Operation Torch (from November 8 1942) was the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa in World War II during the North African Campaign.
The Soviet Union had been putting pressure on the United States and Britain to begin operations in Europe, a second front to relieve the pressure on the Russian forces. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill favoured an attack on northern Africa followed by an invasion of Europe in 1943, while American president Roosevelt suspected the Africa operation would rule out an invasion of Europe in 1943 but agreed to support Churchill.
The Allies planned an Anglo-American invasion of northwestern Africa — Morocco and Algeria, territory nominally in the hands of Vichy France. The French had around 60,000 soldiers in Morocco as well as coastal artillery, a handful of tanks and aircraft, with ten or so warships and 11 submarines at Casablanca. The Allies believed that the French forces would not fight, although they harboured suspicions that the French navy would bear a grudge over the British action at Mers-el-Kebir (near Oran) in 1940. The Allies co-opted a French General, Henri Giraud, into their force as a potential commander of the French troops following invasion. The Allies intended to advance rapidly eastwards into Tunisia and attack the German forces in the rear. General Dwight Eisenhower gained command of the attack, with headquarters in Gibraltar.
The Landings
The Allies planned to capture the key ports from Morocco to Algeria simultaneously, targeting Casablanca, Oran and Algiers.
Casablanca
The Western Task Force comprised all-American units, with Major General George Patton leading the first assault force and Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt heading the naval operations.
The naval support consisted of five aircraft carriers, three battleships, seven cruisers, 38 destroyers, plus transport, support and other vessels. The three initial attack groups numbered 7,000, 19,500, and 9,500 soldiers; some of the force shipping directly from America to the battlefield. The assault force departed from Hampton Roads on October 24, meeting the rest of the force mid-Atlantic.
The initial forces landed on November 8, 1942 at Safi, Fedala , and Mehedia -Port Lyautey to sporadic French resistance.
Pro-Allied forces had attempted a coup on the night of the 7th, but with no success. For the patriotic General Bethouard, after having encircled the General Residency of Vichyist General Nogues, accepted to dicuss, instead of arresting him at once. During that time Nogues succeeded in phoning another regiment to encircle the Bethouard one, and alerting the French army and Casablanca fleet against allied landing.
Safi, to the west, fell the most easily — on the first afternoon. The Americans met tougher resistance at Port Lyautey. The landing at Fedala, nearest to the target of Casablanca, formed potentially the riskiest part of the operation — a sortie by the French navy could reach the landing sites within minutes, and so most of the Allied naval strength stood arrayed against this threat. Weather made the initial landings at Fedala tricky, while around Casablanca the French batteries soon opened fire on the US naval vessels and dogfights between French and US navy fighters occurred — the Allies sank or severely damaged four French destroyers and three submarines. The initial landing at Fedala did not even finish until the 9th, and rather than advance, the American forces hung back, pending the outcome of negotiations for the French to cease armed resistance.
Algiers having been occupated the first day by allied forces, thanks to the French resistance, who had succeeded in neutralizing the French XIX Army Corps of Algiers before the landing, General Clark compelled the vichyist admiral François Darlan and General Juin after 3 days of talks and threats, to order French forces would cease armed resistance, November 10, providing he remained head of a French administration.
Hitler retaliated by ordering German forces to occupy the so-called Unoccupied Zone of Central and Southern France, without any resistance of the vichyst armistice army.
Most French troops in Africa followed Darlan's lead but certain elements joined the German forces in Tunisia.
Oran
Center Task Force, Tafaraiu
Algiers
The French resistance putsch of November 8, 1942 in Algiers caused the immediate Allied military success of Torch Operation in Algiers.
That putsch was one of the most beautiful feats of arms of French resistance, by its circumstances and especially by its effects. It indeed allowed the success of Torch operation, i.e. Allied landing in the whole North Africa, whose success, beside the allied victories of El-Alamein and Stalingrad constituted the turning of the war:
Pursuant to secretly made agreements in Cherchell on October 23, 1942, between Algiers resistance and the combined command, 400 badly armed French civil resistants neutralized, alone, the coastal artillery of Cherchell and the vichyist XIXème army corps of Algiers during about fifteen hours. To get that result their groups, under the command of José Aboulker, Henri d'Astier de La Vigerie, and colonel Jousse, had occupied, during the night from the 7 to November 8, the majority of the strategic points (General Government, Prefecture, Staff headquarters, barracks, etc.) and arrested most of the vichyist military and civil rulers. One of their groups, composed with some eldest pupils of the Ben-Aknoun College directed by the young non commissioned officer (aspirant) Pauphilet, had succeeded in arresting General Juin, Chief commandant in North Africa, as well as the collaborationist admiral Darlan, suddenly present in Algiers that night.
Towards 1 hour of the morning the consul Murphy had gone to the villa des Oliviers to give a message of the president Roosevelt with the General Juin, Head commander of French Africa army. The message of Roosevelt required of the army of Africa to receive the United States forces as friends and to join them, so as to release France from German domination. Then general Juin and later on admiral Darlan refused to receive peacefully American forces.
At the same time, in Sidi-Ferruch, Colonel Baril, one of the rare resistants among the professional officers, had succeeded in occupying the fort with one of its companies, and in neutralizing its artillery batteries, so that the landing allied forces were going to be able to take foot on Sidi-Ferruch beach without any loss. The other landing points were the Pointe Pescade, close by Algiers, and the Cape Matifou beaches, on the eastern side of the city.
Unfortunately, many soldiers of American general Ryder lost their lifes before arriving on shore, as the sea was agitated and the night very black: the pilots of the landing-crafts — which were going to prove reliable later on in Normandy — had not practically get any drive training, for lack of time. Many landing-crafts charged with heavily equipped soldiers knocked the hulls of the ships, or were badly moored on the landing beaches and then rejected by the sea, on those which followed them. Also a number of them were turned and run over by the sea with their occupants. As a result, the surviving soldiers landed in a more reduced number than expected, while the landing-crafts of material were thrown on other beaches than the soldiers charged to use them.
Under these conditions General Ryder, who during hours had not any vehicle, did not dare, despite the requests of the resistance messengers, to walk immediately on Algiers. And thereafter, when he got under way, he was limited, jointly with its forces landed in the east of the city, to encircle the town by the heights without penetrating there. Actually, disabled by its losses at sea, he did not manage to admit that a few hundreds of civil volunteers had really been able to seize a city defended by an army corps.
Around 3 hours of the morning, detonations resounded in the port, where two American destroyers had succeeded in being introduced, and in landing on one of the piers a 300 rangers detachment directed by colonel Swenson. Their goal was to seize the port, to maintain it intact, so that it can immediately be used to land the allied reinforcements. The artillery of admiralty, by cannonading the allied vessels, awoke anybody in Algiers then. The seaboard gendarmes of Darlan, after having killed a dozen American soldiers, did not manage to overcome the well armed commandos. Their attack of the port was only later neutralized by vichyist forces, with the assistance of the armoured tanks of the 5ème Chasseurs.
Later in the morning, Juin and Darlan have been liberated by the mobile guards, and Darlan sent a cable to Vichy, to ask for a bombing by German Luftwaffe of the allied transport vessels in front of Algiers.
Further in the day, Vichy forces spent all the day to besiege the resistant groups one after the other, instead of attack the landing forces on the beaches. Consequently Ryder, after having encircled Algiers, began to penetrate in the town around 5 o’Clock PM, and allied mortars sent some projectiles on vichyist command in Fort-L’Empereur.
Then Juin and Darlan, overestimating allied forces, decided to surrender, but only for Algiers.
Thus, it was thanks to French resistants, which prevented the vichyist Algiers garrison from being mobilized, that the allied forces could land without meeting resistance, encircle Algiers and obtain the surrendering from that key port the very day. See, in French Wikipedia, the articles entitled La preparation de l’Operation Torch , et Le succés de l’opération Torch ).
Eastern Task Force, Medjez-el-Bab
Extension of the Allied military success in Algiers to Oran and Morocco
The Vichyist military commanders in North Africa, Juin and Darlan, being since the November 8 in the hands of the Allies, were constrained, not without sorrow and after 3 days of negotiations and threats, to order cease fire in Oran and Morocco.
Because the generals of Vichy fired on the allies in Oran and Morocco, while they delivered Tunisia to the Germans without a shot, we are forced to note that their attitude was not dictated by a strict respect of armistice conventions, but by a collaborationist reflex.
This coup d'Etat was baptized a few months later "putsch" by its authors, when they realised it had been carried out one November 8, i.e. the same day as the putsch by Hitler in Munich, 1923.
Thanks to this "putsch of November 8, 1942" in Algiers were obtained the two essential military goals:
• The success of the allied landing and
• the reversal of the army of Africa which, after 3 days of bloody combat against the Allies, finished the war in the allied camp.
(See in French Wikipedia Encyclopédie, Putsch du 8 novembre 1942 )
After the battle
Political results
Eisenhower, with the support of Roosevelt and Churchill, made agreements with Darlan as the leader of French North Africa, where he maintened the Vichy regime, with hitlerian laws and internment camps for democrats. Charles de Gaulle of the Free French responded with fury. The problem did not vanished when a local French anti-Nazi, Ferdinand Bonnier de la Chapelle, murdered Darlan on December 24, 1942: general Henri Giraud, who had been hanging around since November, was himself a provichyist opposed to any democratic reform.
Nevertheless, in spite of the temporary maintenance in Algiers of a Vichyist capacity under American protectorate, the Resistance putsch of 8 November 1942 , had not only generated a purely military success: it had capital political consequences.
The Darlan-Giraud authority, initially resolutely Vichyist, was gradually forced to lead the war effort against Nazi Germany; to democratise; to eliminate its principal head vichyist rulers; and to eventually amalgamate with the French national Committee of London. After which the "Comité Français de la Libération Nationale" (CFLN), born from this fusion, despite Roosevelt opposition, passed in a few months under the authority of General de Gaulle, and became the true and independent government of France in war.
When Adolf Hitler found out what Admiral Darlan had done, he immediately ordered Case Anton put into effect and to reinforce Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in order to combat the invaders.
More details about the unfolding of the putsch of November 8, 1942 in the two French Wikipédia articles on the Torch operation.
Military consequences
Between November the 8th and 10th French Tunisian forces under the command of general Barré left the whole country open to the Germans, withdrawning to the Algerian border. The general was receiving since November the 14th Juin's orders to resist, but waited until the 18th to begin fighting against the Germans. Then the Tunisian army fought courageously, despite its lack of equipment. The French were quickly helped by British forces.
After consolidating in French territory the Allies struck into Tunisia. Forces in the British 1st Army under Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson almost reached Tunis before a counterattack at Djedeida by German troops under General Walther Nehring thrust them back. In January 1943 German troops under General Erwin Rommel retreating westwards from Libya reached Tunisia.
The British 8th Army in the East, commanded by General Bernard Montgomery, stopped around Tripoli to allow reinforcements to arrive and build up the Allied advantage. In the West the forces of General Anderson came under attack in February at Faid Pass on the 14th and at Kasserine Pass on the 19th. The Allied forces retreated in disarray until heavy Allied reinforcements blunted the German advance on the 22nd.
General Harold Alexander arrived in Tunisia in late February to take command. The Germans attacked again in March, eastwards at Medenine on the 6th but were repulsed. Rommel counselled Hitler to allow a full retreat but was denied and on March 9 Rommel left Tunisia to be replaced by Jürgen von Arnim , who had to spread his forces over 100 miles of northern Tunisia.
These setbacks forced the Allies to consolidate their forces and develop their lines of communication and administration so that they could support a major attack. The 1st Army and the 8th Army then attacked the Germans. Hard fighting followed, but the Allies cut off the Germans from support by naval and air forces between Tunisia and Sicily. On May 6-7 the British took Tunis and American forces reached Bizerte, by May 13 the Axis forces in Tunisia had surrendered.
Basic bibliography
War Official reports
• Les Cahiers Français, La part de la Résistance Française dans les évènements d’Afrique du Nord (Official reports of French Resistance Group leaders who seized Algiers on November 8, 1942, to allow allied landing), Commissariat à l’Information of Free French Comité National, London, Aug. 1943.
War correspondant report
• Melvin K. Whiteleather, Main street's new neighbors, J.B. Lippincott Co. Philadelphy, 1945.
Scientific works about these events
- George F. Howe, North West Africa: Seizing the initiative in the West, Center of Military History, U.S Army, Library of Congress, 1991.
- Arthur L. Funck, The politics of Torch, University Press of Kansas, 1974.
- Professeur Yves Maxime Danan, La vie politique à Alger de 1940 à 1944, Paris, L.G.D.J., 1963.
- Henri Michel, Darlan, Hachette, Paris, 1993
- Christine Levisse-Touzet, L'Afrique du Nord dans la guerre, 1939-1945, Paris, Albin Michel, 1998.
- Professeur José Aboulker et Christine Levisse-Touzet, 8 novembre 1942 : Les armées américaine et anglaise prennent Alger en quinze heures, Paris, Espoir, n° 133, 2002.
- Liddle Hart, Histoire de la Seconde guerre mondiale, Paris, Fayard, 1973.
External links