Oran, Algeria’s second city and the site of the French naval base at Mers-el-Kébir, was the objective of the Center Task Force under Major General Lloyd R. Fredendall. Its landings on beaches east and west of the city succeeded. Its attempt to seize the harbor directly, Operation Reservist, was destroyed within an hour. Three days of fighting followed before the French commander surrendered the city about noon on 10 November.

The objective

Oran lies on a bay on the Mediterranean coast of western Algeria, about 260 miles east of Gibraltar. In 1942 it had one of the best harbors in North Africa, and a few miles to the west, behind the headland of Mers-el-Kébir, the French Navy had its main Algerian base. It was there that the Royal Navy had attacked the French fleet in July 1940, a memory that made the French Navy at Oran the least likely of any French force to welcome a British-escorted landing. The garrison, the Oran Division under General Robert Boissau, had infantry, artillery and a few tanks, and the coast was covered by heavy batteries on the heights above the bay.

The Center Task Force came from Britain. Its ground force was the U.S. 1st Infantry Division under Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen, with Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. as assistant division commander; Combat Command B of the 1st Armored Division; and the 1st Ranger Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby. Howe gives the planned strength as about 37,100 Americans and 3,600 British. The naval force under Commodore Thomas Troubridge included the battleship HMS Rodney, the cruiser HMS Aurora, escort carriers and destroyers.

The plan: an envelopment

The plan was a double envelopment. The 26th Infantry under Roosevelt would land at Y beach, Les Andalouses, west of the city. A column of Combat Command B would land farther west at X beach, Mersa bou Zedjar. The main force, the 16th and 18th Infantry, the Rangers and the rest of Combat Command B, would land at Z beach, around the small port of Arzew, about 20 miles east of Oran. The armored columns would race inland to seize the airfields at Tafaraoui and La Sénia south of the city, where the 509th Parachute Infantry was also to arrive from England. The infantry would close on Oran from east and west.

The landings began at about 0100 on 8 November, in darkness and calm water. They went better than those in Morocco. At Arzew, Darby’s Rangers landed in the harbor and took the two batteries overlooking it, Fort de la Pointe and the Batterie du Nord, before the defenders could react. The 16th and 18th Infantry came ashore with little opposition, and the small port of Arzew, with its quays and tankers, was taken intact. At Les Andalouses the 26th Infantry landed on schedule, though some landing craft grounded on a sandbar and some men had to wade ashore in deep water.

The problem was speed. Once daylight came, French forces fought the advancing columns at several points. At the village of Saint-Cloud, on the road from Arzew to Oran, the 18th Infantry ran into a strong defense on 8 November and failed to take the village in repeated attacks. Allen eventually decided to bypass and contain it rather than destroy it with artillery and air bombardment, which would have caused heavy civilian casualties. West of the city, the 26th Infantry was held up on the heights near Djebel Murdjadjo and Mers-el-Kébir.

Operation Reservist

The harbor assault was planned to prevent the French from wrecking Oran’s port before it could be used. Two former U.S. Coast Guard cutters, Sebago and Pontchartrain, had been transferred to Britain under Lend-Lease in 1941 and renamed HMS Walney and HMS Hartland. In Operation Reservist they were to break through the boom at the harbor entrance and land troops on the quays to take the docks, the ships in harbor and the port installations. The force was commanded by Captain Frederick Thornton Peters, Royal Navy, a Canadian-born officer, in Walney. The assault troops were 393 men of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Armored Infantry, 1st Armored Division, under Lieutenant Colonel George F. Marshall, with a small U.S. Navy party to prevent sabotage and a handful of U.S. Marines.

The ships went in at about 0300 on 8 November, two hours after the landings had begun and when the French were fully alert. A loudspeaker on Walney broadcast an appeal in French not to fire. Searchlights caught both ships. Walney broke the boom and steamed down the length of the harbor under point-blank fire from French destroyers, a sloop and shore positions. She reached the jetty disabled and on fire and sank. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Peters was the only survivor of those on her bridge. Hartland, blinded by searchlights, was hit repeatedly by the destroyer Typhon at close range near the harbor entrance, caught fire and blew up.

Most of the men aboard were killed, wounded or captured. Figures differ. Rick Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn, drawing on Army and Royal Navy records, gives 189 American soldiers killed and 157 wounded out of 393; 113 Royal Navy sailors killed and 86 wounded; and five killed and seven wounded in the U.S. Navy party. Marshall was among the dead. The survivors, many of them wounded, were taken prisoner by the French and freed when the city surrendered two days later. By then the French had scuttled ships in the harbor and damaged many of the installations Reservist was meant to save.

Reservist was criticized at the time and since. The same kind of attack had worked at Safi, where the defenders were taken by surprise. At Oran it was launched after the landings had alerted the defenses, against a harbor with warships inside and a garrison with memories of Mers-el-Kébir. Some American officers had doubted the plan before it sailed. Later historians have generally judged that it had little chance once surprise was lost. The ships’ crews and soldiers were widely honored. Peters was awarded the Victoria Cross, gazetted in May 1943, and the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross. He did not live to receive either: on 13 November 1942 the Sunderland flying boat carrying him home crashed in fog off Plymouth, and he died in the water.

The fight at sea

As daylight came on 8 November, French destroyers left Oran to attack the transports and the escorts. HMS Aurora and British destroyers engaged them; the destroyer Tornade was sunk, Tramontane was driven ashore, and others were damaged and returned to harbor. On 9 November the flotilla leader Épervier and Typhon came out again; Épervier was run aground in flames after an action with Aurora and the cruiser Jamaica, and Typhon went back into harbor and was scuttled at the entrance. HMS Rodney shelled the coastal battery on Djebel Santon above Mers-el-Kébir, which fired on the ships for two days.

Carrier aircraft from HMS Furious and the escort carriers Biter and Dasher attacked La Sénia airfield at dawn on 8 November and fought French fighters over the beaches. U-boats, arriving after the landings, also found targets off Oran. On 12 November the corvettes HMS Lotus and HMS Starwort depth-charged U-660 off the coast; the submarine surfaced and her crew scuttled her and abandoned ship.

The airfields and the French counterattack

The armored columns did what was asked of them. A column of Combat Command B from Arzew drove nearly 30 miles inland and took Tafaraoui airfield before noon on 8 November; Spitfires of the U.S. 31st Fighter Group flew in from Gibraltar that afternoon. La Sénia, closer to the city and more strongly defended, held out longer and was not occupied until the following days. The airborne side of the operation, and the scattered flight of the 509th, is described in Chapter 6.

On 9 November French forces counterattacked toward Tafaraoui from the south and pressed the beachheads east of the city. Britannica’s summary says the counterattack disrupted the American plan. It was contained, but it showed that the French would go on fighting until ordered to stop. Fredendall and Allen arranged a coordinated attack on the city for the morning of 10 November, with infantry from east and west and two armored columns from the south.

The surrender of Oran

The attack went in early on 10 November. Infantry of the 1st Division pressed in from Saint-Cloud and from the west, and the armored columns of Combat Command B drove into the city from the south and reached the center by late morning. General Boissau agreed to surrender, and the fighting ended about noon. Fredendall accepted the surrender. Some histories, including the Naval History and Heritage Command overview and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, date the fall of Oran to 9 November; Howe’s official history, based on the after-action reports, gives 10 November.

The Center Task Force’s losses in three days were significant. Howe’s preliminary table gives the 1st Infantry Division 313 battle casualties, including 85 killed; most of the 1st Armored Division’s 305 casualties, including 191 killed, were the men lost in Reservist. The harbor was blocked by scuttled warships and merchant vessels, and British and American salvage teams spent weeks clearing it. French dockyard workers helped. Within days Oran became a main supply port for the U.S. forces in North Africa and later for the invasion of Sicily, for which assault units trained at the Fifth Army’s Invasion Training Center at Arzew.

Oran also had a political sequel. When the city surrendered, the French commanders in Algiers had already agreed to a local ceasefire, and Darlan’s order to all French forces was signed that same day. The next chapter turns to Algiers, where the landings met the least resistance and where the politics of Torch were decided. Readers coming from the Moroccan landings in Chapter 3 will notice the contrast between the two harbor assaults, at Safi and at Oran, made the same morning.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

Oran and Mers-el-Kébir, November 1942

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