4

Battle of El Alamein and Operation Torch

Cracking German Invincibility

As the third year of the war began in 1942, both combatant coalitions faced serious challenges with their strategic architectures that forced them to react to changing battlefield conditions. In mid-1941, German strategy had staked everything on the early success of Operation Barbarossa. The grinding attrition that ensued in the winter of 1941–1942 after the Wehrmacht’s failure to capture Moscow, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States meant that Germany confronted a worldwide military coalition. The war had acquired truly global dimensions as its twenty-ninth month began in 1942. Hitler’s problem was that the German Barbarossa offensive had failed to deliver a quick victory in Russia where he had committed the vast bulk of the Wehrmacht.

Policy

The challenge for Reich war policy in 1942, after the terrible losses of Barbarossa’s first winter, was whether it could muster sufficient war-fighting power to finish the war before the Allies could mobilize their economies to equip and field armies to prevail over the Axis. What makes 1942 such an intriguing year of military opportunity for Germany was the rapid sequence of far-flung victories in Russia and North Africa where the Wehrmacht had achieved four of its greatest operational victories at Kerch1 and Kharkov2 in Russia and Gazala and Tobruk in North Africa.3 All of them took place within weeks of one another. In the fall, German armies had advanced another one thousand miles, penetrated into the Caucasus Mountains, threatened Soviet oil supplies, and were poised to take Stalingrad.

For Allied policy, German power posed an equally menacing threat in North Africa. Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel had advanced comparable distances along the North African littoral. Hitler had dispatched Rommel to North Africa in February 1941 with two German divisions, initially designated the Deutsches Afrikakorps,4 to bolster the Italians who were being driven out of Cyrenaica in Libya by the British 8th Army in 1941.5 A German defeat of the British desert army in Egypt would render the British position in the Middle East untenable and sever lines of communication across the Mediterranean. In Churchill’s mind, Egypt and Suez represented the center of gravity of the British Empire. It was central to the prime minister’s preferred maritime strategy of attacking the “soft underbelly” of Europe from a strong base in the Mediterranean.

It was the two-pronged configuration of the German threat in mid-1942 against the Soviet Union and the British position in Egypt, after Rommel’s Gazala victory, that presented the tantalizing opportunity for a deep German penetration into the Middle East, a pincer offensive by two German armies. One was poised to drive into the Middle East from the north through the Caucasus toward Iran, and the other was Rommel’s Afrikakorps to attack east from Libya through Egypt, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq to the Persian Gulf.

Strategy

Germany by 1942 was struggling to assemble enough combat power for its armies to win in the Soviet Union and North Africa. As events unfolded, the Germans sustained two of their most decisive defeats of the war in less than three months: El Alamein in November 1942 and Stalingrad in January 1943. Bewegungskrieg was about to come to another dead end in the desert.

Britain’s victory at El Alamein did not happen easily. The military vicissitudes during this period of the desert war, written about so extensively in British and American military histories, continue to capture the popular imagination. Two combatant commanders are the source of continuing fascination and debate: Rommel and the British general who defeated him, Lieutenant General Bernard Law Montgomery (later field marshal, the Viscount of Alamein).

After Rommel arrived in Libya in February 1941, it was not long before he made an impression not only on his enemies but also the world. Liddell Hart was among the early postwar admirers of Rommel’s accomplishments:

The impact that Rommel made on the world with the sword will be deepened by his power with the pen. No commander in history has written an account of his campaigns to match the vividness and value of Rommel’s. . . . No other commander has provided such a graphic picture of his operations and method of command. No one else has so strikingly conveyed in writing the dynamism of blitzkrieg and the pace of Panzer forces.6

A glance at a map of the Mediterranean basin (map 4.1) illustrates the strategic possibilities Rommel had in mind. Rommel wrote that the Suez Canal had “less strategic importance in this war than is generally supposed, owing to the fact that the Italians were able to bar the Mediterranean at Sicily.”7 He was looking at the oil fields in the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, and Iran. If Axis forces controlled the whole of the Mediterranean coastline and Mesopotamia, he reasoned, they would have an excellent base for an offensive against the southern Russian front. He understood that the principal flow of American arms and material aid to Russia passed through the Persian Gulf where tens of thousands of vehicles and thousands of tanks were unloaded on their way to the Russians.8 Axis possession of this area would have forced the rerouting of American shipping to Murmansk, a route on which the British and American convoys were exposed to great danger from German submarines.9

Map 4.1. Rommel’s strategic vision for the North African campaign was not about the ports at each end of the Mediterranean but, beyond Egypt, access to the oil in the Middle East.

Source: USMA Atlases.

Rommel outlined a chain of events that few German commanders were seeing as an enormous opportunity in 1942. A British defeat in North Africa would have enabled a German buildup in Mesopotamia for a major offensive against the southern Russian front. “This would have struck the Russians in a vital spot. . . . Thus the strategic conditions would have been created for us to close in from all sides and shatter the Russian colossus.”10

Like Rommel, Montgomery endures as one of the most memorable and, between Americans and Britons, controversial commanders of World War II. Unlike Rommel’s task to protect Libya, maintain Italian prestige, and keep British forces preoccupied, Montgomery was sent out to defeat German and Italian forces where a succession of British commanders had failed. Consecutively, they were General (later field marshal) Sir Archibald P. Wavell (1939–1941), General Sir Richard N. O’Connor (1940–1941), General Sir Philip Neame (1941), General (later field marshal) Sir Claude J. E. Auchinleck (1941–1942), General Sir Alan G. Cunningham (1941), and General Sir Neil M. Ritchie (1941–1942).

Operations

The Italians, under Generalità Maresciallo Rodolfo Graziani, had invaded Egypt in September 1940 and driven east unopposed into the Western Desert. Instead of pushing ahead to at least the railhead at Mersa Matruh, only 145 miles from Alexandria, Graziani abruptly stopped and set up a series of poorly organized fortified camps south of Sidi Barrani and west of Matruh (map 4.2a). He seemed not to know what to do next.

Map 4.2. The military initiative during early desert battles passed from the Italians to the British to the Germans.

Source: USMA Atlases.

In January 1941, General Wavell, commander in chief (CINC) in the Middle East, ordered the Western Desert Force (WDF) to conduct a brief raid against the Italians that quickly evolved into Operation Compass in which the WDF captured Bardia and then Tobruk before completing the destruction of the Italian 10th Army at Beda Fomm in February. The British forces captured 110,000 prisoners including twenty-two generals.11

Rommel wasted no time in getting his small two-division force of the Afrikakorps deployed to attack British forces. Within six weeks of his arrival at Tripoli, he commenced a lightning strike on March 31, 1941, against General Neame’s Cyrenaica Command, scattered the British armored division, captured Generals Neame and O’Connor, drove British forces from Cyrenaica, and besieged Tobruk, into which the Australian division had retired (map 4.2b).

What transpired between February 1941 and June 1942 were indecisive fights for ground in Cyrenaica (maps 4.2 and 4.3). The whole point of the North African campaign for both sides was the Suez Canal and the oil beyond. On one side was Rommel’s relentless aggression and, on the other, the British struggling to find the strategic and tactical leadership to devise a winning military formula to defeat the Axis forces in North Africa. At Whitehall’s instigation, General Wavell changed places with General Auchinleck, commander in chief, India, who took over as CINC Middle East; Wavell moved to the CINC India post.

Map 4.3. Between 1941 and 1942, the military initiative returned briefly to the British and then passed to the Germans until the Alamein battle was fought.

Source: USMA Atlases.

After Rommel retired back to his start line at El Agheila toward the end of 1941, the British recaptured all of the territory in Cyrenaica, which Wavell’s 1940–1941 Compass offensive against the Italians had overrun the previous winter (map 4.3a). The British in North Africa were starting to demonstrate a credible operational capability to defeat Axis land forces in the desert. Rommel, before he could renew his advance across Cyrenaica into Egypt, knew he had to solve his logistical problems.12

Auchinleck meanwhile put General Ritchie in command of 8th Army consisting of roughly one hundred thousand men and 850 tanks. Ritchie quickly found himself overtaken by Rommel. In February 1942, Rommel resumed the offensive, and Ritchie retreated back into prepared defensive positions at Gazala (map 4.3b).

The construction of the Gazala Line constituted a massive defensive barrier designed to protect British forces. It consisted of huge minefields. One extended for forty-three miles inland from the coast, and a series of inland “boxes” were created, inside of which generally was a brigade. The most important boxes were at Bir Hacheim, which housed a Free French force, and at “Knightsbridge,” which housed a British brigade. On an operations map, the Gazala Line appeared to be a formidable defensive barrier. However, it had serious weaknesses. British planners assumed that Rommel would attack along the coastal road. Therefore, a disproportionate amount of men and equipment was held in the coastal region at the expense of inland positions. The southern boxes had less artillery ammunition than they wanted. Rommel’s intelligence suggested quite clearly that British strength in the southern part of the Gazala Line was not as strong as the British wanted to portray. Rommel’s forces numbered 90,000 men, 560 tanks, and 500 serviceable planes.

The battle space at this stage was one thousand miles long and fifty miles wide along the North African littoral, and most of it was empty desert. It was ideal for maneuver warfare. There were no civilians to worry about becoming collateral damage. There was no urban property to protect. It was seductive for a commander like Rommel. Given enough supplies, the Afrikakorps could fight anywhere it liked. But getting enough supplies—fuel, water, food, ammunition, medicine, spares—that was a huge problem. By April 1942, each side had to truck its supplies five hundred to six hundred miles from its main bases. The challenge was harder for the Germans. Jon Latimer’s metaphor of a bungee rope is apt. The farther the Afrikakorps advanced from its base in Tripoli, the greater was the restraining effect of that distance, and the easier it was for the defender to resist “the increasingly feeble stretch for the final objective,” especially after Rommel’s Gazala victory had enabled a farther eastward advance as the British retreated to El Alamein.13

The logistical issues in the North African theater underscored how Hitler’s strategic architecture on two continents was becoming unsustainable. Every ton of ammunition, fuel, and food that the Germans consumed first had to be laboriously crated in Italy, then shipped across the Mediterranean to a port of sufficient capacity, principally Tripoli, and then trucked over hundreds of miles to the fighting front. Even water had to be transported this way. There were no railroads except the British line that ran 145 miles west from Alexandria to the railhead at Mersa Matruh. The vast empty spaces had to be entirely covered by road. Martin van Creveld’s logistical metrics are illuminating. Rommel at the beginning of 1942 “demanded another 8,000 trucks for his supply columns. OKW denied the request out of hand because all German armored groups operating in Russia could only muster 14,000 trucks between them.”14 The military reality was that Rommel had advanced 750 miles from his base in Tripoli. Already, he was stretching his logistical bungee rope.

Between May 26 and June 21, 1942, Rommel resumed the offensive, initially attacking the Gazala Line with strengthened Italian units. Then, in a classic desert maneuver, he led an armored attack around the British southern flank. This initiative faltered as British tanks and guns slowed his forward movement. Ritchie now thought he had Rommel trapped as Rommel regrouped his forces for another attack and moved his armor into an area called “the Cauldron” (map 4.4). With the German force virtually surrounded by 8th Army, Ritchie believed he could destroy the Afrikakorps, but his attack lacked strength at the decisive point (Schwerpunkt) and was repulsed by the Germans. Rommel held the line in the center, broke out of the Cauldron, scattered three British armored brigades, and recaptured Tobruk in June, which changed hands for the third time.15 The British 8th Army was in general retreat toward El Alamein.

Map 4.4. British General Ritchie thought he had Rommel trapped at Gazala, but the Desert Fox broke out of “the Cauldron,” attacked British and French boxes, and recaptured Tobruk.

Source: USMA Atlases.

By July 1942, Churchill was desperate for a British victory in North Africa. On July 1, 1942, his government was confronted with a vote of confidence resulting from a motion put before the House of Commons after the fall of Tobruk.16 The prime minister won the vote of confidence handily, but the fact that such a motion went to a vote underscored the pressure under which Auchinleck served. Churchill badgered Auchinleck to go on the offensive after 8th Army had all but exhausted itself after the first battle of El Alamein. Auchinleck had succeeded in early July in stopping the German advance at Ruweisat Ridge. In Latimer’s judgment, at this juncture, “one could say the tide of war turned against the Axis in North Africa,”17 because Rommel advanced no further.

During July, Churchill hectored Auchinleck to attack Rommel, but Auchinleck argued that he needed time to prepare for a counteroffensive. It became obvious that the prime minister had lost confidence in Auchinleck, who was replaced as CINC Middle East Command by General Sir Harold Alexander (later field marshal, the Earl Alexander of Tunis). There were other changes. Lieutenant General William Gott was appointed general officer commanding 8th Army. On a transport flight returning to Cairo from the battle area, the Luftwaffe shot down his plane; after a crash-landing, Gott was among the passengers who died. On Gott’s death, Lieutenant General Montgomery was appointed commander of 8th Army.

General Montgomery’s assumption of command in North Africa on August 13, 1942, signaled a different method for the British in waging war. Montgomery had long been a believer in the well-planned, methodical, set-piece battle. Despite his gaunt appearance and high-pitched voice, he radiated confidence. Latimer points out that “Monty,” as he was soon to become known worldwide, had learned two things during his career that were to serve him well in the desert. One was the meticulously planned battle, a lesson from having served most of World War I as a staff officer. Montgomery was convinced that well-trained troops, given limited and identifiable objectives, supported by the full weight of artillery intelligently used, could force an enemy to withdraw. The other was his knowledge of the mood of the British public during the two years he spent in England between Dunkirk and his posting to Egypt. He understood that British soldiers “want to know what is going on and decide in their own minds what sort of person [their commanding general] is.”18 Montgomery wasted no time in enlightening them. The same day he assumed command in the desert, he said this to his staff:

I want first of all to introduce myself to you. You do not know me. I do not know you. But we have to work together; therefore we must understand each other and we must have confidence in each other. I have only been here a few hours. But from what I have seen and heard since I arrived . . . I do not like the general atmosphere I find here. It is an atmosphere of doubt, of looking to select the next place to which to withdraw, of loss of confidence in our ability to defeat Rommel, of desperate defence measures by reserves in preparing positions in Cairo and the Delta. All that must cease! Let us have a new atmosphere. . . . What is the use of digging trenches in the Delta? It is quite useless; if we must lose this position we lose Egypt. . . . We will stand and fight here. If we can’t stay here, then let us stay here dead [italics in original].19

At El Alamein, a British Commonwealth force of 195,000 men deployed in eleven divisions, four of them armored, defeated an Axis force of 104,000, four weak German and eight Italian divisions.20 Montgomery’s post-Alamein reputation tends to emphasize his cautious and systematic nature. He planned a methodical battle of attrition that he expected to be a “dogfight” lasting ten to twelve days. Numerous military historians have criticized Montgomery for his plodding concept of fighting the Alamein battle, disappointing those who prefer the dash and daring of aggressive maneuver. As Citino points out, “the fact remains that the terrain—the sea to the north, the Qattara Depression to the south, and wall-to-wall Axis divisions in between—hardly permitted any other approach, at least in the opening stages of the battle” (map 4.5).21 In an account written months after the battle, the Desert Fox himself agreed because of the bottleneck terrain both armies confronted.

The Alamein line lay between the sea and the Qattara Depression, which our reconnaissance had finally established as being impassable for major vehicle columns. Thus it was the only front in North Africa, apart from the Akarit position, which could not be turned at its southern end. All other positions could be collapsed by tying them down frontally and outflanking them to the south. Everywhere else it was possible to make a surprise sweep with motorized forces around the southern end of the line in order to seek a decision in mobile warfare in the enemy’s rear. This fact of the open flank had led repeatedly to completely novel situations. But at Alamein it was different. This line, if solidly held by infantry throughout its length, completely ruled out any chance of a surprise enemy appearance in one’s rear. The enemy had first to force a breakthrough.22

Map 4.5. General Montgomery, leading a British Commonwealth force of 195,000 men deployed in eleven divisions, four of them armored, defeated Rommel’s four German and eight Italian divisions.

Rommel had already tried to maneuver twice in this tactical area, and if the Panzerarmee had failed to find a solution in this terrain, 8th Army was equally likely to fail. Montgomery’s plan for the operation sounded simple enough: punch a hole in the German positions, pass an armored corps with mobile, motorized infantry through the hole into enemy territory, and develop operations to destroy the Axis forces.

The Alamein battle commenced on the evening of October 23, 1942, at 2240 hours with the most massive Allied artillery barrage of the war up to that time. Nearly a thousand guns opened up so that all the shells would land on German positions simultaneously, the timing coordinated by a series of BBC timed signals. The first fifteen minutes of the bombardment was concentrated counterbattery fire on German artillery positions from which they never recovered. “Each group of four German guns received a monstrous deluge of 100 shells apiece.”23 The guns then switched to targets on the German front line where they remained for the rest of the night. Then the intensity increased as British airpower followed with flights of Wellington bombers pounding the German guns for the next six hours. The principal “shock and awe” effect of this rain of explosives on German positions was not just on the enemy’s artillery but on the Panzerarmee’s command and control. The continuous shelling and bombing ripped up telephone landlines and smashed radio sets. RAF aircraft, fitted with electronic jamming equipment, compounded the confusion by jamming Axis radio frequency (RF) tactical networks. Two hours into the bombardment, Montgomery crammed four divisions into a narrow sector of the northern front six miles wide. By the next day, large sections of the German front in the north were in British hands. German and Italian units manning their positions along this portion of the front found themselves hammered by air and artillery and bulldozed by what seemed an overwhelming ground force.

The Axis logistical bungee was at full stretch now. Hitler was preoccupied with the stalled assault against Stalingrad on the Eastern Front. There was no manpower or matériel margin to spare. The Panzerarmee was forced to deploy in a line at Alamein, in defensive positions prepared in depth in front of an ocean of five hundred thousand mines, and fight a defensive battle of position. Defensive Stellungskrieg at this stage of the war was not yet a Wehrmacht specialty. Behind this line lay the mobile formations of two Italian divisions in the north and the Afrikakorps in the south, their armor to be used to launch what Rommel and his staff hoped to be pincer counterattacks. But few of these units had adequate fuel stocks.

Rommel was not present when the battle began, having departed for Germany the previous month to recover his physical and emotional health after eighteen months in the desert. He immediately flew back to North Africa. Rommel made his one significant operational decision of the battle. He ordered the crack 21st Panzer Division from its positions behind the southern portion of the line to the north.

He knew at the time he issued the command that it would be a one-way journey because the division barely had enough fuel to get there, let alone do much maneuvering and fighting once it engaged the British northern flank. Many accounts focus on the close-in combat around various positions such as “Kidney Ridge” and British strongpoints such as “Snipe” and “Woodcock,” but at the operational level, at least for the Axis, “the issue was never in doubt.”24 By the first week in November 1942, Rommel was down to thirty serviceable tanks against British forces arrayed in a semicircle in front of Afrikakorps.25 Rommel recognized that his army was on the brink of destruction, and he began to pull parts of it out of the line to begin a retreat.

He had no sooner issued fallback orders than Hitler shocked Rommel, promoted to Feldmarschall after the Gazala victory, by issuing his stand-fast order:

It is with trusting confidence in your leadership and the courage of the German-Italian troops under your command that the German people and I are following the heroic struggle in Egypt. In the situation in which you find yourself there can be no other thought than to stand fast, yield not a yard of ground and throw every gun and every man into the battle. . . . Your enemy, despite his superiority, must also be at the end of his strength. It would not be the first time in history that a strong will has triumphed over the bigger battalions. As to your troops, you can show them no other road than to victory or death.26

These kinds of no-retreat orders were soon to become almost routine military communications elsewhere at places like Stalingrad. Rommel then stopped his retreat in midstream, and at that juncture the Panzerarmee began to fall apart. The Battle of El Alamein was over.

Operation Torch

The war, of course, was not. As Churchill famously remarked, it was only “the end of the beginning.”27 Simultaneous with the British Alamein victory, Allied forces invaded North Africa (Operation Torch) on November 8, 1942. Rommel in retreat from Alamein now faced grave Allied threats in his rear. However, as 8th Army already knew, and as American forces were to discover three months later at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, even a German army in defeat could still be extremely dangerous.

Policy

Eleven months earlier, as 1942 opened, the Allies, like the Axis, faced their own set of strategic problems. At the Arcadia Conference in Washington, between December 22, 1941, and January 14, 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed upon a “Europe First” strategy. A military allocation in the 70/30 range, favoring Europe over the Pacific, appears well established among authoritative sources.28 However, neither the president nor the prime minister nor their senior military staffs were in full agreement about the operational details for beginning a series of effective war-winning campaigns.

President Roosevelt’s decision to invade North Africa emerged from the American desire to see American ground forces engaged in combat against Axis troops somewhere in the European theater of operations (ETO) before the end of 1942. Operation Torch grew out of Churchill’s strong desire to attack the soft underbelly of the Axis as an alternative to the British reluctance to support a cross-Channel invasion of the Continent before 1943 at the earliest. Torch became the compromise between British hesitation to invade Europe directly until there was further attrition of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front and American eagerness to attack German ground forces somewhere because otherwise political pressure might divert more military assets to fight the Japanese in the Pacific.29

Strategy

The American chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, preferred a direct, full-scale, cross-Channel assault on the Continent that held Roosevelt’s sympathy. Once it became clear that neither sufficient numbers of trained men nor matériel could be mobilized in 1942 for a cross-Channel assault, a series of proposals followed early Allied councils of war and were the source of continual Anglo-American disagreements over strategy for the next two and a half years. Four strategic proposals were under Allied debate: a British proposal to fight the Axis in North Africa in 1942 (Gymnast); or to build up forces in England in 1942, 5,800 combat aircraft and forty-eight divisions (Bolero), for an invasion of the Continent in 1943 (Roundup); or in the case of the imminent collapse of the Red Army to divert Allied resources to gain a small foothold in Europe in 1942 (Sledgehammer).30 The back-and-forth negotiations among the Allies over Gymnast, Bolero, Roundup, and Sledgehammer a year later produced a consensus at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 on the timing of the Germany-first strategy agreed to at the 1942 Arcadia Conference in Washington. American commanders would learn as a result of Torch that their war-fighting power and combat skills had to improve before they could assault the Continent across the Channel.

In February 1942, Marshall appointed Dwight D. Eisenhower, then a recently promoted temporary brigadier general, as head of the War Plans Division of the War Department. Eisenhower’s appointment was characteristic of Marshall’s institutional approach to military staffing: identify and promote smart, aggressive, younger officers to key planning and command positions, and reassign or retire the deadwood. Marshall cashiered seven hundred officers in 1940, including most of the generals commanding divisions in the Louisiana maneuvers of 1940–1941, very quietly so he could promote more capable officers.31

As the war started, Eisenhower had been a lieutenant colonel. There were many others whose names soon became familiar to the American wartime public: In 1940, Terry de la Mesa Allen was a lieutenant colonel; Omar N. Bradley, a lieutenant colonel; Mark W. Clark, a lieutenant colonel; J. Lawton Collins, a lieutenant colonel; James “Jimmy” H. Doolittle, a major; Leslie R. Groves, a major; Courtney H. Hodges, a colonel; Curtis E. LeMay, a captain; George S. Patton Jr., a colonel; Matthew B. Ridgway, a lieutenant colonel; Walter Bedell Smith, a major; Maxwell D. Taylor, a major; Lucien K. Truscott Jr., a major; James A. Van Fleet, a major; and Walton H. Walker, a lieutenant colonel. The promotions of these officers and many like them were a shrewd combination from Brian A. Linn’s three traditions of Managers, Heroes, and Guardians.32 To pave the way for these younger men, most of the forty-two division, corps, and army commanders who took part in 1941 US Army GHQ maneuvers were either relieved or reassigned to new commands during 1942. The weeding-out process was ruthless and relentless throughout the war.

Thomas E. Ricks’s comprehensive work on American military leadership points out that under “the Marshall system,” senior American commanders during World War II “generally were given a few months in which to succeed, be killed or wounded, or be replaced. Sixteen Army division commanders were relieved for cause, out of a total of 155 officers who commanded Army divisions in combat during the war. At least five corps commanders also were removed for cause.”33 General Marshall had spent his prewar career, as had Eisenhower, thinking deeply and thoroughly about how the army would have to function as part of a coalition in any future conflict. By the mid-1930s he had started implementing personnel policies that enabled the army’s cadre to be ready in 1940–1941.

The overall command of Torch was placed in the hands of General Eisenhower. Execution of Torch on the heels of Montgomery’s Alamein victory meant that Rommel now found his Panzerarmee caught in a vice with jaws closing from both ends of the North African littoral, pursued by the British 8th Army from the east and threatened from the west by Anglo-American ground forces that landed divisions in November 1942 in Morocco and Algeria at three locations: Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers (map 4.6).

Map 4.6. The invasion of North Africa saved Allied forces from catastrophe had they invaded France in 1943 because Operation Torch uncovered serious operational deficiencies in the US Army, including the debacle at Kasserine Pass.

Source: USMA Atlases.

A total of 125,000 Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen initially participated in Torch, 82,600 of them US Army personnel. Initial Allied casualties were relatively light. By the end of the campaign seven months later, manpower had grown to over half a million, and casualties exceeded seventy thousand.34

Operations

In Peter R. Mansoor’s assessment, the decision to invade North Africa in late 1942 “probably saved Allied forces from catastrophe had they invaded France in 1943. Operation Torch uncovered serious weaknesses in joint and combined operations, combined-arms training, and small-unit leadership.”35 The Americans discovered that they had deployed an army by and large not fully prepared to fight and win its first battles, unsure of its military skills, but determined and innovative enough to win.36

The tactical failure at Kasserine Pass resulted in thirty thousand Americans confronting eleven thousand Germans but sustaining losses of 183 tanks, 194 half-tracks, 208 artillery pieces, 512 trucks, and “more supplies than existed in all the depots in Algeria and Morocco and . . . 6,300 troops” against 989 German casualties.37 The debacle motivated the US Army to study and document lessons learned after the army’s first introduction to land combat against German forces. The lessons included use of fire and maneuver to advance against enemy positions; the importance of careful study of terrain and the enemy; the value of detailed development and communication of comprehensive battle plans; the meticulous attention to tactical command, control, and communications, particularly to the waterproofing of radio sets and attention to their maintenance; the importance of combined-arms coordination, including close air ground support (still in its infancy); the need to train and fight at night; the use of smoke to obscure movement; the importance of small-unit training and practice; and the criticality of a well-organized logistical supply chain at the divisional level and below.38 In mastering the basics, the US Army learned that Bewegungskrieg could be defeated.

Rommel later expressed high praise for the American performance in North Africa and Europe:

In Tunisia the Americans had to pay a stiff price for their experience [inexperience], but it brought rich dividends. Even at that time, the American generals showed themselves to be very advanced in the tactical handling of their forces, although we had to wait until the Patton Army in France [Patton’s 3rd Army was activated on August 1, 1944, to exploit the breakthrough during the execution of Operation Cobra] to see the most astonishing achievements in mobile warfare. The Americans, it is fair to say, profited far more than the British from their experience in Africa, thus confirming the axiom that education is easier than re-education.39

The substantial Anglo-American literature on the British victory at Alamein and the American introduction to land combat in North Africa enabled the US Army to gain early experience in how to defeat Axis armies, take back Axis territory, and hold it.

Conclusions

The outcome in North Africa can be explained by a comparison of the flawed German strategic architecture and the robust capacity of the Anglo-American architecture to adapt. The Germans failed to win in the desert because of their overreach in both the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Even though Hitler dispatched Rommel to North Africa as one of his most aggressive commanders, German strategic overreach became unmanageable. Eighty percent of the Wehrmacht’s deployed armies (more than 230 divisions) were fighting in Russia. Rommel had been fighting with four German divisions in Africa with insufficient combat power and logistics to win. Germany simply lacked the resources to win in either theater. Defeat in North Africa marked the beginning of a German downward slide. The Germans lost as many soldiers in Tunisia as they did at Stalingrad.

In North Africa, the Allies did not yet have all of the elements of a strategic architecture to win the war, but they aligned political leadership, selected new commanders, developed campaign plans, improved military skills, and rapidly expanded production so they could confidently proceed to the next stage of the war: continue to exploit success in the Mediterranean theater until they assembled the strength to liberate the Continent.