While the Allies fought to suppress French defenses, the FÜhrer and his advisers made one of the most disastrous strategic decisions of World War II. Despite the enormous overstretch of German forces on the Eastern Front — in a matter of weeks the Soviets would launch their Stalingrad counteroffensive — Hitler ordered the seizure of Tunisia. When the landings took place, the FÜhrer was on a train headed from East Prussia to Munich to give his annual ‘Beer Hall’ speech, commemorating the failed Nazi putsch of 1923. The OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or armed forces high command) staff, remaining in East Prussia, warned that North Africa could not be held, but as one staff officer noted after the war, that assessment ‘passed unnoticed in the general jumble of vague political and strategic ideas based primarily on considerations of prestige.’ There was certainly no overall strategic assessment of additional commitments in North Africa. Hitler rushed paratrooper units across the Mediterranean by Junkers Ju-52s, and Regular infantry and armored units soon followed.

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In Tunisia, unlike the situation in Morocco and Algeria, the Vichy French garrison and governor cooperated with the German occupation force, a group of lightly armed paratroopers. The Wehrmacht then moved heavier infantry and armored forces across the Mediterranean to secure Tunisia and hold the Allied attacks at bay along the coast from Algeria. In doing so, Hitler placed a whole army of Germans and Italians in a trap — but unlike the trap at Stalingrad, it was one of his own making. On the far side of the Mediterranean, with only tenuous supply lines from Italy, the Axis forces were hostages to fate. They confronted a logistical battle they could not hope to win in the face of overwhelming Allied superiority — a superiority that the breaking of the Wehrmacht’s high-level communications code via Ultra decrypts only served to reinforce. To exacerbate the difficulties confronting Axis forces, Hitler, infuriated by Rommel’s pessimism that North Africa could not be held, appointed a new commander of German forces in Tunisia. And that commander, JÜrgen Freiherr von Arnim, a prim, unctuous product of the German general staff, refused to cooperate with Rommel in defending Tunisia.

At first glance the fact that the Germans were able to grab and then reinforce Tunisia appeared to be a major setback for Allied arms. In the larger sense it was anything but a failure. The six months of fighting in North Africa’s Tunisian desert served as a further warning of the unpreparedness of U.S. troops to engage the Wehrmacht on its home turf of northern Europe. The defeat of U.S. forces at Kasserine Pass by Rommel’s Afrika Korps in February underlined the general and specific weaknesses of U.S. troops and leaders. But one of the marks of U.S. military effectiveness throughout World War II, in contrast to that of their British allies, was the learning curve with which troops and commanders adapted to the actual conditions of combat.

The defeat at Kasserine represented the starting point for Marshall’s generals to begin the process of developing ground forces that could stand up to and beat the Wehrmacht on the fields of France. One might also note that the fighting in North Africa proved a godsend in preparing the U.S. Army’s medical services for the complexities of caring for large numbers of wounded under combat conditions.

The initial German successes during the winter of 1942-1943 in holding their own against the pressure of Anglo-American forces turned into catastrophe by spring. Aided by Ultra decrypts, Allied air and naval forces first shut down German sea lines of communication between Sicily and North Africa. By April 1943, the Axis partners were reduced to moving supplies and reinforcements across the Mediterranean by air alone. Here again, Ultra revealed their movements, and waiting Allied fighters fought off accompanying Luftwaffe aircraft to slaughter the Ju-52 transports. The end came in early May with the surrender of the remaining German and Italian forces in North Africa. The loss of the former robbed the German high command of any chance to establish an effective mobile reserve against an Allied descent on Fascist Italy. In the case of the Italians, the defeat in Tunisia destroyed the last effective military forces with which to defend Sicily and the mainland against Allied landings in early July (Operation Husky). The fall of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime followed almost immediately upon the heels of that successful campaign.

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