Air Marshal Arthur Harris, commander-in-chief of RAF Bomber Command, resented Churchill’s order to ring church bells following the Allied victory at El Alamein in 1942 and after the fall of Tunis. In his view, victories in some distant desert were peanuts compared with the battle he was waging against Germany’s industrial cities. It is possible to see his point. But Saul David would disagree. In Tunisgrad, David seeks to restore a sense of the strategic significance of the war in North Africa.

The result is an enthralling narrative of the last stages of the conflict, presented from the viewpoint of the American and British Empire forces that fought it. David focuses on the final battles in Algeria and Tunisia because he sees these as the hinge of the whole North African campaign. The decisive Allied victories at Alam Halfa and El Alamein set the ball rolling, but David believes that the battles for the small French colony of Tunisia helped turn the course of the war. 

This was a campaign that involved American forces fighting alongside a British army that had been engaged in war for three years. There has long been argument over whether it was better to send the US army to North Africa than to keep it in Britain and launch an early