Operation Torch was the Allied invasion of French Morocco and Algeria that began on 8 November 1942. Three task forces, one entirely American and two Anglo-American, landed on the Atlantic coast around Casablanca and on the Mediterranean coast around Oran and Algiers. The territory was controlled by Vichy France, which had signed an armistice with Germany in 1940. The aim was to secure northwest Africa, advance into Tunisia and, together with the British Eighth Army coming west from Egypt, clear the Axis from Africa.

The landings began before dawn on 8 November 1942. The U.S. Navy and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum date the operation 8–16 November. The U.S. Army’s campaign credit for “Algeria-French Morocco” covers 8–11 November, the days of fighting with the French. The race for Tunisia followed from mid-November and stalled at the end of December. See the record chapter for how these date ranges differ.

In July 1942 the British chiefs of staff and Churchill refused to support a cross-Channel landing that year, arguing that it would fail. Roosevelt wanted American troops in action against Germany in 1942. North Africa was the operation both governments could agree on and mount with the shipping and trained troops available. It also offered a chance to trap Axis forces in Africa and reopen the Mediterranean. Chapter 1 covers the debate.

Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower was Commander in Chief, Allied Expeditionary Force, with Major General Mark W. Clark as his deputy and Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham as naval commander. The Western Task Force was led by Patton and Hewitt, the Center by Fredendall and Commodore Thomas Troubridge, and the Eastern by Ryder and Vice Admiral Sir Harold Burrough, with Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson taking over in Algeria once the assault phase ended.

Figures vary with what is counted. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum gives about 107,000 troops in the fleets off North Africa on 8 November; Britannica gives about 110,000. Britannica divides them as 35,000 Americans in the Western Task Force, 39,000 Americans in the Center and 23,000 British plus 10,000 Americans in the Eastern. The U.S. official history puts the Western Task Force at 33,843 men. Follow-up convoys landed many more in the following weeks.

French officers in North Africa had sworn loyalty to Marshal Pétain’s government, which ordered them to defend the empire against any invader. Many also remembered the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940. A minority, including General Charles Mast in Algiers and General Antoine Béthouart in Morocco, worked with the Allies, but they could not control the senior commanders. Resistance ended when Darlan, as commander of all Vichy forces, ordered it to stop.

On 8 November the El Hank battery and the battleship Jean Bart opened fire on American ships off Casablanca, and USS Massachusetts replied with the first American 16-inch shells fired at a European enemy. French destroyers, submarines and the light cruiser Primauguet then sortied against the transports off Fedala. By the end of the day most were sunk, beached or wrecked. Chapter 3 tells the story.

In Operation Reservist, two former U.S. Coast Guard cutters transferred to the Royal Navy, HMS Walney and HMS Hartland, tried to break into Oran harbor at about 3 a.m. on 8 November with some 393 men of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Armored Infantry, to stop the French from sabotaging the port. French ships and batteries destroyed both. Most of the soldiers and sailors aboard were killed, wounded or captured. Oran surrendered on 10 November.

During the night of 7–8 November a group of civilian resisters, organized with the help of Robert Murphy’s contacts and led by José Aboulker and others, occupied telephone exchanges, police stations and headquarters in Algiers and held them for several hours. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum says the coup neutralized the French XIX Corps before the landings. Many of the participants were young Jewish Algerians. Chapter 5 covers the coup.

Darlan was the one man French officers in North Africa would obey. Giraud, the Allies’ chosen leader, had been ignored. Eisenhower and Clark judged that only Darlan could stop the fighting quickly, bring French forces in Tunisia into the war against the Axis and keep the French fleet out of German hands. The arrangement ended the fighting but was attacked in Britain and the United States as a bargain with a collaborator. See Chapter 7.

On the night of 7–8 November 1942, the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry, later redesignated the 509th, flew from airfields in Cornwall toward the airfields at La Sénia and Tafaraoui near Oran in 39 C-47s. The army.mil account gives the route as 1,500 miles; other accounts give about 1,100. Bad weather and navigation scattered the aircraft, and many landed on a dry lake west of the objectives. The battalion jumped again at Youks-les-Bains on 15 November.

Howe’s official history gives preliminary Allied battle casualties for 8–11 November of 1,469: 530 killed, 887 wounded and 52 missing, of which 1,404 were American and 65 British Commandos. These figures exclude naval losses at sea, including the transports and warships sunk by U-boats after the ceasefire. French losses were heavier; an Office of Naval Intelligence narrative of January 1943 estimated about 500 killed and 800 wounded at Casablanca alone.

The Axis reacted faster. German troops arrived by air from 9 November, while the Allied advance depended on a few roads, a single-track railway and small ports hundreds of miles from Algiers. Luftwaffe fighters flew from all-weather fields close to the front; Allied aircraft operated from distant, muddy strips. Allied units arrived piecemeal. The Axis counterattack at Tébourba on 1–3 December and the onset of winter rain ended the attempt.

The Eighth Army broke the Axis line at El Alamein on 4 November, four days before Torch. The two offensives were planned to squeeze Axis forces from east and west. When Rommel’s retreating army reached southern Tunisia in early 1943, the Axis had two armies there, and in February they struck the inexperienced U.S. II Corps at Kasserine Pass.

Yes. The 9th Infantry Division was activated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on 1 August 1940 and trained there before going overseas. In November 1942 its 47th Infantry landed at Safi, its 60th Infantry at Mehdia and Port Lyautey, and its 39th Infantry near Algiers, where it took Maison Blanche airfield. The division suffered 225 battle casualties in the first four days, according to Howe’s Table 4.

Roosevelt and Churchill met with their chiefs of staff at the Anfa suburb of Casablanca on 14–24 January 1943, in territory taken in Torch. They agreed to invade Sicily after Tunisia, arranged a meeting between Giraud and de Gaulle, and announced at the closing press conference that the Allies would demand the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy and Japan.

Torch showed that night landings by inexperienced crews would scatter troops and wreck landing craft, that combat loading and beach organization mattered as much as fire support, and that air cover depended on capturing and stocking airfields quickly. In Tunisia it exposed weak American training and command arrangements. Those lessons shaped the landings in Sicily, at Salerno and in Normandy. Chapter 9 summarizes them.

Most American dead from North Africa who were not returned home rest in the North Africa American Cemetery at Carthage, Tunisia, which holds 2,841 burials and lists 3,724 names on its Wall of the Missing. Commonwealth dead are buried in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries in Algeria and Tunisia; the Medjez-el-Bab Memorial lists almost 2,000 men with no known grave from the Tunisian fighting.