Iraq and its eastern neighbour, Persia, were the
major suppliers of oil in the region.
Britain’s Middle Eastern dominance was seri-
ously threatened in 1941 by Germany. Germany’s
victory over France stimulated Arab nationalism.
The Vichy French authorities in the Lebanon and
Syria, moreover, were not pro-British in their sym-
pathies; while in Iraq, a group that favoured
Germany staged a military coup and drove out the
regime in power, which had been friendly to
Britain. Turkey, fearful of German power, decided
on neutrality and so did not, as expected, join
Britain. If Hitler had followed his Balkan cam-
paigns in the spring of 1941 by advancing into the
Middle East, there would have been no sufficiently
strong British forces to oppose the Germans.
Instead, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June
- Germany might nevertheless have reached
Persia and the Persian Gulf by way of southern
Russia. But Russia’s defence of the Caucasus
blocked that path. Britain, meanwhile, despite its
militarily weak position, decided on offensive
action. Together with Free French troops, a rela-
tively small British force invaded Syria and the
Lebanon and overcame Vichy French resistance.
Britain intervened in Iraq and restored the pro-
British regime. Persia was also invaded in conjunc-
tion with the Russians. In Persia and the Arab
world, including Egypt, Britain had secured its
strategic interests by force against local political
nationalist groups. From Britain’s point of view,
Arab national feelings could not be permitted to
jeopardise the war effort.
In North Africa on the western frontiers of
Egypt, British and Dominion troops fought the
Axis. The fortunes of this desert war varied dra-
matically until October 1942 when the battle of
Alamein finally broke the offensive power of
General Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps.
General Bernard Montgomery had built up an
army of 195,000 men with a thousand tanks,
almost double the size of the German–Italian
army. At Alamein he outgunned and outwitted
Rommel, who had to withdraw hastily.
Britain’s Alamein victory ended the disastrous
sequence of British defeats. A trap was sprung.
Rommel’s line of retreat was being simultaneously
cut off by Anglo-American landings in his rear.
There had been much inter-Allied dispute on
where an Anglo-American force could best strike
against Hitler’s Europe in 1942. Roosevelt and
the American generals favoured an assault on
France. Their reasoning was political as well as
military. Stalin was pressing for a ‘second front’ to
relieve pressure in the east by forcing the Germans
to transfer forty divisions to the west. But the
Americans were quite unrealistic about the time
needed for so difficult an undertaking. An unsuc-
cessful commando raid on Dieppe in August 1942
showed how hard it would be to establish a
bridgehead. Shortage of landing craft meant that
no more than ten Allied divisions could have been
sent across the Channel in 1942. Churchill and
the British chiefs of staff were in any case opposed
to a premature invasion of France. Agreement was
eventually reached that an Anglo-American force
should land in Vichy French North Africa in
November 1942. General Dwight Eisenhower
commanded this whole operation, codenamed
Torch. At first the Vichy French forces resisted the
landings but then agreed to an armistice. The
Allies were thus able to occupy French Morocco
and Algeria virtually unopposed.
Hitler responded to the Allied invasion of
North Africa by sending his troops into the hith-
erto unoccupied regions of Vichy France. Britain
had always feared that this would happen and that
the French fleet would then fall into German
hands. In fact the French fleet in Toulon eluded
a German takeover by scuttling itself. Hitler also
sent in troops from Sicily to occupy French
Tunisia in North Africa. Rommel, meanwhile,
fought and retreated westwards from Libya. The
real fighting between the Allies and the Italian
and German forces then occurred in Tunisia and
lasted until May 1943, when a total of 150,000
troops (both Italian and German) finally capitu-
lated. It was a major victory for the Anglo-
American forces. Even so, the scale of the fighting
in North Africa cannot be compared with that of
the Russian front. Here, the main war on land was
being waged.
On 22 June 1941 the greatest military force ever
assembled invaded the Soviet Union with almost
3.6 million German and Axis soldiers, 3,600 tanks
1
THE VICTORY OF THE ALLIES, 1941–5 279
