Inferno - Max Hastings [239]
Panzer officer Tassilo von Bogenhardt said: “All the fight seemed to have gone out of the men … We were carpet-bombed, dive-bombed and machine-gunned … The last thing I remember [before being wounded and evacuated] is blowing up my panzer when the petrol had run out, and watching the flames slowly envelop it. It was then that I knew this was the end of our Afrika Korps … I remember wondering why the British advanced so cautiously … if they only knew. I almost wished they did know.”
Rommel was able to extricate a substantial part of his forces, but the Eighth Army had taken 30,000 Axis prisoners and destroyed large quantities of weapons and equipment. This time, for Rommel’s retreating army there would be no further tilt of the seesaw eastwards. The British had achieved the only substantial land victory of the western war for which they would share laurels with no ally. In the course of December, the Germans turned and fought several fierce rearguard actions, but on each occasion the Eighth Army prised them from their positions and pushed on. Tripoli fell on 23 January 1943. Three days later, Montgomery’s forces found themselves in Tunisia, where the last protracted phase of the North African war was fought out.
THE TORCH LANDINGS in Vichy French Algeria and Morocco on 8 November 1942 represented the first big combined operation against the Germans by the U.S. and British armies. Churchill and Roosevelt decreed it in the face of strong opposition from the U.S. chiefs of staff, who saw the Mediterranean merely as the focus of British imperialistic ambitions. Once it was acknowledged that there could be no continental D-Day in 1942, the president accepted the prime minister’s view that some significant military gesture must be made to sustain a sense of Allied momentum; North Africa was the only plausible objective. Torch involved an initial Anglo-American force of 63,000 men and 430 tanks. It was hoped that Vichy French forces would offer no resistance to the two American assault divisions. Instead, however, these incurred 1,500 casualties in early actions ashore and were obliged to hit back hard.
A Foreign Legionnaire manning a Vichy battery above Casablanca described the gunners’ horror when American planes fell upon their uncamouflaged positions: “In five minutes it was all over. I crept out of the ditch where I had flung myself when the first bomb fell … Out of thirty men and one officer, fifteen men and the officer were dead; ten more were wounded. The two guns were out of commission and two trucks were on fire. For a moment I felt great bitterness in my soul as I saw my comrades scattered all around. Ever since the fall of France, we had dreamed of deliverance, but we did not want it that way.” On 10 November, the Allied supreme commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, brokered a cease-fire. Thereafter, French forces progressively joined the Allied front against the Germans, though hampered by lack of weapons and—in the case of some officers—of enthusiasm for their new cause.
The North African advances thrilled the people of the Allied nations, once they dared to believe that these were more than mere swings of the pendulum. The land girl Muriel Green scribbled on 11 November: “Suddenly realized the news has become exciting. I had grown so tired of advances and withdrawals in Egypt for the past few years I did not realize this one was anything to jump about over. It is marvellous the Americans striking the other side, I really think things are beginning