Politically, it was a strange war, the Allied invasion and conquest of French-ruled North Africa – Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia – in November 1942-May 1943, the campaign that cleared Africa of Axis – Vichy French, German and Italian - forces during the Second World War. Many misremember it as an American campaign when in fact, it was a joint American-British effort, joined in its later stages by turncoat French forces. 38,000 of the 70,000-plus Allied casualties in the campaign were British and less than 20,000 were American; anti-Vichy French dead, missing-in action and wounded made up the remainder.
It was strange because in its initial stage, Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of Morocco and Algeria in early November 1942, French troops – agents of the Nazi-aligned Vichy government that ruled the unoccupied southern half of France under Marshal Petain – battled the invaders. Only days or in some cases weeks later, the French soldiers in North Africa switched sides and joined the Allied cause, assisting in the conquest of Tunisia in late November 1942-May 1943.
Strange, too, because the campaign was fought in lands overwhelmingly populated by Muslims, most of them Arabs, a minority Berbers (Amazigh). The Muslims were largely, but not all, innocent by-standers in the battles fought between Americans, Britons (who included Indian, Australian and New Zealand troops), Frenchmen (who included West African contingents), Germans and Italians. Algeria in 1942 had 8.4 million inhabitants, some 90% Muslims and 10% European, mostly French, settlers (known as colons or pied-noir); Morocco had close to 9 million inhabitants, more than 90% Muslim; and Tunisia had close to 3 million inhabitants, also close to 90 per cent Muslim. Jews represented 2.5-3% of the population in Morocco, 1.5-2% in Algeria and 3% in Tunisia.
Historian Rick Atkinson, in his monumental An Army at Dawn, the War in North Africa, 1942-1943, devotes only the odd sentence and a paragraph or two to “the Arabs” (and even less to the Jews), never really explaining their part in what happened or, en large, in what rolled over them. But his throw-away lines, based almost completely on contemporary military records, state and private papers, and diaries, letters and memoirs of troops, give us a good idea of Arab attitudes and behavior during the Allied-Axis battle for North Africa. (Atkinson uses few sources from the Axis side of the war and nothing in Arabic from 1942-1943). These brief passages offer us glimpses, usually by Anglo-American officers and soldiers, of reality (which campus “progressives” are likely to dismiss in knee-jerk fashion as ‘orientalism’ though others may designate them as accurate and enlightening. Of this, more later).
The first time we encounter Arabs, on page 76, is when Atkinson describes the dismal Allied seaborne failure to storm the crucial harbor of Oran (Algeria) and the Vichy French troops herding the captured Americans, some of them wounded and\or barefoot, through the town’s streets “clad only in their underwear” under “a gray drizzle” to military prison. “Weeping [i.e., anti-Vichy] Frenchmen [colons] lined the sidewalks; [but] jeering Arabs spat and threw stones [at the Allied PoWs].” The Arabs may not have liked their French colonial rulers but in November 1942 they did not like the Allies either (or at least sought to show their French colonial masters that they shared their animosity toward the Allies).
Probably more common was a wary indifference to the changing of the guard. At Safi port, some miles south of Casablanca, “white-robed Arabs crowded balconies above the harbor to watch [the arrival of the Allied troops] … A soldier would snake his way painfully through rocks and rubble to set up a light machine gun … and find a dozen natives clustered solemnly around him. Street intersections were crowded with head-turning natives, like a tennis gallery, following the whining flight of bullets over their heads.”
Confusion reigned. When troops of the US Army’s 1st Division marched into Oran they were met by “children in dirty kaftans“ shouting “Hi yo, Silver” and “stiff-arm Fascist salutes to liberators they presumed to be German.” (The ‘Hi yo (or hi-ho) Silver’ may refer to a shout featured in the “Lone Ranger” radio show). But in cafes in downtown Oran “men wearing fezzes looked up from tea glasses long enough to applaud the passing troops, African-style: arms extended, clapping hands hinged at the wrists, no pretense of sincerity,” according to Atkinson. Roadside peddlers hawked eggs, tangerines and gasoline stoves to passing American and British troops while men and officers periodically crowded the exotic local brothels. Atkinson writes: “A war correspondent [David Rame, Road to Tunis, 1944] seeking adjectives to describe the locals settled on ‘scrofulous, unpicturesque, ophthalmic, lamentable’.”
The initial disaffection of the Allied troops with the Muslim inhabitants was triggered by their continuous looting and thievery. At the landing in Fedala, near Casablanca (Morocco), on 8 November General George Patton’s seaborne troops, weighted down with weapons, grenades, K-rations, ammo, etc., hit reefs, sank to the bottom or hit land “in indescribable confusion” as searchlights swept the beaches “while Arabs on spavined donkeys trotted along the water’s edge, scavenging life jackets and canteens.”
The Allied conquerors found that “pilfering by the impoverished locals was epidemic. Troops smeared fuel cans with bacon rind in hopes that the Koranic prohibition against contact with pork might deter thieves.” The locals slashed the canvas tops of Allied jeeps to make shoes; a parachute canopy “was said to yield more than 500 sets of silk drawers.” “If they could have carried it away, they’d have stolen the air out of tires,” The Battle History of the [US] 1st Armored Division quoted an American officer.
And Arab theft was not restricted to the living. As Atkinson put it, at Medjez-el-Bab, amid the fierce battles in central Tunisia, American tankmen “were shocked to see that dead British soldiers from the failed assault earlier in the week had been stripped of every stitch [of clothing] by Arab looters. One soldier explained this behavior in a letter home: ‘It’s because they never had any bringing up [i.e., a proper upbringing]’.”
British and American troops often shot on sight Arab looters. To prevent such de-clothing of dead soldiers, Allied “burial details … [tried] to collect the dead [on battlefields] before looters stripped them; [and] grave robbers had become so bold that chaplains [attending the dead] carried carbines.”
Occasionally, mere theft was overtaken by actual robbery. At Djebel Semmama, “many GIs [American soldiers] who eluded [German] capture were subsequently robbed of their clothes and weapons by Arab brigands.” “In some instances, the Arabs got the drop on the men with [American-made] M-1 and ’03 rifles they had already obtained [i.e., robbed earlier]’.”
In Gafsa, just occupied by German troops in the see-saw battles in Tunisia, Erwin Rommel, the legendary commander of the German Afrika Korps, witnessed “Tunisians busy loot[ing] the town with festive abandon, ripping out pipes, window frames, and sinks.” He watched “in amusement as a crowd gathered around [his] car chanting ‘Hitler! Rommel! Hitler! Rommel!’ [and] peasants pressed forward with gifts of eggs and flapping chickens, while German soldiers divvied up cartons of Lucky Strikes found in an abandoned U.S. Army truck.”
When American troops later recaptured Gafsa, they found that “Italian and Arab pillagers had wrecked nearly every house belonging to [the town’s] 500 French residents and 800 Jews – smashing furniture, tearing doors from their hinges, and stealing rugs, faucets, and bathtubs … Items not stolen or smashed had been thrown down cisterns, including family photo albums. After the previous Axis occupation, French troops had shot Arab looters and left their bodies in the squarer; now they began rounding up the usual suspects.”
Rumors, sometimes baseless, abounded of Arab assistance to the Axis. But Arabs were occasionally caught actively providing the Axis with intelligence or even guiding German troops to sites where they could successfully ambush Americans. Atkinson records Allied troops reacting with brutality. “Arab looters and collaborators were shot or had their houses blown up by Allied vigilantes; rarely was there a legal process that did credit to Anglo-American jurisprudence. [Allied] French troops hanged Arab bodies from balcony rails in Beja as a crude warning, and commandos burned an entire Arab village in retaliation for the alleged shooting of a French [colon] forester.”
The Allies, like the French before their arrival, employed Arabs in a range of services. After the Operation Torch landings in Morocco and Algeria, American and British units occasionally hired Arabs as intelligence agents - “only to find,” according to Atkinson, quoting a British officer, “that ’the inability of most Arabs to read or write, to count accurately over twenty-five, or to tell time’ limited their espionage value.”
The Allied battles in North Africa, especially in the extended fighting in Tunisia, led to barbarization of American, British and French troops and atrocities. “In North Africa, shooting at Arabs became a sport in some units,” writes Arkinson. “Troops convinced themselves that the natives were either in cahoots with the enemy or subhumans; they were called wogs … and they lived in ‘woggeries’.” “We became ruthless with the Arab,” a 1st Division soldier wrote. “If we found them where they were not to be, they were open game, much as rabbits in the States during hunting season.” Another soldier wrote: “Here Arabs live all over. Some we shoot on sight, some we search, and some we make a deal with to buy eggs and chickens.” According to Atkinson, “soldiers boasted of using natives for marksmanship practice, daring one another to shoot an Arab coming over a hill like a target in an arcade.” Soldiers also shot camels without cause “or shot at the feet of Arab children ‘to watch them dance in fear,’ as one 34th Division soldier recounted.” Arabs suspected of espionage or sabotage were handed over to the French “for summary justice.” But they were not always handed over to the French: According to Atkinson one 1st Division soldier reported that “we made them dig their graves, we lined them up and shot them.”
British commandos burned “woggeries whose inhabitants were suspected of aiding the Germans. “‘It is not pleasant to stand round blazing huts while women and children scream outside,’ one witness acknowledged.” An artillery lieutenant from Montana, Edward Boehm, later recounted: “I saw men from another outfit shoot Arabs just to watch them jump and fall. I could hear them [i.e., the soldiers] yell and laugh each time … I saw them do it, like you’re shooting gophers … Those guys were murderers.”
Occasionally, soldiers were punished. One was tried and received a twenty-year sentence after firing at Arabs from a moving truck, shooting dead one man riding a donkey, killing another and then wounding a third. The head of French forces in North Africa, General Henri Honore Giraud, on April 3, 1943 wrote to Eisenhower that there were “continuing cases of rape in the forward areas … against Arab women.” That month drunken American troops had terrorized the Algerian village of Le Tarf for two days. According to a French investigation, the Americans gang-raped six women. Altogether during World War Two 140 US soldiers were executed by the American authorities for murder and rape though it is unclear if any of them were involved in the crimes in Le Tarf.
The spate of atrocities led to the Allies blaming each other. The American OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the CIA’s precursor, in December 1943 reported that, following the Allied conquest of Tunisia, the French high command had launched “a ruthless campaign against Moslems and, to a lesser extent, Italians.” “A general reign of terror was instituted, in which arbitrary arrests and torture of Moslems” became frequent occurrences. Beatings and “mass executions” were reported in the French detention camp on the island of Djerba.
French troops were accused of a variety of crimes in PoW camps, and there was “a constant threat of attempted sodomy by Arab guards” and “Arabs and children spat through the window and threw stones” at Italian PoWs. “a British general [said he had] … observed French jailers ‘using their prisoners to clear minefields, while we consider it contrary to international law. They don’t worry too much about feeding them either’.”
Arab animosity toward their Jewish neighbors surfaces occasionally in Atkinson’s narrative though he never explains its causes. (To the traditional Koranic-generated hatred of the Jewish “infidel” accrued the modern, nationalist perception of the Jew as an ally or ward of the French ruler.) In Algiers, Atkinson tells us, at one point a rumor circulated among the Arabs that Eisenhower, the commander of the Allied forces, was a Jew “sent by the Jew Roosevelt to establish a Jewish state in North Africa.” The American administration felt compelled to circulate a leaflet stressing “the general’s German Protestant ancestry.”
But during those months, the Allies trod gingerly, even appeasingly, when it came to North Africa’s Jews. The Allied administration, says Atkinson, left “the anti-Semitic laws of Vichy in effect for fear of provoking the Arabs.”
With the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria, the Axis prepared for the prospective battle for Tunisia, which both sides understood could serve as the assembly point for an invasion of Italy (as, indeed, happened). In November 1942 the Germans arrested Jewish notables in Tunis, the capital, and ordered the Jewish community to provide several thousand men to work on fortifications. When “only 129 workers showed up, Axis troops rampaged through the streets and synagogues … seizing hostages.” American intelligence then reported that “3,600 laborers were finally drafted” to dig trenches in Tunis airfield and nearby Bizerte. “Others were press-ganged to tend the horses and mules that hauled ammunition.” The Germans also demanded and received millions of francs “to cover [Allied] bomb damage in Tunis” and plundered “Jewish gold, jewelry, and bank deposits.”
A telling reference to North Africa’s Jews, which sheds light on something about President Roosevelt, is provided by Atkinson’s description of the American’s meeting in January 1943 in Casablanca with Auguste Paul Nogues, a senior French officer. Nogues complained that Jews in Morocco and Algeria were demanding a restoration of suffrage. Roosevelt: They need not worry as “there just aren’t going to be any elections.” And he proposed that Jews be restricted in practicing law, medicine and other professions in line with their percentage in “the … North African population.” Thus would be “eliminate[d] the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany” for “disproportionately dominating certain occupations.” This is how that conversation was recorded by American officials.
Curiously, Atkinson makes no mention of the several hundred Jews who died in the Tunisian forced labor camps, in effect killed by the Nazis, during the Holocaust.
A senior American quartermaster officer, quoted by Atkinson, described the “native workforce” in Algeria as “useless, worthless, illiterate, dishonest, and diseased.” The judgment certainly smacks of “orientalism,” the term coined by Edward Said, describing how western writers and societies represented the “East,” especially the Arab Middle East, in stereotyped or patronizing ways, a colonialist attitude governed by prejudice and racism and, more recently, Islamophobia.
But the real question about this quotation’s depiction, and by extension, Atkinson’s take on North Africa’s Arabs in 1942-1943, is whether they accurately convey the reality, the truth.
For example, take the “charge” of Arab illiteracy. Here, the officer was spot on: Illiteracy in Moslem North Africa ranged between 85% to 95% in 1942, literacy restricted to the thin layers of the middle and upper classes, who were not, of course, conscripted by the Allies for the menial workforce.
“Diseased” is more problematic. The colonial and wartime conditions no doubt left the impoverished Arab and Berber majority population with far higher rates of disease – malaria – than afflicted the local French population or the American, British, German, Italian and French occupiers. The other adjectives used by the “quartermaster officer,” “useless, worthless and dishonest,” likely reflected prejudice, perhaps “orientalism.”
But the image of “the Arabs” in North Africa – Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia - in 1942-1943 that emerges from the first-hand testimonies and reports quoted by Atkinson is not particularly attractive. No doubt pilfering, theft and looting by the native population were rampant (and, of course, the Muslim population was by and large poor and needy). But stripping Allied corpses of clothing, “including socks”? And supporting Axis war-making?
To be sure, the Arab world, in both the Middle East and North Africa, to the extent that it is measurable, supported a German victory in World War Two, especially during the war’s first years, when the Germans (and Italians) appeared to be winning. In some measure Muslim sympathies were dictated by a general hostility toward the British and French, who had ruled or at least indirectly controlled most of the Arab world during the previous two decades and had periodically crushed Muslim resistance (Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Palestine). This, in addition to the antisemitism occasionally glimpsed in Atkinson’s narrative, certainly contributed to this hostility. Similarly, the fact that Britain, the United States and France were, in their home turfs, democracies held little attraction in autocratic Muslim societies where “democracy” was not a value.
All this, though not much elaborated, comes across in An Army at Dawn and, to my mind, has nothing to do with “orientalism.”
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