North African campaign

• 1. Introduction

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  The North African campaign of World War II began on the 11th of June 1940 and did not end until the 13th of May 1943 - nearly three years of brutal fighting across some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. Desert, heat, and vast distances shaped every decision made by commanders on both sides. What started as British raids on Italian Libya grew into one of the largest sustained military operations of the entire war, drawing in forces from across the British Commonwealth, occupied Europe, the United States, Vichy France, Germany, and Italy. At stake was not just control of North Africa, but potential access to the oil fields of the Middle East and the fate of millions of people living across the region. The campaign would ultimately trap and destroy an Axis force of around 275,000 soldiers, strip Germany of its most capable battlefield general in that theater, and open the door to the invasion of Italy itself. But before any of that, it began with a single armored unit crossing a border in the Libyan desert.

• 2. Opening Blows

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  On the 14th of June 1940, the British 11th Hussars and part of the 1st Royal Tank Regiment crossed from Egypt into Libya and captured Fort Capuzzo. It was a small, sharp action, but it marked the opening move of a campaign that would reshape the war. Italy had declared war on France and Britain only days earlier, on the 10th of June. Benito Mussolini's declaration was careful on one point: he stated explicitly that Italy did not intend to drag into the conflict other peoples bordering her on land or on sea - a reference to Egypt, at the time a nominally independent kingdom under British protection. Despite that assurance, Italian forces in Libya were ordered to invade Egypt in September. They advanced along the coastal road, hampered by poor transport, low officer training, and inadequate equipment. By the 16th of September, the Italian Tenth Army had reached Maktila, roughly 80 miles west of Mersa Matruh, and halted due to supply problems. General Graziani ordered his men to dig in around Sidi Barrani, establishing a ring of fortified camps. The British struck those camps in December with Operation Compass, a force of 36,000 men attacking an Italian army of ten divisions. The results were staggering. Some 40,000 Italians were captured in the ports of Bardia and Tobruk alone. General Richard O'Connor sent the 7th Armoured Division cutting across the desert to the coastal town of Beda Fomm, arriving roughly ninety minutes before the retreating Italians arrived, blocking their escape. The remnants of the Tenth Army surrendered. In ten weeks, Allied forces had destroyed the Italian Tenth Army and taken 130,000 prisoners of war.

• 3. Rommel Arrives

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  Adolf Hitler named the hastily assembled German expeditionary force the Afrika Korps and placed it under the command of Erwin Rommel. His orders, when the lead elements arrived in Tripoli in February 1941, were straightforward: reinforce the Italians and block any Allied attempt to drive them from North Africa. What followed defied those orders almost immediately. An armored reconnaissance mission in March quickly became a full offensive launched from El Agheila. Allied forces were driven back, and leading general officers were captured. The Australian 9th Infantry Division fell back to the fortress port of Tobruk, while the remaining Commonwealth forces withdrew a further 100 miles east to the Libyan-Egyptian border. Rommel's forward units then swept into Egypt, seizing Fort Capuzzo, Bardia, Sollum, and the tactically vital Halfaya Pass. Tobruk sat behind Axis lines, refusing to fall. The Royal Navy resupplied its garrison under cover of darkness. German and Italian forces lacked both the strength and the training to take it, which created a chronic supply problem for Rommel. His front line at Sollum sat at the end of a supply line stretching all the way back to Tripoli, forced to bypass Tobruk entirely. British operations - Operation Brevity and then the larger Operation Battleaxe - failed to break the siege. After Battleaxe's failure, General Archibald Wavell was relieved of command and replaced by Claude Auchinleck. The Western Desert Force gained a second corps and was renamed the Eighth Army, drawing soldiers from Britain, Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Sudan, and a Free French brigade under Marie-Pierre Koenig.

• 4. The Intelligence War

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  Bonner Fellers, the US military attaché in Cairo, had been tasked by General George Marshall with providing detailed reports on the military situation in Africa. He visited frontline positions, spoke with British commanders, and read sensitive documents. Then he encrypted his findings using the US State Department's Black Code and transmitted them to Washington. The Germans read every word. In September 1941, Italian agents had stolen a Black Code book from the US embassy in Rome, photographed it, and returned it without detection. The Germans knew Fellers by the nickname "die gute Quelle" - the good source - or more informally as 'the little fellow'. His reports informed German commanders of Allied strengths, positions, losses, reinforcements, supply levels, and plans from January to June 1942. On the 29th of June 1942, Fellers switched to a different cipher, and the window closed. The Axis had a further intelligence advantage through the 621st Signals Battalion, commanded by Hauptmann Alfred Seeböhm, which monitored British radio traffic from North Africa starting in late April 1941. British officers made frequent open, uncoded transmissions during combat, making it straightforward for the Germans to identify unit positions and deployments. The situation changed after a British counterattack during the Battle of Gazala overran and destroyed the 621st Signals Battalion and captured some of their documents, alerting the British to the full scope of the problem. The British responded by tightening radio discipline, introducing coded telephony, padding real messages with dummy traffic, and constructing an entire fake signals network in the southern sector. On the Allied side, the Ultra programme - decryption of Axis messages encoded on the Enigma machine - had significant limitations in the early phases. When Ultra intercepts informed General Wavell that Rommel had been ordered by OKW not to take offensive action before the 15th Panzer Division arrived in May 1941, the British command trusted that assessment. Rommel ignored his orders and attacked in March. Trusting that the Germans had no intention of major action, British command did not respond until it was too late. Rommel also deliberately withheld his operational plans from OKW and the Italian Comando Supremo, believing the Italians were prone to leaking information. On the 21st of January 1942, when he launched his second offensive from El Agheila, Comando Supremo was as surprised as the British were. Ultra's most concrete contribution came later: decrypted messages revealed the times and routes of Axis supply shipments across the Mediterranean. It is estimated that 40% to 60% of Axis supply shipping was located and destroyed using this intelligence, though that figure is disputed by historians Vincent P. O'Hara and Enrico Cernuschi, who argue that the effects of Ultra have been exaggerated. They note that of the 2.67 million tons of materiel, fuel, and munitions shipped to Africa, 2.24 million tons arrived safely despite Allied interdiction efforts.

• 5. The Tide Turns

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  The Battle of Gazala in June 1942 ended in an Axis victory, and the fall of Tobruk followed. Rommel drove the Eighth Army back over the Egyptian border. His advance was stopped in July only 90 miles from Alexandria at the First Battle of El Alamein. General Auchinleck, despite halting Rommel's advance, was replaced by General Harold Alexander. Lieutenant-General William Gott was promoted to command the entire Eighth Army, but was killed when his aircraft was intercepted and shot down over Egypt. Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery took command instead. At Alam Halfa at the end of June, the Axis made a second attempt to break through Allied defenses and failed. Montgomery spent months rebuilding and training the Eighth Army before launching a major offensive in late October 1942. The Second Battle of El Alamein decisively defeated the Italian-German army. The Eighth Army then drove Axis forces westward, capturing Tripoli in mid-January 1943.

• 6. Operation Torch

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  President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a direct order that Operation Torch was to have precedence over other operations and was to take place at the earliest possible date. The US Combined Chiefs of Staff, including General George Marshall and Admiral Ernest King, had opposed the North African landings. Marshall had even suggested abandoning the Germany-first strategy and shifting the offensive to the Pacific, arguing that the landings would not help the Soviet Union. Roosevelt rejected that position directly, saying it would do nothing to help Russia. The landings began on the 8th of November 1942 and finished on the 16th of November. Allied forces went ashore in Vichy-held Morocco and Algeria expecting minimal resistance. In Algiers, a French resistance coup d'état on the 8th of November neutralized the French XIX Corps and arrested the Vichy commanders before the landing even began. The city was taken on the first day along with the entire Vichy African command. In Oran and Morocco, Vichy French forces offered strong and bloody resistance. Generals Mark Clark and Dwight Eisenhower met with Vichy Admiral Francois Darlan and General Alphonse Juin. After three days of talks and threats, the two French commanders ordered the cessation of resistance on the 10th and the 11th of November in exchange for a promise to make Darlan the head of a Free French administration. Off the Moroccan coast, Americans fought Vichy French and German naval vessels in the Naval Battle of Casablanca and won. The Allied landings also prompted Germany and Italy to occupy the remainder of Vichy France under Case Anton, including a failed attempt to seize the French fleet at Toulon. The main portion of that fleet was scuttled by its own crews to prevent the Axis from using it. Stalin had long been urging the opening of a second front to relieve pressure on the Red Army. The North African operation absorbed more than half the German Ju 52 transport aircraft that had been needed to supply the encircled German forces at Stalingrad.

• 7. Tunisia and Surrender

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  After the Operation Torch landings, the Germans and Italians rushed troops into Tunisia to fill the gap left by withdrawing Vichy forces. By early December 1942, the Allied Eastern Task Force - redesignated as the British First Army under Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson - had advanced to within 30 kilometers of Tunis before being halted and pushed back. Axis air superiority over the battlefield, made possible by the greater distance of Allied airfields from the front line, proved a decisive factor in those first weeks. On the 4th of December 1942, Allied headquarters reported ongoing operations near Tebourba. A second Axis counterattack in the same area, following a failed first attempt on the 1st of December, was repulsed and the Axis forces took significant losses in equipment. In the second half of February 1943, the Axis achieved its most notable success in Tunisia by routing the US II Corps, commanded by Major General Lloyd Fredendall, at the Battle of Kasserine Pass. Rommel, by that point unwell, returned to Germany for health reasons and was replaced by Italian General Messe. The British Eighth Army reached the Tunisian border in early March and bypassed the Axis defenses on the Mareth Line in late March after heavy fighting. In mid-April, the British First Army in central Tunisia launched its main offensive to compress the remaining Axis pocket. On the 13th of May 1943, the Axis forces surrendered, yielding over 275,000 prisoners of war. The last Axis force to surrender was the 1st Italian Army under General Messe. The destruction of experienced Axis troops in North Africa significantly reduced the military capacity of both Germany and Italy. Two months after the surrender, the Allies landed in Sicily.

• 8. A War Without Hate?

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  For decades after the war, the North African campaign carried a reputation as a clean fight - a pure military contest in the desert, stripped of the ethnic cleansing and partisan murders that defined the war across Europe. That view has been challenged by historians. Civilians did live across North Africa, and both Italian and German forces committed documented atrocities against Allied prisoners of war and against local Maghrebi Jewish, Berber, and Arab populations. The campaign's human cost extended far beyond the soldiers who fought it. Nearly 400,000 Axis and Allied troops were lost, injured, or died of disease by the end of the campaign - a figure that does not account for the civilian toll across the region, or the fate of the estimated 250,000 Axis personnel trapped and forced to surrender in northern Tunisia.