How Jews helped Yanks liberate Algiers in 1942

 Panoramic view of Algiers


It is 70 years since Operation Torch - the Allied invasion - began the liberation of North Africa from the Nazis and their collaborators. Point of No Return flagged an article by David B Green in Haaretz on the subject. But our knowledgeable commenter Eliyahu points out that the US liberation of Algeria would not have gone so smoothly, and certainly not without loss of life, had the  Algerian underground,  85% Jewish, not paved the way for their arrival by taking over key strategic points.  David Green's article makes no mention of this fact:

Eliyahu writes:

This article by David Green is OK as far as it goes. But it is woefully incomplete, probably through no fault of the author. In fact, a group of Algerian Jews in the Resistance did a great deal to help Operation Torch succeed. Whereas more than 500 American soldiers died in the landing at Casablanca, none died landing at Algiers because in Algiers the Underground, about 85% Jewish, made a coup d'etat, taking over the sensitive nodes of political/military control in Algiers, the capital of French North Africa, on the eve of the US landing and in coordination with it. This story is missing in most American accounts of WW2 and the war in the Mediterranean, but I can say about the Algiers Underground what Churchill said about the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Seldom have so few saved so many.

The ingratitude of official US institutions and personalities is striking. Official US Army accounts of the war omit mention of help for the US by natives in North Africa but for one book that mentions the Algiers uprising in a few lines without any mention that most were Jews. The US consul in Algiers at the time [the US was not at war with Vichy], Robert Murphy, worked with the Underground up to a point and supplied one rifle or carbine to the resistance fighters [General Mark Clark had supplied another]. Yet in his book of memoirs, Diplomat Among Warriors, Murphy only fuzzily alludes to the resistance, again without mentioning that they were mostly Jews. Moreover, he refused to help Jose Aboulker who was arrested and jailed by the dissident Vichyites who took over Algeria under American sponsorship after the landing. This is part of the background of Rafael Medoff's account which also overlooks the Underground [Knowing Rafi, I assume that he just didn't know of it, omitted as it is from American accounts of the war].

Here are sources on the events in English, French and Hebrew:
Gita Amipaz-Silber, La Resistance juive en Algerie, 1940-1942 [Jerusalem: Rubin Mass 1986]
--(same author in Hebrew)-- מחתרת יהודית באלג'ריה- 1940-1942
[Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense Publishing House 1983]
--(there is also an English translation. I don't know the title)
--Elliot A Green, "Jewish Anti-Nazi Resistance in Wartime Algeria" in Midstream (New York, January 1989)
--also see articles by David Corcos in Encyclopedia Judaica about Algiers and Algeria.

-- Leon Poliakov writes about the Algiers Underground in his article about the Jews in France [including North Africa] during the Shoah in the Yiddish-language Algemeyner Entsiklopedya, Series "Yidn," vol. zayin, pp 188-191. Poliakov stresses the importance of the Algiers Underground to the success of the Allied landing, that is, the success of Operation Torch. Poliakov thinks that the landing would have ended in catastrophe if not for the Algiers Underground. All things considered, gratitude for the Underground's accomplishment has been less than deserved in France and almost non-existent in America, judging by later publications.