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Special Units · Tunisia, 1943
The 57th Fighter Group
An American P-40 group that flew off a carrier to Africa in 1942, fought beside the British Eighth Army from El Alamein to Tunisia, and on 18 April 1943 broke up a great formation of German transports over the Gulf of Tunis.
- U.S. Army Air Forces
- Western Desert to Cap Bon
- July 1942–May 1943
Off the Ranger and into the desert
The 57th Fighter Group reached the war by an unusual road. On 19 July 1942 its pilots flew 72 new Curtiss P-40F Warhawks off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, off the Gold Coast of West Africa, and then ferried them in stages across the width of Africa to Palestine. From there the group went into the Western Desert with the British Eighth Army, and it fought beside the Eighth Army from El Alamein through Libya and into southern Tunisia (Wikipedia, “57th Operations Group,” citing Air Force lineage records; Chapter 7).
Its three squadrons, the 64th, 65th and 66th Fighter Squadrons, flew the P-40F, the version of the Warhawk with a Packard-built Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. The P-40 was rugged and heavily armed but outclassed at altitude by the Messerschmitt Bf 109G and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190. In the desert the Americans flew with the Royal Air Force’s Desert Air Force, whose commander until early 1943, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, worked out with Montgomery the system of air-ground cooperation that the Allies later adopted for all of Tunisia (Craven and Cate; Chapter 7).
One of the group’s Distinguished Unit Citations covered that whole long campaign: its support of the Eighth Army from 24 October 1942, the opening of the Second Battle of El Alamein, to the capture of Sicily in August 1943. When the Eighth Army reached southern Tunisia, its air force came with it. After the February reorganization of the Allied air forces, the Desert Air Force under Air Vice Marshal Harry Broadhurst came under Coningham’s Northwest African Tactical Air Force, and the American and British fighters that had fought in Libya joined those that had fought at Thelepte and Kasserine in one command (Chapter 7).
The air bridge
By the spring of 1943 the Axis armies in Tunisia lived on what crossed the Sicilian Strait. Allied submarines, aircraft and ships based on Malta and Bône were sinking a growing share of the shipping, and the Germans leaned more and more on transport aircraft. In late March the Axis had about 500 transports on the route: the three-engined Junkers Ju 52, the Italian SM.82 and the huge six-engined Messerschmitt Me 323 “Gigant,” based mainly around Naples and Palermo. They flew in large formations, low over the water and under fighter escort, to the fields at Tunis, Bizerte and Cap Bon (Craven and Cate).
The Northwest African Air Forces had planned an operation to destroy the transport fleet, code-named Flax, in February, and canceled it on 19 February because of the crisis at Kasserine. It was launched on 5 April 1943. That morning P-38s intercepted a formation of Ju 52s off Cap Bon while bombers struck the transport fields in Sicily and Tunisia. For two weeks the attacks went on, and the Allied fighters hunted the transport formations over the strait (Craven and Cate; Chapter 7).
The first day showed how hard air statistics are to trust. The Northwest African Strategic Air Force claimed 201 Axis aircraft destroyed on 5 April, all but 40 of them on the ground, for three aircraft lost and six missing. German records list 14 Ju 52s shot down, 11 transports destroyed on the ground and 67 damaged; the British official history counts 27 German and three Italian transports lost that day. The same pattern, honest claims well above the enemy’s recorded losses, would run through the whole operation (Craven and Cate; Levine, 2008, as cited in Chapter 7).
Palm Sunday, 18 April 1943
The best-known action of Flax came on Sunday, 18 April 1943, Palm Sunday. Late in the afternoon four P-40 squadrons, the 64th, 65th and 66th of the 57th Fighter Group and the 314th Squadron of the 324th Fighter Group, with Spitfires flying top cover, caught a large formation of Ju 52s flying low over the Gulf of Tunis toward Cap Bon with an escort of Italian Macchi C.202s, Bf 109s and Bf 110s. The fight was fought at wave-top height. The official American air history describes a formation of about 100 Ju 52s and says that 50 to 70 were destroyed, with 16 of the escorting fighters, for the loss of six P-40s and one Spitfire (Craven and Cate).
The pilots’ first claims, made in the confusion of such a fight, reached 146. They were later reduced to 58 or 59 Ju 52s, 14 C.202s and Bf 109s, and two to four Bf 110s. The German losses were heavy but lower than the claims, and the sources do not agree on how much lower. The air force history says the Germans admitted losing 51 Ju 52s. The figures most often cited from German records today are 24 Ju 52s, nine Bf 109s and one Bf 110 shot down into the sea, with another 35 Ju 52s damaged and crash-landed along the Sicilian and Tunisian coasts (57th Fighter Group history; Murawski, 2009, as cited in Chapter 7).
The gap between claims and records is not a mark against the pilots. Claims made in good faith by several men firing at the same aircraft, or at aircraft that were damaged and came down later on a beach, add up to more than the other side lost, in every air campaign of the war. On either count Palm Sunday was one of the most one-sided air actions of the war, and the transports lost that evening were carrying men and supplies the Axis armies in Tunisia could not replace. Four of the 57th’s pilots became aces in that single action, and the group received a Distinguished Unit Citation for it, one of three it earned in the war (Chapter 7).
The end of the air bridge
Flax went on. The next day, 19 April, twelve of twenty escorted Ju 52s were shot down. On 22 April Spitfires and four South African Air Force P-40 squadrons caught a formation of Me 323s loaded with fuel over the Gulf of Tunis and claimed 21 of them, for the loss of four Kittyhawks; other accounts give 16 or 17 Me 323s destroyed. By one summary of the published sources, Flax cost the Axis between 123 and 157 Ju 52s, 21 Me 323s and other transports between 5 and 22 April, and 432 aircraft of all types to all causes (Craven and Cate; Wikipedia, “Operation Flax,” as cited in Chapter 7).
The air bridge never recovered. When Tunis and Bizerte fell on 7 May and the last Axis forces in Africa surrendered on 13 May, more than 600 Axis aircraft were left wrecked or abandoned on the fields around Tunis, Bizerte and Cap Bon. The 57th went on to Sicily and Italy. Its war in Africa had begun on a carrier deck off the Gold Coast and ended over the strait across which the Axis had flown its first troops into Tunisia in November 1942 (Craven and Cate; Chapter 7).
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem.
Timeline
- The group’s pilots fly 72 P-40Fs off USS Ranger off the Gold Coast and ferry them across Africa.
- The Second Battle of El Alamein opens; the group supports the Eighth Army from here to Sicily.
- The Northwest African Tactical Air Force is formed; the Desert Air Force comes under it as the Eighth Army reaches Tunisia.
- Operation Flax is canceled because of the Kasserine crisis.
- Flax begins against the Axis transport fleet.
- Palm Sunday: the 57th’s three squadrons and the 314th Squadron intercept Ju 52s over the Gulf of Tunis.
- Me 323 transports are destroyed over the Gulf of Tunis.
- The last Axis forces in Africa surrender.
Read the full story
- Chapter 7: The Air War over Tunisia
- XII Air Support Command and the 99th Fighter Squadron, the other P-40 units of this section
- The Kasserine Pass collection and atlas
By the numbers
The 57th Fighter Group by the numbers
Palm Sunday, 18 April 1943: claims and records
Aircraft claimed by the American pilots and losses in German records. Honest claims ran above recorded losses, as in every air campaign; sources disagree on the German figures
Source: Craven and Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. II (1949); Marek J. Murawski (2009), as cited in Chapter 7
The first day of Flax, 5 April 1943
Axis aircraft claimed by the Northwest African Strategic Air Force against losses in other records
Source: Craven and Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. II (1949); Alan J. Levine (2008), as cited in Chapter 7
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
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Sources
- Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. II, Europe: Torch to Pointblank (University of Chicago Press, 1949), chs. 5–6.
- Wikipedia, “57th Operations Group,” citing Air Force lineage and honors records, and “Operation Flax,” for the works it cites: Alan J. Levine (2008), Marek J. Murawski (2009), John Weal (2003), Andrew Thomas (2005).
- Office of War Information photographs of the 57th Fighter Group in Tunisia, April 1943, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
- Further reading: Christopher Shores, Hans Ring and William N. Hess, Fighters over Tunisia (1975); Daniel R. Mortensen, ed., Airpower and Ground Armies (Air University Press, 1998).