Operation Torch

Why North Africa?

By the summer of 1942, America had been at war for about seven months. In the Pacific, Americans were already fighting. But in Europe, American ground troops had not yet gone into battle against Germany.

The Soviet Union was bleeding, and Joseph Stalin wanted a second front. Many American generals wanted to cross the English Channel and invade France as soon as possible. The British said we weren't ready. Not enough landing craft. Not enough trained troops. They were right.

So the Allies chose North Africa. The British Eighth Army was already fighting German and Italian forces in Egypt and Libya. Land behind them, in Morocco and Algeria, and the Axis armies could be caught between two forces.

In July, President Franklin Roosevelt approved the plan. The commander would be a general most Americans had never heard of, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

But there was one big complication. Morocco and Algeria were French colonies. France had surrendered to Germany in 1940, and its new government at Vichy cooperated with the Nazis. The French army and navy in North Africa were still armed, and still loyal to Vichy.

In October, Eisenhower's deputy, Major General Mark Clark, slipped ashore in Algeria from a British submarine to meet French officers friendly to the Allies. He came back with promises of help. But nobody could promise what the French Army and Navy as a whole would do.

Would they fight? Nobody knew.

Three Task Forces

The plan called for three landings, spread across almost a thousand miles of coastline, with more than a hundred thousand American and British troops. Eisenhower would run it from a command post dug deep inside the Rock of Gibraltar.

Two forces sailed from Britain. One, largely British but with Major General Charles Ryder's American Thirty-Fourth Infantry Division, would land near Algiers. The other, all American under Major General Lloyd Fredendall, would land near Oran.

The third was the boldest. About thirty-five thousand American soldiers under Major General George S. Patton sailed straight from Hampton Roads, Virginia. The Navy carried them across the Atlantic in about a hundred ships, under Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt. Patton rode with Hewitt aboard the heavy cruiser USS Augusta.

That was something new. An American army, loaded in America, carried across an ocean, and put straight onto a hostile shore.

As a Navy veteran, this is the part that gets me. German submarines were hunting that ocean. A hundred ships is a big target. And yet the convoy made it across without being found. That's thousands of sailors standing their watches right.

Their targets were three spots on Morocco's Atlantic coast. Safi in the south. Mehdia and Port Lyautey in the north. And in the middle, Fedala, just up the coast from the great port of Casablanca.

The U-boats had missed them on the way over. They would not miss them forever.

Landing Day

Which brings us back to those cargo nets. In the early hours of November 8th, the landings began. As the first troops headed in, Roosevelt's voice went out over the radio to the people of France and North Africa, speaking in French. The Americans came as friends, he said, and would leave once the threat was gone. He asked them not to stand in the way.

Near Algiers, French officers sympathetic to the Allies had tried to seize the city from inside. Resistance was light, and Algiers fell that same day.

Oran was much harder. American Rangers under Lieutenant Colonel William Darby took the gun batteries at Arzew. But two British ships carrying American soldiers tried to rush Oran harbor, and both were sunk. Many aboard were killed or captured. American paratroopers flew all the way from England to seize airfields, the first major combat jump in American history. Bad weather scattered the planes. It took two days of hard fighting before the French at Oran gave up.

In Morocco, the surf was heavy and the boats were clumsy. Boats broached. Boats got lost in the dark. Troops landed miles from where they belonged. Their training had been rushed, and it showed.

Still, at Safi, Major General Ernest Harmon's troops took the port. At Fedala, the Third Infantry Division got ashore and pushed toward Casablanca. But in the north, at Mehdia, Brigadier General Lucian Truscott's men hit French troops dug into an old fortress called the Kasbah. It took three days to take it, and the airfield behind it.

So the French had answered. Nobody had to wonder anymore. They were fighting. And out at sea, so was their navy.

The Naval Battle of Casablanca

In Casablanca harbor sat the French battleship Jean Bart. She was unfinished. She couldn't leave the pier. Only one of her two main turrets worked. But that one turret carried four fifteen-inch guns.

Shortly after dawn, French shore batteries and the Jean Bart opened fire on the American fleet. The battleship USS Massachusetts answered with her sixteen-inch guns. With the cruisers Wichita and Tuscaloosa, she pounded the harbor, and a hit from the Massachusetts jammed the Jean Bart's working turret.

Then the French Navy came out to fight. The light cruiser Primauguet and a group of destroyers steamed out of Casablanca, straight for the American troop transports off Fedala. The cruisers Augusta and Brooklyn, American destroyers, and planes from the carrier Ranger met them head-on. One by one, the French ships were sunk, wrecked, or driven onto the beach. French submarines fired torpedoes at the battleship and the carrier. They missed.

The Jean Bart's crew repaired their turret, and two days later she fired again. This time, dive bombers from the Ranger sank her where she sat.

As a sailor, this is the hardest part to picture. American and French sailors, whose countries had been allies since the Revolution, killing each other off the coast of Africa. Neither side wanted it. But every sailor out there did what his ship asked of him.

And still, the deadliest danger to that fleet hadn't fired a shot.

The Cease-Fire

Behind the scenes, the Allies were bargaining with Admiral François Darlan, commander of all Vichy French forces, who happened to be in Algiers. On November 10th, Darlan ordered French forces in North Africa to stop fighting.

In Morocco, the word came just in time. Patton had a full assault on Casablanca set for the morning of November 11th. About an hour before it was to begin, the French surrendered the city. Armistice Day. And George Patton's birthday.

The fighting ashore was over. But the transports were still sitting off Fedala, unloading. And the German submarines had finally found them.

On the evening of November 11th, a U-boat torpedoed the transport Joseph Hewes, and she went down off Fedala.

Late that night, Admiral Hewitt signaled his northern force that hostilities had ceased in French Morocco. And he added one more line.

"Be especially vigilant against Axis submarines."

The next day, another submarine sank three more transports. The Tasker H. Bliss. The Hugh L. Scott. The Edward Rutledge. Sailors died at anchor, after the war on that shore had already ended.

Any sailor will tell you a ship at anchor is a ship that can't run. That's the cost nobody writes into the plan.

Why It Mattered

The landings cost more than five hundred American lives, and more than a thousand French. Soon, many of those same French forces switched sides and fought alongside the Allies. Darlan, a collaborator the Allies had made a deal with, was assassinated on Christmas Eve.

Torch started a hard campaign, including a painful American defeat at Kasserine Pass in February 1943. By May, the Axis in North Africa had surrendered. Then came Sicily. Italy. Normandy. Every one built on what was learned at Torch.

Off Fedala, four of the transports whose cargo nets those soldiers climbed down in the dark never made the trip home.

Tomorrow: rush hour in New York City, and in a single moment, every light goes out. What could black out thirty million people at once? The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. Hit subscribe, and the next muster will be waiting for you. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.