A World at Arms (86 page)

THE ALLIED OFFENSIVE IN AFRICA

It was during the period that the Germans were pushing at the gates of the Caucasus and pounding their way into Stalingrad, while the Soviet high command was organizing the forces for operation “Uranus” to entrap and destroy the German and Romanian armies in and near Stalingrad, that the war in Africa changed with significant repercussions for the whole development of the war, including the Eastern Front.
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At El Alamein the British 8th Army offensive opened in the night of October 23–24, breaking through and driving the Germans fleeing before them by November 4. Four days later, American and British troops landed in operation “Torch” on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of French Northwest Africa. The last stages of the battle in Egypt had in fact been influenced by the knowledge that “Torch” was about to be carried out.
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The Northwest Africa landing achieved complete surprise; the Germans and Italians had their attention on the rapidly unravelling situation at the other end of the Mediterranean and thought that the great convoys they were hearing about might be designed either for Malta or a landing on the Libyan coast behind Rommel’s retreating army.

The North African landing was a massive undertaking involving huge
convoys from Great Britain as well as directly from the United States. In view of the shortage of aircraft carriers–these were the months of the most desperate fighting on and around Guadalcanal–several of the first completed escort carriers, small carriers which were in fact variant versions of merchant ships, quite literally just turned over to the navy, were allocated to the invasion force.
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While the Soviet Union at the time (and some scholars since) complained about the delays in launching a second front as if American and British men, ships, and planes were resting idle somewhere, the grim reality was one of training cut short to meet deadlines set very optimistically in the hope that all would go smoothly.

The hopes associated with “Torch” for the Allies were, however, only partly realized.
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It had been anticipated that the French in North Africa would quickly turn from Vichy and join the effort against Germany and Italy, but this proved to be a misassessment.
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The governors remained loyal to Pétain, who expected them to fight the primarily American landing forces assisted by some British units; the local troop commanders with very few exceptions led their men in resistance to the invaders; and those who sympathized with the cause of the Allies and tried to take over control to swing the area to the Allied side were quickly disarmed and arrested.
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The French at first fought at the beaches and landing sites, inflicting considerable casualties, but were pushed back over the next few days by the overwhelming strength, equipment and determination of the landing forces, many of them in action for the first time.
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The combination of a Soviet front holding in the East and the British victory at EI Alamein made it impossible for the Germans to get Spain into the war on their side and thus close off the Mediterranean portion of the landing. Now that the United States and British troops were safely ashore, the great questions were: what next? and how quickly? The question, what next, revolved about the failure to rally the French forces to the Allied side, a situation which threatened to bog down the American forces for months as they conquered the whole huge area and then established a new administration in it.
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By an extraordinary coincidence, this puzzle was resolved as the result of the fact that Admiral Darlan happened to be in Algiers to see his fatally ill son. Darlan decided to order the French forces to surrender as a result of an agreement with the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied invasion force, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
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On Darlan’s side, this deal was apparently motivated in part by his recognition that the tide of battle in the war was turning from being in favor of the Axis to the Allies. An opportunist of great sensitivity as to who was winning, the check to the German 1942 summer offensive, which was
obvious in November even before the Soviet counter-offensive had been launched, combined with the British victory at EI Alamein and the Allied landing in Northwest Africa, showed Darlan which way the wind was blowing.
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The fact that there was no German or Italian interference with the landing convoys or the landings themselves must have impressed the naval officer. A further factor appears to have been the arrival of General Henri Giraud, an escaped POW, whom the Allies hoped to install in charge of French forces in Northwest Africa, only to discover that he had no influence with anyone. The recognition of Darlan as head of the whole area, Giraud as head of all military forces, and General Juin as head of the army seemed for a moment to calm the situation.

Several aspects of this arrangement did not, however, work out. In the first place, at the most critical point, Tunisia, Darlan could not assert his authority. There the Vichy government found in Admiral Esteva, the Resident-General, a pliant tool for the policy of continued collaboration with Germany in spite of the fact that German and Italian troops had now occupied hitherto unoccupied France according to Hitler’s orders issued on November 10. No resistance had been offered to the Germans; Pétain’s message to Roosevelt that the French when attacked would defend themselves applied only to the allies, not the enemies, of France at least until November 19 when it was far too late.
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The repercussions of the situation in Tunisia on the war would be great.

Secondly, the arrangement with Darlan caused enormous political embarrassment in both Britain and the United States. The idea of a “deal” with so compromised a supporter of the Axis in the most recent past was very much resented, appeared to cast a pall over the cause and consistency of the United Nations, and suggested that similar deals might be made with all sorts of other unsavory figures when expediency appeared to call for it.
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This uproar appears to have contributed to the timing of the announcement of the “unconditional surrender” policy at Casablanca in January 1943, although not to the adoption of such a policy which long predated its public proclamation.

Finally, the Darlan deal naturally enraged the Free French in general and General de Gaulle in particular and would add further complexities to an already muddled and difficult situation. By a second equally extraordinary coincidence of timing, at least a part of this problem was resolved on December 24 by the assassination of Darlan at the hands of a young monarchist, but enough troubles were left to try the patience of those on the spot and the governments in Washington and London.

The other question, namely how quickly could the Allies move, was the most critical one of all. As early as August it had been evident to the Allied planners that the key to a full success for “Torch” would be
the speed with which Tunisia could be seized.
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The hope was that this could be done still in November 1942, and that such a success would clear North Africa and pave the way for a landing in Western Europe in the late summer of 1943, but a number of factors combined to make this impossible.

The first obstacle to quick success was built into the “Torch” operation itself. There was simply not enough shipping available to the Allies in the fall of 1942 to send to Northwest Africa both the troops and the transportation equipment that the commanders believed necessary. As explained in the preceding chapter, these were the months when the Germans were sinking Allied ships at a terrifying rate. The commanders had opted for troops over vehicles and this resulted in their being short on transport once ashore.
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The shortage of transport naturally slowed down the movement of troops eastwards from Algiers to Tunis–a distance of well over 500 miles.

A second factor has already been alluded to, the refusal of Admiral Esteva to side with the Allies. He allowed the Germans to land on the Tunisian airfields, and by the time he and other French officers began to think about the possibility of defending the French colonial empire against the Germans and Italians, the Axis forces were far too numerous and well entrenched.
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The third element is implicit in the second: the decision of the Germans to fight for Tunis and to make a massive commitment of forces to this theater. While it is correct that from November 7 to 23, 1942, Hitler was away from his regular military headquarters in the East, spending time in Munich for his annual speech to the Party faithful and taking a vacation in Berchtesgaden afterwards, he certainly remained in touch with the situation at the fronts and made a whole series of key decisions.
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It was at this time that he decided to occupy the unoccupied part of France in violation of the armistice agreement of 1940. He also ordered a rapid and massive buildup of Axis forces in Tunisia, and to include in this buildup large air force contingents from the Eastern Front, including most of the bombers hitherto engaged in the battle against the convoys on the route to Murmansk and a squadron of ninety bombers from support of the German offensive in the Caucasus.
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In November and December 1942, more than 50,000 German and 18,000 Italian soldiers were rushed into Tunisia, with about another 100,000 German and 10,000 Italians in the subsequent months of the campaign.
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Vast quantities of equipment were flown or shipped in and hundreds of fighters assigned to this new front.
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Concerned about a possible collapse of Italy and an attack on Europe from the south, Hitler was now determined to allocate resources to the North African campaign on a scale far greater than ever before in the war. Earlier, when urged by his naval advisors, Hitler had always kept the German commitment in this theater to a minimum; this was Italy’s future living space and the fewer German resources were allocated to it the better. But now he saw Germany itself threatened from there, and therefore, at a time of enormous tension on the Eastern Front, he diverted to Tunisia troops and equipment desperately needed there. It must be noted, furthermore, that he thought of the campaign in Tunisia as more than a holding operation. The situation of the Africa Corps had always been difficult as long as supplies could not be sent across the short route from Sicily to the ports of Tunis and Bizerta. Now the Corps could work together with the new army being built up in Tunisia; and, when he discussed the whole situation there with Rommel on March 10, 1943, Hitler was seriously thinking of an operation against Casablanca after what he assumed would be a continued successful holding by Axis forces in Tunisia.
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In the meantime, on the political side he still deferred in North Africa to Mussolini’s preferences,
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while a new German army headquarters under an experienced general (Hans-Jürgen von Arnim) moved from the Eastern Front was to command the rapidly built up Axis force sent to hold the position in the area.
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It had been the original plan of the Allies to cover the route to Bizerta and Tunis quickly with the aid of commandos and parachute troops. These projects had to be scrapped because of concern about the attitude of French troops in the area. The forces, primarily British with some American participation, which raced overland to seize the key harbor of Bône and move into Tunisia, crossed the border into Tunisia by November 16, but it soon became evident that they had lost the race.
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As the weak Allied spearheads, inadequately covered by air forces without forward bases, ran into the German formation operating out of their bridgehead of Tunis and Bizerta, 20 and 40 miles away respectively, they were checked. In the first fighting, November 16–23, short supply routes and excellent air cover enabled the Germans to hold and push back the first Allied units on the scene. In the race to build up troops and equipment for a new assault, the British, Americans and some French could not pull together sufficient strength to push through the German and Italian forces on November 25–30. A German counter–attack in the first days of December followed by more fighting in late
December only made the stalemate more obvious as the Allies were obliged to pull back and consolidate their position. They could now build up their strength and move forward the bases for their air cover, but the opportunity of the moment was gone in the face of quickly assembled and growing Axis strength. It would take a two-months pause before a new push could begin.
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Some French troops, nominally under General Giraud but actually commanded by General Juin, were participating on the Allied side, but the French forces in Tunisia-obedient to orders from Pétain in German-occupied Vichy-had missed their opportunity. This meant that Pétain had performed his last major service for the Germans: there had to be a major campaign for Tunisia and hence no Allied landing in the West in 1943. All of France could look forward to an additional year of German occupation; if Eisenhower’s gamble on Darlan had paid off in terms of a moderately secure base in French Northwest Africa from which to launch a new offensive into Tunisia, the German gamble on Vichy had paid off at least as handsomely; they had kept the Western Allies out of Western Europe for additional months.

This point is especially clear when one sees how the recognition that “Torch” would not include a rapid seizure of Tunisia affected Allied planning for 1943. Into the last days of November, 1942, there was still hope in both London and Washington that an invasion of France would be feasible in the summer of 1943.
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By December 8, the British Chiefs of Staff had concluded that this idea had to be abandoned and only operations in the Mediterranean would be possible;
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and by the end of the month, Churchill had been brought to this point of view. As he put it on December 27, “the delay in taking the Tunisian tip in any case throws out all previous calculations.”
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The only concern of the Americans, and especially of General Marshall, was coming to be that the need to clear Tunisia and the follow-up operations in the Mediterranean in 1943 might become so extended as to postpone the cross-Channel attack even beyond 1944.
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