Epilogue

Summary

For the purposes of a counter-offensive in the secondary phase of the war in Europe, Operation Torch in late 1942 marked a significant advance for the Allies, at crossed purposes whether to strike at Hitler’s New Order from the periphery, versus a direct continental assault as favored by the US Army. Torch reinforced alliance cohesion, held the potential to bring France back into the war, and preserved maritime flexibility characteristic of the indirect approach. The success of Torch also assuaged Roosevelt’s fear that Gibraltar and “the great shoulder of Africa” with its European imperial realm might be infiltrated and occupied by Axis forces. As abstruse as this idea seems in the twenty-first century, that might have preempted a mortal threat to the American hemisphere where an Axis fifth column lurked in the southern cone.