Torch was carried to Africa by three separate fleets on two routes. Rear Admiral H. Kent Hewitt’s Western Naval Task Force brought Patton’s army from Hampton Roads across 4,000 miles of ocean. Two Royal Navy task forces brought the Center and Eastern forces from Britain and through the Strait of Gibraltar. The planning, loading and timing of these convoys were as much a part of the operation as the fighting ashore.

A combined command

Eisenhower’s Allied Force Headquarters was the first fully integrated Anglo-American command of the war. Under Eisenhower and his deputy, Major General Mark W. Clark, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham commanded all Allied naval forces. Air power was split. The new U.S. Twelfth Air Force under Brigadier General James H. Doolittle was to support the Western and Center Task Forces, and the RAF’s Eastern Air Command under Air Marshal Sir William Welsh the Eastern. Each landing had an army commander and a naval commander, and the naval commander was in charge until the troops were established ashore.

The plan for this command grew out of the strategic bargain described in Chapter 1. Because the British had agreed to an operation that would be presented to the French as American, the senior posts on land went to Americans, while the Royal Navy, which had far more experience of combined operations, provided most of the ships inside the Mediterranean. The Twelfth Air Force was a new organization, formed in August 1942 and drawing on squadrons and staff from the Eighth Air Force in England; its story belongs to the wider history of the Army Air Forces. Many of the men who learned their trades in this headquarters, Hewitt, Cunningham, Truscott and Eisenhower himself among them, would apply the lessons in Sicily and at Salerno the following year.

The three forces were very different. The Western Task Force was entirely American, from its transports and warships to its infantry. The Center Task Force at Oran was American on land, under Major General Lloyd R. Fredendall, but was carried and escorted by the Royal Navy under Commodore Thomas Troubridge. The Eastern Task Force at Algiers was mixed on land: an Eastern Assault Force of American and British troops under the American Major General Charles W. Ryder would make the landings, after which Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson’s British First Army would take over and push east. Its naval force, under Vice Admiral Sir Harold Burrough, was British.

The Western Task Force

Patton’s force was built around the 3rd Infantry Division under Major General Jonathan W. Anderson, two regimental combat teams of the 9th Infantry Division, and the 2nd Armored Division under Major General Ernest N. Harmon, with separate tank, tank destroyer, signal and engineer units. Howe gives its strength as 33,843 men after cuts forced by the shortage of shipping. It was divided into three sub-task forces. GOALPOST, under Brigadier General Lucian K. Truscott Jr., would land at Mehdia and take the airfield at Port Lyautey. BRUSHWOOD, under Anderson, would land at Fedala and attack Casablanca from the north. BLACKSTONE, under Harmon, would take the port of Safi, 140 miles to the south, so that medium tanks could be unloaded at a pier.

The naval force, Task Force 34, was correspondingly large. Howe describes it as more than 100 ships; the Office of Naval Intelligence’s combat narrative of January 1943 counts about 99. A Covering Group of the new battleship Massachusetts, the heavy cruisers Tuscaloosa and Wichita, four destroyers and an oiler was to deal with the French fleet at Casablanca. An Air Group built around the carrier Ranger and the escort carriers Suwannee, Sangamon and Santee would provide air cover; a fourth escort carrier, Chenango, carried Army P-40 fighters to be flown ashore once an airfield was taken. Northern, Center and Southern Attack Groups, each with transports, fire-support ships and minesweepers, would deliver the three sub-task forces.

Few of the troops or crews had experience of landing operations. Amphibious training had been short, and a final rehearsal in Chesapeake Bay in October went badly. Transports were combat loaded, so that the equipment needed first would come out of the holds first, but the work was done in haste at Hampton Roads and Norfolk in October and many ships were loaded inefficiently. Of the transports and cargo ships assembled at Hampton Roads by 1 October, the ONI narrative counts 26 transports and seven cargo ships. Several of the landing-craft crews were Coast Guard and Navy reservists who had never put a boat on a beach in surf.

Crossing the Atlantic

The first section of the transports left Hampton Roads on the afternoon of 23 October and the second the next morning. The Covering Group came out of Casco Bay, Maine, and joined on 27 October; the Air Group, which had been exercising near Bermuda, joined on 28 October. To mislead Axis observers, the combined force steered at first toward Dakar in French West Africa, then turned northeast toward Morocco. It crossed without losing a ship.

Weather was the greatest worry. The Atlantic coast of Morocco is exposed to long swells, and surf there in November often makes landing impossible. On 6 November forecasts from Washington and London predicted surf too high for landing. The plans included alternatives, among them postponement, if the Moroccan beaches proved impassable. Relying on his own staff forecaster, who predicted that the swells would moderate, Hewitt held to the original plan. The surf on the morning of 8 November was moderate enough at most beaches, although it rose again in the following days.

On 7 November the attack groups separated. The Southern Attack Group turned for Safi, the Northern for Mehdia, and the Center Attack Group, roughly twice the size of each of the others according to Howe, for Fedala. The Covering Group took station off Casablanca, and the carriers moved to their launch positions. At midnight the transports were in position off the coast, with the lights of the towns visible ashore. The landings in Morocco are described in Chapter 3.

The forces from Britain

The Center and Eastern Task Forces were formed in Britain from American divisions that had crossed the Atlantic in the summer and autumn of 1942 and from British units of the First Army. At Oran, Fredendall had the 1st Infantry Division under Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen, Combat Command B of the 1st Armored Division and the 1st Ranger Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby. At Algiers, Ryder had two American regimental combat teams, the 168th Infantry of his own 34th Division and the 39th Infantry of the 9th Division, the British 11th Infantry Brigade Group of the 78th Division, with the 36th Brigade Group as a floating reserve, and Nos. 1 and 6 Commandos.

The troops and equipment went to sea in two series of convoys. A slow convoy of cargo ships left British ports on 22 October and a fast troop convoy followed on 26 October. Howe gives the troop convoy as 39 vessels with 12 escorting warships and the slow convoy as 46 cargo ships with 18 escorts, with each convoy later dividing into Oran and Algiers sections. Many of the troops sailed in requisitioned liners such as the Reina del Pacifico, fitted to carry British assault landing craft in their davits. The convoys steamed far out into the Atlantic before turning south toward Gibraltar, keeping well clear of the U-boat patrol lines and the long-range Focke-Wulf Condor reconnaissance aircraft based in western France. Their escorts were drawn from the convoy routes of the Battle of the Atlantic, which suffered for it in the weeks that followed.

The convoys were covered by most of the Royal Navy’s available heavy ships. Force H, based at Gibraltar, deployed battleships, a battlecruiser and fleet carriers inside the Mediterranean to guard against an intervention by the Italian fleet, which never came. Each task force had its own escort carriers or carriers for air cover over the beaches, and the battleship HMS Rodney supported the Center force at Oran. The headquarters ship HMS Bulolo carried Burrough, Ryder and their staffs to Algiers.

The Oran and Algiers sections separated on 4 November. The Algiers-bound ships passed through the Strait of Gibraltar on the night of 5–6 November and the Oran section of the slow convoy in daylight on 6 November; the Oran section of the fast convoy entered in darkness on 6–7 November. German and Italian observers in Spain reported the ships, but the Axis commands concluded that they were bound for Malta or for a landing in Libya behind Rommel, and positioned submarines and aircraft accordingly.

Eisenhower at Gibraltar

Eisenhower and his principal staff flew from Britain to Gibraltar on 5 and 6 November, according to Howe, and set up an advanced command post deep inside the Rock. The location was chosen because it was the closest Allied territory to the landings and had communications to London and Washington. In practice those communications were poor. On the night of the landings, messages from the beaches arrived slowly or not at all, and much of what Eisenhower learned came hours late.

Gibraltar’s North Front airstrip was packed with fighters, transports and bombers waiting to fly to captured airfields. The same days brought Giraud, landed by HMS Seraph and flown in on 7 November. In a long and angry meeting he demanded command of the whole operation and refused at first to broadcast an appeal to the French army. He agreed only late on 8 November to accept a lesser role and flew to Algiers on 9 November, where, as Chapter 7 describes, he found that few French officers would follow him.

The last day at sea

The only serious loss before the landings came on 7 November. The U.S. transport Thomas Stone, carrying troops of the Eastern Task Force, was torpedoed about 150 miles short of Algiers. The ship stayed afloat, but her landing craft and the soldiers in them set off on their own and were scattered by heavy seas; the troops arrived too late to take part in the assault. The ship itself was towed into Algiers several days later.

That evening, 39 C-47 transports of the 60th Troop Carrier Group took off from airfields in Cornwall carrying the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry, on a night flight to the airfields near Oran, the first American combat parachute operation. Its fate is told in Chapter 6. At sea, the assault forces made their final approach. In Algiers, the members of the resistance group described in Chapter 5 received word to act. In Rabat, General Béthouart, commander of the Casablanca Division, moved troops to surround the Resident General’s residence, a coup attempt that failed within hours.

What the voyage proved

The voyage itself was a success that later accounts tend to pass over. Three fleets totaling hundreds of ships had been assembled on two continents, loaded, sailed by different routes over distances of up to 4,000 miles, and brought to their objectives within hours of the planned time without detection of their true purpose. That required precise routing, refueling at sea for the escorts, radio silence and close coordination between the Admiralty in London and the Navy Department in Washington. Hewitt’s was the largest amphibious force the U.S. Navy had yet sent across an ocean.

The weaknesses lay in the final stage: getting men and equipment from ships to beaches. The transports had been loaded by inexperienced units, many landing-craft crews had trained for only weeks, and few officers had planned a night landing on a defended coast. Those weaknesses showed as soon as the boats went in, and they are a recurring theme of the next three chapters, which begin with Morocco and the Battle off Casablanca.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

At sea, October–November 1942

Sources and further reading

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