This week in the War, 3–9 May 1943: The fall of Tunis

This week in the war, 0n 7 May 1943, tanks of the British 7th Armoured Division (newly detached from the British Eighth Army to join the American First Army) entered Tunis.

On the same day as the fall of the Tunisian capital, American and Free French troops of the US Second Corps took the city of Bizerta further north.

The Allied conquest of Tunisia was almost complete, regardless of Hitler’s assurance to Mussolini in Salzburg that Tunis would be defended. The Duce’s dream of riding his white horse triumphantly into Cairo would never come to pass. Within a week, the German and Italian forces in Tunisia had surrendered: over a quarter of a million men.

On 13 May 1943, the army-group commander for the North Africa theatre, General Harold Alexander, sent the following message (subsequently recorded in his memoirs) to Winston Churchill: “Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over. All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.”