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| Douglas A-20 Havocs in formation, about to bomb an enemy position in Tunisia during the Allied campaign in North Africa, 1943. |
Operation Torch, as the African invasion was called, was dictated by the activities of a man then known as the "Desert Fox"—Rommel. As his panzers clanked forward on the dusty coastal road that led to Alexandria, in 1941 the situation in the Mediterranean grew more critical. To those on the Allied side responsible for the conduct of the war, it became increasingly evident that he must be stopped. The worst thorn in Rommel's side was Malta. If Malta fell and Rommel's supply lines grew stronger, then there was every probability that Egypt would fall too. With Egypt would go the Suez Canal and the Middle East. The Germans would flank the Russians, win the Caucasian oil which they so desperately needed and possibly link up with the Japanese in the Indian Ocean. By July 1942, the consequences of not stopping Rommel were so obvious and so grave that earlier plans had to be shelved. Our Britain-based air offensive would have to struggle along as best it could, without the services of some of its most experienced squadrons and, even more disheartening, without the P-38 Lightning fighter cover originally scheduled to escort the heavies t worthwhile targets in Germany.
At the time of Torch, American air power was already represented in Egypt by the Ninth Air Force. At the start of the battle of El Alamein, 23 October 1942, it had 164 aircraft consisting of a squadron of Fortresses, a squadron of Liberators, two P-40 groups, and one B-25 group. These, plus British air strength of some 1,100 planes, were opposed by about two thousand Axis planes of all types. The Luftwaffe had its hands full dealing with these guardians of Egypt. It was not equal to a heavy assault on its rear. The responsibility for that assault was given to the Twelfth Air Force which landed with the invasion forces on 8 November.
Torch differed sharply from subsequent invasions in that it was directed against territory held by a power that was semi-friendly, or at worst only half hostile. Adequate air cover, it was thought, could be provided from carriers and nearby Gibraltar. There were two operational plans for the invaders, a war plan in case the Vichy French forces resisted, and a peace plan in case they did not. The uncertainty as to which plan would be followed persisted until a few hours before H-hour.
For the invasion, an American paratroop force was flown from Britain in C-47s in the first American airborne operation of the war. Their story is worth recalling because it indicates the growing pains incident to any new project, in peace or war, and because it was the small seed from which grew the great vertical envelopments later in Normandy, southern France, in Holland, and across the Rhine.
The planes took off on the night of 7 November, expecting to receive a friendly welcome in daylight the next day. The flight down was a rough one. Most of the planes had been undergoing modification until a matter of hours before take-off. In some planes, wingtip lights burned out, making formation flying in the wretched weather almost impossible. When the C-47s finally reached Africa, they found severe fighting in progress. French fighters raked the defenseless transports with machine gun fire, forcing several to crash-land in the desert. These were some of the difficulties, but even so the operation had a measure of success inasmuch as the scattered arrival of the C-47s thoroughly confused the French air defenses and had them tilting at shadows.
On the whole, air opposition was light. Spitfires from Gibraltar made short work of such Dewoitines as offered resistance. Carrier-ferried P-40s swooped onto captured airfields. Within a day or two some heavy bombers, including the "veteran" 97th Group from England, were moved in. Mediums and fighters also arrived to begin the long task of hacking at Rommel's rear guards and his supply lines.
Living conditions faced by these airmen were rugged, to put it mildly. Ground crews performed miracles of ingenuity in keeping aircraft operational in a climate that seemed to consist of dust storms and bottomless mud. Missions were flown on short notice, with organization improvised on the spot. Fighter pilots attended bomber briefings to get a picture of the type of mission they were being called on to escort. Troop Carrier dropped the paratroops that captured Bone airdrome, flew countless air supply missions, learned how to operate on a shoestring.
But even in those early days, the pattern of tactical support was emerging precisely as predicted by the logicians in the pre-war classrooms. First: gain air superiority. Second: isolate the battlefield. Third: provide direct cooperation with the ground forces in the liquidation of the enemy. The success of the second phase depended, obviously, on the first. Without air control there could be no interdiction of the battlefield. And until the battlefield was isolated, close cooperation could have no more than local effect. All this the air planners knew already. The African campaign was to teach them how to apply that knowledge successfully.
Air superiority was not gained in a week, or a month. At the time of the African landings, the embryonic Twelfth Air Force consisted of 551 aircraft. There were 1,700 miles between it and the other jaw of the Anglo-American pincer. And the Luftwaffe fought hard. But the truth was that the German Air Force at this moment of its greatest territorial expansion was simply stretched beyond the limits of its capacity adequately to supply itself. Committed to major efforts in both Russia and Africa, with the growing weight of the RAF's night assault oppressing its cities and the AAF's Britain-based day offensive already casting an ominous shadow, its doom in Africa was sealed from the moment our landings succeeded. The Germans must have wondered in bitter afterthought whether their African squadrons, pulled out in time, might not have tipped the scale at Stalingrad.
At the time, their faith in Rommel was so high, and stakes for which he fought so glittering, that any such admission of defeat was out of the question. So they fought on, until the harbors of Tunisia were choked with ships sunk by the AAF, and the desert battlefields littered with the skeletons of more than one thousand of their first-line aircraft.
While the North African ground campaign was slogging through the mud that marked the end of 1942, air power was slashing at Rommel's over-extended supply line, blocking roads, strafing motor columns, sinking ships, and shooting down air transports.
Much of the doctrine of tactical air power was being reasserted in action: that to operate effectively in conjunction with the ground forces, you first must have control of the air, that when you do have such control, the primary role of tactical air power consist in attacking supply lines in the rear rather than close support in the immediate battle area. New lessons were learned every day about the value of softening up the enemy air force by bombing airdromes before launching a ground attack, about the importance of hand-in-glove coordination between air and ground commanders, about the necessity for integrated air forces that could act as a whole rather than scattered squadrons operationally tied to a particular army or navy unit.
This principle of unity of command was accepted at Casablanca in January 1943. In the following month, the converging Twelfth and Desert Air Forces were merged in the Northwest African Air Forces under General Spaatz, with a second air command in the Eastern Mediterranean, under Air Marshall Tedder. It was not until the end of the year that the solution of the joint command problem found clearest expression in the creation of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, in which the function of air units, not their nationality, determined where they were placed and how employed.
As the days lengthened and spring arrived, General Spaatz's forces proceeded with the arduous and necessary task of whittling down the Luftwaffe. A constant problem in those early days was how to find enough fighters to protect the bombers against the still threatening Axis air power. The original heavy bomber group, the 97th, found revenge for the pasting it had taken from the German Air Force on its first night in Algiers by plastering Axis shipping and harbor facilities. In December, it had been joined by three squadrons of Liberators from the 92nd Group in England, who lived in the desert on Spam and dehydrated cabbage, harassed Rommel's rear guards, and struck across the Mediterranean at Naples and the Sicilian airdromes. Several groups of mediums, living under conditions just as rugged, gave the Nazis a foretaste of what B-24s and B-26s could do. There were some bad moments in the Tunisian campaign—as, for example, when Rommel flung his panzers through Kasserine Pass. On that occasion everything with wings was thrown against him, even the heavies flying below medium altitude. But there were also red-letter days like the famous Palm Sunday engagement when P-40s of the 57th Group caught a swarm of Ju 52s and Me 323s flying men and supplies to Rommel's hard-pressed forces and shot seventy-nine into the sea in a slaughter reminiscent of the Battle of Britain.
In the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO) there was more variety of air combat—if not more heroism—than was dreamed of in northern Europe at that time. High-, medium-, and low-level bombing, bridge-busting, strafing of armored columns and airdromes, skip bombing of Axis shipping—all these tactics and many others appeared in the 191 days between the landings in North Africa and the collapse of the Axis forces there.
It was in this period, too, that an aerial weapon whose potentialities had never been fully exploited began to be recognized as the indispensable aid to modern warfare. In 1939, one of Germany's best generals, Werner von Fritsch, had predicted that the side with the best aerial photo reconnaissance would win the war. In Britain, the RAF had skilled photo interpreters assessing bomb damage in making target selections based on high altitude photos brought back by unarmed Spitfires or Mosquitos. A squadron of American Lightnings, profiting by RAF experience, was almost operational. But it was in Africa that tactical reconnaissance proved itself invaluable to the ground forces. At one point during the final stages of the drive on Tunis, when weather grounded the recce boys, the ground commander flatly refused to move until his air photo coverage was obtained. Flying P-38s (F-versions) members of the 90th Photo Recon Wing experimented with night photography, and brought low-level photo recon missions—dicing missions, as they were called—to a state of development which was invaluable later on in Italy and still later in the battles of France and Germany. They got little recognition for their work—photo recon was strictly hush-hush in those days—but they came to be acknowledged as the real eyes of the army. To the long-range planners, with an eventual D-day in mind, their work proved beyond question that complete photo coverage of the invasion area and its defenses would be indispensable to successful landings.
With the final collapse of the Axis African forces on 18 May 1943, air power was free to turn its attention across the Mediterranean to what Mr. Churchill had once called the "soft underbelly" of the Axis. The Northwest African Air Forces was, by this time, a battle-hardened aggregation of nearly four thousand aircraft, with 2,630 American airplanes, 1,076 British, and ninety-four French. The first Axis target to feel the weight of its blows was Pantelleria. Between 30 May and 11 June, this heavily-fortified Italian island rocked under more than 6,000 tons of bombs and finally capitulated without a ground assault—the first territorial conquest to be achieved solely through airpower. It was a great victory, and a relatively cheap one: we lost sixty-three aircraft and claimed 236 of the enemy's while gaining fighter fields indispensable for the invasion of Sicily. It was a great victory.
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| Twelfth Air Force's 60th Fighter Squadron, 33rd Fighter Group's Curtiss P-40 Warhawks took off from the USS Chenango, landing at Port Lyautey, French Morocco, November 10, 1942. This marked the beginning of a fighting tactical air force. |
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| U.S. Army Air Forces Curtiss P-40L Warhawk flown by 1st Lt. (later Maj.) Charles B. Hall of Brazil, Indiana, 99th Fighter Squadron, 33rd Fighter Group, in North Africa. On Friday, 2 July 1943, Hall became the first USAAF pilot of African-American descent to shoot down an enemy plane, a German Focke-Wulf Fw 190. |
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| B-26C Marauder, 41-35014, 17BG, 95BS, '62', "Lil Angel's Big Sis' Tarry" North Africa, January 1943. |
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| Five servicemen pose on a USAAF CCKW-353 truck, North Africa. |
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| B-26B, "Bucket of Bolts", 319BG, North Africa, 1943. |
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| Beaufighter, USAAF, North Africa, 1943. |
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| Spitfire, USAAF, 52FG, 5FS, VF-U, crash site, North Africa. |
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| Service members sit in a B-25D Mitchell from the 379th Bombardment Squadron, 310th Bombardment Group, 12th Air Force, stationed at Dar el Koudia Airfield, Tunisia, June 1943. |
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