U.S. Troops Land in North Africa
The North African Campaign: Operation Torch
Copyright © 2005-6, Henry J. Sage
U.S. Troops Land in North Africa
Although the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came as a shock to most Americans, it cannot be said that America was completely unprepared for war. The first peacetime draft in American history had been instituted in 1940, and the size of the Army and Navy were being expanded, and new equipment was being tested and built. Americans had watched nervously as Germany overran Poland, Denmark, Norway and France and were then stunned when Germany turned and invaded Russia in the summer of 1941 just months before Pearl Harbor. Few thought that America would be able to avoid war indefinitely.
But being somewhat prepared for war and being in a war are two different things, and with the attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany's declaration of war on the United States a few days later, America and her British allies were facing a two-front war of huge proportions. The the joint American and British staffs quickly adopted a policy of Germany first, based on a prior understanding between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. Hitler's Luftwaffe was pounding Great Britain, and although much of the British army had been spared by the “Miracle of Dunkirk,” Britain was stretched very thin.
Reluctantly or not, the United States and Great Britain had accepted the Soviet Union as an ally in the fight against Nazi Germany. From the beginning, Soviet Premier Stalin had urged the Western powers to open a second front to take pressure off the Russian armies being driven back by Hitler's legions. Plans called for an eventual cross-channel invasion against the continent of Europe, but in 1942 such a move was out of the question. Thus the background was established for Operation Torch.
Lieutenant General Dwight Eisenhower, who had been a major only a few years before, suddenly found himself in command of the first American offensive operation against Hitler's Germany in World War II. The British had been fighting the Italians and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps on that continent throughout 1942, and the joint staffs decided that the first American operation would be an invasion of western North Africa. Although North Africa was removed from the continent of Europe, control of the Mediterranean was considered vital to the British. Thus securing North Africa was strategically important.
The landings in North Africa began on November 8, 1942. At first the Americans, untested in battle, with equipment that was not yet up to the combat standards of a fast, mechanized mobile war, fared poorly. At the Battle of Kasserine Pass Americans suffered a humiliating defeat under poor leadership. Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley, however, weeded out incompetent commanders and began to restore the morale and combat effectiveness of the American armies.
With Field Marshall Montgomery's great victory at El Alamein in May 1943 and the Americans applying more pressure on the German armies to the west, North Africa was finally secured. The fighting in North Africa for the American army can be seen as a sort of on-the-job training exercise, though it was fierce and brutal fighting all the same. General Rommel was taken back to Germany and eventually given command on the Western front. General Patton went on to command the U.S. Third Army, one of America's superior fighting units during the war, and General Eisenhower rose to the position of the Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces in Europe.
With North Africa secured, the next target for the allies was the Italian peninsula, which would be reached via an interim assault on the island of Sicily.
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