First Fire of Operation Torch - November ‘96 World War II Feature

First Fire of Operation Torch
In the crucible of Operation Torch, the men of Sub-Task Force Goalpost received their baptism of fire capturing the Moroccan town of Port Lyautey.

by Pierre Comtois

The darkened ships of Sub-Task Force Goalpost lay silentlyoff the coast of a great continent. Ashore, lights gleamed,marking the unsuspecting target of the assault planned to takeplace before dawn. Suddenly, there was movement at the mouth of the Sebou River where it emptied into the sea from a long jetty. A line of four light steamers, well lit, crept out to sea directly toward the assembled fleet.

Brigadier General Lucian K. Truscott watched them warily from the deck of his command ship Henry T. Allen until the lead vessel was close enough for him to read its name, even in the dark early morning. As Lorraine passed Allen, the steamer blinkered a signal, and a young naval officer standing with Truscott translated it from the French: “Be warned. Alert on shore for 5.” As the ships steamed out to open water, Truscott wrestled with the knowledge that the most ambitious combined-arms operation in history had been discovered by the enemy in its climactic hour.

Sub-Task Force Goalpost was only a single part of a larger, three-pronged invasion fleet called the Western Task Force, whose mission was to invade French Morocco. The Western Task Force in turn, was yoked to two others, the Center and Eastern task forces. The three task forces, under the aegis of Operation Torch, had the mission of seizing all of French North Africa. It was a military operation of immense complication, involving the assembly and coordination of hundreds of ships, thousands of tons of supplies and countless man-hours of planning and training under the added stress of cooperating with new allies and trying to second guess the intentions of the enemy. All this by a nation that had not even been at war a few months before. But once involved, the United States was an eager participant.

The final agreement on the Allies’ first combined military action in the European theater did not come about overnight. The self-confident Americans had arrived in England early in 1942, spoiling for the showdown with Hitler. To the horror of their British counterparts, they suggested an immediate cross-Channel attack into France. With patience and persistence, the British explained the practical difficulties of mounting such a huge operation so soon, including the fact that the Allies were losing vast amounts of shipping to German submarines in the Atlantic. Until that problem was licked, they could not build up the materiel needed for an invasion of France. On July 22 the Americans approved Operation Torch, the British alternative to an invasion of Europe.

Although the grand design of Torch had the objective of securing all of North Africa for the Allies by squeezing Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps between Lt. Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army in the east and the combined American, British and possibly Free French forces in the west, it was not that simple. French forces in North Africa were under the command of the Vichy government, whose first concern was not to give the Germans any excuse for occupying the rest of France or her possessions. Unofficially, there were plenty of Frenchmen eager for an opportunity to actively support the Allies. Add to those two factors the element of French pride, and the Allies had a situation that was almost impossible to predict.

To find out how the French would react to an invasion of North Africa, the Allies flooded Morocco and Algeria with spies, set up an elaborate network of clandestine radios, arranged secret meetings with French officers and even succeeded in smuggling out of France the four-star general Henri Giraud, whose prestige, it was hoped, would convince the French military in North Africa not to resist the planned invasion. Even with all of this activity, however, there was still no guarantee that the landings would be unopposed.

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