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Article: North African Campaign
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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NORTH AFRICAN CAMPAIGN
NORTH AFRICAN CAMPAIGN.
After two years of desert skirmishes among the British, Italians, and Germans, the North African campaign opened on 8 November 1942, when Anglo-American forces under U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower landed in French Morocco and Algeria near Casablanca and met bitter French resistance. An armistice brought the fighting to an end on 11 November, and the French forces soon joined the Allies.
Allied units under British Gen. Kenneth Anderson tried to take Bizerte and Tunis quickly, but Italian and German troops held firm. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Italo-German army, defeated at El Alamein, Egypt, in October, retreated across Libya and at ...