically incapable of giving up ground once it had been won. ‘It is, indeed, quite remarkable’, he told the House of Commons that day,
that the Germans should have shown themselves ready to run the risk and pay the price required of them by their struggle to hold the Tunisian tip. While I always hesitate to say anything which might afterwards look like over-confidence, I cannot resist the remark that one seems to discern in this policy the touch of the master hand, the same master hand that planned the attack on Stalingrad, and that has brought upon the German armies the greatest disaster they have ever suffered in all their military history.76
*
‘During the last weeks of January 1943,’ records a history of Torch, ‘Rommel was shepherded warily towards the Tunisian frontier by Montgomery’s forces.’77 Driven across that border early in February, the Afrika Korps prepared to make a stand at the Mareth Line, its first major attempt to halt Montgomery since El Alamein. As these units dug in, however, Rommel flew westwards to perform one of his stunning counter-attacks, in a series of five engagements collectively known as the battle of the Kasserine Pass. This struggle, between Rommel’s Afrika Korps and Major-General Fredendall’s II Corps through the Western Dorsal mountain range in Tunisia between 14 and 22 February, perfectly illustrates the formidable and apparently ubiquitous German capacity for counter-attack, and illustrates why Marshall’s plan for an early attack on north-west France was probably impracticable.
The initial defence of the pass had to be carried out by the US 19th Combat Engineer Battalion, a construction unit that had not completed rifle training before being shipped overseas, and only one member of which had seen active service before, as well as an infantry battalion from the 1st Division and a four-gun French battery, barely 2,000 men all told.78 ‘Machine guns were badly sited, foxholes were too shallow, and barbed wire remained mostly on the spools. Nearly every man had entrenched on the floor of the pass, rather than the adjacent heights.’79 Anti-tank mines had been dumped rather than buried and there were not enough sandbags or entrenching tools. This was no way to send green GIs into battle, especially against German veterans who had fought in Poland, France and Russia, and were now armed with the six-barrelled 75-pound high explosive Nebelwerfer (‘fog-throwing’) mortar.
Major-General Orlando Ward’s 1st Armored Division was split into small units, and an Allied counter-attack was ambushed, with ‘appalling’ ground-to-air liaison and ‘lamentable’ co-operation between US armour, artillery and infantry, which led to more than 6,000 Allied casualties out of the 30,000 engaged, against 989 German casualties (of whom only 201 were killed), and 535 Italians captured. Fredendall’s corps alone lost 183 tanks, 104 half-tracks, 200 guns and 500 trucks and jeeps.80 Although Rommel’s counter-attack finally petered out on the road to Thala called Highway 17, it was not before he had almost broken through to the straight roads and flat country which led to the Le Kef supply depots only 40 miles away. ‘I felt strategic fear,’ the highly competent commander of the French forces in the region, General Alphonse Juin, later admitted, ‘for if Rommel broke through, all of North Africa was doomed.’81 This included more than a touch of Gallic hyperbole: the 10th Panzer Division’s fifty tanks, thirty guns and 2,500 infantry were not about to thrust the Allies all the way back to Casablanca, but they could possibly have turned the tide in Tunisia. Instructed therefore to hold the town ‘at all costs’, Brigadier Charles Dunphie of the British 26th Armoured Brigade ordered ‘every cook, driver and batman in Thala to the [front] line’.82 A tank fight developed in the dark of night at 20 yards’ range, with Dunphie losing twenty-nine of his fifty tanks before midnight. The arrival at 08.00 hours the next day of Brigadier-General Stafford Le Roy Irwin of the US 9th Infantry Division with, as one historian has put it, ‘2,200 men, 48 guns and a killer’s heart’, was critical in persuading Rommel not to press on further that morning, and instead an intensive artillery duel developed through the day.83
With four days’ rations and only enough fuel to drive 200 miles, and intelligence reports of the reinforcement of Thala, Rommel appeared ‘depressed’ to Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who as commander-in-chief south had overall responsibility for the Mediterranean Basin and who visited Kasserine to confer with him. ‘Rommel was physically worn out and psychologically fatigued,’ thought Kesselring, noting that ‘he had undoubtedly turned into a tired old man’. In the event, the outskirts of Thala was the furthest the Axis were ever to get in North-West Africa, and on the night of Monday, 22 February 1943 the Afrika Korps turned back, with the 21st Panzer Division acting as rearguard. It took three days for the Americans and British to reach the pass, and to organize Italian POW burial parties to bury the many corpses found there.
Fredendall had been forced back 85 miles in seven days, and Eisenhower’s amanuensis Harry Butcher noted that his ‘proud and cocky’ countrymen ‘today stand humiliated by one of the greatest defeats in our history’.84 The blame for Kasserine must be shared by Anderson, Eisenhower and Fredendall, and the last was swiftly replaced by Patton, but the German assault had nonetheless petered out, leaving the Desert Fox exhausted and blown. Co-operation between the British, French and Americans had been dire, at least until Eisenhower’s deputy Harold Alexander arrived the next month to take over command of the 18th Army Group, comprising the British First and Eighth Armies, the French XIX Corps and the US II Corps. (When Patton arrived to take up command of II Corps, General Omar Bradley later recalled the ‘procession of armoured cars and half-tracks [that] wheeled into the dingy square opposite the schoolhouse headquarters at Djebel Kouif on the late morning of 7 March. In the lead car Patton stood like a charioteer. He was scowling into the wind and his jaw strained against the web strap of a two-starred general.’) 85
The defeat at the Kasserine Pass – and the humiliating sight of 4,026 Allied POWs being marched from the Colosseum through Rome – ended any mood of over-confidence, and reminded each component of the Western alliance of the importance of close co-operation. ‘Our people from the very highest to the very lowest have learned that this is not a child’s game,’ Eisenhower reported to Marshall on 24 February. Yet it must be remembered that the Kasserine Pass was recaptured only days after the defeat. Despite having fallen back more than 1,000 miles, Rommel was still not getting the supplies he needed. He estimated that he required 140,000 tons of supplies a month to sustain him, and by early 1943 was receiving only one-quarter of that. Furthermore, almost every request to Kesselring in Rome was – unbeknown to him – landing on Eisenhower’s desk via Ultra, often within six hours of transmission.
By 17 March Patton was ready to advance, and he delivered this me
ssage to his troops:
Fortunately for our fame as soldiers, our enemy is worthy of us. The German is a war-trained veteran – confident, brave and ruthless. We are brave. We are better equipped, better fed, and in the place of his blood-glutted Woten, we have with us the God of our Fathers, Known of Old… If we die killing, well and good, but if we fight hard enough, viciously enough, we will kill and live. Live to return to our family and our girl as conquering heroes – men of Mars.86
While Patton attacked Rommel’s rear – and with fine covering artillery support defeated the veteran German 10th Panzer Division at El Guettar – the Eighth Army attacked the Mareth Line on 20 March, but got bogged down in the minefield. Montgomery nonetheless took the port of Sfax shortly afterwards. The nutcracker effect of Patton and Montgomery on each side of Rommel was one that was to lead to a ludicrous competitiveness – culminating in outright enmity – between the two men. ‘God damn all British and all so-called Americans who have their legs pulled by them,’ Patton wrote in his diary. ‘I would rather be commanded by an Arab. I think less than nothing of Arabs.’87 Montgomery’s vanity has already been noted, but this is what Patton wrote in his diary before sailing on Torch: ‘When I think of the greatness of my job and realise that I am what I am, I am amazed, but on reflection, who is as good as I am? I know of no one.’88 Yet there was a sentimental side to the bruiser too: Patton wept at his ADC’s funeral and put flowers on his grave before leaving the North African theatre.
The final part of the campaign from March 1943 saw Mark Clark’s II Corps – Patton had passed on the command in order to plan for the invasion of Sicily – attacking the northern sector of the Axis defensive position, and some particularly tough fighting by the US 34th Division for a defensive position called Hill 609. Only twenty months earlier, that division had been composed merely of National Guard units from Iowa and Minnesota. Anderson’s First Army and Montgomery’s Eighth Army also played crucial roles, which were reallocated by Alexander to ensure that the British and Americans jointly took the glory for expelling the Axis from Africa.
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 38