The Air War over Tunisia

The Americans who landed in North Africa in November 1942 expected to fight for the airfields of Tunisia. Instead they spent the winter fighting from the wrong ones: mud strips and dry-weather fields a hundred miles or more from the front, while German fighters and dive bombers flew from all-weather bases minutes away. This chapter follows the air war from the Torch landings to the Axis surrender in May 1943: the struggle for forward fields such as Thelepte and Youks-les-Bains, the air side of Kasserine, the reorganization that put Allied air power under a single airman, the destruction of the Axis air bridge in April, and the arrival of the 99th Fighter Squadron, the first Black American fighter unit sent overseas. It ends with the surrender of Pantelleria and with a War Department field manual that still shapes how Americans think about air power.

Why it mattered

For American soldiers in Tunisia, the air war was something they experienced mostly from below. The memory that runs through letters, unit histories and the newspaper columns of the winter of 1942–43 is of German aircraft: Stukas over the hills at Tebourba, Messerschmitts strafing the roads behind the Eastern Dorsal, and the repeated question of where the American planes were. Ground commanders asked for fighters to circle over their positions as an “air umbrella.” Airmen answered that a fighter flying in circles over a division was a fighter wasted, and that the way to protect the troops was to attack enemy airfields and win control of the air. That argument, between soldiers and airmen and between Americans and British, ran through the whole campaign and through the Kasserine crisis in February 1943.

The answer the Allies reached in Tunisia changed the U.S. Army. In February 1943 the Allied air forces in Northwest Africa were placed under one air commander, with the tactical air forces supporting the armies under an airman who worked beside the army commander rather than under him. By April the Allies controlled the air over Tunisia and were shooting the Axis transport fleet out of the sky over the Sicilian Strait. In July 1943 the War Department published Field Manual 100-20, Command and Employment of Air Power, which declared that land power and air power were equals and that air power must be controlled centrally by an air commander. Airmen later called it their declaration of independence. The U.S. Air Force became a separate service four years later.

Tunisia also produced American stories that outlasted the doctrine. Jimmy Doolittle, the leader of the April 1942 raid on Tokyo, commanded the Twelfth Air Force in its first campaign. Young pilots such as William W. Momyer, later a four-star general who ran the air war over Vietnam, learned their trade over the Eastern Dorsal. And in the spring of 1943 the 99th Fighter Squadron, trained at Tuskegee, Alabama, arrived in North Africa to begin the combat record of the Tuskegee Airmen. This chapter tells those stories against the record of what the air forces actually did, and notes where claims made at the time and the records of the other side disagree.

Torch brings the air forces to Africa

The Twelfth Air Force was activated at Bolling Field, in Washington, on 20 August 1942, specifically for the invasion of French North Africa. Brig. Gen. James H. Doolittle formally took command on 23 September, with Col. Hoyt S. Vandenberg as his chief of staff (Wikipedia, “Twelfth Air Force”). Its plan for Operation Torch divided Northwest Africa into two air areas. The Twelfth would support the American landings at Casablanca and Oran and the forces in the west; the Royal Air Force’s Eastern Air Command, under Air Marshal Sir William Welsh, would support the British First Army in its advance from Algiers toward Tunis. Welsh could not command the American squadrons sent east to help him and had to work through Doolittle, often after long journeys between headquarters (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 4). The arrangement reflected the Allies’ expectation that the Tunisian ports would be reached quickly, before the Axis could react.

The Germans reacted faster. Ju 52 transports landed at El Aouina, the municipal airfield of Tunis, on 9 November 1942, the day after the landings, and the Vichy French authorities in Tunisia did not resist them (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 3). Within days Ju 52s were averaging about fifty landings a day at Bizerte, and by 17 November about 150 German fighters and dive bombers were based at the Tunis and Bizerte airfields, with long-range bombers flying from Sicily and Sardinia (Craven and Cate). By one summary of the published figures, the airlift that began about 12 November carried more than 15,000 men and 581 tons of supplies into Tunisia in its first weeks, while ships brought tanks, guns and vehicles (Wikipedia, “Tunisian campaign”). This air bridge, along with shipping, carried the troops who won the race for Tunis described in Chapter 1.

The first American fighters reached Africa in a manner that showed how improvised the operation was. On 10 November the escort carrier USS Chenango catapulted 77 P-40F Warhawks of the 33rd Fighter Group, commanded by William W. Momyer, toward the airfield at Port Lyautey in French Morocco, which had just been taken by American troops. One aircraft crashed into the sea, one was lost in fog, and seventeen were damaged on landing; another 35 P-40s arrived on the British escort carrier HMS Archer with the convoy five days after the landings, and four of those cracked up on arrival (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 3). Fighter groups flying the P-38 Lightning came in from England by way of Gibraltar.

Airborne troops seized the forward fields. On 12 November, 26 C-47s dropped 312 British paratroopers at Duzerville, six miles southeast of Bône, to secure its airfield. On 15 November, 20 C-47s dropped about 350 American paratroopers of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion at about 09:45 at Youks-les-Bains, the airfield near Tébessa, without opposition (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 3). The next day six B-17s of the 97th Bombardment Group’s 340th Squadron bombed the Sidi Ahmed airfield at Bizerte, the first U.S. Army Air Forces bombing of Axis forces in Tunisia. On 21 November a squadron of the 14th Fighter Group’s P-38s moved to Youks and attacked an Axis column moving on Gafsa; six P-38s were lost landing after dark that day (Craven and Cate). Welsh also sent east the DB-7 light bombers of the 15th Bombardment Squadron, the unit whose crews, flying borrowed RAF Bostons, had made the first American bombing raid in Europe on 4 July 1942.

All-weather fields and mud: the airfield problem

The single fact that shaped the air war over Tunisia that winter was geography. The Axis had all-weather airfields at Sidi Ahmed (Bizerte) and El Aouina (Tunis), with concrete or hard-surfaced runways built before the war, and coastal fields at Sfax, Sousse and Gabès. Stukas based at El Aouina could reach the fighting at Djedeida, about 20 miles away, and answer a call for support within five to ten minutes. The Germans also flew from open Tunisian plains that served as landing grounds (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 3).

The Allies had almost nothing comparable. Between Casablanca and the Tunisian border there were only four airfields with hard-surfaced runways: Port Lyautey, Tafaraoui near Oran, Maison Blanche at Algiers, and Bône. Bône was about 120 miles from the front lines, Youks-les-Bains about 150 and Souk el Arba about 70, and the last two were often mired. From Tafaraoui to Bizerte was nearly 600 miles, close to the B-17’s maximum tactical radius, and the mud at Tafaraoui was, in the words of the official Army Air Forces history, “deep and gooey.” A Spitfire flying from a forward field had a radius of about 90 miles and could stay over the battle area for only five to ten minutes (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 3). The Germans, in other words, could keep aircraft over the front most of the day; the Allies could visit it.

The winter rains made it worse. Engineers laid Sommerfeld track, the British wire-mesh matting, at Souk el Arba; it “simply sank in the mud.” Doolittle estimated in mid-December that only about a third of his roughly 600 aircraft could be used at one time, because of mud, shortages of spare parts and the distance from base to front (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 4). The best of the forward fields was Thelepte, in the semidesert country of west-central Tunisia, about forty miles southeast of Tébessa: a “good dry-weather field,” roomy and less subject to flooding than Youks. American fighters moved in during early December 1942, and by January the 33rd Fighter Group’s P-40s were flying from it. The men lived largely in a ravine about forty minutes’ walk from where the aircraft were dispersed (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 4).

The aircraft and the men

The American air forces in Tunisia flew a mix of types that reflected the state of American industry in 1942. The fighter groups supporting II Corps in central Tunisia flew the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, a rugged, heavily armed fighter that was outclassed at altitude by the German Messerschmitt Bf 109G and Focke-Wulf Fw 190; the 33rd Fighter Group’s P-40Fs had Packard-built Merlin engines. Bell P-39 Airacobras, poor fighters but useful for strafing, flew from the same fields. Three groups, the 1st, 14th and 82nd Fighter Groups, flew the twin-engined Lockheed P-38 Lightning, the only American fighter with the range to escort bombers to Bizerte and Tunis. Two American groups, the 31st and 52nd, flew British Spitfires (Craven and Cate, vol. II, chs. 3–5).

The bombers were equally varied. The Douglas A-20 Havoc and its export version, the DB-7, flew low-level attacks for the ground forces; the 47th Bombardment Group’s A-20s operated from Youks. North American B-25 Mitchell and Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber groups attacked ports, airfields and bridges. The heavy bombers were B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 97th and 301st Bombardment Groups, joined in the spring of 1943 by further groups; flying from Algeria, they struck the ports of Bizerte, Tunis and Sfax and the airfields at El Aouina and Sidi Ahmed. On 15 December 1942, seven B-17s escorted by six P-38s bombed Tunis, and a single 500-pound bomb sank the 10,000-ton Italian freighter Arlesiana; on 18 December, 33 of 36 B-17s bombed Bizerte, losing one bomber and four escorts; on 5 January 1943 eleven B-17s destroyed the power station at Sfax. By then the flak at Tunis and Bizerte rivaled that over the most heavily defended targets in northwestern Europe (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 4).

On the Axis side, the Luftwaffe brought some of its best fighter units. II. Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 2, flying Fw 190s, was based at Kairouan from November 1942 to May 1943; Jagdgeschwader 53 flew Bf 109Gs from the Tunis and Bizerte fields; and Jagdgeschwader 77 came west with Rommel’s army from Libya. Fw 190 fighter-bombers of Schnellkampfgeschwader 10 attacked airfields, ports and columns; Ju 87 Stukas of Sturzkampfgeschwader 3 and Hs 129 ground-attack aircraft flew close support; and Ju 88s and other bombers struck Bône, Algiers and the convoys from Sicily and Sardinia (Luftwaffe Resource Center, “Fw 190 in North Africa”; Craven and Cate). The Italian Regia Aeronautica contributed Macchi C.202 fighters, bombers and transports, including the SM.82s of the air bridge. German fighters in Tunisia consistently outnumbered Allied fighters over the battle area in the first months (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 3).

The kill-and-loss figures that the Twelfth Air Force reported give a rough sense of the air fighting, though, like all such figures, the claims are higher than the enemy’s records later supported. For December 1942 the Twelfth claimed 61 enemy aircraft destroyed for 49 of its own lost; for January 1943, 167 claimed for 72 lost (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 4). The pattern is familiar from every air campaign of the war: claims made in good faith by several pilots firing at the same aircraft, or at aircraft that were damaged and not destroyed, add up to more than the other side lost.

The real markings of American aircraft in North Africa were simpler than nose art and changed during the campaign. In May 1942 the red disc at the center of the white star had been painted out, because at a distance it could be mistaken for the Japanese red disc. For Torch, a chrome-yellow ring was added around the blue disc and white star on the fuselage and under the wings, so that French and Allied gunners would recognize American aircraft; some units painted it on the upper wing stars as well. The white bars on either side of the star, outlined in red, became official in June 1943, after the Tunisian campaign, and the red outline gave way to blue in the late summer and autumn of 1943 (Wikipedia, “United States military aircraft national insignia,” citing Army-Navy aeronautical specifications). Nose art was a different matter. It was unofficial, painted by crew members or squadron artists with the tolerance of their commanders, and ran from names of wives and hometowns to cartoon characters and pin-up girls; it was more common on bombers, whose crews lived with one aircraft, than on fighters, and many of the aircraft in Tunisia carried none at all.

The winter campaign and the air umbrella

By December 1942 it was clear that the divided command did not work. On 5 January 1943 Eisenhower created the Allied Air Force under Maj. Gen. Carl Spaatz, with Air Vice Marshal James Robb as chief of staff, to coordinate the Twelfth Air Force and Eastern Air Command. Its “great failure,” the official historians wrote, was that there was still no central direction for the tactical air forces facing Tunisia (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 4). American support for II Corps in central Tunisia came from a new organization. A detachment of XII Air Support Command was set up on 6 January 1943 under Col. Rosenham Beam; Brig. Gen. Howard A. Craig took command on 10 January; and on 21 January Col. Paul L. Williams succeeded Craig (Craven and Cate, vol. II, chs. 4–5). On 26 January Williams had 52 P-40s, 23 P-39s, 27 A-20s and eight DB-7s (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5).

By the numbers

XII Air Support Command, 26 January 1943

Aircraft available to support II Corps in central Tunisia, three weeks before Kasserine

Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighters52

Douglas A-20 Havoc light bombers27

Bell P-39 Airacobra fighters23

Douglas DB-7 light bombers8

Total110

Williams’s airmen and II Corps disagreed from the start about how those aircraft should be used. The U.S. Army’s doctrine at the time, Field Manual 31-35, Aviation in Support of Ground Forces (April 1942), allowed air support units to be allotted to ground commanders and was vague about who controlled them. Ground commanders who had been under air attack wanted fighters overhead. Since the fighting at Tebourba in December, the official air historians wrote, commanders had pressed for “aerial umbrellas” (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5). Airmen argued that standing patrols over the troops used up aircraft and pilots, could not be maintained from distant fields, and left the German airfields untouched. Brig. Gen. Laurence S. Kuter, who studied the problem that winter, judged that German dive bombers had inflicted really heavy casualties on American troops only once, at Sened on 1 February 1943 (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5). The soldiers who had been strafed on the roads would not have agreed, and the argument was never settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

The fighter groups paid heavily that winter. On 31 January eight of the 33rd Fighter Group’s P-40s met four to seven Bf 109s and lost two for one; on 2 February five P-40s were lost covering the troops at Sened Station, and two more were lost escorting A-20s (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5). The 33rd, the official history records, “had finally either to receive replacements or be relieved,” and its survivors went back to Morocco to rebuild; the 31st Fighter Group’s Spitfires began arriving at Thelepte on 6 February to replace it. The P-38 groups were worn down too. When Gen. Henry H. Arnold reached Casablanca for the conference in January, the three P-38 groups had about ninety aircraft between them; the 14th Fighter Group ceased operations after 28 January, gave its remaining P-38s to the 82nd, and withdrew to refit (Craven and Cate, vol. II, chs. 4–5). The battles at Faïd and Sened in late January and early February are told in Chapter 2.

At the Casablanca conference, Roosevelt, Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed on a new command structure for the Mediterranean, laid down in a directive of 20 January 1943. Eisenhower, meanwhile, set up an Allied Air Support Command under Kuter to coordinate XII Air Support Command and the RAF’s No. 242 Group supporting the First Army. Kuter’s directive was ready on 22 January, and the command was in operation by 25 January (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5). It was a halfway measure, and it was overtaken by the German offensive of mid-February before the full reorganization took effect.

Thelepte and the Kasserine crisis

When the Germans attacked at Sidi Bou Zid on 14 February 1943, the battle described in Chapter 3, XII Air Support Command flew strafing and bombing missions, and A-20s bombed a tank column in the Faïd Pass. On 15 February the day at Thelepte began with a strafing attack by six Bf 109s, and Spitfires and P-39s strafed and patrolled over Sidi Bou Zid all day (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5). With the withdrawal from Gafsa on the 14th, the air command put its evacuation plan into effect, and Sbeitla’s air units moved at 22:00 that night. On the night of 16 February, Maj. Gen. Lloyd R. Fredendall told Williams that II Corps was dug in and expected to hold the Sbeitla–Fériana line; later that night the corps summoned Williams again, because a German night attack at Sbeitla had made the situation serious (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5).

Thelepte, the best forward field the Americans had, lay just north of Fériana, directly in the path of the Afrika Korps’ advance from Gafsa. It was abandoned on 17 February 1943. The last mission took off at 10:30. About 124 operational aircraft were flown out to Tébessa, Youks and fields farther back; eighteen aircraft that could not be flown were burned, five of which were beyond repair in any case, and about 60,000 gallons of aviation fuel were poured out on the ground (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5; Wikipedia, “Paul L. Williams”). The ground story of the retreat through Sbeitla, Fériana and Thelepte is in Chapter 4.

The weather then took over. On 19 February, the day the Germans attacked the Kasserine Pass, dust from a sirocco kept XII Air Support Command grounded; the next day was also poor, and on 21 February rain and fog limited flying (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5). The absence of air support worked both ways. Howe notes that the German infantry attacking the pass on 20 February lacked the air support to which they had become accustomed (Howe, Northwest Africa, ch. XXIII). The fighting in the pass is told in Chapter 5, and the battles at Thala and Djebel el Hamra that stopped the German advance in Chapter 6.

On 22 February, with the Axis attack stalling at Thala and Djebel el Hamra, Youks opened under a low ceiling with showers that lasted until midmorning. The first bombers took off at 11:35, and by the end of the day XII Air Support Command had crowded in what the official history calls “the creditable total of 23 missions—114 sorties.” The A-20 crews could rarely see their bombs burst, and one A-20 crash-landed after a brush with three Bf 109s; Spitfires of the 31st Fighter Group, under Col. Fred M. Dean, shot down a Stuka and a Ju 88. Twelve B-25s of the 12th Bombardment Group, with Spitfire escort, attacked a bridge, and two squadrons of P-38s joined P-39s in strafing Axis traffic in the pass. Not everything went well: a formation of B-17s lost in the clouds strayed about 100 miles north and bombed a friendly town (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5).

Williams had planned an all-out attack on the German columns once they began to withdraw, and the weather hampered it on both 22 and 23 February (Wikipedia, “Paul L. Williams,” citing the AAF history). But the attacks that did go in were felt. On 23 February the air forces concentrated on what the official history calls the “backtracking columns” on the far side of the Western Dorsal; American ground forces were by then close enough to fire 155 mm guns into the pass (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5). The British official history records that XII Air Support Command “got back into its stride” and that B-17s made a heavy attack on Kasserine on the 23rd and on the Kairouan airfield the next day (Playfair, vol. IV, p. 302). Rommel, whose columns were on the receiving end, recorded the change in the weather and what followed.

In their words

…hammer-blow air attacks by the U.S. air force in the Feriana–Kasserine area, of a weight and concentration hardly surpassed by those we had suffered at Alamein.

Rommel had reasons of his own to stress Allied air power when explaining a withdrawal, and his comparison should be read with that in mind. The American record supports a more modest conclusion. The air forces did not decide the Kasserine battle, which was decided on the ground at Thala, Sbiba and Djebel el Hamra, but once the weather cleared they made the Axis withdrawal through the passes costly and helped persuade Rommel not to try again. The official American air historians judged that “in its air phase the battle had given hopeful signs of a new cooperation” (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5).

One air commander: the February reorganization

The reorganization agreed at Casablanca took effect in the middle of the Kasserine battle. On 17 February 1943 Allied Force Headquarters constituted the Mediterranean Air Command under Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, the RAF commander in the Middle East, to direct all Allied air forces in the Mediterranean; it began work the next day. Under Tedder, the Northwest African Air Forces were activated on 18 February under Spaatz, and the Allied Air Force was abolished (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5). The Twelfth Air Force’s units, people and equipment passed to the new command, and the Twelfth survived as the administrative headquarters for the American elements; Spaatz took command of it on 1 March (Wikipedia, “Twelfth Air Force”).

The Northwest African Air Forces were organized by function rather than nationality. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, who had commanded the Western Desert Air Force alongside Montgomery’s Eighth Army, took command of Kuter’s Allied Air Support Command on 17 February, and the next day it became the Northwest African Tactical Air Force, with Kuter as his deputy; the Desert Air Force under Air Vice Marshal Harry Broadhurst came under it as the Eighth Army arrived. Doolittle took the Northwest African Strategic Air Force, the heavy and medium bombers, based around Constantine. The Northwest African Coastal Air Force, directed from Algiers by Group Capt. G. G. Barrett and soon by Air Vice Marshal Hugh P. Lloyd, protected shipping; Maj. Gen. John K. Cannon ran the Northwest African Training Command, General Dunton the Air Service Command, and Lt. Col. Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, the photographic reconnaissance wing (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5).

Coningham brought with him the doctrine he and Montgomery had worked out in the desert. Speaking to senior officers at Tripoli on 16 February, the day before he took over in Tunisia, he blamed the early misuse of air power in Tunisia on “mutual petulance” between the services and set out the principle that the army and air commanders were equals who planned together (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5). On 18 February he ordered that umbrellas be abandoned unless NATAF specifically authorized them, wrote that “an air force on the offensive automatically protected the ground forces,” and directed that tanks be left alone in favor of enemy concentrations and soft-skinned vehicles (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 5). The order meant that the strategic bombers, too, were at Coningham’s disposal when the battle required them, as they were on 22 and 23 February.

In their words

The Soldier commands the land forces, the Airman commands the air forces; both commands work together…

Patton and Coningham, April 1943

The new system was tested within weeks. Maj. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. took command of II Corps on 6 March 1943, and in late March his corps attacked toward Gafsa, El Guettar and Maknassy, the campaign told in Chapter 8. The Luftwaffe was still active over the front. On 1 April, after a morning of German air attacks on his forward troops and command posts, Patton sent a situation report that was circulated widely through the Allied commands.

In their words

Forward troops have been continuously bombed all morning. … Total lack of air cover for our units has allowed German Air Forces to operate almost at will.

Coningham replied with an intemperate signal of his own, distributed as widely as Patton’s, that turned the criticism back on II Corps (Mortensen, 1998). He argued, as the official air history puts it, that containing the enemy air force at its bases and sweeping the forward area was the proven remedy, and that NATAF would not return to defensive tactics (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 6). Tedder learned of the quarrel on 2 April. He made Coningham withdraw his signal and apologize to Patton in person; in a letter of 5 April Coningham admitted that “the Chief reproved me” for it (Mortensen, 1998, pp. 19–20). Tedder and Spaatz then called on Patton at his headquarters to settle the matter (Atkinson, 2002), and the photograph above may record a related meeting of the air commanders. The episode is remembered as a clash of personalities, which it was, but it also showed that the new command could settle such disputes at the top, and that Eisenhower and Tedder would insist that Americans and British, soldiers and airmen, work in one system.

Breaking the air bridge: Operation Flax

By March 1943 the Axis armies in Tunisia depended on supplies brought across the Sicilian Strait by ship and by air. Allied submarines, aircraft and ships based on Malta and Bône were sinking a growing share of the shipping, and the Germans relied more and more on transport aircraft. In late March the Axis had about 500 transports in use on the route, Ju 52s, Italian SM.82s and the huge six-engined Me 323 “Gigant,” based mainly around Naples and Palermo (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 6). They flew in large formations, low over the water, with fighter escort, to the fields at Tunis, Bizerte and Cap Bon.

The Northwest African Air Forces had planned an operation to destroy the transport fleet, code-named Flax, in February, but canceled it on 19 February because of the Kasserine crisis. It was launched on 5 April 1943, when the weather allowed. That morning, at about 08:00, 26 P-38s intercepted a formation of 50 to 70 Ju 52s with fighter escort off Cap Bon, while B-17s and B-25s bombed the transport fields in Sicily and Tunisia (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 6). The claims and the records for the day illustrate the problem of air statistics. NASAF claimed 201 Axis aircraft destroyed, all but 40 on the ground, for three aircraft lost and six missing. German records list 14 Ju 52s shot down, 11 transports destroyed on the ground and 67 damaged; the British official history counts 27 German and three Italian transports lost that day (Craven and Cate; Levine, 2008, as cited in Wikipedia, “Operation Flax”). At the Milo airfield in Sicily, the 301st Bombardment Group claimed 52 aircraft destroyed on the ground; the actual losses there were 13 German and eight Italian aircraft destroyed and 41 damaged (Levine, as cited in Wikipedia).

The best-known action came on Sunday, 18 April 1943, Palm Sunday. Late that afternoon four P-40 squadrons, the 64th, 65th and 66th of the 57th Fighter Group and the 314th Squadron of the 324th Fighter Group, with Spitfires flying top cover, caught a large formation of Ju 52s flying low over the Gulf of Tunis toward Cap Bon with fighter escort. The official American history describes a formation of about 100 Ju 52s and says that 50 to 70 were destroyed, along with 16 escorting fighters, Macchi C.202s, Bf 109s and Bf 110s, for the loss of six P-40s and one Spitfire (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 6). The pilots’ first claims, made in the confusion of an action fought at wave-top height, reached 146; they were later reduced to 58 or 59 Ju 52s, 14 C.202s and Bf 109s, and two to four Bf 110s (57th Fighter Group history; Murawski, 2009, as cited in Wikipedia, “Operation Flax”).

German losses were heavy but lower than the claims, and the sources do not agree on how much lower. The AAF history says the Germans admitted losing 51 Ju 52s; the figures most often cited from German records today are 24 Ju 52s, nine Bf 109s and one Bf 110 shot down into the sea, with another 35 Ju 52s damaged and crash-landed along the Sicilian and Tunisian coasts (Craven and Cate; Murawski, 2009, as cited in Wikipedia). On either count it was one of the most one-sided air actions of the war. The next day, 19 April, twelve of twenty escorted Ju 52s were shot down. On 22 April, two and a half squadrons of Spitfires and four South African Air Force P-40 (Kittyhawk) squadrons intercepted a formation of Me 323s over the Gulf of Tunis loaded with fuel; they claimed 21 Me 323s and 10 fighters for the loss of four Kittyhawks (Craven and Cate). Other accounts give 16 or 17 Me 323s destroyed that day (Levine, 2008; Thomas, 2005, as cited in Wikipedia).

Distinguished Unit Citation · 18 April 1943

The 57th Fighter Group over the Gulf of Tunis

The 57th Fighter Group’s pilots flew 72 new P-40Fs off the carrier USS Ranger off the Gold Coast on 19 July 1942 and across Africa to Palestine, and fought with the Eighth Army from El Alamein to Tunisia. For the interception of 18 April 1943 it received a Distinguished Unit Citation, one of three in the war; another covered its support of the Eighth Army from 24 October 1942 to the capture of Sicily in August 1943. Four of its pilots became aces in that single action (Wikipedia, “57th Operations Group,” citing Air Force lineage records).

The end in Tunisia

By the final offensive of May 1943 the Allies had won control of the air. For the attack of 6 May, which broke through to Tunis, the Northwest African Air Forces laid on more than 2,000 sorties, 1,000 of them before 09:00 (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 6). Tunis and Bizerte fell on 7 May, and the last Axis forces in Africa surrendered on 13 May 1943. The Luftwaffe, the official air history notes, had managed to evacuate most of its serviceable aircraft and pilots to Sicily, but more than 600 Axis aircraft were left wrecked or abandoned on the fields around Tunis, Bizerte and Cap Bon. Maj. Gen. Karl Koechy, who commanded the Luftwaffe’s Tunisian air district, and four other air generals were taken prisoner (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 6). By 22 May the heavy bombers had lost 24 B-17s in combat in the campaign, eight of them to enemy fighters.

FM 100-20 and the doctrine of centralized control

The lessons the airmen drew from Tunisia were written down quickly. Kuter returned to Washington in the spring of 1943 and, with a small team on the Army Air Forces staff, drafted a new field manual in a matter of weeks (Grant, Air & Space Forces Magazine, September 2007). On 21 July 1943 the War Department published Field Manual 100-20, Command and Employment of Air Power (Mortensen, 1998, p. vi). It replaced the approach of FM 31-35, under which air units could be parceled out to ground commanders, with the system Coningham had used in the desert and in Tunisia. Its opening sentence, printed in capital letters, set the tone.

In their words

LAND POWER AND AIR POWER ARE CO-EQUAL AND INTERDEPENDENT FORCES; NEITHER IS AN AUXILIARY OF THE OTHER.

The manual set out an order of priorities for tactical air forces that matched what NATAF had done since February: first, air superiority, by attacking enemy aircraft in the air and on the ground; second, isolating the battlefield by attacking the enemy’s supply lines and reinforcements; and third, attacks on targets in the immediate zone of the ground battle, in close cooperation with the troops. It made the air commander at each level the equal of the ground commander, working from a joint headquarters, rather than a subordinate who provided aircraft on request. Many Army ground officers disliked it, and some historians have argued that it put close air support too low on the list. Airmen welcomed it as recognition of the independence they had sought since the 1920s; in a later phrase, it was the Army Air Forces’ “declaration of independence.”

The arrangement worked better in practice than the argument over the manual suggested. In Sicily, Italy and France, American tactical air commands worked beside American field armies on Coningham’s model, and by the summer of 1944 the partnership between Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley’s armies and Maj. Gen. Elwood R. Quesada’s IX Tactical Air Command, with its fighter-bombers controlled from the front lines, was the standard of close cooperation. The principle of centralized control by an air commander passed into the doctrine of the independent U.S. Air Force after 1947 and, through it, into the joint doctrine that still assigns a single air component commander in American campaigns. The airmen who wrote it, Kuter and later Momyer among them, had learned it over Tunisia.

The 99th Fighter Squadron comes to North Africa

In the last weeks of the Tunisian campaign, a fighter squadron unlike any other in the Army Air Forces arrived in North Africa. The 99th Pursuit Squadron was activated on 22 March 1941 at Chanute Field, Illinois, with Black enlisted men and a white commander, Capt. Harold R. Maddux, as the first fighter unit for the Black pilots the Army had agreed, under political pressure, to train at a segregated field at Tuskegee, Alabama. It became the 99th Fighter Squadron in May 1942. By the end of September 1942 there were at least 33 trained Black military pilots, enough for the squadron to be operational (Haulman, A Tuskegee Airmen Chronology, AFHRA, 2016). On 22 August 1942 Lt. Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., a West Point graduate of 1936 and the son of the Army’s first Black general, took command (Haulman).

The squadron left Tuskegee Army Air Field on 2 April 1943, sailed from New York harbor on the steamship Mariposa on 16 April, and arrived at Casablanca on 24 April, to serve with the Twelfth Air Force. On 29 April it moved to Oued N’ja, near Fez in French Morocco, for training (Haulman). There, by the squadron’s own accounts and Davis’s autobiography, experienced fighter pilots, among them Lt. Col. Philip Cochran, a P-40 squadron commander from the Tunisian fighting, flew with the new squadron and passed on what they had learned. The squadron’s P-40Ls were new; its pilots had trained hard at Tuskegee but had no combat experience, and none of the veterans of the other P-40 groups served with them, since the Army kept Black and white flying units separate.

On 29 May 1943 the squadron was attached to Momyer’s 33rd Fighter Group, then flying in the Allied air campaign against Pantelleria, and between 30 May and 7 June it moved to Fardjouna on the Cap Bon peninsula. Its first combat mission, on 2 June 1943, was a patrol over the Mediterranean in which no enemy aircraft were met; some accounts describe that day’s work as dive-bombing on Pantelleria, and a wartime Office of War Information caption gives 4 June as the date the squadron “first went into action” (Haulman; Wikipedia, “Benjamin O. Davis Jr.”; NARA 535767). On 9 June, four of its P-40s escorting twelve A-20s over Pantelleria intercepted four Bf 109s, which broke away (Haulman). Two days later Pantelleria surrendered.

The first aerial victory came after Tunisia, but it belongs to the story of the squadron’s first campaign. On 2 July 1943, escorting B-25s on a raid on the airfield at Castelvetrano in western Sicily, 1st Lt. Charles B. Hall shot down a fighter he identified as an Fw 190, the first aerial victory credit of the Tuskegee Airmen (Haulman). The German records researched by Andrew Arthy and Morten Jessen suggest that no Fw 190s were present that day and that the defenders were Bf 109s of JG 77, two of which were lost; misidentification of enemy types was common on all sides (Arthy and Jessen, 2013, as cited by This Day in Aviation). Hall, from Brazil, Indiana, born on 25 August 1920, was congratulated by Eisenhower and by Maj. Gen. John K. Cannon, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross; he flew 198 combat missions before the war ended, and died on 22 November 1971 (This Day in Aviation).

The squadron’s first months were also its most difficult politically. In September 1943 Momyer, under whose group the 99th had flown since 29 May, gave Maj. Gen. Edwin J. House a sharply critical report on its performance, judging that it lacked aggressiveness. On 16 September House sent Cannon a memorandum titled “Combat Efficiency of the 99th Fighter Squadron,” drawing partly on Momyer, which recommended that the squadron give up its P-40s for P-39s and coastal patrol and that no Black fighter group be sent overseas for combat. Cannon endorsed it on 18 September, writing that the squadron’s pilots fell “well below the standard” of his other squadrons, and on 19 September Spaatz forwarded both papers to Gen. Henry H. Arnold, expressing confidence in their fairness. Time magazine’s issue of 20 September asked whether the “experiment” was over (Haulman; Commemorative Air Force Rise Above archive).

Davis, by then back in the United States, defended the squadron’s record at a Pentagon press conference and before the War Department’s Advisory Committee on Negro Troop Policies in October 1943 (Wikipedia, “Benjamin O. Davis Jr.”). Arnold ordered a statistical comparison. Released at the end of March 1944, “Operations of the 99th Fighter Squadron Compared with Other P-40 Aircraft Squadrons in the MTO, 3 July 1943–31 January 1944,” prepared by the Army Air Forces’ Statistical Control Division, found that the 99th had performed in combat about as well as the white P-40 squadrons (Commemorative Air Force Rise Above archive). The historian Walter J. Boyne later summed it up plainly: “Momyer’s assessment was wrong” (as quoted in Wikipedia, “William W. Momyer”). The episode is part of Momyer’s record and part of the 99th’s, and both men went on to long careers in the Air Force that the Tuskegee Airmen’s record helped to integrate in 1948–49.

Pantelleria: an island surrenders to air power

Pantelleria is a volcanic island of about 32 square miles in the Sicilian Strait, about 45 miles off the Tunisian coast and about 60 miles from Sicily. Mussolini had fortified it as an air and naval base, with an airfield whose hangar was cut into the rock. Before the invasion of Sicily, the Allies wanted it for its airfield and to remove a base from which Axis aircraft and boats could watch and attack the invasion convoys. Eisenhower decided to see whether bombing could force its surrender before a landing; the operation was named Corkscrew. Allied intelligence estimated the garrison at about 10,000 men (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 13).

The air offensive began on 18 May 1943, with regular heavy attacks from 23 May and a second, more intense phase from 6 June. Between 18 May and 6 June the air forces flew about 1,700 sorties, dropping more than 900 tons of bombs on the port and airfield and about 400 tons on the gun positions. From 1 to 10 June they dropped 4,844 tons in 3,647 sorties, and on 10 June alone nearly 1,100 aircraft dropped 1,571 tons. For the whole period from 8 May to 11 June the official history gives 5,285 sorties and 6,200 tons, for the loss of four aircraft destroyed, ten missing and sixteen damaged over the island (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 13). The Royal Navy shelled the island as well. The 99th Fighter Squadron flew some of its first missions in this campaign.

By the numbers

Bombs on Pantelleria, May–June 1943

Tons of bombs dropped on the island in Operation Corkscrew (periods overlap)

8 May–11 June, whole operation6,200

1–10 June (3,647 sorties)4,844

10 June alone (nearly 1,100 aircraft)1,571

18 May–6 June (about 1,700 sorties)about 1,300

On 11 June 1943, D-day for the landing, British troops of the 1st Infantry Division came ashore. A white flag was reported on Semaphore Hill between 11:30 and 12:00, and the formal surrender was signed at 17:35 that day in the underground hangar (Craven and Cate, vol. II, ch. 13). More than 11,000 prisoners were later rounded up and evacuated, more than the estimate of the garrison; fewer than 200 of the defenders had been killed, and only 78 of the 600 Germans on the island remained. The only Allied casualty, according to the official air history, was a British soldier “nipped by a local jackass” (Craven and Cate). The smaller island of Lampedusa showed white flags at about 19:00 on 12 June and passed under Allied control the next morning, with about 4,000 military and 3,000 civilian personnel (Craven and Cate).

Timeline

The air war over Tunisia

1. 20 Aug 1942Twelfth Air Force activated at Bolling Field; Doolittle takes command on 23 September.
2. 8 Nov 1942Operation Torch: Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria.
3. 9 Nov 1942German Ju 52 transports land at El Aouina, Tunis.
4. 10 Nov 194277 P-40Fs of the 33rd Fighter Group catapulted from USS Chenango to Port Lyautey.
5. 15 Nov 1942, 09:45American paratroopers seize the airfield at Youks-les-Bains.
6. 16 Nov 1942Six B-17s bomb Sidi Ahmed airfield, Bizerte: the first USAAF bombing in Tunisia.
7. 5 Jan 1943Allied Air Force formed under Spaatz.
8. 21 Jan 1943Col. Paul L. Williams takes command of XII Air Support Command.
9. 22–25 Jan 1943Allied Air Support Command under Kuter.
10. 17 Feb 1943, 10:30Last mission from Thelepte; the field is evacuated and 18 aircraft burned. Mediterranean Air Command constituted under Tedder.
11. 18 Feb 1943Northwest African Air Forces (Spaatz) and Northwest African Tactical Air Force (Coningham) activated.
12. 22 Feb 1943XII Air Support Command flies 23 missions and 114 sorties from Youks.
13. 23 Feb 1943Air attacks on Axis columns withdrawing through the passes; B-17s bomb Kasserine.
14. 1–5 Apr 1943Patton–Coningham dispute over air cover; Tedder makes Coningham withdraw his signal.
15. 5 Apr 1943Operation Flax begins against the Axis air transport fleet.
16. 18 Apr 1943“Palm Sunday” interception of Ju 52s off Cap Bon.
17. 22 Apr 1943Me 323 transport formation destroyed over the Gulf of Tunis.
18. 24 Apr 194399th Fighter Squadron arrives at Casablanca.
19. 6 May 1943More than 2,000 Allied sorties support the final offensive.
20. 13 May 1943Last Axis forces in Africa surrender.
21. 2 Jun 194399th Fighter Squadron flies its first combat mission.
22. 11 Jun 1943, 17:35Formal surrender of Pantelleria.
23. 2 Jul 1943Lt. Charles B. Hall scores the first Tuskegee Airmen aerial victory.
24. 21 Jul 1943War Department publishes FM 100-20, Command and Employment of Air Power.

Questions readers ask

Did the Germans have air superiority at Kasserine?

Over the front, through most of the winter, yes: the Luftwaffe’s fighters and dive bombers flew from all-weather fields close to the battle, while the Allies flew from distant or muddy fields. During the Kasserine battle itself, though, weather grounded both sides at the critical moments of 19 to 21 February, and once it cleared on 22 and 23 February the Allied air forces attacked the Axis columns heavily. The Allies won general control of the air over Tunisia in March and April 1943.

What was the “air umbrella” argument about?

Ground commanders wanted fighters patrolling continuously over their troops to keep German aircraft away. Airmen argued that standing patrols wasted aircraft and pilots and could not be kept up from distant fields, and that the best protection was to attack the enemy’s airfields and win control of the air. Coningham ended umbrellas without his authorization on 18 February 1943, and FM 100-20 made the airmen’s view official in July 1943.

Did the Tuskegee Airmen fight in Tunisia?

The 99th Fighter Squadron arrived in North Africa on 24 April 1943, three weeks before the Axis surrender in Tunisia, and trained in Morocco during the last weeks of the campaign. It flew its first combat missions from Cap Bon in Tunisia from 2 June 1943, against Pantelleria, and scored its first aerial victory over Sicily on 2 July 1943.

How it connects

The air war ran under every chapter of this collection. The Axis air bridge that won the race for Tunis is in Chapter 1; the Stukas at Sened and the worn-out fighter groups of January are part of Chapter 2; the air strikes on 14 and 15 February belong to the battle of Sidi Bou Zid in Chapter 3; and the evacuation of Thelepte is part of the retreat in Chapter 4. The weather that grounded both air forces on 19 and 20 February shaped the fight for the pass in Chapter 5 and the stand at Thala in Chapter 6.

Patton’s II Corps at El Guettar fought under the new air command, and the quarrel of early April came out of that fighting; the end of the campaign is told in Chapter 8. The airmen who died in Tunisia are buried and remembered with the soldiers at the North Africa American Cemetery near Carthage, described in Chapter 9.

What happened afterward

The Northwest African Air Forces went on to support the invasions of Sicily in July 1943 and of Italy in September. The heavy bombers became the core of the Fifteenth Air Force, formed under Doolittle in November 1943 to bomb targets in southern Germany, Austria and the Balkans from Italian bases; Doolittle then commanded the Eighth Air Force in England from January 1944. Spaatz became the senior American air commander in Europe, and Tedder Eisenhower’s deputy for the invasion of Normandy. Coningham commanded the Second Tactical Air Force, the British tactical air force in the campaign in northwest Europe. Kuter rose to four-star rank in the Air Force. Williams commanded the IX Troop Carrier Command, which dropped the American airborne divisions in Normandy and Holland.

The 99th Fighter Squadron fought over Sicily and Italy, joined the 332nd Fighter Group under Davis in 1944, and became part of the group known as the “Red Tails.” Davis became the Air Force’s first Black general in 1954. Momyer commanded the air war over Vietnam from 1966 to 1968 and wrote one of the standard American accounts of air power in the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam. Thelepte returned to the dust, and its field is today a stretch of open country near Fériana. The doctrine the airmen wrote after Tunisia, that air power should be controlled by an airman and used first to win control of the air, is still recognizable in the way American forces fight.

Walking the ground today

Little of the air war’s infrastructure survives in recognizable form, because most of the fields were scraped out of open ground and returned to farmland or desert when the armies left. The Thelepte fields lay in open country north of Fériana, in Tunisia’s Kasserine governorate, close to the Roman ruins of ancient Thelepte; a visitor sees fields and scrub, and the ravine where the men lived is not marked. Youks-les-Bains, across the border in Algeria near Tébessa, is a small spa town; its wartime airfield is not a memorial site. El Aouina is now part of Tunis–Carthage International Airport and of a Tunisian air base, and Sidi Ahmed at Bizerte remains a Tunisian military airfield, so neither can be visited as a battlefield. On Pantelleria, the airport still uses the site of the wartime field.

The best place to remember the airmen of the campaign is the North Africa American Cemetery at Carthage, outside Tunis, maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. Airmen of the Twelfth and Ninth Air Forces lie there with the soldiers of II Corps, and the Wall of the Missing records the names of men whose bodies were never found, including airmen lost over the Mediterranean. Thelepte and the passes of the Western Dorsal can be visited from Kasserine, and the U.S. Air Force’s own museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, displays aircraft of the types flown in Tunisia, including a P-40 and the story of the Tuskegee Airmen. Closer to home for North Carolina readers, the Sandhills around Camp Mackall, near the hamlet of Marston, where the steel landing mat that later covered airfields from Africa to the Pacific was first laid in 1941, are still used for Army training.

Sources

• Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. II, Europe: Torch to Pointblank, August 1942 to December 1943 (University of Chicago Press, 1949; Office of Air Force History reprint, 1983): ch. 3, “The Landings and the Race for Tunis”; ch. 4, “The Winter Campaign”; ch. 5, “Defeat and Reorganization”; ch. 6, “Climax in Tunisia”; ch. 13, “Pantelleria” (HyperWar Foundation).
• George F. Howe, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West (U.S. Army in World War II; Office of the Chief of Military History, 1957), ch. XXIII, “Rommel’s Thrust Through Kasserine Pass”.
• I. S. O. Playfair et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. IV, The Destruction of the Axis Forces in Africa (HMSO, 1966), p. 302, including Rommel’s account of 23 February 1943; B. H. Liddell Hart, ed., The Rommel Papers (1953).
• War Department, Field Manual 100-20, Command and Employment of Air Power (21 July 1943); Field Manual 31-35, Aviation in Support of Ground Forces (April 1942).
• Daniel R. Mortensen, ed., Airpower and Ground Armies: Essays on the Evolution of Anglo-American Air Doctrine, 1940–43 (Air University Press, 1998); Daniel R. Mortensen, A Pattern for Joint Operations: World War II Close Air Support, North Africa (Office of Air Force History and U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1987).
• Rebecca Grant, “Up From Kasserine Pass,” Air Force Magazine (now Air & Space Forces Magazine), September 2007.
• Daniel L. Haulman, A Tuskegee Airmen Chronology (Air Force Historical Research Agency, 2016); Commemorative Air Force Rise Above archive, “Maj Gen Cannon memo on 99th Fighter Squadron, 18 Sep 1943”.
• Bryan R. Swopes, “2 July 1943,” This Day in Aviation (on Charles B. Hall, citing Andrew Arthy and Morten Jessen, 2013).
• U.S. Air Force biographies: Gen. William Wallace Momyer; Maj. Gen. Paul L. Williams; Home of Heroes, Distinguished Service Cross citation, William W. Momyer.
• Luftwaffe Resource Center, “Focke-Wulf Fw 190 in North Africa”.
• Wikipedia: “Operation Flax” (for the works it cites: Levine, 2008; Murawski, 2009; Weal, 2003; Thomas, 2005), “Tunisian campaign”, “Battle of Kasserine Pass”, “Twelfth Air Force”, “57th Operations Group”, “99th Flying Training Squadron”, “Marston Mat”, “United States military aircraft national insignia”, and the biographies of Benjamin O. Davis Jr., William W. Momyer and Paul L. Williams.
• Books: Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (Henry Holt, 2002); Martin Blumenson, Kasserine Pass (Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Vincent Orange, Coningham (Methuen, 1990); Christopher Shores, Hans Ring and William N. Hess, Fighters over Tunisia (Neville Spearman, 1975); William W. Momyer, Airpower in Three Wars (Air University Press, 1978); Benjamin O. Davis Jr., Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., American: An Autobiography (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Alan L. Gropman, The Air Force Integrates, 1945–1964 (Office of Air Force History, 1978).

Photographs: U.S. Army Signal Corps and Army Air Forces photographs in the U.S. National Archives; Office of War Information photographs in the Library of Congress and the National Archives; an official U.S. Air Force portrait; a Royal Air Force official photograph in the Imperial War Museums; and a German propaganda-company photograph in the Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe. All public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The nose-art panels and insignia are modern illustrations, not period artifacts.