The landings in Morocco and Algeria were only half of Torch. Its strategic object was Tunisia, with the ports of Tunis and Bizerte that controlled the narrows between Africa and Sicily. From 9 November the Axis poured troops into Tunisia by air and sea, while a small Allied force raced east from Algiers along hundreds of miles of poor roads. By the end of November Allied tanks were on the edge of the Tunis plain. By Christmas the race had been lost, and the campaign settled into a winter stalemate that lasted until the spring of 1943.

The Axis reaction

Hitler and Mussolini reacted to Torch faster than Allied planners had expected. On 9 November, according to Howe, German aircraft began landing at El Aouina airdrome near Tunis; the Vichy government had already agreed to make Tunisian air bases available to the Luftwaffe. Italian fighters followed on 10 November. An airlift of troops and supplies began at once from Sicily and southern Italy, using Junkers Ju 52 and giant Messerschmitt Me 323 transports. By the end of November, Howe records, about 15,000 personnel and 581 tons of supplies had been flown in. Tanks, guns and vehicles followed by sea in convoys to Bizerte and Tunis.

The French in Tunisia did not resist. The Resident General, Admiral Jean-Pierre Esteva, and the naval commander at Bizerte, Admiral Edmond Derrien, received conflicting orders from Vichy and from Darlan in Algiers and in the end obeyed Vichy. Howe notes that their orders shifted repeatedly between resisting and remaining neutral. The army commander in Tunisia, General Georges Barré, chose a middle course: he withdrew most of his troops from the coast into the hills to the west, around Medjez el Bab and Béja, to avoid being disarmed and to wait for the Allies.

On 12 November General Walther Nehring was appointed to command the new German XC Corps in Tunisia. He had a handful of parachute and infantry battalions and a few tanks, but he used them aggressively, pushing west to secure a bridgehead around Tunis and Bizerte large enough to protect the ports and airfields. On 8 December, as reinforcements arrived, the command was upgraded to the Fifth Panzer Army under Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim. The same day Derrien handed over the naval base at Bizerte to the Germans.

East from Algiers

The Allied force for Tunisia was Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson’s British First Army, which in November 1942 was an army in name only: the 78th Infantry Division under Major General Vyvyan Evelegh, part of the 6th Armoured Division, commandos and paratroops, later reinforced by Combat Command B of the U.S. 1st Armored Division. It had to move east from Algiers by a coastal road and a single-track railway through mountainous country, and by sea to the small ports of Bougie and Bône. Distances were long; transport, especially trucks, was short.

The first moves were by sea and air. On 11 November the British 36th Infantry Brigade landed unopposed at Bougie, but German bombers sank the empty transports Awatea and Cathay and the landing ship Karanja in the harbor. On 12 November the 3rd Parachute Battalion seized the airfield at Bône and No. 6 Commando took the port. Djidjelli airfield was reached by road on 13 November. On 15 November advance guards reached Tabarka on the Tunisian border, and the U.S. 509th Parachute Infantry dropped unopposed on Youks-les-Bains, near Tébessa, far to the south. The British 1st Parachute Battalion dropped at Souk el Arba on 16 November.

The first clash with the Germans came on 17 November at Djebel Abiod, on the coast road toward Bizerte, where British troops of the 36th Brigade met a German force of about 17 tanks, some 400 paratroops and self-propelled guns. Two days later, on 19 November, Nehring demanded passage through Medjez el Bab, the key bridge over the Medjerda River on the main road to Tunis. Barré refused. His troops repulsed two German attacks before withdrawing, the first time French forces in North Africa fought the Germans after Torch. The same day, far to the east, the Soviet offensive that would encircle the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad began.

The attack toward Tunis

Anderson launched his main attack on 25 November with three columns. In the north, the 36th Brigade advanced along the coast road toward Mateur and Bizerte and was ambushed at Jefna, where its leading battalion suffered 149 casualties. In the center, Blade Force, an armored group built around the 17th/21st Lancers with a battalion of American light tanks attached, moved through the hills toward the Tébourba gap. In the south, the 11th Infantry Brigade moved down the Medjerda valley through Medjez el Bab, which the Germans had abandoned, and on 26 November entered Tébourba unopposed.

The most spectacular moment came on 25 November. Light tanks of the 1st Battalion, 1st Armored Regiment, under Lieutenant Colonel John K. Waters, attached to Blade Force, broke through to the Axis airfield at Djedeida, about 15 miles west of Tunis. One company drove onto the field and shot up the aircraft parked there before withdrawing; American accounts claimed about twenty destroyed. It was the closest the Allies came to Tunis in 1942. Axis aircraft operating from Djedeida and El Aouina were only minutes’ flight from the front.

The advance went no further. On 28 November an attack on Djedeida village by the 11th Brigade and American tanks of Combat Command B was beaten off; the Americans lost 19 tanks to anti-tank guns. On the night of 29 November the British 2nd Parachute Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel John Frost dropped near Depienne, south of Tunis, to attack the airfield at Oudna. The airfield was abandoned, the ground advance it was meant to support never arrived, and the battalion had to fight its way back over several days, losing 266 men missing and others killed and wounded.

The counterattack at Tébourba

On 1 December the Axis struck first. Nehring’s forces, reinforced by the newly arrived 10th Panzer Division, attacked the Tébourba salient from the north and east. Among the German tanks were a few Tiger Is of the 501st Heavy Panzer Battalion, in their first action in North Africa. Blade Force was withdrawn on 2 December. In a delaying action around Tébourba from 1 to 4 December, the 2nd Battalion, Hampshire Regiment and the 1st Battalion, East Surrey Regiment held the town long enough for other units to escape; the Hampshires lost about three-quarters of their strength and the East Surreys nearly 60 percent, according to regimental accounts. By 4 December the Allies had been driven back to the hills around Longstop and Medjez el Bab.

Combat Command B of the 1st Armored Division, which had moved up to join the fighting, suffered heavily. On 10 December German tanks attacked its positions at Bou Aoukaz; American counterattacks bogged down, and 18 tanks were lost. That night, ordered to withdraw across the Medjerda over a narrow bridge and muddy tracks, the combat command lost most of its remaining tanks, guns and vehicles, many abandoned in the mud after a false alarm. Howe’s account of the episode is one of the most critical passages in the American official history.

The causes of the failure were not only tactical. The Allies had arrived piecemeal, with British infantry and American armor that had never trained together. Their supply line ran back hundreds of miles along a single road and railway. The Luftwaffe operated from paved, all-weather airfields at Tunis and Bizerte, while Allied fighters flew from Bône, Souk el Arba and Youks-les-Bains, often too far away to give cover over the front, and from strips that turned to mud. German dive bombers attacked the forward troops at will in the first weeks. Rain began in earnest in December.

Longstop Hill

Anderson and Eisenhower planned one more attempt for late December. Its first step was to take Djebel el Ahmera, a long ridge about six miles northeast of Medjez el Bab that commanded the road and railway down the Medjerda valley to Tunis. The British called it Longstop Hill. On the night of 22–23 December the 2nd Battalion, Coldstream Guards, attacked in heavy rain and took what they believed was the crest. They handed it over to the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry, of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division and withdrew. The Americans found that the true summit, Djebel el Rhar, lay beyond, still held by the Germans, who counterattacked and drove them off part of the ridge.

The Coldstream Guards returned on 24 December and retook part of the hill, but German reinforcements, the rain and the mud made it impossible to hold. On 25 December the Allies withdrew toward Medjez el Bab. The Germans called the ridge the Weihnachtsberg, Christmas Mountain. It was not taken until the final offensive in April 1943, when the 78th Division captured it in heavy fighting.

On 24 December Eisenhower had visited the front. After seeing the condition of the ground, where vehicles sank to their axles off the roads, he and Anderson agreed to postpone the offensive on Tunis. That evening he learned that Darlan had been assassinated in Algiers, as told in Chapter 7, and he returned there at once. The Allied line ran from the coast west of Bizerte through Medjez el Bab, which became the anchor of the front for the winter. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission notes that Medjez el Bab stayed on the front line until the April–May 1943 offensives.

Stalemate and what followed

By the end of December the Axis had a firm bridgehead in northern and eastern Tunisia, and the Allied armies, British, American and French, faced it along the mountains of the Eastern Dorsal. In January 1943 Rommel’s German-Italian Panzer Army, retreating after El Alamein, reached the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia. The Axis now had two armies in Tunisia. In February they struck the U.S. II Corps at Sidi Bou Zid and Kasserine Pass, the first major defeat of American forces by the German army.

The Tunisian campaign ended on 13 May 1943 with the surrender of about a quarter of a million German and Italian troops. In hindsight, the reinforcements Hitler sent to Tunisia after Torch were lost there. But the failure to take Tunis in 1942 delayed the end in Africa by five months, and with it the invasion of Sicily and any possibility of a cross-Channel invasion in 1943. The losses and lessons of Torch are summarized in Chapter 9.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

The road to Tunis, November–December 1942

Sources and further reading

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