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overwhelmingly in the Allies’ favour. The caution of the Italian high command denied Rommel a chance to exploit a brief opportunity to outflank and destroy Allied forces in northern Tunisia. The Americans were reinforcing rapidly, while German strength was shrinking. On 22 February 1943 Rommel was obliged to break off his offensive. Next day, he was promoted to become C-in-C Army Group Africa. A week later, Ultra revealed his intention to use all three of his weak panzer divisions to strike Montgomery’s Eighth Army, approaching the Axis Mareth line in southern Tunisia. The German push at Medenine on 6 March was easily thrown back; Rommel, a sick man, left Africa for the last time.

Soon Montgomery was attacking Mareth with a large superiority of tanks and aircraft. After the failure of his first assault on 19 March, he conducted a successful outflanking operation deeper inland, but the Germans were able to withdraw intact to new positions at Wadi Akarit. Meanwhile, the Americans regained the ground lost in the small disaster at Kasserine. At the urging of Alexander, now Eisenhower’s deputy, chaotic Allied command arrangements were reorganised; the most visibly incompetent American officers were replaced with a ruthlessness the British might profitably have emulated. Through April, the Allies steadily pushed back the Axis line. By early May, von Arnim’s forces were confined to a pocket seldom more than sixty miles from the Mediterranean coast, along a 150-mile front where the British confronted them in the east, the Americans further west.

The Allies tightened their grip on the Mediterranean supply route, achieving record sinkings of Axis ships. Von Arnim’s shortage of armour, ammunition, fuel and food worsened. It became plain that his resistance could not be much prolonged; indeed, it was remarkable that he sustained the struggle for so long, against much superior Allied forces – at no time in North Africa did Eisenhower’s and Alexander’s soldiers find their task easy. In April, the US 2nd Corps was frustrated in an attempted breakthrough, but Montgomery finally achieved success at Wadi Akarit, driving back his opponents to a new line. On 22 April, Alexander launched an all-out offensive: First Army attacked towards Tunis, Bradley’s corps at Bizerta and the French towards Pont du Fahs. The British Eighth Army failed to smash the new German line at Enfidaville. On Montgomery’s advice, Alexander transferred two of his divisions to First Army, to deliver a final assault along the Medjez–Tunis road, with massive air and artillery support. The combined pressure on von Arnim’s front proved irresistible: Tunis, Bizerta and Pont du Fahs fell on the same day, and two wrecked German panzer armies disintegrated. The last Axis pocket surrendered on 13 May, and 238,000 prisoners fell into Allied hands.

Victory had required almost five months’ more fighting than the Anglo-American high command had anticipated in November, after El Alamein and Torch. But Hitler’s reinforcement of failure rendered success, when it came, correspondingly greater. Initial American hubris was punished by Wehrmacht skill, but Eisenhower and his colleagues displayed sense and humility in learning the lessons. Weaknesses of command, tactics, equipment and junior leadership were addressed to some effect before the Allied armies began to cross the Mediterranean.

The British Army was vastly cheered by the sense of redemption that accompanied its arrival in Tunis. After almost three years of hard campaigning, it had achieved a victory which won enthusiastic applause at home. Despite the overblown acclaim lavished on Montgomery, Eighth Army’s commander had shown himself a steady professional. His record was tarnished by failure to destroy Rommel’s army after Alamein, the sluggishness of his subsequent pursuit and some important failures against German defensive positions. British Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, a bitter critic, asserted that ‘The pursuit of Rommel across Africa was in the nature rather of a stately procession than of a rout of a defeated army.’