By the standards of later Allied landings, Torch was not costly ashore. The Army’s official history counts 1,469 Allied battle casualties in the four days of fighting with the French. The heavier losses came at sea, after the landings, when U-boats and aircraft found the transports and escorts. The operation’s real cost and value lie in what followed: the long campaign in Tunisia, and the experience that shaped every Allied amphibious operation from Sicily to Normandy.

What counts as Torch

Before counting losses, it helps to be clear about dates, because the sources use several. The Naval History and Heritage Command and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum treat Operation Torch as 8–16 November 1942, from the landings to the end of the main naval operations. The U.S. Army’s campaign credit, “Algeria-French Morocco,” covers only 8–11 November, the days of fighting with the French; its official brochure in the Army’s World War II campaign series uses those dates. The Army’s next campaign, “Tunisia,” runs from 17 November 1942 to 13 May 1943. The race for Tunisia described in Chapter 8 therefore belongs, in the Army’s terms, to a different campaign.

Surrender dates differ as well. Howe’s official history, based on after-action reports, gives the ceasefire at Algiers on the evening of 8 November, the surrender of Oran about noon on 10 November, and the Moroccan ceasefire early on 11 November. The NHHC overview and the Holocaust Memorial Museum give 9 November for Oran and Algiers and 10 November for Casablanca. The difference usually lies in whether a source dates an order, its arrival at a local command or the end of firing. This collection follows Howe and notes the alternatives.

Casualties ashore

The fullest published breakdown of Allied ground casualties is Table 4 in chapter IX of Howe’s Northwest Africa. Drawing on preliminary Army records of April 1945, it gives 1,469 battle casualties for 8–11 November 1942: 530 killed, 887 wounded and 52 missing. Of these, 1,404 were American (526 killed, 837 wounded, 41 missing) and 65 were British Commandos, counted for 8–17 November. Howe notes that the Army’s final battle casualty report of June 1953 gave different totals for the campaign, 449 killed in action, 720 wounded and 85 captured or missing, without a breakdown by division. Neither set includes the U.S. Navy or the Royal Navy.

Broken down by division, the preliminary figures show where the fighting was. The 1st Infantry Division at Oran had 313 casualties and the 3rd Infantry Division at Fedala 293. The 9th Infantry Division, split between Safi, Mehdia and Algiers, had 225, most of them at Mehdia. The 1st Armored Division’s 305 casualties included 191 killed, a figure dominated by the infantry lost in Operation Reservist at Oran. The 34th Infantry Division at Algiers had 78, the Twelfth Air Force 67 and the 2nd Armored Division, whose tanks landed at Safi, only nine. For Morocco, Howe also gives a combined Army and Navy total of 337 killed, 637 wounded, 122 missing and 71 captured.

Losses at sea

The Allied fleets crossed to North Africa almost without loss, but they suffered once the landings had fixed their positions. Off Morocco, transports were left at anchor in the open roadstead off Fedala to unload. On the evening of 11 November U-173 torpedoed the transport Joseph Hewes, which sank, and damaged the oiler Winooski and the destroyer Hambleton. The next evening U-130 sank the transports Hugh L. Scott, Edward Rutledge and Tasker H. Bliss. In the Mediterranean, the transport Thomas Stone was torpedoed on 7 November and Leedstown was sunk off Algiers by aircraft and submarine attack on 8–9 November.

British losses were heavier. Operation Reservist and Operation Terminal cost the sloops Walney and Hartland and the destroyer Broke. German aircraft sank the transports Awatea and Cathay and the landing ship Karanja at Bougie. U-boats sank the destroyer HMS Martin and the destroyer depot ship HMS Hecla, and on 12 November damaged the destroyer HMS Marne, which was towed into Gibraltar. On 15 November U-155 torpedoed the escort carrier HMS Avenger west of Gibraltar; she blew up and only twelve of her crew survived. The Axis paid too: U-173 was sunk off Casablanca on 16 November, U-660 off Oran on 12 November, and several more German and Italian submarines were lost in the area during the month.

Lessons for amphibious war

The Navy’s monograph on the Moroccan landings by Alexandra Lohse and John Middaugh concludes that lessons from North Africa informed every subsequent American landing in Europe. The problems were plain in the after-action reports. Night landings by inexperienced boat crews scattered troops along miles of coast. Landing craft were lost in large numbers: at Mehdia, the ONI counted 70 of 162 boats damaged or destroyed, 43.4 percent. Transports had been loaded hastily, so that needed equipment was buried under less urgent cargo. Beaches became choked with supplies because there were too few trucks and organized shore parties to move them. Radios failed or were lost in the surf.

Other things worked. Naval gunfire silenced shore batteries and broke up counterattacks. Carrier aircraft destroyed the French air force in Morocco and gave cover until airfields were taken. The Navy learned to keep transports in protected anchorages and to unload them faster. The Army and Navy set up permanent amphibious training organizations, and in North Africa the Fifth Army’s Invasion Training Center at Arzew trained the divisions that landed in Sicily in July 1943 and at Salerno in September. New landing ships and craft, the LST, LCI and LCT, which had not been available in quantity for Torch, made those landings faster and more orderly.

Lessons in command and coalition

Torch was the first test of a fully integrated Anglo-American command, and it held. Allied Force Headquarters, with British and American officers mixed in every staff section, became the model for Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in 1944. Eisenhower learned to manage British and American commanders, the press and the politicians, and to take responsibility for unpopular decisions such as the Darlan arrangement described in Chapter 7.

The fighting in Tunisia exposed weaknesses that the landings had hidden. American units had not trained with British ones; air and ground forces had no agreed method of cooperating; and American armored and infantry units were committed piecemeal. After the defeat at Kasserine Pass in February 1943, the Allies reorganized their air forces in the Mediterranean under unified command, Patton replaced Fredendall at II Corps, and training was overhauled. The Army Air Forces drew on the Tunisian experience in its doctrine for tactical air power published in 1943, a story told in the site’s Army Air Forces collection.

Intelligence and politics offered lessons too. The Allies had badly misjudged how far a small group of conspirators could influence the French army and navy, and how little authority Giraud had. They learned that political arrangements made in haste for military reasons would be judged later on moral grounds. In Sicily and Italy, and in France in 1944, Allied military government and civil affairs planning were far more elaborate than they had been in North Africa.

Reading the record

The basic published sources for Torch are official histories written soon after the war. George F. Howe’s Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West (1957), in the U.S. Army’s “Green Book” series, is the fullest account of the ground fighting and the politics, with detailed footnotes to the records. Samuel Eliot Morison’s Operations in North African Waters (1947), volume II of his history of U.S. naval operations, covers the naval side; Morison sailed with the fleet off Morocco in November 1942. The British official histories, S. W. Roskill’s The War at Sea and the volumes by I. S. O. Playfair on the Mediterranean, give the Royal Navy and British Army story. The Office of Naval Intelligence’s combat narrative, The Landings in North Africa, written in 1943 from action reports, gives the most precise times for the naval actions.

Later histories, notably Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn (2002), draw on letters, diaries and interviews to tell the story from the ranks and are franker about command failures. French accounts, including memoirs of participants in the Algiers coup, add perspectives the American and British histories largely lacked. When sources disagree, as they do on the time Massachusetts opened fire or the date Oran fell, the reason is usually what each source is measuring; this collection gives the alternatives in its record notes.

The photographs are themselves a record. Most of those in this collection are official images: U.S. Navy photographs in the 80-G series and the National Museum of the U.S. Navy’s lots, U.S. Army Signal Corps photographs, and Imperial War Museums photographs by Royal Navy, RAF and Army Film and Photographic Unit cameramen. Navy photographers recorded the damage to French ships at Casablanca in detail, and such photographs show what American shells and bombs had done.

Memory

Torch is less remembered in the United States than Normandy or the Pacific battles, partly because the enemy in the first days was French and partly because it led into the hard winter in Tunisia. Most Americans killed in North Africa who were not returned home rest in the North Africa American Cemetery at Carthage, outside Tunis, which holds 2,841 burials and lists 3,724 names on its Wall of the Missing, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission. Commonwealth dead lie in war cemeteries across Algeria and Tunisia; the Medjez-el-Bab War Cemetery, at the limit of the Allied advance in December 1942, holds or commemorates 2,903 servicemen, and its memorial lists almost 2,000 men with no known grave.

In North Africa the landings and the Casablanca Conference that followed in January 1943 are remembered in the context of the end of French rule, which came to Morocco and Tunisia in 1956 and to Algeria in 1962 after a long war. The Allied campaign in Tunisia, which ended with the victory parade in Tunis on 20 May 1943, opened the way to Sicily, Italy and, through the experience gained, to D-Day. For the wider numbers of the war, see the site’s World War II by the Numbers; to begin the Torch story again, return to the collection hub.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

Casablanca, Tunis and after

Sources and further reading

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