The Axis surrender in Africa

Around midday on 13 May 1943 the Italian First Army of Marshal Giovanni Messe – the last organised body of Axis troops in Africa – laid down its arms. That same day General Harold Alexander, commander of the 18th Army Group, cabled Prime Minister Winston Churchill to report that the Tunisian campaign was over and all enemy resistance had ceased: “We are masters of the North African shores.” After almost three years of fighting in the deserts of Libya and Egypt and in the mountains of Tunisia, the war in Africa had come to an end.

Popular chronologies state that “the remaining units of the German Afrika Korps and the Italian troops” surrendered and that the Allies took “more than 250,000 prisoners”. The first part of this needs qualifying: by May 1943 the Afrika Korps was only one of several German corps in Tunisia, and its remnants surrendered on 12 May; the following day Messe’s Italians surrendered, together with the German divisions fighting alongside them. As for the number of prisoners, the sources differ: the British official history gives about 238,000 unwounded prisoners, the 18th Army Group staff about 244,000, and the American official history about 275,000. Historians usually accept that roughly a quarter of a million German and Italian soldiers were taken prisoner – somewhere between about 230,000 and 275,000.

The last week

The fate of the Axis forces in Tunisia was sealed on 6 and 7 May, when the British First Army broke through the front in the Medjerda valley and its tanks entered Tunis, while the Americans entered Bizerte. The front disintegrated into several isolated groups, and the British 6th Armoured Division, forcing its way through Hammam-Lif to Hammamet on 8–10 May, sealed off the neck of the Cape Bon peninsula, where the Germans and Italians might have tried to make a stand. On the seaward side, the escape route was cut by the British destroyers and motor torpedo boats of Admiral Andrew Cunningham. There was no evacuation like the one the British had carried out from Dunkirk in 1940: at most a few hundred men reached Italy by sea and air.

The surrender took place in stages. On 9 May General Gustav von Vaerst, with the remnants of the Fifth Panzer Army that had been holding out between Bizerte and Tunis, laid down his arms to General Omar Bradley’s US II Corps. On 11 May some 22,000 Germans surrendered to the French in the mountains near Zaghouan. The remaining German units – what was left of the Afrika Korps, the 10th and 15th Panzer Divisions and other formations – fell back into the hills south of Tunis, ever more tightly packed together, without fuel, ammunition or food. Many soldiers destroyed their equipment and waited for the Allies to arrive.

On 12 May men of the 1st Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, of the 4th Indian Division reached the command post of Army Group Africa near Sainte-Marie-du-Zit. Its commander, Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, was taken prisoner together with his staff. He refused to issue an order for a general surrender, explaining that he no longer had communications with his units; he presumably also did not want to take responsibility for surrendering an army that Hitler had ordered to fight to the last round. That same day the Afrika Korps headquarters sent its last signal to Germany: ammunition expended, weapons and equipment destroyed, the corps had fought as ordered until it could fight no more. The corps commander, General Hans Cramer, went into captivity together with his men.

Marshal Messe

The Italian First Army held out longest – the same army that under Erwin Rommel had retreated from El Alamein across the whole of Libya and later, under Messe, had defended the Mareth Line and the positions on the Wadi Akarit. Since April it had held the front in the hills north of Enfidaville, where it had successfully checked the attacks of the British Eighth Army. It was made up of Italian and German divisions, including the 90th Light Division and the 164th Light Division, veterans of the desert. After the fall of Tunis it found itself surrounded: units of the First Army and the French were closing in from the north and west, Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army was pressing from the south, and Allied aircraft attacked it ceaselessly from the air.

On 12 May Messe informed the high command in Rome that his men would fight on. That same day Benito Mussolini promoted him to Marshal of Italy – a gesture meant to underline the importance of resistance and keep up morale, but which in practice rewarded the commander of an army doomed to destruction. In the evening, when the German front in the north no longer existed, Mussolini authorised Messe to surrender. On 13 May, after another day of shelling and air attacks, some 80,000 men of the First Army laid down their arms. Messe, together with the commander of the 164th Light Division, General Kurt von Liebenstein, formally surrendered to units of the Eighth Army, the victors being represented by the commander of the 2nd New Zealand Division, General Bernard Freyberg. The commander of the 90th Light Division, General Theodor von Sponeck, had already surrendered to the New Zealanders. Individual groups of soldiers went on giving themselves up for several more days.

Messe was taken into captivity in Britain. Arnim, also taken to England, was later transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in the United States and returned to Germany in 1947. Rommel never went back to Tunisia: at the beginning of March, ill and convinced that further fighting was hopeless, he had flown to Europe to persuade Hitler to evacuate the army, and Hitler kept him at home. He thus escaped captivity, but lost the army with which he had won his victories in Africa for two years.

A mass of prisoners

The scale of the surrender took even the victors by surprise. The Allies had expected a few tens of thousands of prisoners, but columns thousands strong were streaming westwards along the roads, often marching without escort, in their own lorries and under their own officers. The makeshift open-air camps could not keep up with the influx, water and food were short, and many Germans and Italians had gone several days without eating. A dozen or more German and Italian generals were among the captives. Over the following months most of the prisoners were shipped to camps in Algeria and from there to the United States and Britain; for many of them the war ended in Tunisia.

According to the British official history, the 238,243 unwounded prisoners included about 102,000 Germans and 89,000 Italians, the rest being of undetermined nationality. The differences between the various counts arise from different ways of counting the wounded, auxiliary personnel, sailors and airmen, and from whether the prisoners of the last few days or of the whole campaign were counted. What is certain is that the Axis lost more men in Tunisia than with the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, which had surrendered at the turn of January and February 1943: there, some 91,000 exhausted and starving men had been taken prisoner. Over the whole Tunisian campaign the Germans also lost an estimated 8,500 killed and the Italians about 3,700; the number of wounded reached 40,000–50,000. Allied losses amounted to some 76,000 killed, wounded and missing, the largest share falling on the British and, in proportion to their numbers, on the poorly armed French.

The end of the war in Africa

The surrender in Tunisia closed the chapter opened by Italy’s entry into the war on 10 June 1940. The first skirmishes on the Libyan–Egyptian border were fought as early as June 1940, and in September that year the Italian invasion of Egypt began a war that for almost three years surged back and forth along the coast of North Africa. In 1941 the Italians lost their empire in East Africa, and from February 1941 Rommel’s Germans of the Afrika Korps fought at their side, reaching deep into Egypt, as far as El Alamein, in the summer of 1942. The turning point came in the autumn of 1942: the Second Battle of El Alamein and, almost simultaneously, the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria. The British Eighth Army then covered more than 3,000 kilometres in six months – through Cyrenaica and Tripoli into Tunisia – and the last Axis forces were trapped in the Tunisian bridgehead between two Allied armies.

For Italy, defeat in Tunisia meant the loss of the whole African empire it had been building since the end of the nineteenth century, and with it the loss of the best units of its army. Mussolini, who in 1940 had counted on easy gains at the expense of a defeated France and a weakened Britain, was left empty-handed, with an exhausted country and an army that in Tunisia, as earlier on the Don, had suffered enormous losses. For Germany it was the second great pocket, after Stalingrad, in which an entire army was lost. The name “Tunisgrad” has stuck in the literature, and the German historian Gerhard Schreiber wrote that in terms of numbers Tunisia was a “second Stalingrad” for the invaders. The responsibility lay above all with Hitler, who in the winter of 1942–1943 had decided to hold Tunisia at all costs and kept sending divisions and aircraft there, even though from the spring it was no longer possible to keep them supplied across a sea controlled by the Allies.

Place in the war

News of the victory reached Churchill in Washington, where the Trident Conference, with Roosevelt taking part, had been in session since 12 May. Victory in Tunisia strengthened the British case for continuing operations in the Mediterranean: with the whole coast of North Africa in Allied hands, the natural next step was Sicily, and then Italy itself. The Americans agreed, but in return secured a date in the spring of 1944 for the cross-Channel invasion.

The capture of Tunisia also brought the Allies more down-to-earth benefits. The Mediterranean was opened to convoys which since 1940 had had to sail to Egypt, India and the Persian Gulf around Africa, by way of the Cape of Good Hope; shortening this route saved hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping. Malta ceased to be a besieged fortress, and airfields in Tunisia brought Sicily, Sardinia and southern Italy within range.

In June 1943 the Allies took the Italian island of Pantelleria, and on 10 July they landed in Sicily. Two weeks later, shaken by the defeats in Africa and the invasion of Italian territory, the Fascist Grand Council turned against Mussolini, and the King had him arrested. In September Italy capitulated. Messe, released from captivity after the armistice, became chief of staff of the Italian army now fighting on the Allied side. For Germany, 13 May 1943 meant that the war it had so far waged on other people’s peripheries was drawing close to the borders of Europe, and that the Axis’s “soft underbelly”, as Churchill called it, lay open.