The Great Divide: The Uneasy Linkup of the British First and Eighth Armies in Tunisia, 1943
“In dozens of minor matters of everyday life, the two armies were mutually incomprehensible.”
Historically, military allies and partners have suffered their fair share of failure — much of it attributable to deeply-rooted antagonisms, divergent interests, and clashing civil-military traditions. Indeed for centuries, rivalry, disagreement, and contention have been the rule rather than the exception in coalition warfare.
While international — and indeed, interservice — rivalries make frequent appearances in our history books, there is another sphere of military rivalry that often gets glossed over: Intranational rivalry, or rivalries among forces within the same national branch of service.
Intranational rivalries aren’t as common, but they certainly occur. In the North African campaign of World War II, for example, the tumultuous linkup of the British First and Eighth armies during the Allied campaign through Tunisia provides an excellent example of the type of rivalry that can result when national armies with vastly different fighting backgrounds are thrown into the same crucible.
The Junction of the British First and Eighth Armies in Tunisia
In mid-March 1943, two British armies were set on a long-anticipated collision course in North Africa.
Five months earlier on November 8, 1942, the British First Army made landfall in Algeria as part of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of Vichy French North Africa. The landings initiated a frantic race to capture Tunis before it could be reinforced by the Axis — one that quickly devolved into a bitter back-and-forth struggle along Tunisia’s mountainous northern coastal corridor.
Many Allied problems stemmed from the difficulty of sustaining inexperienced American, British, and French units then comprising the British First Army — a British formation in name alone — from industrial bases sited an ocean away.
General Kenneth Anderson — the somewhat taciturn, fifty-one-year-old British senior officer in charge of First Army’s thrust into Tunisia — did the best he could under the circumstances. By Christmas, his superior, General Eisenhower, recognized the futility of trying to seize Tunis while winter rains inundated the battlefield. “Thus ended my hopes of capturing Tunis by storm,” Anderson later remarked, “and it now was clear that when the time came later to launch a new attack it would have to be on a much heavier scale against greatly-increased opposition.”
While Anderson’s haggard force dug in to rest and resupply, Allied commanders looked ahead to the spring months when warmer weather would herald in the return of battlefield mobility. There was something else to look forward to as well: The imminent arrival of General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army fast-approaching from the east.
Eighth Army’s arrival marked the culmination of an epic continental struggle against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his wily Afrika Korps.
For the better part of two years, their armies had seesawed across Libya and Egypt, pursuing one another from the sands of El Alamein to the shores of Tripoli. While Anderson and the Allies were landing in Morocco and Algeria for Torch in November 1942, Montgomery’s men scored a smashing victory against Rommel in Egypt, initiating a 1,700 mile pursuit of retreating German and Italian forces across the vast desert wastes of North Africa.
By late February 1943, Montgomery had seized Tripoli and pushed Rommel clear into southern Tunisia. Preparing to spring forth out of their mountainous redoubts in the eastern Atlas Mountains, Anderson’s forces planned to use Montgomery’s army as a great anvil to encircle and smash the Axis bridgehead around Tunis.
Captain Harry Butcher, Eisenhower’s chief aide, recorded at the time that the junction of both armies would make the campaign “one giant battle,” one that demanded “close and intimate co-ordination and understanding” between Anderson and Montgomery.
It took a month of hard fighting for Montgomery’s Eighth Army to penetrate the Mareth Line, an antiquated network of French fortifications barring the entrance to southern Tunisia. But by April, Eighth Army soldiers prepared to meet their Anglo-American counterparts who, for months, had heard only tidbits of news regarding their brothers-in-arms.
The linkup of American and British soldiers in southern Tunisia was a well publicized affair. Having finally punctured the Mareth Line defenses and gone “up Tunisia like a plunger being pushed into a tube,” on April 7 an Eighth Army patrol spotted lead elements of Patton’s U.S. II Corps rushing toward them.
The Anglo-American reunion near Oued el Zitoun finalized the convergence of “two armies which had started out at opposite ends of Africa.” Shaking hands, a British observer recorded the “unemotional, business-like” tenor of the meeting “curiously suggestive of the difference between them”:
“Eighth Army soldiers were reddened with the sun and dusty with the sand, already dressed in dirty shirts and ragged shorts — a desert, summer army: the Americans had Mackintosh wind-jackets and baggy trousers and gaiters and boots and iron-grey vehicles — a winter, mountain army.”
Stereotypical slights leveled at one another reflected an early gulf in experience, tradition, and culture: To the British, the Americans were little more than “wealthy, gifted amateurs”; to the Americans, the British could be “blasé and patronizing.” The insults were surface level, noted Alexander Clifford, a British journalist on scene. “Gradually the differences would become blurred and smoothed over until they were no longer perceptible save to the expert eye.”
British on British Hostility
Such differences were to be expected. What was unexpected, at least to Clifford, were similar feelings of hostility he subsequently witnessed among First and Eighth Army forces meeting for the first time — two groups whose respective formative experiences made them as alien to one another as international strangers.
“We drove on through the walled city of Kairouan,” Clifford wrote, “and came into the First Army’s country. And for the first time we became conscious of the inevitable rivalry between the two armies.”
Though First Army was cosmopolitan in its own right, Eighth Army took multinationality to another level. Mustering its manpower from the far reaches of Britain’s empire, partnering nations in exile, and other eager volunteers, the Indians, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, Free French, Greeks, Czechs, Poles, Yugoslavs, Scots, British, and yes, Americans comprising its ranks were, wrote Eisenhower, “probably the most cosmopolitan army to fight in North Africa since Hannibal.”
Eighth Army’s impressive transformation in the Western Desert between 1940 and 1943 was rapidly becoming the stuff of legend. In his account on the war in North Africa, eminent author and Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead recorded that the first year of Eighth Army’s experience was one “of tremendous experiments, of thrusting about in the dark; the year of bluff and quick movement when nobody knew what was going to happen.” Thereafter followed a year of “set battles and eventual retreat” building up to a famous final year of triumph wherein Montgomery and his superior, General Harold Alexander, implemented hard-earned lessons in desert combat and combined arms warfare and emerged triumphant against Rommel’s Afrika Korps at last.
It was, wrote Ernie Pyle, “a magnificent organization,” one that modeled effective combined operations better than perhaps any other army in the field. “We correspondents were dazzled by its perfection,” he wrote. “So were our troops.”
The admiration did not extend to all. Still very much experimenting their way to a success that still felt remote, contact with Montgomery’s veteran, weather-worn outfit served as an ever-present reminder of just how far Anderson’s First Army had to go.
As with the Americans, the differences in First and Eighth armies’ appearances were striking. Clifford observed how the dark grey paint covering First Army vehicles contrasted heavily with Eighth Army’s sandy beige. In general, First Army faces were thicker and paler, their recently-issued clothes warmer and better suited for fighting in cold, wet Tunisian hill country. They looked like a home army — a European army — trim, coordinated, and well-suited to its environment.
Eighth Army’s appearance, on the other hand, was also suited to its desert environment, but it had long shed the trappings of decorum and formality. Like some strange foreign legion, the motley assemblage were changed in — and by — the desert.
Their exposed faces ran the gamut from deep tan to a semipermanent sunburned pink; they were hardy and lean, the natural result of a spartan existence spent almost exclusively in the open; and they wore a “slightly strained look about their eyes that comes from the glare of the sun and the distant horizons of the desert.”
The journey across the desert rendered dress codes obsolete; as sun-bleached garments caked in layers of dust and grime inevitably tore, Eighth Army soldiers replaced them with plum-colored corduroys and wool sweaters that “compared unfavorably with the uniformed neatness of the First.” Their vehicles were outdated and ramshackle, nurtured and coaxed along their tremendous trek to Tunisia. Like hard-earned battle scars, Eighth Army leaned into these unique physical features and displayed them prominently.
Intense pride and inner self-belief — cultivated and championed no more than by Montgomery himself — permeated Eighth Army from top to bottom. This behavior appealed to the Americans, who expressed “genuine, open-hearted admiration the Brits found embarrassing.” But it also colored early interactions with First Army, whom the Eighth scrutinized with interest and “perhaps, with a touch of condescension: the condescension of a ripe, experienced man towards an extremely promising junior partner.”
Moorehead recorded this brewing sense of “superficial jealousy and fundamental misunderstandings” between both armies as they interacted. “In Kairouan a friend of mine from the First Army had gone up to a sergeant from the Eighth Army and said, ‘Hullo! Pleased to see you. I am from the First Army,’” he wrote, “to which the desert sergeant replied lightly, ‘Well, you can go home now. The Eighth Armys arrived.” That night, Moorehead listened as a young Eighth Army officer on Montgomery’s staff derided the First Army, an inept outfit he felt should have no stake in the final push on Tunis.
Many in First Army — particularly its leaders — found this condescension galling. Clifford described Anderson’s outfit as “a very self-critical army, deeply conscious of its mistakes and shortcomings — just as the Eighth had been a year before.” First Army had toiled over rough mountains and hills — a challenging environment in its own right, but one that was a far cry from the swift, open advances the Eighth Army experienced in the Western Desert. Feeling as though their “problems had never been understood,” Clifford added that, “the First Army welcomed the Eighth warily, keenly on the look-out for a hint of patronage or criticism.”
“Such obvious boasting usually came from men who had only recently arrived in the desert,” Moorehead clarified. “But it antagonized the soldiers who had been struggling all winter in the mountains and the mud of northern Tunisia. They regarded the desert soldiers as noisy and over-confident, an army that was sunning itself in publicity, and they looked forward with grim and unfriendly relish to the moment when the desert fighters struck the mountains.”
Before long, operational exigencies persuaded Allied commanders to intermingle Eighth and First Army formations in Tunisia for the first time. Overseeing the encirclement of the Axis bridgehead at Tunis, General Harold Alexander shored up Anderson’s northern thrust with one of Montgomery’s armored divisions.
Their enforced union brought an even deeper linguistic divide to the fore. As the two groups compared experiences, they stumbled over each other’s vernacular. Whereas the First Army celebrated with a “spot of sprig,” the Eighth would “brew up” their tea; while the First spoke in far more civilized tones, the Eighth communicated using “a sort of bastard Arabic sprinkled with technical desert terms.” To them, water became “moy-ah,” valleys became “wadis,” and soldiers greeted each other with “say-eeda,” an outdated Bedouin expression meaning “Go with God.”
As a result, “in dozens of minor matters of everyday life,” Clifford wrote, “the two armies were mutually incomprehensible.” In their isolation from Europe during the trying years after the Fall of France, Eighth Army developed “a complicated set of private habits.” “Anyone who did not fit into these habits,” Moorehead observed, “was an outsider.”
Moorehead attempted to distill the underpinning rationale of the rivalry at dinner one night:
“The thing went deeper. The Eighth Army was very largely an empire army comprised of Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders and Indians. The settlers who had gone out to Australia in the nineteenth century learned and earned their independence. When they returned on visits to England the Australians appeared to the English as aggressive, boastful and a little uncouth in manner. To the Australians the English appeared as more than a little effete and soft. Yet the Australian was very often aggressive solely in order to hide his sense of insularity. And the Englishman very often admired the virility of the Australian. Then when the Tommy demonstrated his toughness in Flanders, the English and Australian troops got on very well indeed.
The same phenomenon, he argued, occurred in Tunisia.
When the Eighth Army saw the fine equipment, the new guns and tanks and uniforms of the First Army, a slight sense of insularity was forced upon Montgomery’s men and to stifle it they boasted a little. In other words, an inferiority complex existed inside their superiority complex.
Moorehead’s dinner companions disagreed. The Eighth Army, they claimed, was simply better by virtue of its experience, and that was the end of the conversation.
With the ring tightening around Tunis, Alexander gave the weight of the final Allied offensive that spring to Anderson’s First Army. The decision made good tactical sense; given the terrain, a westward push would ostensibly divide the fourteen enemy divisions around Tunis and Bizerte rather than pool retreating forces onto themselves.
It also provoked the ire of Eighth Army officers. Having come so far across Africa just to have Anderson reap the glory was a bitter pill to swallow.
One of Montgomery’s divisional commanders, General Oliver Leese, summarized his and his fellow Eighth Army officers’ festering resentment after a four-day tour of First Army’s sector in a letter to his wife:
“[First Army] are jealous as hell of us and our reputation and achievements,” he wrote. “It’s a pity but then…[Anderson] has no personality and puts nothing across — so what can you expect…I had the most extraordinary interview with…[him]…He was quite f — g about the 8th Army…I said nothing and listened in frank astonishment to a tirade of a mixture of jealousy and inferiority complex. It gave me no feeling of confidence — in fact only contempt…At one time, I hoped [Montgomery] would be merciful and considerate. I hope now he rams the 8th Army down their throat to the last drop. They are ignorant and untrustworthy in comparison and they must be forced to learn.”
Montgomery’s Eighth Army would play a supporting role in the final destruction of the Axis in North Africa while Anderson’s First Army went on to take Tunis at long last in May 1943.
In the long run, however, Montgomery’s rapidly ascending star quickly overcame that of his First Army peer. Montgomery took command of Allied ground forces after Normandy and, as an army group commander, helped oversee the final Allied victory in the west.
Anderson was widely recognized for his contribution to Allied victory in North Africa. Behind the scenes, however, superiors and subordinates alike called into question his capacity for leadership. Praised by Eisenhower for his selflessness and devotion to duty, the American commander conceded that Anderson could nevertheless be shy, unpopular, and “blunt, at times to the point of rudeness,” adding that “this trait, curiously enough, seemed to bring him into conflict with his British confreres more than it did with Americans.” For his part, Montgomery labeled him “a good plain cook.”
Receiving a fate befalling several other Allied commanders found wanting, the shy British general was “sidelined — or perhaps more succinctly kicked upstairs” for the remainder of the war.
In his postwar reminiscences of the Tunisian campaign, Anderson expressed disappointment that the challenges he and his army confronted had never been fully appreciated. Deemed unfit for battlefield command, he disappeared into the British command hierarchy after his victory in Tunisia and has remained largely forgotten ever since.
But while Anderson and Montgomery never got along, the fighting men of the First and Eighth Armies eventually did. Conjointly seizing Tunis in May 1943, Eighth Army formations finally found common ground with the First Army in the crucible of battle. Many First Army units were later grafted into the Eighth Army as it went on to help liberate Sicily and Italy — a fitting end to their Mediterranean odyssey.
Conclusion
As these interactions reveal, institutional and cultural homogeneity don’t not always translate into uniform military effectiveness.
The British First and Eighth Armies may have emerged from the same generic institutional milieu, but when grafted into their respective battlefield environments, their unique institutional cultures evolved in such a way as to, in the end, momentarily create a seedbed of rivalry.
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