The North African Campaign commenced after the Allied landings on French Morocco and Algeria, November 8, 1942, in Operation Torch. The campaign concluded in May 1943 with the surrender of Axis forces in Tunisia.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed that the Allies' first joint offensive in World War II would be an attack on North Africa and its liberation from Axis control. The defeat of France in the Battle of France in June 1940 left that nation's North African colonies under the control of Vichy government forces, which were supposed to defend the colonies against any invader, Allied or Axis. The initial British plan for the occupation of Tunisia and Algeria (Operation Gymnast) was nevertheless based on the assumption that Axis support was soft among the colonial French administration and that, ultimately, the French in North Africa would cooperate with (or at least not resist) an Allied invasion. When the United States entered the war after the Battle of Pearl Harbor, Operation Gymnnast was revised as Operation Super-Gymnast, which included an American component. Still, it was based on an assumption of French cooperation. But when the Eighth British Army suffered defeat at the Battle of Gazala in June 1942 and was forced to withdraw from Libya, Super-Gymnast was shelved--only to be resurrected when an invasion of North Africa was settled upon (over objections from U.S. high commanders George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower) as a more feasible alternative to an immediate joint invasion of France. This time, the Allies did not simply assume French cooperation; nevertheless, they gambled on this as a probability.

French general Henri Giraud, resolutely opposed to collaboration with Germany, was spirited out of Vichy France in the hope that he would become the nucleus around which pro-Allied colonial French forces would rally. This quickly became a forlorn hope, as Giraud initially failed to cooperate with the Allied leaders, then simply proved ineffectual.

Now assuming that the French might offer at least some degree of resistance, Allied leaders reformulated Super-Gymnast as Operation Torch, which would be primarily an American operation under Eisenhower (as commander in charge of the Allied Expeditionary Force). American major general Mark Clark was named Eisenhower's deputy, and another American, Brigadier General James Doolittle, took charge of the Western Air Command (Twelfth USAAF). The rest of Eisenhower's top commanders were British: Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, and Air Marshal William Welsh (Eastern Air Commander). Eisenhower set as his task the goal of achieving perfectly unified command between the Allies; although he was never able to remove all friction, he succeeded, after some stumbling, to a remarkable degree. . .

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