Previous posts about the 70th anniversary of the North African campaign have seemed fairly straightforward; the American landings in Morocco and Algeria (Operation Torch) faced limited resistance from Vichy French forces, which soon came around to the point that Roosevelt and Churchill could meet in Casablanca.
But however easy Morocco and Algeria had been, Tunisia was to prove a different matter entirely, where the opponent would be not Vichy but th4e Wehrmacht. After the Torch landings the Germans had sent General von Arnim's Vth Panzer Army to Tunisia; as the British Eighth Army under Montgomery advanced westward after the victory at El Alamein and took Tripoli, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel fell back to a fortified line known as the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia. Tunisia had become a fortified bastion of the Afrika Corps.
US Infantry in Kasserine Pass
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