World War II
After the fall of France in June 1940, Tunisia's border with Libya and the large naval base at Bizerte were demilitarized. Tunisian ports and airfields were used, however, to give logistical support to Axis forces in Libya. The French colons were generally sympathetic to the Vichy regime, and Mussolini's Fascists had for years been building areas of support in the Italian community. Shortly after the French surrender, a pro-Vichy naval officer was appointed resident general in Tunis and given broad responsibilities for defense.
Allied landings in Algeria and Morocco in November 1942, code-named Operation Torch, had as an objective the speedy occupation of Tunisia, with the cooperation of French authorities and armed forces there. Admiral Jean Darlan, the French high commissioner in North Africa, who had initially offered resistance to the landings, ordered a cease-fire when word reached him that the Germans had moved into Vichy-controlled France, and he surrendered Algiers to Allied commander Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In Tunis the resident general hesitated to act on Darlan's orders and awaited confirmation from Vichy. His delay allowed quick-moving German forces to relieve the French garrisons and occupy key positions in Tunisia ahead of the Allies.
American airborne units took Gafsa in mid-November, but Allied attempts to mount a concentrated drive on Tunis before German reinforcements could be introduced failed. Allied air and naval power cut off supplies to the Axis forces by sea, but between December 1942 and March 1943 more than 40,000 German and Italian troops were ferried by air from Sicily to Tunisia. Supported at one point during the campaign by an estimated one-quarter of the total German tactical air force, 'they held nine American, British, and Free French divisions along a line that stretched from the north coast down the spine of the Eastern Dorsale to the desert, while 14 divisions of General (later Field Marshal) Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps retreated westward across Libya and into Tunisia before the advancing British Eighth Army.
In January Rommel hurled an armored attack at the untried United States II Corps and broke through at the strategic Kasserme Pass, throwing Allied forces to his rear off balance while the Afrika Korps prepared to defend the Mareth Line in the south. The Mareth Line was a 35-kilometer-long defense system constructed by the French before the war against the threat of an Italian invasion. When frontal assaults against the Axis positions were turned back, Eighth Army commander Bernard Montgomery sent the New Zealand Division on a wide end run around the German defenses, attacking through the narrow defile at Djebel Tebaga and compelling General Jurgen von Armin, who had succeeded the ailing Rommel in command of the Afrika Korps, to abandon the Mareth Line in March.
Early in April, units of II Corps advancing from the west linked up with the Eighth Army at the Wadi al Akarit. Von Armin's skillful withdrawal, however, saved the bulk of his army to take up the defense of Tunis along a new line at Enfidaville. The Enfidaville front held firm, but at the end of April the Allies opened an offensive from the west. On May 7 the British took Tunis and II Corps entered Bizerte, trapping tens of thousands of Axis troops between their pincers. Meanwhile, a British sweep through Cape Bon cut off the remaining Germans and Italians facing the Eighth Army at Enfidaville. Axis resistance in Tunisia ceased on May 13, and the North African phase of the war was brought to a close. Fewer than 700 of the 250,000 German and Italian troops engaged in the battle of Tunisia escaped death or capture. Control of air bases in Tunisia and the naval facility at Bizerte was crucial to the success of the subsequent Allied invasion of Sicily and the mainland of Italy.
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