Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  The Allied landings in French North Africa, successively named Gymnast, Super Gymnast and finally Torch, were the result of a not altogether happy compromise between American and British strategic aims. From April 1942 the planners of the two nations had been endeavouring to produce a common, coordinated strategy that would ensure no dispersion of effort. All agreed that this was needed; the problem was that both parties had different ideas as to how it should be achieved. The Americans, having accepted the Germany First policy, despite the reservations of Admiral King,*. now wanted to get on with it, and proposed a landing in northern France in 1942, possibly around Boulogne. This would take pressure off the Russians – and at the time the proposal was first made it looked as if the Russian front might collapse – and attacking German-occupied Europe head-on was the obvious thing to do. For their part, the British knew very well the most that the Allies could land in 1942 would be six divisions, at least four of them British, and that with over twenty German divisions in Western Europe such a lodgement could not possibly be sustained nor expanded. There were insufficient landing craft to get even six divisions ashore in one lift, and in any case after September the weather in the Channel would make any large-scale adventure there very risky indeed. The Americans thought that the lack of landing craft was a mere excuse – this was a technical problem which could easily be overcome – but as the troops involved would be mostly British (there were as yet insufficient American troops in England for them to take the leading role) they had, unwillingly, to acquiesce. Eventually, in what was known as the Marshall Plan, both sides signed up to an intention to land in Europe in 1942 if possible (Operation Sledgehammer) and, if that were not achievable, a landing in 1943 (Operation Roundup) with thirty US divisions and eighteen British, supported by 6,000 aircraft.

  Despite agreeing to the plan as a statement of intent, and no doubt crossing their fingers behind their backs as they signed, the British were in fact much more concerned with the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean: the US Navy’s victory at the Battle of Midway in early June, when four Japanese carriers were sunk for the loss of only one American, was good news for the Asian war, but at this stage things in Burma were going from bad to worse, the situation in North Africa was giving cause for concern and the British had given vague hints to the Russians about a second front in late 1942, while stressing that there were no promises. In July 1942 Churchill informed Roosevelt that, despite their best intentions, the British could not take part in a proposed landing in Cherbourg and the Channel Islands in 1942, or anywhere else in Europe that year, although he held out hopes of one in 1943. This caused a major crisis in Anglo-American relations: the British, despite their protestations, were reneging on the common strategy agreement; their performance so far was unimpressive and General Marshall and Admiral King unsuccessfully pressed their president to leave the British to it in Europe and the Mediterranean and concentrate on the Pacific.

  In the summer of 1942 the Allied generals, admirals and air marshals were not helped in their planning by Churchill’s flights of fancy, which ranged from simultaneous landings in Denmark, Holland and Belgium to an invasion of northern Norway or, if an invasion of northern France was decided upon in 1943, a series of landings all around the coast, with the intention of forcing the Germans to disperse their resources to defend multiple locations. The planners were horrified – this would force the Allies to disperse their resources too, and it made no operational sense. Another matter that sowed distrust was the development of atomic fission. The British had been working on this for some time and, by the summer of 1942, the scientists involved were confident that a weapon of enormous power could be developed. The expense of building the necessary plant to produce such a weapon was, however, going to be so enormous that it was decided to pool knowledge with the Americans, who had also been undertaking research in the field but lagged behind the British. Under the codename of ‘Tube Alloy’, the British work to date was handed over to the Americans and a facility to develop a bomb was built in the Nevada desert. To begin with, despite the agreement to develop jointly, the Americans would not divulge details of the project’s progress, citing various laws which restricted the passage of military information to a foreign power. Eventually, in late 1943, the matter was resolved to British satisfaction, but the atomic relationship was not one to foster mutual trust.

  The British accepted that, while they had persuaded a reluctant Roosevelt and Marshall that no major cross-Channel offensive could take place in 1942, they nevertheless had to be seen to be doing something, particularly under pressure from Marshall, who wanted US troops to gain some battle experience. Churchill had always favoured Operation Gymnast, a plan for a landing on the north-west coast of Africa, considered but never implemented, and he now resurrected this as Super Gymnast. The Americans were suspicious: was this all about British imperial ambitions to control the Mediterranean? Was it an excuse to avoid doing anything in Europe? They were not interested at first, but as they realized that the British were not prepared to get involved in anything else in 1942, they reluctantly went along with it, eventually having to accept that, if Gymnast, now renamed Torch, happened, then that ruled out a major landing in Europe for 1943 as well – which the British knew very well. While Torch did favour British interests over Allied ones, the British were right to veto a landing in Europe in 1942, and in 1943 as well. In the interests of Allied solidarity and to keep the USA on side, they had to make some show of being interested in the Marshall Plan, but the British had considerable experience of opposed landings – much of it disastrous – and any attempt to invade Europe in 1942 or 1943 with the troops and landing craft available at the time would have risked a massive military and propaganda defeat, and, once they were thrown back into the sea, there could be no knowing when the Allies would be ready to try again. General Sir Alan Brooke was not always right in his strategic appreciations, but this time he surely was.

  Operation Torch would coincide with an attack – a successful attack, it was hoped – by Eighth Army from Egypt, as this would ensure that Axis eyes were looking east and not towards the other end of the Mediterranean. There would be three landing areas, West Task Force at Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, Central Task Force at Oran in Algeria and East Task Force at Algiers. Here arose a major disagreement between the Americans and the British: the British wanted to land near to Tunis in order to give Rommel and the Axis as little room for manoeuvre as possible, whereas the Americans were concerned that German and Italian submarines would make any landing east of Algiers too risky. The American view prevailed, although in hindsight the Royal Navy could almost certainly have got a task force ashore somewhere in the Tunis area. The Western Task Force would have 35,000 American troops commanded by Major-General George S. Patton, last seen chasing Bonus Marchers out of Washington, and would be mounted from Norfolk, Virginia, and escorted by the US Navy; Central Force troops would also be American, 37,000 men commanded by Major-General Lloyd Fredendall, mounted from the UK and escorted by the Royal Navy; and Eastern Force, also mounted from the UK and under the care of the Royal Navy, would consist of 10,000 Americans and 10,000 British troops, initially commanded by the American Major-General Charles Ryder, who would hand over to the British Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson. These somewhat unusual command arrangements were necessitated by the belief that the French were unlikely to oppose American troops, whereas they almost certainly would fight hard against their traditional enemy, who had moreover attacked their fleet in 1940. Once the assault landing by the Americans had succeeded, the British would then take over. The overall commander would be an American, the now Lieutenant-General Dwight D. Eisenhower, currently commander of all US troops in the European theatre, which consisted of those of the continuing build-up of American troops in Britain, codenamed Operation Bolero, with Major-General Mark Clark as his deputy and Brigadier-General (major-general from December 1943) Walter B. Smith (always known as Bedell Smith) as his chief of st
aff, both Americans. The overall naval commander would be Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham RN and the air commander Air Vice-Marshal Welsh RAF, with Brigadier-General Doolittle commanding the USAAF component.

  In Berlin, German intelligence had been picking up rumours about an Allied landing somewhere in the Mediterranean and Eisenhower’s promotion to lieutenant-general in July 1942 was taken as a prelude to a second front somewhere. In August, General Juin, the French Commander-in-Chief North Africa, dismissed rumours that a landing would be made in his bailiwick, and various intelligence reports suggested Portugal, Spanish Morocco, Dakar or between Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya. In the same month General Vigón, now Spanish Minister for Aviation and an old chum of the Germans from the days of their joint planning to take Gibraltar, said that he expected a landing in Tunis or Algeria, probably in October. For its part, the German navy concluded that the likely objective would be the Libyan coast, while the Italians worried that any landing might be aimed directly at them, and the German army assumed that the increased British convoy traffic was intended to reinforce Malta. But the source that got it right was one in the Vatican, who in September told the Germans that there would be a landing in Algeria between mid-October and mid-November.

  Allied intelligence about the likely reaction of the French was mixed. The Free French, ever the optimists, claimed that the French colonial administrations were only waiting for an opportunity to declare for de Gaulle, whereas British intelligence was less sure, citing the French tendency to obey whoever was in charge. The Allies put little faith in de Gaulle and he was not told of the operation until after the landings had begun, largely because his Free French organization leaked like a sieve with very large holes: anything told to the Free French got to the Germans eventually, not through deliberate betrayal but through a general lack of security, loose talk in bars and clubs, and in letters that evaded the censor. In the event, despite the approach of over 300 warships, including a number of the new escort carriers, merchant ships converted into small aircraft carriers by the addition of a flight deck, and 370 transports carrying over 100,000 men, local surprise was complete, but the French did not roll over and invite les Anglo-Saxons to tickle their collective tummy. Pétain had made clear to Roosevelt in a telegram that the French would fight if attacked, and those few French officers who tried to take their men over to the Allies were quickly disarmed and arrested. With the exception of Algiers, where resistance was quickly overcome, fighting was fierce with around 1,400 Americans and 700 French being killed, and the French battleship Jean Bart in Casablanca harbour being badly damaged by Allied gunfire. On 10 November, General Juin agreed to a ceasefire but insisted on referring the proposal to Admiral Darlan, the Commander-in-Chief of all French Armed Forces, who was in Algiers in a private capacity to see his son, who had contracted polio. After some negotiation, Darlan agreed to a truce but his decision was repudiated by the French government, and, when he tried to cancel the ceasefire arrangements, he was promptly arrested by the Americans. Despite not being convinced of the success of the Allied landings, the Germans reacted swiftly, moving troops into the hitherto unoccupied part of France and airlifting 17,000 German and Italian troops into the French protectorate of Tunisia, where the French minister-resident, Admiral Estéva, interpreted Pétain’s claim that French troops would fight if attacked as applying only to the Allies and not to the Germans, with whom his administration cooperated wholeheartedly. Meanwhile, Germany made another unsuccessful attempt to persuade Franco to bring Spain into the war, the Italians occupied Corsica and Vichy France broke off diplomatic relations with the United States.

  Admiral Darlan now considered that, with the German occupation of Vichy France, he no longer owed any loyalty to the Pétain regime and declared for the Allies.* His efforts to persuade the French fleet in Toulon to come over came to naught, although the admiral in command did at least scuttle his ships before the Germans could take them over. The Allies then set up a client French regime in North Africa headed by Darlan as high commissioner, but the admiral was promptly assassinated on Christmas Eve 1942 by a French student who may or may not have been an agent of de Gaulle’s Free French and has been claimed by some conspiracy theorists to have been put up to it by the British. Whatever the truth of the assassination, the trial and execution of the perpetrator were carried out in remarkably quick time and General Henri Giraud, always the Americans’ preferred candidate for leadership of the Free French, became high commissioner and Commander-in-Chief. With the Allies safely ashore, the British took the port of Bougie, 120 miles east of Algiers, by an unopposed seaborne landing on 11 November and Bône, another 120 miles east, by a combined sea and parachute landing on 12 November. The British 78 Division began to disembark at Bône on 15 November and the Americans relieved the British at Bougie on the 17th. Now for the push east, as the various task forces coalesced into First Army, commanded by Anderson and containing the US II Corps commanded by Major-General Lloyd Fredendall, the British V Corps commanded by Lieutenant-General C. W. Allfrey and the French XIX Corps commanded by Major-General Marie-Louis Koëltz. The immediate task was to defeat the Axis forces in Tunisia and then to squeeze the retiring Panzer Army Africa between Eighth Army and themselves.

  History has not treated Kenneth Anderson kindly. He had served on the Western Front in the first war and had seen considerable active service between the wars before commanding a brigade under Montgomery in the Battle of France and then a division and a corps in the UK. His command of First Army was fraught with difficulty: Fredendall did not like the British and nor did his eventual replacement, Patton. Koëltz also disliked the British, perhaps with more reason, and refused to accept any orders from Anderson unless they had been cleared though Juin first, and Juin insisted on clearing everything through Giraud. His American troops had no battle experience, his French troops were lacking modern equipment and had only just turned their coats from being loyal Pétainistes, and his British troops had been sitting around on anti-invasion duty in England. The Supreme Commander, Eisenhower, was in Algiers and his representative in Tunisia, Major-General Lucian Truscott, established himself so far away from Anderson that it took a minimum of four hours to get from one headquarters to the other. Anderson’s main problem, however, was not the chaotic command arrangements, eventually rectified at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 when he also got a second British corps, but his fellow army commander, Montgomery. When serving under Montgomery, Anderson had obviously not tugged his forelock sufficiently hard, for Montgomery did all he could, in letters to Brooke and in comments to visitors, to disparage Anderson, an exercise he continued when the North African campaign was over and subsequently in his memoirs. One can only assume that Montgomery’s paranoia was now such that anyone who might possibly be a rival must be destroyed: any glory going was to be his and he was not prepared to share it with anyone. The commander of V Corps, Lieutenant-General Allfrey, would also eventually suffer, although he would last until Italy before being sacked in March 1944 on Montgomery’s departing recommendation.

  Despite the swift German response to the Torch landings, OKH in Berlin were inclined to accept that North Africa was a write-off, and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief South, thought that the Italian navy should be used to evacuate all Axis troops to Italy. Hitler, on the other hand, having initially been relatively uninterested in African adventures, now decided that Tunisia was ‘the cornerstone of our conduct of the war on the southern flank of Europe’61 and he took note of Mussolini’s concerns that an Axis defeat in North Africa would mean unfettered Allied control of the Mediterranean and hence an invasion of the Italian mainland. The main focus of German strategy would remain the Russian front but Tunisia must be held ‘at all costs’ – a form of words frequently sent down from on high and one which is particularly depressing to soldiers because it usually means that they are destined to be killed or to spend a considerable time in a prison camp. The Axis troops in Tunisia were to be formed int
o Fifth Panzer Army, under Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, with, unusually, because German doctrine did not include such appointments, Lieutenant-General Heinz Ziegler as his second-in-command. In fact, it would not be much more than a corps, with one German armoured division (10 Panzer), and two divisions of infantry, one German and one Italian. That it was named an army and commanded by an officer of a rank normally found in command of three or four times as many troops was pure propaganda. It did include a company of the latest German tanks, the much-feared Mk VI Tiger, but, despite the rapid initial build-up, it could only be reinforced with great difficulty, anything sent from Italy having to run the gauntlet of Allied naval vessels and air strikes.

  On 25 November, Anderson’s First Army began to push east in three columns, using 78 Division augmented by tanks from the US 1 Armoured Division, and that day met the Germans at Medjez El Bab, about twenty-five miles from Tunis, while an American tank column penetrated as far as the airfield at Djedeida, only fifteen miles from Tunis, before being forced to withdraw when German anti-aircraft gunners using their 88mm guns in the anti-tank role began to pick them off. The Germans withdrew skilfully by groups and began to defend along what they called the Tunisian Bridgehead, centred on Djedeida airfield. On 28 November, Kesselring visited Tunis, decided that the bridgehead was too small and ordered that it was to be expanded using the arriving 10 Panzer Division. At 0705 hours on the morning of 1 December sixty-four German tanks, including two Tigers, moved off. Supported by low-flying aircraft, they punched east out of Djedeida airfield and by 10 December they had pushed the Allies back east of Medjez el Bab, where they encountered stiff resistance from American armour and British infantry. The size of the bridgehead was now considered sufficient; von Arnim and his deputy arrived in Tunis that day and Fifth Panzer Army now went into defence along a 100-mile line from the north coast through Djefna south-east to Pont du Fahs to Gabes on the east coast. The north was held by a German infantry division, the centre by 10 Panzer Division and the south by the Italian Superga Division. For the time being, the Allies concentrated on reinforcing their army and positioning troops and guns for a major attack intended to capture Tunis. The attack was originally intended for 16 December but the weather broke on that day and Anderson postponed his D-Day until 24 December. As that date approached, however, Eisenhower decided to hold on the Tunisian front and concentrate instead on Eighth Army’s operations in Libya.