Chapter 32: Nov 1942 U.S. Invasion of North Africa

“A man must know his destiny ... if he does not recognize it, then he is lost. By this I mean, once, twice, or at the very most, three times, fate will reach out and tap a man on the shoulder ... if he has the imagination, he will turn around and fate will point out to him what fork in the road he should take, if he has the guts, he will take it.”

― George S. Patton Jr.

In the closing days of 1942, the United States was faced with a decision as to where to begin hostilities against the German Wehrmacht in the European Theater of Operations. The American nation was faced with global war on two fronts against impressive military forces with the capability of dominating the entire planet. The most solid weapon that the Americans possessed was the mobilization of their industrial base to a full-time war footing.

During that formative war year of 1942, the Japanese moved from victory to victory across all of Asia and they dominated the seas of the Pacific with their impressive naval power. In Europe, Nazi Germany had yet to suffer a major defeat and their blunder in the invasion of the Soviet Union had yet to reach the point of no return when even the lowest ranking private realized their only hope was to retreat and try to make it back to the Fatherland in one piece. It was beginning to look like the major powers of the Axis might soon link up and form an enemy zone that controlled most of the globe from Asia to Europe.

The war planners at the Pentagon were faced with the unenviable decision point of selecting the initial starting point to counterattack against their enemies with the least amount of risk and the greatest possibility of victory.

The question really boiled down to: How might the United States select a proper battlefield where they could defeat the enemy and still retain the momentum of industrial production to give them leverage in future operations on two fronts.

Stalin encouraged the Americans to move swiftly to a European invasion of occupied France.

The North African campaign was seen as a vital first step in securing the oil fields and protection the southern flank of a Europe-wide assault that would begin with a cross-channel invasion as soon as possible.

It was the fall of Tobruk to Field Marshal Rommel that prompted Franklin Delano Roosevelt to choose North Africa as the starting point in a long and costly war effort.

In actuality, Roosevelt’s move was in direct contradiction of the war planners and he made the judgement based entirely on his own astute sense of timing and the will of the American people. It proved to be the correct decision because at the same time, American Marines landed at Guadalcanal in a bloody battle with entrenched Japanese land forces. At almost the same time, The Wehrmacht reached the outskirts of Stalingrad and they eventually suffered the first great defeat at the hands of the Russians marking the probable turning point of the war in Europe. The American landing in North Africa was greeted with the stunning British victory at El Alamein and the much needed reinforcements bolstered the allied balance of power in North Africa.

This German defeat was further supported by the final victory in Guadalcanal by American forces and the surrender of over a quarter of a million German army troops in Stalingrad only a couple of months later.

The American operation in North Africa was a mixed bag of success and failure.

They managed to avoid a debacle like the Churchill experience at Gallipoli in World War One when he was the head of the Admiralty.

Eventually, the Afrika Korps started to crumble due to the long, never-ending conflict racing back and forth along the coastal highways filled with death and destruction. They had put hundreds and even thousands of rounds through their main guns and many of the tanks were due for in-depth maintenance. The supply lines back to the Fatherland were rift with obstructions and gaps that made their tactical abilities limited to the point of unavoidable surrender. The inexperience of many of the American Officer ranks drove the General Officer ranks into frustrating corrective actions. It was a problem of not building up a viable military presence until the last moment before the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. There was a depth of combat experience in the upper enlisted ranks but the lower ranks were untested and their training in many cases was superficial at best.

To make matters worse for the initial American effort, they had to rely on their allies for intelligence and in the case of the British, that intelligence was skewed in favor of bolstering the underpinning of the British overseas empire rather than in keeping losses to a minimum or getting a fair shake in the distribution of high risk movements.

It was a valuable lesson for General Eisenhower and one that he remembered with great clarity on the eve of the Normandy invasion. The participation of the French was a confused affair with one officer giving orders favoring the Petain government that owed allegiance to the Nazi regime and another officer changing the order to show the will of the “Free French” in supporting the allies. It was no wonder that the French soldiers were disgusted with the contradictions in their own upper echelons.

The Italian forces were a different story with most of the leadership being ashamed of supporting the Axis and the obvious lack of motivation in the lower ranks to actually put up stiff resistance to the allied movements. The joke on the ground was that the Italians were doing their best to surrender to the Americans before they were killed or maimed in a war that was not of their making. The German Wehrmacht held the Italians in overt contempt and was quick to blame any defeat on their ally for the lack of victory.