In the spring of 1943, on a dirt road east of Mareth in southern Tunisia, a German armored column was caught in the open by American and British fighter-bombers. The wreckage was still smoking the next day when Allied ground troops came through. Panzer 3 tanks with their turrets split open by cannon fire, Opel trucks burned down to the chassis rails, a kitchen trailer reduced to twisted ribs of steel.
There were no artillery craters beside the vehicles and no enemy tank tracks in the sand. What had destroyed the column had come from above, at low altitude, in a single pass. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who had commanded that army and was at that moment in Germany on sick leave, understood what those photographs meant before he ever saw them.
He had been watching it happen for 6 months, and what he wrote afterward, in the personal manuscript he kept and in the letters he sent home to his wife Lucie, is one of the most unflinching professional autopsies any commander has ever performed on his own defeat. Rommel wrote that anyone forced to fight against an enemy in complete command of the air fought, in his words, like a savage against modern European troops, under the same handicaps and with the same chances of success.
The phrase is his, set down in the private notes his widow Lucie and his former chief of staff Fritz Bayerlein published in 1950 under the title Krieg ohne Hass, War Without Hate. Three years later, the British military theorist Basil Henry Liddell Hart, working with Lucie, their son Manfred, and Bayerlein, translated and expanded those notes into the volume known as The Rommel Papers.
The same manuscript contains the line that every American air power officer would eventually quote back at him. Rommel wrote that the fact of Allied air superiority had thrown to the winds all the tactical rules which he had hitherto applied with such success, and that in every battle to come, the strength of the Anglo-American air force would be the deciding factor.
That is the language of a professional performing an autopsy on a condition of battle that had made his own methods unworkable. Rommel, the man who had broken the British line at Gazala in June 1942 and driven the Eighth Army back to the gates of Egypt in a matter of weeks, had come to understand by the end of that same year that something fundamental had changed about the shape of modern war.
To see how that understanding arrived and why it came too late for him to do anything about it, we have to look at the campaign that put him there, not the popular version of it with the sweeping tank battles in the dunes. The other version, the one that happened overhead. What follows is the record of how the United States Army Air Forces, operating as the junior partner in a combined Anglo-American Air Command that British and Australian veterans of the desert had spent two bitter years perfecting, broke the Africa Corps from
the sky. It is also the record of what Rommel wrote when those aircraft destroyed his Panzers in Africa and of why, for the rest of his life, he could not quite stop writing about it. The paradox at the heart of this story is that Rommel was never an air power skeptic. In the French campaign of 1940, his Seventh Panzer Division had moved so fast in part because Stuka dive bombers under Luftwaffe command were answering his calls in real time.
When he was sent to Libya in February 1941 to salvage the Italian position, he expected the same integration and for roughly 18 months he had it. Luftwaffe Jagdgeschwader flew from forward desert airfields. Messerschmitt 109s escorted the convoys across the Mediterranean. Junkers 87 dive bombers answered the divisional commanders.
At the peak of the Axis position in the summer of 1942, after Rommel had captured Tobruk on June 21 and been promoted to field marshal the following day at age 50, the Luftwaffe in North Africa held local air superiority over whatever stretch of front he happened to be attacking. What happened after that, in the space of about 5 months, is the heart of the problem.
It was not that the Luftwaffe became bad, it was that the opposing air force became something the Axis had never faced before. And the man most responsible for that change was an Australian-born New Zealand-raised officer whose name most viewers will not recognize. Arthur Coningham was born in Brisbane in January 1895.
His family moved to New Zealand when he was a small child, and he went to war in 1914 with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force at Gallipoli. When illness ended his infantry service, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, took the nickname Maori, which was later misheard and rendered permanently as Mary, and spent the next two decades building a reputation as one of the most tactically imaginative officers in the Royal Air Force.
In July 1941, he took command of the Western Desert Air Force, the RAF’s tactical air arm supporting the British Eighth Army in Egypt and Libya, and for the 18 months that followed, in defeat after defeat, he built a doctrine that would outlive him. The doctrine is simple, which is why it took so long to figure out. An air force fighting alongside an army on a modern battlefield has to operate as a single theater-wide weapon, not as a collection of local squadrons handed out to core commanders for their personal protection. It has to do three things in
strict order. It has to win air superiority first, by killing the enemy air force in the air and on the ground. It has to then conduct interdiction against the enemy’s rear area, striking his supply heads, his rail junctions, his armored columns while they are still moving up. And only then, with the first two jobs done, can it provide close support to the ground forces.
The The cannot be reversed. If you start with close support before you have won the sky, you lose your aircraft to enemy fighters and you fail the infantry. If you stop at interdiction without winning the sky, you cannot sustain the campaign. Superiority, interdiction, close support in that exact order. Cunningham did not invent these principles in isolation.
He built them on top of two years of trial and error in the Western Desert working with Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder who had taken over RAF Middle East Command in June 1941. Tedder and Cunningham spent much of the second half of 1941 fighting the British Army command structure as much as the Luftwaffe because the standing assumption in the Eighth Army at that time was that air units should be parceled out to core and divisional commanders for direct support.
Every time that had been tried, the aircraft had been used up in penny packets on missions the ground forces thought they needed and the Axis Air Force had been left free to operate in the rear. Tedder and Cunningham pushed back. By the autumn of 1941, during Operation Crusader, they had established the principle that air assets would remain under a single air commander with the army commander specifying priorities but not individual tasks.
That principle took root slowly. It was still being argued about when the Eighth Army broke at Gazala in May 1942. Cunningham spelled the mature version of the doctrine out in a formal address at Tripoli on February 16, 1943 attended by most of the senior American and British air officers in the theater. The room included Tedder, Spaatz, Doolittle and most of the tactical air commanders who would prosecute the final phase of the African campaign.
The same principles were later codified in the United States War Department Field Manual 100-20 dated July 21, 1943. A document written in the language of American Army regulation, but reading in substance as a near translation of Coningham’s desert lessons. It would govern Allied tactical air operations for the rest of the war and would shape United States Air Force doctrine for decades after.
When the Americans first began arriving in the theater during the autumn of 1942, Coningham’s message to them was plain. He wanted them, in his own phrase, to profit by all their mistakes and by their successes. They listened. On the American side, the officer who carried this forward was Major General Carl Spaatz, a pilot of the First World War generation, cigar chewing, patient, intensely focused.
Spaatz took command of the Northwest African Air Forces, NAAF, when it was activated on February 18, 1943, with headquarters in Algiers. Under him, the strategic component, the Northwest African Strategic Air Force, or NASAF, was commanded by Major General James Doolittle, who fewer than 12 months earlier had led the carrier raid on Tokyo.
The tactical and coastal air forces had their own commanders. Above the whole edifice, as air commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Air Command, was Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder of the RAF, the man who had mentored Coningham and who now gave him operational authority over all Allied tactical aviation. It was for the Axis the worst possible news.
The Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean had never built the equivalent structure. Its fighters still flew close escort for its Stukas. Its Stukas still attacked ground targets. Its transports shuttled fuel and men across the Sicilian Strait. Its commanders in the theater, brilliant as many of them were, reported upward through channels that ultimately reached Hermann Göring in Berlin, who by 1942 had begun treating the air force as an extension of his personal political fortunes.
There was no theater-wide priority doctrine. There was no strict sequence. There was no unified command on the Axis side that could contest what Cunningham and Spaatz were about to unleash. The first clear sign that something had changed came during the second battle of El Alamein between October 23 and November 4, 1942. But the groundwork for that shift had been laid earlier.
In the Battle of Alam Halfa, fought from August 30 to September 5, 1942, Rommel had attempted the last major Axis offensive of the desert war. Montgomery, reading the German intentions through Ultra, had let Rommel’s armor drive into prepared killing ground south of Alam Halfa Ridge. What finished the attack, in Rommel’s own words, was the desert air force.
Fleet Air Arm Albacores dropped flares over the German columns at night. Wellington medium bombers followed the flares in. During the day, fighter bombers ranged over the German transport trains. General Walther Nehring, commander of the Afrika Korps, was wounded in an air raid on the first night of the attack. General Georg von Bismarck, commanding the 21st Panzer Division, was killed the following morning when his vehicle struck a British mine in one of the uncleared belts.
Rommel called off the attack on September 2. Afterward, he would write that British air superiority had been the decisive factor. And he began for the first time to disperse his forces as a defensive measure against air attack. He did not yet know that Montgomery had read his moves in advance through decrypted signals.
He attributed to the air force what had been a combination of the air force and the intelligence. And in assigning the credit that way, he was more right than he knew because both were products of the same underlying Allied advantage. There was also Malta. Rommel had understood from early 1941 that Malta sat directly across his supply line from Italy and that it had to be dealt with.
The island had been under siege by Italian and German air forces for over two years, but it had never stopped functioning as an Allied air and naval base. Rommel pressed for a proper invasion, Operation Hercules, and Hitler approved it in principle in April 1942. Then, after the capture of Tobruk in June, Hitler changed his mind.
Hercules was cancelled. Malta was neutralized as an offensive base through the summer of 1942, but by the autumn the Allies had pushed reinforcements into it and it was operating at full strength again, interdicting convoys bound for Libya. When the Battle of El Alamein opened in late October, the Axis supply crisis in the desert was already, as Rommel privately acknowledged, terminal.
His fuel situation was so bad that he was flying gasoline in from Crete. When the British offensive opened on the evening of October 23, Rommel was not in Africa. He was recuperating at Semmering in Austria after months of exhaustion and illness. He flew back under direct order from Hitler, reaching his headquarters on the evening of October 25 to find a situation he could not immediately repair.
Casualties in his forward positions were severe and most of them were not from British tanks. They were from a combination of massed British artillery and continuous air attack that he had never experienced at this scale. The Desert Air Force, under Coningham, flew over 1,000 sorties on several days of the battle.
When Rommel ordered armored counterattacks, his columns were detected on the move and bombed before they reached their assembly areas. On the night of October 26, at a position the British called Outpost Snype on On edge of Kidney Ridge, the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, part of the 7th Motor Brigade under the 1st Armoured Division, dug in with 19 6-pounder anti-tank guns.
Over the next 24 hours, as Rommel himself led successive armoured counter-attacks to seal off the British penetration, the Rifle Brigade Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Victor Turner held the position through a day of ferocious combat. Turner personally crawled from gun to gun under fire. When he was finally wounded in the head, he refused to be evacuated.
By the time relief arrived, his battalion had knocked out over 50 Axis armoured vehicles, including roughly 32 tanks. Turner was awarded the Victoria Cross for the action. It was one of the outstanding small unit defensive engagements of the entire war, and it had been possible in part because Cunningham’s aircraft had disrupted the German armoured reserves before they could mass.
By October 30, Rommel had been reduced to 148 serviceable German tanks and 187 Italian tanks against roughly 800 British tanks. On November 2, he signaled Hitler that the battle was lost. And in the letters he wrote home to Lucy during those weeks, the word that kept appearing was powerlessness. He described standing on a ridge and watching his own transport columns burn, knowing he had neither the fuel to move them nor the fighters overhead to protect them.
Air superiority, he wrote, had fundamentally changed what was possible for a commander on the ground. He did not yet know the worst was still coming. The Americans were about to arrive in force. The landings went in on November 8, 1942. British and American troops came ashore in Morocco and Algeria under Operation Torch, nearly 1,800 miles behind Rommel’s retreating lines.
Hitler’s reaction was to pour reinforcements into Tunisia by sea and air, trying to hold the last corner of the African continent and prevent the campaign from collapsing entirely. By early February 1943, the Axis had roughly 180,000 troops concentrated in the Tunisian bridgehead, a number that would swell toward a quarter million before the final surrender.
The 5th Panzer Army under General Hans Jürgen von Arnim held the north. Rommel’s battered Panzer Army Afrika, retreating westward from Egypt, held the southern approach. Then came Kasserine, which complicates the story. On February 14, 1943, von Arnim’s 5th Panzer Army launched Operation Frühlingswind against American positions at Sidi Bou Zid in central Tunisia.
The American 1st Armored Division, scattered across a broad front under Major General Orlando Ward, was badly beaten in the first 48 hours. Combat Command A of 1st Armored, positioned around Sidi Bou Zid itself, was overrun by a concentric attack of the 10th and 21st Panzer divisions. A counterattack by Combat Command C on February 15 walked into the same trap and lost most of its Sherman tanks to hull-down German armor.
Four days later, Rommel joined the attack from the south, pushing through the Kasserine Pass with elements of the 10th and 21st Panzer divisions now transferred to his command. On February 20, his columns drove through the pass and fanned out in two directions, one toward Thala and the British brigades holding there, the other toward Hydra and the American supply base at Faid Pass.
The Americans, in their first sustained engagement with the Afrika Korps, took the worst beating the United States Army would suffer on the Western Front for the rest of the war. Roughly 6,500 American casualties. More than 200 tanks destroyed or abandoned. Stocks of fuel, ammunition, and equipment captured at the forward depots.
German after-action reports described the Americans as poorly coordinated and tactically unimaginative. Their commanders as unable to adapt to fluid situations, their combined arms integration as non-existent. Rommel himself, when he read those reports, believed them. It reinforced what he had been telling Berlin for months, that the United States Army in the field was not yet a serious opponent.
When he had pushed as far as he believed the logistics would carry him, he turned the attack off on February 22 and withdrew back through the pass. The American II Corps under Lieutenant General Lloyd Fredendall reoccupied the ground behind him. He was wrong. And the reason he was wrong sits at the center of this whole story. Kasserine was the last engagement in the African theater in which the Axis enjoyed anything close to air parity.
Within 5 weeks of it, the air balance in the Mediterranean would tilt so sharply that the doctrine Cunningham and Spaatz had built would begin destroying the Afrika Korps at a rate the Germans could not match. When that happened, everything Rommel had learned about mobile armored warfare would stop working.
The Allied response to Kasserine on the ground was equally consequential. Eisenhower, who had commanded the theater from Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers, relieved Lloyd Fredendall on March 6th and put Major General George S. Patton in command of the Second Corps. Patton arrived at the Corps Headquarters with orders to restore discipline and he did.
Uniform regulations were enforced at every level. Junior officers who had been lax were sent home. Combat training resumed in the rear areas even as the Corps continued operations. Within 2 weeks, the II Corps was a noticeably different formation. At the air level, similar reforms were already underway.
The Northwest African Tactical Air Force was constituted on February 18 under Cunningham, bringing together American 12th Air Support Command and British Royal Air Force squadrons under a single combined command with headquarters at Constantine in Algeria and later at Hydra. Brigadier General Paul L. Williams, Brigadier General Lawrence S.
Kuter, and other American officers who had watched the early failures of American close air support now operated under Cunningham’s doctrine and learned to apply it. When the American air support came back up in March, it came up under the same three priority sequence that had been breaking the Luftwaffe in the desert since the summer of 1942.
The turn began on March 6, 1943 at a town called Medenine in southern Tunisia. Rommel had proposed a week earlier a spoiling attack against Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army which was advancing westward out of Libya and closing on the old French Mareth Line. His subordinate, the Italian General Giovanni Messe, drew up the plan under the code name Operation Capri.
At 6:00 in the morning under the cover of fog, three panzer divisions of the Afrika Korps, the 10th, the 15th, and the 21st, rolled forward with about 150 serviceable tanks and roughly 10,000 infantry. They were expected. Montgomery, reading German signals through Ultra, had positioned nearly 500 anti-tank guns in concealed enfilade across the open ground and his artillery had pre-registered every approach.
When the fog burned off, the German columns stood exposed in the desert. At 8:30 in the morning, a group of 10 panzer three tanks advancing on Tadjera Kébira was surprised by two British six-pounder anti-tank guns and half the tanks were destroyed in the opening minutes. Between 9:00 and 10:00, British divisional artillery dispersed German infantry concentrations at will.
The Luftwaffe’s attempts to intervene, in the formal language of the after-action report, proved ineffectual against the weight of Allied fighter cover and anti-aircraft defense. By late afternoon, Rommel canceled the attack. His losses were approximately 50 Panzers for the day. British casualties came to 130 men and six tanks.
That night, Montgomery wrote to Field Marshal Alan Brooke in London. The letter is in the British archives and reads in part that Rommel was attempting to attack him in daylight with tanks followed by lorried infantry, that it was an absolute gift, and that the man must be mad. What Rommel wrote in his own papers about Medenine is harder to translate without understanding what had broken in him that morning.
He had committed a third of his armored strength to an attack his own reconnaissance had failed to scout because he could no longer fly that reconnaissance. His Panzers had been destroyed by anti-tank gun positions that had been known to the British for days, positions he could not detect from the air because the air over southern Tunisia now belonged to someone else.
Three days later, on March 9, Rommel flew out of Africa. He would never return. Officially, he was on sick leave. In fact, he had tried and failed to convince Hitler to evacuate the African armies back to Europe before the sky finished them. Hitler refused. Rommel was quietly shelved. The destruction he had seen coming proceeded in his absence.
The climax of that destruction begins at an oasis village in central Tunisia called El Guettar, and it begins with a sergeant digging a firing position in the cold dark of a hillside on the morning of March 23, 1943. The unit was the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Herschel D. Baker and attached to the 1st Infantry Division of Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen.
Their weapon was the M3 half-track with a 75-mm gun mounted on the bed, an improvised and lightly armored tank destroyer that existed because the production version was not yet ready. Baker had 31 of them. Behind him, a few of the brand new M10 tank destroyers of the 899th Battalion had just arrived from the supply depots.
Across the valley, the 10th Panzer Division was preparing a spoiling attack of its own with roughly 50 Panzers, 6,000 men, a company of Marder self-propelled guns, and an assault gun battery. Von Arnim had looked at the after-action reports from Kasserine and concluded that a sharp German blow would push the Americans back from the Eastern Dorsal and buy him time.
At 6:00 in the morning, the Panzers came out of the pass. They overran the forward American infantry positions in the first hour. Allen, a Texan cavalryman of the old school, was told Panzers were closing on his command post and that he should consider moving. His answer, recorded by officers who were there, has become part of the division’s oral history.
He said he would like help pulled out and he would shoot the first man who did. What happened next is a sequence the Germans, in every after-action report they filed on El Guettar, described with puzzlement. The Panzers hit an American minefield and slowed. As they slowed, Baker’s M3s fired from concealed positions behind Keddab Bridge, engaging the Panzers as they rolled down Highway 15, then displacing and firing again from new positions.
Divisional artillery, guided by forward observers in camouflaged posts on the hills, bracketed the German formation with methodical airburst shells. Tanks of the 10th Panzer Division, deployed across open desert, were being killed by an enemy they could not locate. By 9:00 in the morning, 30 Panzers were burning. By midday, the division had withdrawn.
A second attack went in at 4:45 in the afternoon behind fresh infantry and American artillery broke it within 2 hours. The 601st lost roughly two dozen of its vehicles. The 899th lost seven of its new M10s. But the 10th Panzer division, which had broken the American first armored division at Kasserine 5 weeks earlier, had been stopped cold by the same first infantry division that many of those Panzer crews had dismissed as hopeless amateurs.
Much of the published narrative of El Guettar emphasizes the tank destroyers and the artillery. The part that is less often explained is what was missing on the German side. The Stukas that should have suppressed the American observation posts were not there. The reconnaissance that should have identified the American positions had not flown.
The fighter cover that should have protected the 10th Panzer from marauding Allied aircraft was itself being hunted that same week in a different sector. On the same mornings the first infantry division was digging in east of El Guettar, fighter groups based at El Gem and elsewhere in Tunisia were preparing for an operation that would, within 3 weeks, tear the spine out of the German air bridge into Africa.
The operation had a code name, Flax. It began on April 5, 1943. Its instrument was the combined weight of the American 12th Air Force strategic and medium bombardment groups, the American fighter groups that had been trained by the Desert Air Force, and the RAF, and South African squadrons operating alongside them. Its target was not the Africa Corps directly.
Its target was the supply system that kept the Africa Corps alive. By early April, with Allied naval interdiction strangling Axis shipping, the Germans had transferred most of their Tunisia logistics to the air. Daily flights of Junkers 52 transports, giant Messerschmitt 323 cargo aircraft, and Italian Savoia-Marchetti 82s crossed the narrow strait from Sicily to Tunisia.
At peak, over 100 such missions a day. Through Ultra intercepts, the Allies had the German flight schedule. The operation opened at 6:30 on the morning of April 5 with 26 P-38 Lightnings of the First Fighter Group sweeping the Sicilian Strait. North of Cape Bon, they intercepted a mixed formation of more than 50 Ju 52s, 20 Messerschmitt 109s, six Stukas, and four Focke-Wulf 190s.
In the running fight that followed, the Americans lost two P-38s. The Germans lost 11 transports and four fighters. Simultaneously, 18 B-25 Mitchells of the 321st Bomb Group attacked Axis shipping in the Strait sinking two Siebel ferries and a destroyer. B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 97th Bomb Group hit the arrival airfields at Sidi Ahmed and El Aouina in Tunisia.
35 B-25s of the 310th Bomb Group struck the departure airfield at Borizzo in Sicily destroying 13 German and eight Italian aircraft on the ground. The Axis aircraft there had been parked close together because the airfield lacked dispersal hardstandings and the American fragmentation bombs scattered in a creeping pattern across the parking area found the gaps for them. That was the first morning.
Day after day for the next three weeks, fighters hunted the transport lanes at low altitude. Bombers hit the airfields in strict sequence time to catch aircraft on the ground at departure and at arrival. By April 10, another 10 Italian transports had gone down along with two Macchi fighters in a single engagement with P-38s of the First Fighter Group.
The rate of attrition was so severe that on the evening of the 18th, only six out of 65 German transports that had left Tunis that day made it back to Sicily. The rest had been shot down, damaged beyond flight, or forced to crash land along the coast. Göring, in Berlin, eventually ordered the transport flights to Tunisia restricted to night operations only.
Kesselring protested that any supply was better than none. The argument was academic. The transports could no longer fly in daylight and survive. The symbol of what Operation Flax had become, the day the German transport force lost any serious prospect of keeping the African armies supplied, fell on Palm Sunday, April 18, 1943.
The 57th Fighter Group, an American outfit based at El Jem in Tunisia, had reached the Mediterranean theater by the unlikely route of being loaded aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ranger at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, the previous July. Launched off the Gold Coast on July 19th with 72 P-40F Warhawks, the group had flown across equatorial Africa to Palestine, joined Ninth Air Force, and been attached to number 211 Group of Coningham’s Desert Air Force.
The pilots trained alongside the RAF, the South African Air Force, and the Royal Australian Air Force. By April 1943, commanded by Colonel Arthur Salisbury, they were experienced desert fighter pilots flying an aircraft that was technically inferior to the Messerschmitt 109, but that, in the hands of pilots who knew their trade, killed Luftwaffe aircraft at a rate the Germans could not replace.
On the afternoon of April 18, 46 of their P-40s, with approximately a dozen Spitfires of number 92 Squadron RAF providing high cover, were sweeping the coast of Cape Bon when they spotted, flying at wave-top level, a formation of Junkers 52s returning empty to Sicily. The German records list 65 transports that day, escorted by 16 Axis fighters and five Messerschmitt 110s.
The American pilots, watching the gaggle come up from the south against a setting sun, estimated 90 or more. One P-40 pilot later said in the group’s own debrief that the transports looked like the most beautiful formation he had ever seen and that it seemed a shame to break them up because it looked like it could have been a propaganda film.
They broke them up. The 57th split into four squadrons. One stayed high with the Spitfires fixing the Messerschmitt escort. The other three rolled in on the transports out of the sun. What happened in the next 10 minutes is one of the most concentrated scenes of destruction in the entire air war. P-40s cut through the transport Vics at high speed, firing, climbing, rolling, coming back.
The transport gunners and desperate soldiers firing pistols and rifles out of the transport windows could do little against diving fighters. Junkers 52s exploded in the air, broke apart, or crashed burning into the sea and along the Tunisian shoreline. Lieutenant R.J. Byrne described it afterward in the wartime Ninth Air Force booklet in words that have been quoted ever since.
He said he had a ringside seat for the whole show. All you could see, he wrote, were those big ships coming apart in the air, plunging into the sea, and crashing in flames on the beach. Captain James G. Curl of Columbus, Ohio, said the planes were packed so tightly he missed the transport he had targeted and hit the one flying beyond it.
Lieutenant MacArthur Powers of Inwood, New York, who had flown earlier with the Royal Air Force at El Alamein and had two victories from that service, shot down four Junkers transports and a Messerschmitt 109 in the space of that single afternoon. He finished the day with seven aerial victories in total. The after-action claims were extravagant.
The Americans filed for 146 Axis aircraft destroyed. Post-war cross-checking against Luftwaffe records reduced that to 58 or 59 transports, 14 fighters, and two to four Messerschmitt 110s. The actual verified German losses were 24 Junkers 52s shot down with another 35 damaged so badly they crash-landed along the Sicilian coast, and 10 escort fighters destroyed.
The American cost was six P-40s and a single Spitfire. And for the German air transport force, it was a casualty rate that they could not replace. The Afrika Korps on the ground was waiting for fuel that was not arriving. On April 22, 4 days later, a South African Air Force formation caught a flight of giant Messerschmitt 323 cargo aircraft north of Cape Bon, escorted by Italian and German fighters, and shot down 16 of the big six-engine transports in a single engagement.
After that, the daylight transport runs effectively stopped. Göring issued his night-only restriction on April 25. By then, it no longer mattered. The Axis supply system in Tunisia was finished. For every transport destroyed, there were Panzers on the ground inside the Tunisian perimeter running out of fuel.
Artillery batteries were down to a handful of rounds per gun. Infantry were eating reduced rations. When the final Allied ground offensive, Operation Vulcan, began on April 22 and reached its climax on May 6 with 400 artillery pieces firing a 3,000-yd bombardment and massed fighter-bombers ahead of the infantry, the Axis line did not hold because it could not hold.
Tunis fell on May 7. Bizerte fell on May 7. On May 13, the last organized Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. The prisoner count reached approximately 250,000 with additional personnel rounded up in the Cape Bon pocket over the following days. 2,422 Axis aircraft had been destroyed in the Mediterranean between November 1942 and May 1943, roughly 40% of the entire Luftwaffe force structure.
More German and Italian soldiers surrendered in Tunisia than had surrendered at Stalingrad 3 months earlier. Ordinary Germans, making the Stalingrad comparison at home, began calling it Tunisgrad. The word stuck. Why did the Luftwaffe, one of the most tactically sophisticated air forces in the world, lose the Mediterranean so completely within 6 months of the American arrival? The answer is less a question of aircraft than a question of systems.
The Luftwaffe in North Africa had been built around the assumption that it would support its army directly at the front. It had never developed a theater-wide command that could contest air superiority across hundreds of miles at once. Its transport arm, already bled by the airlift into Stalingrad over the winter, could not replace the trained crews it was losing in the Mediterranean.
Its Italian partner, the Regia Aeronautica, fought bravely with aircraft a generation behind. And above it all, a culture had settled in which junior commanders could not be confident their initiative would be rewarded. Göring and Hitler between them had hollowed out the trust the doctrine required. Against that system, the Western Allies had assembled what Cunningham had spent 2 years designing, a single theater air headquarters.
Three priorities in strict sequence, superiority, interdiction, close support, never reversed. If Rommel had foreseen this outcome, he had also been unable to prevent it. A note in his papers from 1942, written during a quiet stretch in the desert, predicts almost exactly what happened. He wrote that in future, battle on the ground would be preceded by battle in the air, and that which of the contestants had to suffer operational and tactical disadvantages would be determined by the outcome of that air fight. He could see it. He was
a field marshal commanding an army group. He had no authority over the Luftwaffe and no direct line to its decisions. By the summer of 1943, he was writing that the fact of Anglo-American air superiority had thrown to the winds all the tactical rules that had made his reputation and that every battle to come would be decided by that one factor.
He was in the end correct about himself. On July 17, 1944, roughly 6 weeks after the Allied landings in Normandy and at the height of the Battle of Caen, Rommel had been touring the front as commander of Army Group B. That morning he had visited first SS Panzer Corps headquarters to confer with its commander, Sepp Dietrich, about the growing crisis on the British sector.
He left for his own headquarters at La Roche-Guyon in the afternoon. His staff car, a Horch driven by Corporal Daniel, was on the road near the village of Saint-Foy-de-Montgommery when Allied fighters spotted it. The Spitfire that caught the car, most likely flown by Flight Lieutenant Charlie Fox of No.
412 Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force, though a rival claim has been advanced for Squadron Leader Johannes Le Roux of No. 602 Squadron of the South African Flyers serving with the RAF, dropped out of the overcast and strafed the car with cannon fire. The Horch went off the road and overturned. Daniel was killed. Rommel was thrown clear and suffered a fractured skull along with other serious injuries.
He was evacuated to a military hospital, survived, and after weeks of recuperation was sent home to his village of Herrlingen, a few kilometers west of Ulm, to continue his recovery. He was still at home on October 14, 1944, when two generals sent by Hitler, General Wilhelm Burgdorf and General Ernst Maisel arrived from Berlin with the choice Hitler had prepared for him.
The investigation into the July 20 bomb plot had turned up his name. One of the plotters, under torture, had identified Rommel as a potential figurehead for the post-Hitler government the conspirators had planned. Burgdorf gave him the terms. Public trial before the People’s Court, which would cost his family their home, his wife her freedom, and his son Manfred his future, or cyanide in exchange for a state funeral and the guarantee that his family would be left alone.
Rommel said goodbye to his wife and son. He put on his overcoat. He walked out with the generals to their waiting Opel and drove with them a short distance onto a side road outside Hurlingham. There he took the poison Burgdorf provided. He was 52 years old. The official cause of death was announced as a cerebral embolism resulting from his earlier wounds.
The state funeral, held in Ulm, was what Hitler had promised. The truth was not published in Germany until after the war. In one of the last letters he wrote to Lucy before his wounding, composed shortly after D-Day in June 1944, he repeated in the plainest language available to him what he had first written about the African campaign 2 years earlier.
The enemy’s air superiority, he told her, had a very grave effect on their movements. There was, he wrote, simply no answer to it. The men who had built that answer deserved to be named. Arthur Coningham, the Australian-born New Zealand-raised air marshal who ran the Desert Air Force and codified the doctrine.
Arthur Tedder, the RAF officer who held the whole Mediterranean Air Command together at the top. Carl Spaatz, the American general who commanded the Northwest African Air Forces from Algiers. James Doolittle, who ran the strategic component and whose bombers worked the Sicilian airfields around the clock. Colonel Arthur Salisbury, who led the 57th Fighter Group through the Palm Sunday interception, Captain Roy Whittaker, Captain James Curl, Lieutenant R.J.
Byrne, and Lieutenant McArthur Powers, four of the American pilots who made ace that afternoon over Cape Bon. Lieutenant Colonel Herschel Baker, whose 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion absorbed 2/3 of its own strength in order to break the 10th Panzer Division at El Guettar. Major General Terry Allen, who said he would not leave and did not.
Lieutenant Colonel William Darby, whose Rangers had taken El Guettar in the first place on March 18, 1943. And thousands of ground crew, mechanics, navigators, armorers, radio operators, and maintenance sergeants, whose names did not make the official histories, but who kept the aircraft flying through desert heat that killed engines and winter mud that swallowed runways.
If your father or your grandfather served in North Africa with any Allied unit, in any branch, I would be honored to read their names in the comments below this video. The units, the base names, the stories. Those details are the real record of what happened there. They deserve to be kept alive by the people who carry them.
What Rommel said when American planes destroyed his Panzers in Africa was that the strength of the Anglo-American Air Force would be the deciding factor in every battle to come. He was correct in a way that has outlasted the war he was writing about. Modern armies have not fought a sustained campaign without air superiority in 80 years.
The doctrine that made that possible was written in the desert, in defeats that nobody celebrates and victories that nobody fully remembers, by men who understood before anyone else in their profession that the shape of the next war was going to be decided in the first thousand feet above the ground.
If this investigation gave you a way of looking at the North African campaign that you did not have before. Tap the like button to help it reach other viewers who care about getting the facts right. Subscribe if you want the next chapter. The next one is already being prepared and it too rests on the record of ordinary men who were handed an unprecedented task and worked out the answer by doing the work.
Rest well, all of you. The desert kept your silence. We are still writing your names down.
