So what in the end were the pluses and minuses of Torch? In fact, there were relatively few minuses. On one hand, Marshall was clearly correct that an American intervention in the Mediterranean in November 1942 would make a landing on the coast of France impossible in 1943. On the other hand, the prospects for a successful landing by Allied amphibious forces in 1943 on the heavily defended coast of northern France were dubious at best. However, Torch did make possible the opening of the Allies’ Mediterranean sea lines of communication, which freed up approximately 5 to 6 million tons of shipping for use elsewhere in the world. That alone was an enormous boon to the hard-pressed Allied merchant marine, which had not yet begun to recover from the disastrous losses suffered in the great convoy battles of 1942.

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One of the major unexpected benefits from Torch was the fact that military operations in the Mediterranean from November 1942 to the fall of 1943 allowed the British and Americans to establish an effective combined, joint high command. It provided Allied staff officers and senior military leaders the opportunity to work together in evolving common practices, and even a common language for military operations. Eisenhower in particular benefited from the experience of leading a combined force of British and American ground, sea and air forces. Beginning in September 1943, British and American senior ground and air commanders began the process of transferring from the Mediterranean to London, to begin planning for Operation Overlord. Besides Eisenhower, Bernard Law Montgomery (ground force commander), Omar Bradley (First Army commander), George S. Patton (Third Army commander), Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz (chief, Strategic Air Forces, Europe), Arthur Tedder (Eisenhower’s principle deputy), and James H. Doolittle (commander of the Eighth Air Force) all transferred from the Mediterranean, where they had won their spurs, to the Overlord operation. Whatever the difficulties that would emerge in the command relationships during the campaigns in northwestern Europe during 1944 and 1945, they were at least manageable. One can only imagine how much more difficult Anglo-American cooperation would have been without that year and a half of seasoning in North Africa and the Mediterranean. That 18 months of fighting, moreover, had a tremendous impact on the capability of the Wehrmacht to repel the invasion. Defeats at Stalingrad, at Kursk and along the Dnieper River in the fall of 1943 were followed by a disastrous series of defeats in the Ukraine over the winter of 1943-1944 that seriously undermined German fighting power.

But it was not just the Reich’s ground forces that were suffering terrible defeats. Over the course of the year from spring 1943 through spring 1944, the combined bomber offensive placed unrelenting pressure on the Luftwaffe and the German air defense system. For a time the Germans gave as good as they got. In two disastrous air raids against Schweinfurt in August and October 1943, the U.S. Eighth Air Force lost 60 bombers shot down in each attack. Crew losses in the Eighth hovered at a rate of over 30 percent each month for the last eight months of 1943. But in January 1944 the tide finally swung in favor of the Americans. The North American P-51 Mustang, with its extraordinary range, provided the great bomber formations with fighter escort all the way to Berlin, and the Luftwaffe suffered a loss rate that eventually led to its collapse. By May 1944, the American air offensive had won general air superiority over the European continent.

Moreover, Allied air forces in spring 1944 possessed capabilities as well as a force structure that allowed them to conduct a massive and effective campaign against the French transportation network. By June 6, 1944, the entire rail network in western and central France had largely broken down, and the Germans had lost the battle of the logistics buildup before the Normandy campaign ever began. Allied air forces had neither the capability nor the force structure to conduct such a campaign in 1943.

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