Preface

In August 1942, the Mediterranean Sea was effectively the Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”) that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had set out to create, with Italy the dominant power in the Mediterranean.

Other than the British Eighth Army in Egypt, a small force of British ships and aircraft at besieged Malta, and another small British force at Gibraltar, the southern coast of the Mediterranean was entirely in the hands of either Italian and German forces, or held by the dependent pro-Axis Vichy French. The advance of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had been held at El Alamein, less than 60 miles from Cairo, close enough for the city’s residents to hear the sound of artillery.

No one at that moment in mid-August 1942 could have believed that only 11 months later, the entire southern coast and the island of Sicily would be under Allied control; that more than 200,000 highly trained and experienced – and thus irreplaceable – Afrika Korps veterans would be headed to prisoner-of-war camps in the United States; that the armed forces of Vichy France had changed sides to become part of the Allied coalition; that the Italian government was fully engaged in attempting to rid itself of fascism and surrender to the victorious Allies.

Yet that is what had happened over the course of those 11 months.

Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States on December  11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in the belief that the incredible industrial potential of the United States – recognized by all parties as the strongest industrial power on the planet – would not be able to produce an armed force capable of undertaking offensive operations in Europe before the summer of 1943. He expected that – in that interim – the Axis could defeat the Soviet Union and impose so many continued defeats on the British Empire in Europe and the Far East, that the Churchill government would fall with a dictated peace imposed, all before he would face American forces.

Instead, the first American reinforcements of British forces in Egypt were already in place in August 1942, albeit only in the form of a small force of heavy bombers and a single fighter group, but more were already on the way. Ninety days after Rommel’s advance came to a stop at El  Alamein, the Eighth Army mounted a counteroffensive sustained by supplies from the United States, while at the other end of the Mediterranean, an American army landed in Morocco, leading to the quick surrender of the Vichy French forces there.

The nine months between the arrival of the US Army and Air Force in North Africa and the end of fighting in Sicily saw some of the most desperate fighting of the war. Rommel’s bloodying of the US Army’s nose at Kasserine Pass resulted in the longest retreat in the history of that Army. In the air, American pilots flying the P-38 – the most advanced US fighter in North Africa – were so inexperienced regarding use of tactics appropriate for fighting Bf-109s and Fw-190s in a twinengine fighter that their losses became unsustainable by January 1943; the 78th Fighter Group in England was stripped of P-38s and pilots to make up North African losses.

Yet only six weeks after the Kasserine debacle, by late March 1943, both American ground and air units had changed tactics, and leaders with demonstrated ability were in command. In April  1943, they defeated the Afrika Korps and the Luftwaffe, leading to the first major Axis surrender in May. A month later they began the Sicilian campaign, which saw that strategic island liberated by the end of July. Mare Nostrum was now an Allied lake.

As one senior American commander wrote of the North African campaign, “We had to learn to walk before we could run.” By the end, the 57th  Fighter Group – the first US unit to arrive in Egypt after being launched from the carrier Ranger and flying across the African continent to get there – was so good that RAF Western Desert Air Force commander Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, who ranked his fighter pilots as “A” or “B” in skill according to their combat records, listed all the unit’s pilots as “A;” they were 40 percent of the DAF’s “A” fighter pilots though the unit was only 14 percent of the total.

Sadly, the North African campaign, in which American soldiers and airmen learned the lessons needed to defeat the Wehrmacht in Europe, has been largely forgotten even by those who take an interest in World War II.

It’s my hope that Turning The Tide will help change that. The record set by these pilots and crews who fought in one of the most difficult combat environments on the planet is one worthy of recall and acclaim.