Winston Churchill and Victory in North Africa: Anthony Tucker-Jones (1943)
Anthony Tucker-Jones © Mick Kavanagh
In this episode we take a look back at the career of Winston Churchill, one of the twentieth-century’s great figures. The year in focus is 1943, a year poised at the centre of the Second World War. It is one that catches Churchill at the peak of his reputation as a wartime leader. Our guide on this trip to north Africa and southern Italy is the military historian Anthony Tucker-Jones.
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Perhaps no historical figure’s reputation has been challenged quite so much over the last years as that of Winston Churchill. Rather than the hero of 1940, he has been attacked as the instigator of famines, the suppressor of peaceful protesters and many more things besides. But is this fair? Do these accusations take account of the times in which Churchill lived?
Questions like this lie at the centre of a new book by today’s guest Anthony Tucker-Jones. In his lucid, wide-ranging and brilliantly researched Winston Churchill: Master & Commander, Tucker-Jones seeks to analyse Churchill by placing his military successes and disasters in their proper historical context.
Tucker-Jones’s book covers half a century of Churchill’s life, from 1895-1945, and we discuss many of the events that occurred during his long apprenticeship for the trials of 1940. The year we examine in specific, however, is 1943. This is a fascinating one for students of Churchill and the Second World War. It lies between the astonishing Nazi successes of 1940-1 and the Allied reversals of 1944-5. As Tucker-Jones points out, 1943 was a time when the dynamics of the war changed. It was a time when Churchill first truly sensed the victory that was to come.
Churchill: Master & Commander by Anthony Tucker-Jones
Victory in North Africa
One of the most exhilarating moments arrived in May 1943 when the Allied forces made a lightning run towards the Tunisian capital Tunis. After months of fighting in the Western Desert Campaign, and long after the victory at El Alamein in November 1942, this was the ultimate moment of collapse. On 7 May 1943 the Allies drove into Tunis, achieving their first major liberation of an occupied city since the start of the war. At the time, Tucker-Jones explains, it was considered as great a victory as Stalingrad. Five days later almost a quarter of a million Axis forces surrendered in North Africa.
Churchill was as delighted about this development as anyone. Always keen to be at the centre of the action – something that had been displayed throughout his career, from the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 to the Sidney Street Siege in 1911 - he was soon afterwards addressing the soldiers of the British 1st Army at the Roman amphitheatre in Carthage.
Churchill knew that the fall of Tunis was a significant event. But he also knew that it was only a prelude to an even-more decisive phase of the war. This was the central, obsessive goal of everyone who opposed Adolf Hitler: the liberation of Europe.
Within months of Tunis’s fall this next stage of the war began with an assault on Sicily. The conquest of the island was the high water mark of Churchill’s Mediterranean-First strategy. The achievement of the arrival of the Allied troops at Messina was marred by the fact that many Axis soldiers were able to slip away to the Italian mainland. This failure to trap the enemy led to the stalling of the Italian campaign and, ultimately, to the opening of a second front in the European war, with the D-Day invasion of June 1944.
From Tunis to Sicily, Tucker-Jones guides us through this fraught and consequential history. The four-month period of time he isolates was a crucial one for the outcome of the war. It is also a time that shows us Churchill in all his colours: brave, dogmatic, querulous and visionary.
Anthony Tucker-Jones’s Churchill: Master & Commander is published by Osprey Press.
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Show Notes
Scene One: 7 May 1943. The Allied liberation of the Tunisian capital Tunis.
Scene Two: 1 June 1943. Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s visit to the Roman amphitheatre at Carthage, to congratulate 3,000 men of the British 1st Army on their victory.
Scene Three: 17 August 1943. The Liberation of Messina.
Memento: Churchill’s sun helmet from his trip to Carthage.
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Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Anthony Tucker-Jones
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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About Anthony Tucker-Jones
Anthony Tucker-Jones is a writer, military historian and a widely published expert on regional conflicts, counter-terrorism and armoured and aerial warfare.
His recent titles include The Battle for Budapest 1944-1945, The Battle for the Caucasus 1942-1943, Hitler’s Panzers: The Complete History 1933-1945 and Allied Armour 1939-1945: British and American Tanks at War. For further information his website can be found at www.atuckerjones.com.
[Image credit LOC]
Featured Images
Winston Churchill involved (as ever) in the action
Joseph Stalin, Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, in Teheran, 1943
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