Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
Originally posted by Abdul Hadi Pasha
Yes. But it was poorly defended at that time - only by French troops who were not eager to fight the Americans.
There was also a risk of failure - as I mentioned above, the Maghreb was not heavily defended, without air cover, etc. Greece, OTOH, would have been heavily defended. Notice also, that most of Torch forces were American - well equipped, but with no experience at all. Sending them to hard terrain, without full air superiority against entrenched Germans with Italian support... Too risky. And imagine how terrible the failure would have been to Allies' morale.
And frankly, I doubt Turkey really would have entered the war in 1942/1943 - Germany was to strong then. Ankara staid neutral even in 1945, when there was no doubt Germany was loosing. Even Chile declared war on Germany in 1945 - Turkey did not.
Turkey was still adjacent to the Axis in 1945. If the Balkans were falling to the Western Allies, they would have been forced to come in.
Possibly good point about failure, but I don't think Crete could "fail" - just be overly costly as a worst case.
I just don't see how Torch was worth the effort. I would have done Normandy earlier and dispensed with other efforts, but I'm not sure why "soft underbelly" ideas are so maligned. It worked pretty well in WWI - the Salonika front forced the Ottomans out of the war and that plus the Italian front disposed of A-H.
What did Torch really accomplish? Once the Allies had landed in France in force the French would have come around to our side anyway, North Africa was useless, and Italy was more or less irrelevant. Why bother?