All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings

Author:Max Hastings [Hastings, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Military, General, World War II, History, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780007338092
Publisher: HarperPress
Published: 2011-06-15T03:13:11+00:00

The Torch landings in Vichy French Algeria and Morocco on 8 November 1942 represented the first big combined operation against the Germans by the US and British armies. Churchill and Roosevelt decreed it in the face of strong opposition from the US 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, Allied supreme commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower brokered a ceasefire. 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 peoples of the Allied nations, once they dared to believe that these were more than mere swings of the pendulum. 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 to happen and that victory is on the way.’ Some Germans were of the same opinion. ‘It is enormously impressive to see how sea power prevails,’ wrote Helmuth von Moltke, who yearned for Hitler’s downfall, on 10 November after the Torch landings. ‘It advances like a colossus.’ To the Russians, the war in Africa usually seemed of scant relevance to the immensity of their own struggle. But tidings of Torch and Alamein reached the Red Army, and gave its soldiers a small new infusion of hope. Even as Muriel Green was composing her diary in western England, on the Eastern Front Captain Nikolai Belov wrote, ‘Good news came today: the Americans and English are giving the Germans a real thrashing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.