In addition, this campaign in Tunisia constituted excellent tactical preparation and morale in the war that the three allies were going to wage in Western Europe.
For the young American army, it had been an indispensable test bed. Under the command of leaders like Patton, this army was to draw lessons from it and benefit, on the European battlefields, from an experience often dearly paid for in Tunisia, but which would have cost it much more if it had acquired it directly. in the great European confrontations.
The British 1st Army itself had undergone the running-in which it needed, for it was far from having the experience acquired, in two years of fierce fighting, by the armed city. But it had quickly equaled its elder.
For us, French, this campaign had marked a real renaissance. It had cleared us in our own eyes of the humiliation of the defeat of 1940 and of the armistice, which had forced the army of Africa to capitulate without having fought and which had then imposed on it the vexatious control of the commissions enemies who had persisted, for more than two years, in disarming it and stripping it of its resources.
The Tunisian campaign had, at the same time, had the effect of giving army the esteem of the Allies. General Anderson wrote:under my command men as loyal and as valiant as General Koeltz and his officers and soldiers of the French 19th Army Corps.
And the English war correspondent John d 'Arcy-Dawson speaks, in his work on the Tunisian campaign, of the French, "those magnificent fighters 1...1, those eternal sacrifices, fiercely clinging to positions lost in advance", and he says his admiration for " those combative fellows of the 19th corps, eager to measure themselves against the Boche.”
This fine resistance to fire of our army of Africa, in spite of its obsolete and insufficient weapons, was going to earn him this rearmament with modern American equipment which would allow it to finally measure itself on equal terms with the adversary of 1940.
Thanks to this renovated armament and to this reforged morale, the French expeditionary force, formed by the army of Africa and joined by the 1st Free French Division, will be able to e cover of glory in Italy, marching on Rome at the tip of the Allied victory, under the command of its great leader of Tunisia, General June.
Another result of the campaign of Tunisia , essential for the rest of the war, was to have reunited the Allies and reunited the block of the victors of 1918.
But the crucial point of the campaign, the one that was going to allow all these happy conditions, material, tactical and moral, to give their full effect, was the strategic result.
The victory of Tunisia had definitively driven out Africa the forces of the Axis. It had given the Allies absolute mastery of the air and the sea in the Mediterranean theatre. It had liberated the North African platform, from where first the air squadrons, then the Allied armies would launch an assault, from the south, on "Fortress Europe".
This Tunisian victory was therefore not an end, but a beginning, a three-way start, the start of the "one-night battle" which was about to open, first in Italy, towards final victory and liberation of the homeland.
The estate of Hasdrubal (221) After the death of Hasdrubal, no one doubted that the initiative of the soldiers who had immediately carried the young Hannibal into the praetorium and proclaimed him general with a unanimous cry and voice, was confirmed. by popular vote. He had barely reached the age