Conner VanDevelde's List: Operation Torch

• Vichy French forces resisted, sometimes ferociously, and all sides suffered some 5,000 casualties. But after three days, a cease-fire was reached with French military commanders in North Africa.
• TORCH revealed profound shortcomings in leadership, tactics, equipment, martial élan, and common sense. Most soldiers remained wedged in the twilight between the habits of peace and the ruthlessness of war. In a note to his chief of staff, Eisenhower sensed how long the road would be: "We are just started on a great venture."
• The shortcomings of the Allied host quickly became evident as they swung east toward Tunisia in hopes of occupying Tunis and the key port of Bizerte before the Axis could. But German commanders, lashed by Adolf Hitler, reacted with speed and audacity, ferrying tens of thousands of troops into Tunisia from Sicily, Italy, and southern France. By early winter, the Allied drive had stalled almost within artillery range of Tunis; foul winter weather consigned the Anglo-American army to static trench warfare reminiscent of the Western Front in World War I.
• nhower moved his headquarters from Gibraltar to Algiers
• "I have observed very frequently that it is not the man who is so brilliant [who] delivers in time of stress and strain," Eisenhower wrote John on March 12, "but rather the man who can keep on going indefinitely, doing a good straightforward job."
• Axis deficiencies in manpower and materiel worsened as demands on the Russian front stretched the Wehrmacht thin
• Allied forces poured into Tunisia so that by mid-April 20 divisions, supported by overwhelming air and naval superiority, had more than 200,000 Axis troops penned like sheep in a fold measuring 50 by 80 miles

  • Showing how the Axis had nothing going their way and the Allies kept rolling
    
• The last remnants of the Axis horde surrendered on May 13

  • Good way to end information paragraph

6 more annotations...

• From a distance of 60 years, we can see that the North African campaign became a pivot point in American history, the place where the United States began to
• act like a great power--militarily, diplomatically, strategically, tactically--during the seven months needed to win
• No large operation in World War II surpassed the invasion of North Africa in complexity, daring, risk, or--as the official U.S. military history concludes--"the degree of strategic surprise achieved."
• The conquest of Morocco and Algeria proved deceptively simple. More than 100,000 American and British soldiers, dispatched in two enormous convoys from Britain and the eastern United States, splashed ashore on nine landing beaches around the northwest rim of Africa

2 more annotations...

• Eisenhower commanded  the invasion of North Africa in November 1942. He drew brief but intense  criticism when, on the ground of military necessity, he extended recognition  to French leaders who had collaborated with the Germans. The North African  campaign concluded victoriously in May 1943
• It was followed by the conquest  of Sicily in July and August 1943 and by the invasion of Italy proper  in September —a difficult project that Eisenhower had not favored

• Code name for Allied North African campaign for landing on Atlantic  and Mediterranean coasts in 1942, the first American appearance  in the European theater of war