As Winston Churchill arrived in the US, he received a telegram from General Alexander in North Africa:
The end is very near. General von Arnim has been captured, and prisoners will most likely be over a hundred and fifty thousand. All organised resistance has collapsed, and only pockets of enemy are still holding out. It appears that we have taken over a thousand guns, of which most are 88-mm, over two hundred tanks, and many thousands of motor vehicles, many of which are serviceable. German prisoners driving their own vehicles formed a dense column on the road from Grombalia to Medjez el Bab all day today.
My next telegram, denoting the formal end of the campaign, will follow, I hope, in a few hours.
Total prisoners, once they were counted, came closer to a quarter million, bringing the Italian and German losses for the North African campaign to nearly one million. They had won nothing from it.
Alan Moorehead, who had chronicled the campaign all the way through, was still there at the end. He summed up the mood:Rico says it was good news, for once...
The fact that von Arnim himself had not been able to get away was proof of the speed and completeness of our victory. No Axis aircraft had been able to take off into a sky filled with British and American aircraft, no Axis ship of any size had been able to put to sea.
All the Axis generals, with only one notable exception, had now been taken. One after another the famous units, like the Tenth Panzer Division, gave up en masse. It is doubtful if more than one thousand enemy troops got away to Italy at the last. In the end a quarter of a million prisoners were taken.
In the southern sector, the New Zealanders and the German Ninetieth Light Division broke off their fighting at last. These two divisions were the élite of the British and German armies. For two years they had mauled one another across the desert. We had killed two of the Nintieth Light’s commanders. The Nintieth Light had almost killed Freyberg. They had charged up to the gates of Egypt in the previous summer, and it was the New Zealanders who broke the German division’s heart outside Mersa Matruh.
There is hardly a major battlefield in the desert where you will not find the intermingled graves of the New Zealanders and the men of the Nintieth Light.
And now, at last, it was all over. Eight minutes to eight o’clock on 12 May is the official time given for the cessation of all organized enemy resistance in Africa. No special incident marked that moment. This tragedy of three years and three acts simply ended, with all the actors crowding on to the stage, too exhausted to be exultant or defiant or humiliated or resentful.
At the end the battlefield fell to pieces and lost all pattern and design, and those who had fought hardest on both sides found they had nothing to say, nothing to feel beyond an enveloping sense of gratitude and rest. The anger subsided at the surrender, and for the first time the German and Allied soldiers stood together looking at one another with listless and passionless curiosity.
The struggle had gone on so long. It had been so bitter. There were so many dead. There was nothing more to say.
The last of the German generals came down to the landing field and was flown off to captivity. The last of many thousand enemy soldiers trudged into the internment camps. And, in our ranks, the soldiers stripped off their uniforms, washed, and fell asleep in the sunshine.
All Africa was ours.
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