The End of the Desert War
On 7 April 1943, the Americans and British of Eisenhower’s Allied Expeditionary Force, advancing from the west met Montgomery’s Eighth Army advancing east, forcing the Germans and Italians into a pocket ringed by mountains around Tunis. A month of hard fighting pushing the passes commenced. However, with both the American capture of Bizerte and the British capture of Tunis on 6 May, the Axis forces in North Africa were doomed. Allied air and sea superiority, mainly operating from Malta, cut off all paths of escape for the Rommel’s Panzer Armee Afrika. (Though Rommel was recalled before that could happen and he turned over command to GenLt Hans-Jürgen von Arnim.) On 13 May 1943, 270,000 of the best and most experienced, not to mention irreplaceable, German and Italians troops surrendered to Allied forces in Tunisia. This was the largest surrender of German troops so far in the war (Only 90,000 surrendered to the Soviets at Stalingrad, although the German casualties there were much higher).
The Allies were not prepared for the large amount of prisoners. General Eisenhower would remark, “Why didn’t some staff college ever tell us what to do with a quarter million prisoners so located at the end of a rickety railroad that it’s impossible to move them and where guarding and feeding them are so difficult?” In spite of the difficulties, they were cared for and transported, and most would end up in prison camps in the continental US.
In the two and half months since the American rout at Kasserine Pass, the U.S. Army came of age in the mountains and passes of Tunisia. The hard lessons of basic discipline, warfighting, and soldiering dearly paid for by their fathers and grandfathers in the Philippines, Mexico, and on the Western Front in the Great War were relearned at the cost of much blood, treasure, and time in North Africa. The US Army that made the Run for Tunis was a very different animal than the peacetime army that landed in Morocco and Algiers six months before during Operation Torch. Moreover, the Tunisian campaign solidified the military senior leadership that, for the next two long years, would lead the Allied armies on the difficult road to Germany. They would become household names by the end of the war: Eisenhower, Alexander, Montgomery, DeGaulle, Patton, Bradley, Horrocks, Harmon and Juin, among many others.
The War for North Africa was over and the War for Sicily and Italy began.
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