Operation Torch

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Torch began at dawn on the 8th of November 1942, when Allied forces waded ashore on three separate coastlines across French North Africa at the same moment. The question hanging over every planner in London and Washington was not whether they could land, but whether the French defenders would fight back. These were not enemy soldiers in the usual sense. They were former allies, governed by the Vichy regime that had made its accommodation with Adolf Hitler. Some might resist. Some might not. Nobody knew for certain.

  What followed over the next eight days was not a clean military triumph. It was a tangle of combat, negotiation, political intrigue, and improvised deals struck in the middle of a war. The man who ended up holding the keys to French North Africa was not a general the Allies had groomed for the role. He was Admiral Francois Darlan, a Vichy official who happened to be in Algiers visiting a sick family member when the ships arrived.

  Torch was also something unusual in Allied strategy: a compromise. The Americans wanted to fight Germans in Europe. The British wanted to fight them in Africa first. President Franklin D. Roosevelt cast the deciding vote, and the result was an invasion that would set in motion events reaching far beyond the beaches of Morocco and Algeria.

• 2. A Compromise Born in Washington

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  On the 7th of December 1941, the United States entered the war, and within weeks British and American leaders gathered at the Arcadia Conference in Washington D.C. to sort out what to do next. Both sides agreed on a Europe-first principle, putting Germany before Japan, but they disagreed sharply on how to execute it.

  General George Marshall, head of the United States Army, and Admiral Ernest King, head of the US Navy, preferred a direct thrust. Their plan called for a limited landing in Europe in 1942, which they called Operation Sledgehammer, followed by a larger assault in 1943 under the name Operation Roundup. Winston Churchill pushed back. He argued that American forces were still building up under Operation Bolero and that there was not enough shipping for large-scale European landings so soon.

  Churchill proposed North Africa instead. Marshall and King so strongly opposed the idea that they threatened to abandon the Germany-first strategy entirely if it went forward. Roosevelt settled the argument. He wanted to support the Soviet Union, which was bearing the heaviest fighting of the war, and a Pacific operation would do nothing for the Russians. He approved the North Africa plan.

  On the 14th of August 1942, Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed Commander in Chief of the Allied expeditionary force and set up his headquarters in London. Planners identified Oran, Algiers, and Casablanca as the three targets. There was debate about whether to include Bône in eastern Algeria, roughly 300 miles closer to Tunis than Algiers, as a fourth landing. Eisenhower personally favored an eastern option that would have moved forces faster toward Tunisia. The Combined Chiefs of Staff overruled him, worried that if Spain abandoned neutrality and joined the Axis, the Strait of Gibraltar might close, cutting off any Allied force deep in Algeria. Casablanca was chosen precisely because it sat on the Atlantic, reachable overland even if the strait closed.

• 3. The French Question

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  Robert Daniel Murphy, the American consul in Algiers, was the Allies' window into Vichy French thinking, and what he reported was cautiously optimistic. He believed much of the French colonial army might not fight, and his covert contacts with local officers seemed to bear that out. General Charles Mast, the French commander-in-chief in Algiers, was one of those who expressed willingness to support an Allied landing.

  The political landscape was complicated by the split between Vichy and Free France. The United States had recognized the Pétain government in 1940, while Britain had refused and instead recognized General Charles de Gaulle's French National Committee as a government-in-exile. De Gaulle had supported British operations against Vichy forces at Dakar and in Syria, which left him with few admirers in North Africa. The Allies concluded he had to be kept entirely out of Torch.

  The French officers who were willing to cooperate asked that General Henri Giraud be brought out of Vichy France to lead. Giraud was smuggled out on HMS Seraph and arrived at Eisenhower's headquarters in Gibraltar. Then negotiations ran into a wall. Giraud would accept nothing less than supreme command of the entire invading force. When the Allies refused, he announced he would remain, in his own words, a spectator in this affair.

  Major General Mark W. Clark had already made a secret journey to Cherchell in Algeria aboard a British submarine on the 21st of October 1942 to meet with French officers. He gave them almost nothing about concrete plans, to preserve secrecy. They gave him detailed intelligence about the military situation in Algiers. The most important French official of all, Admiral Darlan, was not part of any of these arrangements. His presence in Algiers on the night of the invasion was a coincidence that would reshape the entire political outcome of the operation.

• 4. Three Task Forces

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  Torch assembled three separate amphibious forces, each aimed at a different stretch of coastline hundreds of miles apart, all to land simultaneously before dawn on the 8th of November.

  The Western Task Force, targeting Casablanca, sailed directly from the United States in a convoy of more than 100 ships, the first of a new series of UG convoys created for North African logistics. Major General George S. Patton commanded the ground element, with Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt overseeing the naval side. The force carried 35,000 troops, drawn from the U.S. 3rd and 9th Infantry Divisions and two battalions of the U.S. 2nd Armored Division.

  The Centre Task Force, bound for Oran, put 18,500 troops ashore under Major General Lloyd Fredendall, conveyed from Britain by Royal Navy Commodore Thomas Troubridge. Its air component was unusual: USS Ranger was the only true aircraft carrier in the entire operation, joined by the escort carrier USS Suwannee carrying Grumman Wildcats.

  For the Eastern Task Force aimed at Algiers, an elaborate fiction was maintained for French public opinion. Torch was officially presented as an American operation, with British forces playing a supporting role. Churchill suggested British soldiers might wear American uniforms, and No. 6 Commando did exactly that. Fleet Air Arm aircraft flew with US star roundels, and two British destroyers raised the Stars and Stripes. In reality, Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson commanded the Eastern Task Force, which included a brigade from the British 78th Division, the U.S. 34th Infantry Division, and No. 1 and No. 6 Commandos among its 20,000 troops. Air operations were divided at Cape Tenez: Royal Air Force aircraft under Air Marshal Sir William Welsh took the eastern sector, while all United States Army Air Forces aircraft operated to the west under Major General Jimmy Doolittle.

  Facing them were roughly 125,000 Vichy French soldiers across the territories, backed by around 500 aircraft, of which 173 were modern Dewoitine D.520 fighters, plus coastal artillery and 210 tanks.

• 5. Eight Days of Fighting

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  At Algiers, French Resistance fighters attempted to seize the city in the early hours of the 8th of November before the landings began. They succeeded initially, but when no American troops appeared by morning, Vichy forces reestablished control. On the beaches, opposition was light. Only at Cape Matifou did coastal batteries open fire. By 06:00 the airfield at Maison Blanche had fallen, and within four hours, Hawker Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft from Gibraltar were landing there.

  The fiercest moment at Algiers came in the harbor, where Operation Terminal sent British destroyers Malcolm and Broke to put 250 American Rangers directly onto the docks. Heavy artillery struck Malcolm and forced her back. Broke made it in and disembarked the Rangers, who secured the power station and oil installations. Then she too had to withdraw under the same fire. Broke foundered the following day in bad weather. By 16:00 on the 8th, American troops had surrounded Algiers, and General Alphonse Juin agreed to stop fighting.

  In Morocco, things were louder. At Fedala, the principal assault toward Casablanca, the first wave reached the beach at 05:00 against no opposition, but Vichy shore batteries opened fire at dawn and all available French ships sortied from Casablanca. By 11:00 the naval battle was over, the American cruisers having sunk or driven ashore the light cruiser, two flotilla leaders, and four destroyers. The battleship Jean Bart, moored at Casablanca and used as a coastal gun platform, was hit five times on the first day, knocking out her one operational turret. After repairs she reopened fire on the 10th and was attacked by dive-bombers from Ranger, taking two bomb hits. Casablanca surrendered at 06:00 on the 11th, one hour before a full-scale ground assault was scheduled to begin at 07:15.

  At Oran, both sloops sent to seize the port were sunk by Vichy destroyers in the harbor. The airborne assault by the 2nd Battalion of the 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which had flown all the way from England over Spain to reach the target airfields, also failed. British carrier aircraft destroyed 70 aircraft on the ground at those airfields in the morning. Oran's surrender on the 10th followed bombardment by a British battleship.

• 6. The Darlan Deal

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  Eisenhower, with backing from both Roosevelt and Churchill, struck a bargain with Admiral Darlan on the 10th of November. Darlan would be recognized as French High Commissioner in North Africa. In exchange, he ordered all French forces across the region to cease resistance and cooperate with the Allies. French resistance across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia stopped almost at once.

  The agreement was politically toxic. It left Vichy officials in their posts throughout North Africa. It gave no role to Free France and deeply offended de Gaulle. Much of the British and American public regarded all Vichy French as Nazi collaborators, and the spectacle of the Allied command cutting a deal with one of the most senior Vichy figures shocked many. Eisenhower defended the arrangement by arguing that moving on against the Axis in Tunisia mattered more than purging the French colonial administration.

  When Hitler learned of the agreement, he ordered the immediate occupation of Vichy France. Darlan responded to a German move on the French fleet at Toulon by inviting Admiral Jean de Laborde to bring those ships over to the Allied side. De Laborde refused and on the 27th of November ordered the fleet scuttled as German forces entered Toulon.

  On the 24th of December, Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, a French resistance fighter and anti-fascist monarchist, assassinated Darlan in Algiers. Giraud succeeded him but likewise replaced few Vichy officials. Over time, under pressure from Allied governments and de Gaulle's supporters, the regime shifted, Vichy decrees were rescinded, and the Free French gradually took hold. French North African troops would eventually fight under the Allied banner as part of the French Expeditionary Corps, which by April 1944 numbered 112,000 soldiers in the Italian campaign, with Maghrebis, mostly Moroccans, making up more than 60 percent of that force.

• 7. The Road to Tunisia

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  Torch was never conceived as an end in itself. The point was to close a vice on Axis forces in North Africa by approaching from the west while the British Eighth Army drove from Egypt. From the moment Algiers fell, the clock started on reaching Tunisia before the Germans could fortify it.

  Axis forces began building up in French Tunisia on the 9th of November, the day after the landings, and the local French garrison did not oppose them. Elements of the British First Army pushed east under Anderson and came within 40 miles of Tunis before a German counterattack at Djedeida pushed them back. The Tunisia Campaign ground on through the winter.

  At the Battle of Sidi Bou Zid on the 14th to the 15th of February and then at the Battle of Kasserine Pass on the 19th, the US II Corps suffered sharp defeats. Allied reinforcements halted the Axis advance on the 22nd of February. Fredendall was removed and replaced by Patton. General Sir Harold Alexander arrived in late February to command the new 18th Army Group, unifying the Eighth Army and the Allied forces in Tunisia under one structure.

  From the east, Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army was pressing Erwin Rommel's forces steadily toward Tunisia after the victory at El-Alamein. In January 1943 the Axis made a stand at the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia. The Axis counterattacked westward at the Battle of Medenine on the 6th of March but the Eighth Army repulsed them easily. Rommel left Tunisia on the 9th of March, replaced by Jurgen von Arnim. The First and Eighth Armies attacked together in April. British forces took Tunis on the 6th of May and American forces reached Bizerte the following day. By the 13th of May, all Axis forces in North Africa had surrendered.

• 8. The Overlooked Operation

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  Operation Torch occupied a strange position in history almost from the moment it ended. The political awkwardness of the Darlan deal, the fact that French forces were the initial enemies, and the absence of a clean heroic narrative made it difficult to fit into standard accounts of the war.

  The Economist, in a later assessment, speculated that this discomfort explained why Torch has been largely overlooked in popular histories. An Allied invasion where the first shots were exchanged with former allies, followed by a deal with a Vichy admiral, followed by that admiral's assassination by a French monarchist six weeks later, does not lend itself to straightforward retelling.

  Yet the operation carried weight that extended well past the battlefield. It was the first time American armed forces deployed in the Arab world since the Barbary Wars, the early 19th-century conflicts in North Africa that had been the young republic's first overseas military engagements. According to The Economist, the relationships and patterns established during Torch laid the foundations for American postwar policy across the Middle East, a consequence that none of the planners at the Arcadia Conference in late 1941 had mapped onto their strategic charts.