The final plan was an ambitious one. The western Allies would transport 65,000 men, commanded by Lt. Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower, from ports in the United States and England, and invade French North African possessions at Casablanca, Oran and Algers. The Allied move against French North Africa benefited enormously from the fact that the attention of Axis political and military leaders remained focused elsewhere. The Germans were involved in their struggle for Stalingrad and the Caucasus. Moreover, the situation in Egypt was growing increasingly grim throughout September and into October, as the British built up their forces under Lt. Gen. Bernard Montgomery for a renewed offensive against Rommel’s Afrika Korps. At the end of October, Montgomery’s Eighth Army attacked the Germans at El Alamein, precipitating a massive battle of attrition that Axis forces had no hope of winning. Not surprisingly, Axis leaders concentrated on what was happening in Egypt’s desert sands. By early November, Rommel’s forces were rapidly retreating back into Libya against Hitler’s express orders.

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At the beginning of November, German and Italian intelligence did detect a major buildup of Allied shipping around Gibraltar. But the Germans dismissed the threat as simply another large supply convoy to reinforce Malta. The Italians were not so sure, but by that point in the war the Germans were paying them little attention. A diary entry for November 8 by the Italian foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, suggests the extent of the disarray in the Axis camp at the beginning of Torch: ‘November 8, 1942: At five-thirty in the morning [German foreign minister Ulrich Jaochim] von Ribbentrop telephoned to inform me of American landings in Algerian and Moroccan ports. He was rather nervous, and wanted to know what we intended to do. I must confess that, having been caught unawares, I was too sleepy to give a very satisfactory answer.’

At the operational level, the Torch landings almost immediately succeeded. The initial Allied hope was that dissident French officers who supported the Allied cause would rise up and seize control of the levers of power. Such hopes, however, proved false. Ironically, the military forces of Vichy France once again, as they had done at Dakar in 1940 and in Syria in 1941, resisted Allied military forces — something they failed to do against invading German forces in France in November 1942 and in Tunisia that same month. Fortunately for the fate of the Allied invasion, the Germans had never trusted the Vichy leaders and, as a result, had prevented them from modernizing their military forces in North Africa. The result was that French tanks were obsolete even by 1940 standards, while the defenders possessed insufficient combat aircraft. Nevertheless, the French gave a good account of themselves. In some places it was touch and go, but in the end the French were never in a position to put up sustained resistance against attacking Allied forces.

For the initial landings, the Americans provided the bulk of the forces, in the hope that the French would be less willing to offer resistance to U.S. troops. That also proved to be an idle hope. On the coast of Morocco, the French failed to put up effective opposition against most of the American landings, but the heavy Atlantic surf more than made up for the weak resistance. During the landings at Fedala, the transport Leonard Wood lost 21 of its landing craft in the surf, with heavy loss of life. The transport Thomas Jefferson lost 16 of its 31 landing craft, with three more damaged, in delivering just the first wave of troops. The transport Carroll had the worst experience: She lost 18 of her 25 landing craft in the first wave and five in the second wave, leaving just two operable boats to move troops and supplies to the beachhead. Luckily for the Americans, only the landings near Mehdia ran into serious opposition from defending French forces. As the official history notes: ‘The situation of [the landing] force at nightfall, 8 November, was insecure and even precarious.’

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