Operation Torch - the Allied Invasion of North Africa

In their boldest move yet, the Allies planned out the invasion of North Africa through Operation Torch. With the Americans onboard, the British now had some substantial meat added to their war-weary legs. The combined invasion force - numbering some 102 vessels - would be comprised of the US Western Task Force, the US Central Task Force and the combined US/British Eastern Task Force. Each task force would yield between 23,000 and 39,000 troops.

Though many US generals wanted an all-out invasion of Europe, American President Franklin Roosevelt trusted his counterpart, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in establishing a second front across Northern Africa. The move, if successful, would contain German expansion to Europe, block off vital shipping lanes in the Mediterranean and provide the Allies with a jumping off point into Italy.

On November 8th, 1942, the Operation Torch landings took place supported by air power. Despite the thinking on the Allies part that the French would greet them as liberators, pockets of Vichy French soldiers battled it out as hard-core enemies. In other places, fighting was not in the cards and areas fell without so much as a shot being fired. The invasions marked the formal beginning of American General George S. Patton into the war.

As news of the invasion spread, German General Irwin Rommel - fresh off his defeat at El Alamein - diverted his Panzer forces to the West. In Germany, Hitler was so enraged by the success of the Allied invasion over his Vichy French allies that he ordered his forces to take the south of France into his reach (to this point, Southern France was under the control of Vichy French forces loyal to Hitler's Germany). At the news of this, most all Vichy French forces in North Africa officially surrendered to Allied forces.

For a bulk of the invasion progress was relatively steady and strategic routes, cities and airfields all fell under Allied control within time. It wasn't until the arrival of a more stout German defense that the Allied push became bogged down by November 30th.

The German defense would remain in place into 1943 but the damage was done.