First Blood in North Africa: Operation Torch and the U.S. Campaign in Africa in WWII (Stackpole Military Photo Series)

By Jon Diamond

A pictorial history of America’s first major military campaign in Africa during WWII.

In November 1942, eleven months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. launched Operation Torch, a multipronged attack on French North Africa—a region controlled by Germany through Vichy France. Led by Generals Eisenhower and Patton, it was America’s first major offensive against the Germans. 

Through rare wartime images, this book vividly chronicles the initial landings in Morocco and Algeria and the subsequent desert clashes in Tunisia as American forces battled the German Afrika Korps of Erwin Rommel, the famous “Desert Fox.”

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9780811765619

Jon Diamond

Jon Diamond is a practising physician who has had a life-long interest in military history. A graduate of Cornell University, Jon has been on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and Pennsylvania State University. He has served as a civilian attendee to the United States Army War College National Security Seminar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and has written a significant number of articles and papers including over fifteen for Military Heritage Presents WWII History. He has just completed a book on David Low's Cartoons and the British Policy of Appeasement. He resides in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Book preview

FIRST BLOOD IN NORTH AFRICA

FIRST BLOOD IN NORTH AFRICA

Operation Torch and the U.S. Campaign in Africa in WWII

Jon Diamond

STACKPOLE

BOOKS

Guilford, Connecticut

Published by Stackpole Books

An imprint of Globe Pequot

Distributed by

NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright © 2017 Jon Diamond

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Diamond, Jon (Jonathan Russell), author.

Title: First blood in North Africa : Operation Torch and the U.S. campaign in Africa in WWII / Jon Diamond.

Description: Lanham, Maryland : Stackpole Books, an imprint of Globe Pequot, trade division of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2017. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016033734 (print) | LCCN 2016034537 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811717779 (pbk.) | ISBN 780811765619 (e-book) | ISBN 9780811765619 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Africa, North. | Operation Torch, 1942. | Africa, North—History, Military.

Classification: LCC D766.82 .D53 2017 (print) | LCC D766.82 (ebook) | DDC 940.54/231—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033734

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 Strategic Overview and the War in North Africa, 1940–1942

CHAPTER 2 Geography, Terrain, and the Invasion

CHAPTER 3 Commanders and Combatants

CHAPTER 4 The Amphibious Landings

CHAPTER 5 Tunisian Warfare and Weapons

CHAPTER 6 Epilogue

Acknowledgments

References

The interval from October 1942 through January 1943 has been referred to as a turning of the tide in the epic struggle of World War II. During this three-month time frame, five major land campaigns were conducted, leading to staggering losses for the Axis partners of Germany and Italy as well as the Japanese Empire. These included the protracted battles for Papua New Guinea; Guadalcanal, in the southern Solomon Islands of the South Pacific Area; across the Western Desert of the North African littoral, culminating in the First and Second Battles of El Alamein; the defense of Stalingrad, resulting in the surrender of large numbers of Axis coalition troops, comprising mostly the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army; and the invasion of Northwest Africa on November 8, 1942, Operation Torch.

First, in the Southwest Pacific Area, after the Japanese withdrew from their overland assault on Port Moresby, New Guinea, Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur’s American and Australian forces captured the Japanese garrisons at Buna and Gona on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, albeit at horrific cost to those troops fighting in that hellacious locale. The victory over the tenacious Japanese defenders at Buna and Gona, along with a previous repulsion of an enemy amphibious assault at Milne Bay in late August and early September 1942, effectively ensured that Port Moresby would not be attacked again from the eastern half of New Guinea.

Second, in the South Pacific, the U.S. Marine Corps’ 1st Division (Reinforced), along with U.S. Army contingents initially from the Americal (23rd) Infantry Division, held off repeated Japanese land, sea, and air assaults to continue to maintain control over Henderson Field on the northern plain of the southern Solomon Island, Guadalcanal. Eventually more-substantial American forces went on the offensive, causing the Japanese to completely withdraw from Guadalcanal by the end of the first week of February 1943.

Third, at Stalingrad, Soviet forces made an epic defense within that city’s streets against the Wehrmacht’s Gen. Friedrich von Paulus and his vaunted Sixth Army, some of the finest troops in the German army. The planning for Operation Torch would have been for naught had the Germans won their epic clash with the Soviets. By October 1942 two Nazi armies had driven forward deep into the Soviet interior’s Caucasus Mountains but had become bogged down only a few miles from the oil fields that Hitler required to continue his war effort. Just to the north of the Caucasus Mountains was the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River. It was to become the farthest point that the German Sixth Army and 4th Panzer Army would advance to. On October 2 von Paulus unleashed his last offensive against the Russians in Stalingrad, namely, a 2,000-yard deep pocket, which included the gutted remains of buildings and factories. The German gains were measured in yards, and von Paulus admitted to his peers, Things are going very slowly, but every day we make a little progress. The whole thing is a question of time and manpower. The Wehrmacht could not do anything to delay winter’s onset, nor could they tap into any ready reinforcements for von Paulus’s dwindling Sixth Army ranks. The German High Command knew that if Stalingrad was not captured within a month, the whole Nazi position in southern Russia would be a precarious one since their flanks to the north and west were held by Rumanian troops. As it happened, the flanks were overrun by a Russian winter counteroffensive, and despite Gen. Erich von Manstein’s attempt to open a corridor to von Paulus’s troops, the Sixth Army was encircled and forced to surrender. The loss of the Sixth Army’s twenty divisions doomed the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Fourth, British prime minister Winston S. Churchill and his chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, needed to engage the Axis forces somewhere; however, both were dreadfully afraid of sending another expeditionary force to the European continent or Scandinavia after the disasters at Dunkirk and Norway in the spring of 1940. In the future both British leaders would also learn that an attack on a fortified continental port was suicidal, as evidenced at Dieppe during Operation Jubilee in August 1942, which inflicted horrific casualties on the assaulting Canadian infantry and British armor. An understanding of the campaign in Northwest Africa requires a description of the combat events that occurred in the Western Desert of Egypt and Libya from December 9, 1940, through November 8, 1942, the latter date corresponding to the Operation Torch landings in French Morocco and Algeria.

The Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, gave the British War Cabinet its entrée into a land battle against the junior Axis partner across the North African littoral and in rugged and remote East Africa, rather than on the European