Cleaver, Thomas McKelvey Turning the Tide

The USAAF in North Africa

In 1942, the Western Allies were forced to go on the offensive against the Axis powers to relieve pressure on the Soviet Union. Because planning a cross-Channel invasion was fraught with logistical and operational difficulties, US President Roosevelt instructed his military leadership in May 1942 to prepare to support the British in the Mediterranean. This led to the first USAAF units arriving in the Middle East in July, initially as reinforcements for the British and later as part of Operation Torch, which landed in French Morocco and Algeria in November. In just over ten months from the summer of 1942, the USAAF in North Africa went from being a nonentity to a leading partner, providing aircraft and crews that the other Allies could not match. The Axis forces, which had controlled almost the entire southern coast of the Mediterranean, were expelled from the African continentthanks in no small part to the efforts of the USAAF. Using firsthand accounts from pilots and other aircrew, Tom Cleaver describes how the USAAF units that landed in Morocco were forced to learn their own lessons in combat with veteran air units, and how the experience gained in the skies over North Africa and Sicily was invaluable in the development of the Allied air forces that would dominate the skies over Europe in the final years of the war.