Planning Operation Torch

At the beginning of August 1942 the planning of Operation Torch, the Anglo-American landing in French North Africa, got properly under way. It is often stated that on 5 August an American team of planners, including Major General George Patton, Brigadier General James Doolittle and Hoyt Vandenberg, assembled in Washington to join the combined planning staff from London. This needs to be made more precise. Patton and his officers had been doing preliminary work in Washington since 30 July, and according to his staff’s records he left for London around 5 August, where until 21 August he worked at the headquarters of Lieutenant General Dwight Eisenhower. In August Doolittle, earmarked to command the American air forces in the operation, also flew to London, and Colonel Vandenberg, who had been in England since the summer, helped to prepare its air plan there. The combined staff, then, did not come to Washington. It was the Americans from the United States who joined it in London.

The July decision

The dispute over where the Western Allies should attack the Germans in 1942 had been going on since the spring. The Americans, above all the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, wanted to assemble a great army in Britain and land in France, and in case the USSR collapsed they were preparing a limited landing as early as the autumn of 1942, Operation Sledgehammer. The British considered it suicidal and from the beginning of the summer pressed for a landing in North Africa, which Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already discussed in Washington with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in June. In July Marshall, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest King, and the President’s adviser Harry Hopkins flew to London. The British could not be persuaded to adopt Sledgehammer, and Roosevelt had wanted from the outset for American soldiers to fight the Germans that same year.

On 24 July the Combined Chiefs of Staff adopted a compromise: a landing in North Africa was to be prepared, and the final decision taken by mid-September. Roosevelt did not want to wait. On 25 July he instructed his envoys to plan a landing in Africa for the end of October at the latest, and on 30 July he told the chiefs of staff that the operation had priority over all other undertakings. The previous code names, Gymnast and Super-Gymnast, were replaced by the name Torch. For Marshall and King this was a defeat: they believed that an expedition to Africa would draw forces away from the only theatre in which Germany could be defeated and would postpone the invasion of France. They were right about the latter. The cross-Channel landing was ultimately put back to 1944.

Eisenhower and the staff at Norfolk House

The expedition was to be commanded by an American, because the British knew that the French forces in Africa, hostile to Britain since Mers-el-Kébir and Dakar, would more readily accept the army of the United States. Already at the end of July Marshall had let Eisenhower know that he would be given the command. According to the American official history, Roosevelt and Churchill approved the choice in an exchange of cables on 6 August, and on 13 August the Combined Chiefs of Staff issued Eisenhower with a directive; in many studies 14 August is given as the date of his appointment as Commander-in-Chief, Allied Expeditionary Force. Eisenhower’s deputy was Major General Mark Clark, who had flown to London with him in June.

The planners worked at Norfolk House in St James’s Square in London. From the start Eisenhower wanted the staff to be genuinely combined: American and British officers sat in the same sections, and he threatened to send home anyone who indulged in national quarrels. The British land forces were to be led first by General Harold Alexander and, when he left for Cairo in August, by General Bernard Montgomery. When Montgomery too was summoned to Egypt, command of the British First Army passed to General Kenneth Anderson.

The dispute over the landing sites

The first outline plan, of 9 August, envisaged simultaneous landings at four points: at Casablanca on the Atlantic and at Oran, Algiers and Bône (today Annaba) on the Mediterranean. For so many points, however, there were not enough escort vessels and aircraft carriers. The plan of 21 August therefore dropped Casablanca. The British wanted to land as far east as possible in order to beat the Germans in the race for Tunisia, and they feared the Atlantic swell, which could make a landing on the open beaches of Morocco impossible. The Americans, for their part, feared that Francisco Franco’s Spain or the Germans would close the Strait of Gibraltar and cut off the troops inside the Mediterranean. They wanted a secure port on the ocean and insisted on Casablanca.

The dispute, conducted in cables between London and Washington, was later called the “transatlantic essay contest”. By the end of August it had reached deadlock, and it was settled only by Roosevelt and Churchill. On 5 September three landings were agreed: at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. The forces were divided into three task forces. The Western, under Patton, with the fleet of Rear Admiral Henry K. Hewitt, was to sail directly from the United States and land at three points on the coast of French Morocco. The Centre, with the American II Corps of Major General Lloyd Fredendall, would sail from Britain to Oran. The Eastern, with American and British troops, was to take Algiers, covered by the ships of Rear Admiral Harold Burrough, and then hand over command to Anderson and advance on Tunisia. The American air forces were organised as the new Twelfth Air Force, activated in Washington on 20 August; Doolittle took command of it in September, and Vandenberg became its chief of staff. Its first units and some of its aircraft were taken from the Eighth Air Force in England.

The political dimension

The most difficult question was not a military one. In North Africa there were more than a hundred thousand soldiers of the army of Vichy France, and warships of the French fleet in the ports. If they resisted, the landing could end in bloodshed. Washington had a unique position there: it maintained relations with the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain and since 1941 had had a diplomat, Robert Murphy, in Algiers along with a network of vice-consuls who, under the guise of supervising food deliveries, gathered information and contacts. Murphy held talks with a group of conspirators that included General Charles Mast, and General Henri Giraud, who had escaped in April from a German fortress, was chosen as the candidate to lead the French who would join the Allies. General Charles de Gaulle was excluded from the plans. Roosevelt did not trust him, and the Americans believed that in Africa the Free French would stiffen resistance rather than weaken it.

Place in the war

September and October were taken up with assembling ships, loading convoys and exercises. On the night of 21/22 October Clark landed secretly from a submarine near Cherchell to agree with Mast on help from French officers. On 8 November 1942 more than a hundred thousand Allied soldiers landed in Morocco and Algeria. The French resisted for two to three days, and the matter was settled not by the figure of Giraud but by Admiral François Darlan, who happened to be in Algiers and concluded an agreement with the Allies. The Germans responded by occupying southern France and moving troops into Tunisia, where fighting continued until May 1943. The British were right that the race for Tunis would be difficult; the Americans were right that Casablanca was indispensable.

Operation Torch was the first great offensive of American forces against Germany and the first great test of a combined Allied command. Eisenhower, who in the summer had regarded Roosevelt’s decision as a mistake, gained in Africa the experience with which in 1944 he led the invasion of Normandy. For Joseph Stalin, whom Churchill told in Moscow a few days later that the second front would be postponed, Africa was a poor substitute. For Patton and Doolittle it became the first chapter of great careers in Europe.