Overview

World War II had many superlatives, but none like Operation Torch-a series of simultaneous amphibious landings, audacious commando and paratroop assaults, and the Atlantic's biggest naval battle, fought across a two thousand mile span of coastline in French North Africa. The risk was enormous, the scale breathtaking, the preparations rushed, the training inadequate, and the ramifications profound. Torch was the first combined Allied offensive and key to how the Second World War unfolded politically and militarily. Nonetheless, historians have treated the subject lightly, perhaps because of its many ambiguities. As a surprise invasion of a neutral nation, it recalled German attacks against countries like Belgium, Norway, and Yugoslavia. The operation's rationale was to aid Russia but did not do this. It was supposed to get Americans troops into the fight against Germany but did so only because it failed to achieve its short-term military goals. There is still debate whether Torch advanced the fight against the Axis, or was a wasteful dispersion of Allied strength and actually prolonged the war. Torch: North Africa and the Allied Path to Victory is a fresh look at this complex and controversial operation. The book covers the fierce Anglo-American dispute about the operation and charts how it fits into the evolution of amphibious warfare. It recounts the story of the fighting, focusing on the five landings-Port Lyautey, Fedala, and Safi in Morocco, and Oran and Algiers in Algeria-and includes air and ground actions from the initial assault to the repulse of Allied forces on the outskirts of Tunis. Torch also considers the operation's context within the larger war and it incorporates the French perspective better than any English-language work on the subject. It shows how Torch brought France, as a power, back into the Allied camp; how it forced the English and the Americans to work together as true coalitions partners and forge a coherent amphibious doctrine. These skills were then applied to subsequent operations in the Mediterranean, in the English Channel, and in the Pacific. The story of how this was accomplished is the story of how the Allies brought their power to bear on the enemy's continental base and won World War II.

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9781612518237

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O'Hara's gripping operational narrative is the great strength of his book This book's corrective to the widespread assumptions of easy success makes an important contribution to the historiography of the war in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Michigan War Studies Review

Author of several very readable accounts of maritime warfare in World War II, O'Hara makes a sound contribution to the literature on the war in North Africa. --Robert Farley, Lawyers, Guns & Money

The first U.S. offensive in the European theater in World War II was Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. The action involved U.S. naval air, surface and amphibious action against the navy and air force of Vichy France, which governed Morocco and Algeria. The author credits the operation with forging U.S.-U.K. amphibious cooperation, bringing France back on the side of the Allies and, ultimately, being crucial in routing the German Afrika Corps. Seapower

Author Information

Vincent P. O'Hara is an independent scholar and the author of nine works including five published by the Naval Institute Press, most recently To Crown the Waves. His articles have appeared in the Naval War College Review, Warship, MHQ, Storia Militare, and other periodicals and journals. O'Hara was named ""Naval Institute Press Author of the Year for 2015."" He holds a history degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

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