THE NORTH AFRICAN STALINGRAD

It was an Allied victory that helped change the course of the Second World War. Yet the bitter six-month campaign for Tunisia remains one of the least-known of the entire conflict. Now a thrilling new book aims to set the record straight

- By Saul David

DOLF Hitler's special train the Führersonderzug "Amerika" was travelling from Berlin to Munich in the early hours of November 8, 1942, when it was stopped at a small station in the Thuringian Forest to receive an urgent message: "A US expeditionary corps was disembarking in Algiers and Oran", two ports in French Algeria.

Hitler was aghast. Aware that French North Africa Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, controlled by the unoccupied Vichy rump state was an area of the "greatest political and strategic importance", he asked his military advisers what resources were available to meet the threat. The answer was none. Farther down the track, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop boarded the train and urged Hitler to put out peace feelers to Stalin, hoping to free up German men and materials to be rushed to North Africa. The Führer refused: a "moment of weakness was not the proper time to negotiate with an enemy".

Instead, he ordered his military chiefs to "organise the Wehrmacht for the defence of Tunis", the capital of French Tunisia, which was a short flight and sea journey from Sicily. By securing Tunisia, Hitler hoped to stymie Allied plans to trap Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel's Italo-German Panzer Army in Libya between General Sir Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army advancing from Egypt in the east, and the forces just landed in Algeria and Morocco to the west.

The Allies had the same idea, and the subsequent "Race for Tunis" would set the scene for one of the decisive campaigns of the war.