TUNISGRAD EB

Saul David

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780008653828
• eBook ISBN: 9780008653835
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

A Waterstones and BBC History Magazine Best Book of the Year

'Terrific – full of drama … it has profoundly altered my understanding of the Second World War' PATRICK BISHOP

FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SKY WARRIORS AND SBS COMES AN EPIC HISTORY OF THE ALLIED VICTORY IN NORTH AFRICA DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR.

On 8 November 1942, British and American troops invaded French North Africa as part of Operation Torch, the largest amphibious operation of the war to date. The Germans responded by flooding troops into Tunisia and the stage was set for one of the most decisive clashes of the war.

For months the outcome hung in the balance. The Allies failed to capture Tunis before Christmas, and early in the New Year the legendary German commander Erwin Rommel ( the ' Desert Fox ') inflicted a series of crushing defeats on inexperienced American troops in the mountain passes of central Tunisia. But once the two Allied armies – the First and the Eighth – had joined hands in southern Tunisia in early April, the defeat of Axis forces was inevitable. The end came on 13 May when the remnants of the First Italian Army surrendered to British troops in northern Tunisia, leaving the Allies ' masters of the North African shores '.

It was, with Guadalcanal in the Pacific and Stalingrad in Russia, one of three Axis defeats in early 1943 that changed the course of the war. Historians have recognized the significance of the others, but not Tunisia which they have either ignored or characterized ( as the Americans did at the time ) as a sideshow. Yet it ended Axis sea power in the Mediterranean, destroyed more than 2,400 Axis aircraft ( 40 per cent of the Luftwaffe ' s strength ), and resulted in the surrender of over 250,000 German and Italian troops, more than were captured at Stalingrad. Such was the scale of their defeat that the German public wryly dubbed it ' Tunisgrad '.

It was the first campaign fought by the Anglo-American alliance, and would determine how and where the Allies would fight for the rest of the war. It was where America first brought to bear the full weight of its industrial strength, and where the Allies learned, after early setbacks, how to defeat the Germans with a combination of air, land and sea power. It featured many of the great commanders of the Second World War, including ' Ike ' Eisenhower, George S. Patton Jr, Omar N. Bradley, Harold Alexander, Bernard Montgomery and Erwin Rommel. But the campaign ' s chief significance is that it extinguished any lingering hopes in Italy that the war could be won and led, inexorably, to the dissolution of the Axis in Europe. By destroying the Axis it marked, for Hitler, the beginning of the end.

Tunisgrad is the first comprehensive 360-degree history, told from the perspective of all the combatants, and ranging in focus from politicians and senior commanders to ordinary servicemen fighting in and over the mountains of Tunisia, and across the Mediterranean. Using a variety of first-hand sources, it restores the campaign to its rightful place as a defining moment of the war

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Maps
• Prologue
• 1 ‘The most dismal setting’
• 2 ‘We had won after all!’
• 3 Ike
• 4 ‘Welcome to North Africa’
• 5 ‘Suicidal and absolutely unsound’
• 6 ‘I’ve captured my objective!’
• 7 Little Napoleon
• 8 ‘Old Blood and Guts’
• 9 ‘France and her honour are at stake’
• 10 ‘Money for old rope’
• 11 ‘They had better hurry up’
• 12 The Race for Tunis
• 13 ‘A Herculean task’
• 14 ‘Cut to pieces’
• 15 ‘A nasty setback’
• 16 ‘My word still counts for something’
• 17 ‘It was all so utterly pointless’
• 18 ‘Sit still in the middle, goddammit, or we’ll all drown!’
• 19 Longstop Hill
• 20 ‘It is killing that animates them’
• 21 Desert Raiders
• 22 The Casablanca Conference
• 23 Victory or Destruction
• 24 ‘Save yourselves! Save yourselves!’
• 25 Monty
• 26 ‘Let’s give Rommel this one last chance of glory’
• 27 ‘I’ve got a hunch this is the dance’
• 28 Sidi Bou Zid
• 29 ‘We are going to kick hell out of him today’
• 30 Kasserine Pass
• 31 ‘The enemy has broken through’
• 32 Alex
• 33 Operation Oschenkopf
• 34 Medenine
• 35 ‘We beat the living hell out of them’
• 36 Monty’s Left Hook
• 37 ‘The Führer is not ready to think of retreat’
• 38 Wadi Akarit
• 39 Mission Impossible
• 40 ‘They were bunched like a herd of cattle’
• 41 Operation Strike
• 42 ‘We are masters of the North African shores’
• 43 ‘We have struck a blow equal to Stalingrad’
• Epilogue
• Picture Section
• Footnotes
• References
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher