The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Robinett pulled himself to his full, unimposing height, jaw thrust out, gaze level and unblinking. “No, General,” he answered. “I have saved you.”

  He had indeed, although salvation was ephemeral on the night of December 10. Medjez had been preserved for the moment, but more than three battalions of American troops remained at risk. Oliver chose not to venture down the valley again; bucking the traffic that would soon jam the road from Bordj Toum to Medjez seemed more than his frayed nerves could handle. Instead, the evacuation was left to the senior officer on the Bou, a forty-three-year-old West Pointer from Ohio, Lieutenant Colonel John R. McGinness. Oliver lay down on a straw mat pulled from an olive press and dozed off.

  Rain was falling again, heavy as birdshot, as the long columns debouched from the ravines around the Bou. Blackout lights—cat’s-eye slits—gleamed from the trucks and half-tracks inching toward the river and the macadam highway that would carry them to safety. A flare arced across the sky a mile to the northeast, hissing for half a minute before winking out. Somewhere in the dark near the Bordj Toum rail station, 300 German infantrymen and two dozen panzers had bivouacked after a day of brutal combat so close that artillery gunners fought with rifles as infantrymen. Somewhere also in the dark two platoons of British soldiers waited for the Americans; Evelegh had first pledged to hold the bridge until at least 10:30 P.M., then, under pleas from CCB, had extended the deadline to four A.M. and eventually to dawn.

  A CCB infantry platoon crossed the narrow Bordj Toum bridge, followed by a company of General Lees. Tank tracks creaked across the plank deck only inches from the edge on both sides. As the Lees swung onto Highway 50, German voices sang out near the rail station. A few yellow muzzle flashes stabbed the darkness, followed by a machine gun’s stutter. An officer ordered his infantrymen back toward the bridge for better cover until the gunfire could be sorted out.

  But panic had been building for a week, fed by stories of headless drivers and eyeballs on strings. Another sputtering flare projected—as Robinett later observed—“new terrors into the minds of the weak.” If minds were weak, legs remained strong: the cold light revealed silhouetted men sprinting back across the bridge, their eyes glazed with fear. “The Krauts! The Krauts!” Fear raced down the column like a lit fuze. A panting officer splashed through the mud to Colonel McGinness’s jeep. His words tumbled out: Germans had broken through; no Brits could be seen; panzers were said to block the bridge already.

  A casual stroll to the front of the column would have disproved it all. No breakthrough had occurred. The British, while modest in strength, were standing their ground not far from the bridge. The panzers were wrecks, knocked out in earlier fighting. The shots had been inconsequential.

  But McGinness was not the man to vanquish bogeys. Ignoring reasoned pleas from his subordinates and taking counsel only of his fears, he issued the fateful order: “Turn the column around.” The battalions would return to Medjez on an unpaved goat path along the south bank of the river.

  The first few vehicles at the column’s tail, now its head, managed to reverse course and plow west through bumper-deep mud. But each passing set of wheels and armored tracks churned the mire more. After a few hundred yards, vehicles began to bog down—first the tanks, then the half-tracks and guns and jeeps and trucks. Swearing, sweating soldiers stuffed bedrolls and ration cases beneath the wheels and tracks. They hacked at the mud with shovels and picks until their hands bled, while drivers gunned the engines and groped for traction in the muck. Clutches burned out. Axles and transmission rods broke. Tracks slipped from their bogey wheels. Gas tanks ran dry.

  At 1:30 A.M. an aide shook Oliver awake. Smelling faintly of olive residue, the general read with disbelief the radio transmission from McGinness. The column had mired. Most vehicles were stuck, and McGinness had “ordered their abandonment and destruction.” Oliver tried to raise the column by radio. No one answered.

  The sopping dawn revealed a spectral, half-buried procession strung out for three miles along the swollen Medjerda. Thermite grenades had melted through engine blocks, leaving silver puddles of metal congealing in the mud. A few soldiers, ignoring the abandon-ship order, continued to rock their trucks back and forth in a stubborn search for grip. Some troops had tossed away their rifles and wandered into a boggy field; like dead men they slept where they fell, swaddled in mud. Hundreds of others staggered westward eight miles into Medjez, too weary even to watch for Stukas. Officers organized foraging parties to gather straw for the shivering troops.

  McGinness stumbled in at noon, spattered and bedraggled. Although Patton, upon hearing of the debacle, proposed a firing squad, Oliver simply sacked him—making McGinness the second battalion commander from the 13th Armored Regiment relieved in three days. “I never felt so bad in my life,” Oliver said. Eisenhower also considered firing Oliver, but would instead send him home for promotion and eventual division command. Robinett, promoted to brigadier general, soon succeeded him as CCB commander.

  He would take over a ghost unit. The miring at Bordj Toum had cost eighteen tanks, forty-one guns, and 132 half-tracks and wheeled vehicles. Buried to the headlights, most of the carcasses were too deep for even the Germans to salvage. With more disbelief than anger, Anderson observed, “It was a crippling loss.” In two weeks at the front, CCB had lost three-quarters of its tanks and howitzers, and comparable portions of half-tracks and trucks. Never having anticipated such grievous losses—especially not the destruction of 124 tanks and the complete wearing out of the rest—the Americans had no system to provide quick replacements. Many dismounted armor crews were reduced to traffic duty for weeks; one battalion had six tanks left. Two days after Bordj Toum, Anderson declared CCB no longer combat worthy.

  It was humiliating, and nearly past imagining for the cocky young men who had rolled out of Oran and Algiers only a month before. A. D. Divine, the South African–born journalist who had spent many weeks with the Americans, shrewdly assessed their shortcomings:

  The faults were clear enough: the greatest of them was an initial lack of appreciation of the possibilities of the enemy; a certain indiscipline of mind; a tendency towards exaggeration…. Men used the skyline because the view was better from there. Men neglected camouflage because it might smack of overanxiety. Men failed to dig slit trenches because the work was hard.

  Other deficiencies could hardly be blamed on green soldiers. Virtually no bazookas had been shipped to Tunisia; Patton had plenty in Morocco, a thousand miles from the front, where he was testing their penetrating power against live goats placed in a light tank. Another three weeks would pass before ordnance officers discovered that American tank crews had gone into combat with training ammunition rather than more explosive, more lethal armor-piercing rounds. And not only had German tanks, tactics, and airpower proved superior, so too had the enemy’s field glasses, tank sights, smokeless powder, and machine guns.

  Even more important, little cohesion obtained among Allied formations or even between American units. They had fought not as an army, but as a disjointed confederation. Neither leaders nor the led had yet proven themselves, despite flashes of competence and many acts of valor. British command had been as deficient as American command. In a crucial phase of the campaign, when every rifle squad counted—infantrymen were particularly valuable in seizing hilly redoubts and holding passes—whole battalions had been thrown away, beginning with those in Operations RESERVIST, TERMINAL, and VILLAIN, and extending through the destruction of the Argylls, the Hampshires, the Surreys, the commandos, Frost’s paratroopers, and now McGinness’s 2nd Battalion, which lost all but ten vehicles.

  Eisenhower again chose to be optimistic. “We are having our troubles; so is the enemy,” he wrote in a note to himself on December 10. “If we can make up our minds to endure more and go farther and work harder than he does…we can certainly win.” History would reveal the correctness of his appraisal, but he could hardly foresee the pain implicit in the phrase “endure more and go farther.”
A month of fighting had ended, the first in what would be thirty months of pitched battle between the Allies and the Axis. All the players were now onstage. Although the combat in these initial weeks had been small scale—companies and battalions hurled against other companies and battalions—soon the bloody epic would embroil regiments, divisions, corps, and, eventually, armies.

  There was yet time for the Allies to regroup, to punch through, to seize the whole of the African shore and avoid the deadlock of World War I trench warfare. But that time was short.

  6. A COUNTRY OF DEFILES

  Longstop

  FOR eleven days in mid-December, both sides licked their wounds along the Medjerda valley. War clawed out a no-man’s-land between Medjez-el-Bab and Bordj Toum, seven miles wide and crowded with shades. Patrols went out and patrols came back, or failed to. Sniper bullets whizzed about like small, vexing birds. Shells rustled overhead, and smoke drifted from the gun muzzles in stately gray hoops above poplar groves now smashed to splinters. Concussion ghosts rippled the pup tents, like pebbles in a pond. Anything that moved drew fire, but Arab farmers still scratched their fields with ancient plows, veering around the shell craters; sentries squinted from their dugouts and debated whether the furrows were shaped like an arrow to signal enemy pilots. “Hovering there on that borderland that divided the two hostile armies,” a correspondent later wrote, “was like standing on a window ledge of a high building waiting to commit suicide.”

  Medjez was wrecked, but German guns continued to make the rubble dance—the British called it “their shelling programme.” Whenever a dud landed, French soldiers murmured, “Fabriqué à Paris!” in tribute to saboteurs toiling among the forced laborers at home. Life moved underground. A Grenadier Guard battalion occupied the shaft of an abandoned lead mine, and “it was only after some days that they discovered a complete family of Arabs living in darkness at the far end.” Foxholes and trenches—“coffin slits,” to the Tommies—scarred the landscape like pox. British sappers proudly turned the eastern approaches to Medjez into “one bloody great mine.”

  By December, 180,000 American troops had arrived in northwest Africa. Yet fewer than 12,000 of them could be found at the Tunisian front, plus 20,000 British and 30,000 ill-equipped French (who now counted as 7,000 in the Allied calculus). Together they lived at the sharp end. Blackout rules for the long winter nights meant everyone turned in at six P.M. and rose at four A.M. Canned stew and biscuits were “donkey dung” and “armor plating.” Soldiers softened their hardtack by dipping it into ersatz coffee brewed from pulverized dates, with the color and taste of ink. GI toilet paper was rough-hewn enough to be used for double-sided stationery, and troops caught up on their correspondence even as they battled ferocious dysentery.

  “No shave, no bath, very little food, no beds, no liquor, no women, no fun, no nothing,” an American soldier wrote his sister. A platoon leader in the 18th Infantry Regiment apologized for not sending Christmas presents; he had spent his last $50 on eyeglasses for nine of his men after Army stocks ran short. “Thanks for giving me the grandest gifts of all,” added Lieutenant Robert M. Mullen, “faith and love.” In three months he would be dead. Mail finally arrived for some troops—many had received nothing for two months or more—and Christmas packages often implied a certain homefront incomprehension of life in the combat zone: bathrobes, slippers, and phonograph records were particularly popular.

  A redhead in a knit cap, slender as a thread at 100 pounds and given to drink and melancholy, showed up with a typewriter to educate America. Ernest Taylor Pyle had recently become a war correspondent after writing more than 2 million words as a roving reporter during the Depression. From Tunisia he wrote:

  There are none of the little things that make life normal back home. There are no chairs, lights, floors, or tables. There isn’t any place to set anything, or any store to buy things. There are no newspapers, milk, beds, sheets, radiators, beer, ice cream, or hot water. A man just sort of exists…. The velvet is all gone from living.

  The lull allowed Brits and Yanks to take each others’ measure in circumstances other than abject bloodletting. Scruffy GIs noticed that no matter how foul the weather, the Tommies shaved every morning, religiously; in their trousers, collarless shirts, and broad suspenders, they reminded one American officer of “old-fashioned workingmen cleaning up on a Saturday night.” Every British officers’ mess seemed to have a Christmas goose fund, to which each man contributed 200 francs and extensive advice. Yanks soon adopted the expression “Good show!”—although always uttered sardonically. Because British sutlers provided many staples for both armies, the Americans at times fed on treacle pudding and oxtail stew with jointed bones. Steak-and-kidney pie in British “compo” rations inspired a field kitchen ditty:

  We’ve eaten British compo,

  We like the meat the best,

  We know a cow has kidney,

  But where in hell’s the rest?

  Across the killing fields, the Germans and Italians also took stock. Axis troop strength in the Tunisian bridgehead had reached 56,000, with 160 tanks, roughly equal to the Allies but with the added benefit of Luftwaffe air superiority and good defensive terrain. From the Mediterranean coast twenty miles west of Bizerte, the line extended just east of Medjez-el-Bab and then down the entire length of Tunisia. German soldiers held the northern sector, with the 10th Panzer Division shielding Tunis, and the Italian Superga Division held the south. Nowhere was the enclave deeper than forty miles, and no shoulder-to-shoulder manning of such a long front would have been possible even if Nehring had been so inclined.

  General Nehring’s success in blunting the Allied offensive failed to atone for the abandonment of Medjez and his persistent pessimism. Without warning, his replacement had arrived on December 8: Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, whom Hitler whisked from a corps command in Russia to take over the newly formed Fifth Panzer Army in Tunis. Nehring flew home. With a bird of prey’s beaked nose and stern countenance, the fifty-three-year-old Arnim issued from a Prussian family that had been producing officers for the Fatherland since the fourteenth century. Having compiled a distinguished record in both the Great War and this one, he gave Kesselring a diligent, quick-thinking field commander. On December 13, Arnim announced that since Allied forces around Tébourba had been obliterated, the Fifth Panzer Army would go over to the defensive to await the next blow.

  Defense meant fortifications, and fortifications required laborers. Sixty thousand Jews served nicely. Mostly artisans and tradesmen, Tunisian Jews were a tiny minority with a long pedigree; on the island of Djerba—said to be the original of Homer’s Land of the Lotus Eaters—tradition held that the small Jewish community had arrived after the sack of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 B.C. Under a Vichy-inspired statute, Tunisian Jews had been banned from teaching, banking, and other professions since 1940. When the Axis invaded, life soured even more.

  On November 23, German troops had arrested a number of Jews in Tunis, including the president of the Council of the Jewish Community. On December 9, the city’s grand rabbi was ordered to provide overnight a list of 2,000 young Jews for a labor corps; when the rabbi requested a delay, the quota was increased to 3,000. All were to appear with tools. After only 120 workers showed up, Axis troops rampaged through the streets and synagogues in various Jewish quarters, seizing hostages. A secret OSS assessment reported: “Equipped with tools and food by the Jewish community, 3,600 laborers were finally drafted.” Hundreds worked under Allied bombardment in Bizerte and at the Tunis airfield. Hundreds more dug defensive trenches for Major Witzig near Green and Bald Hills, and for General Fischer’s men west of Tébourba. Others were press-ganged to tend the horses and mules that hauled ammunition.

  In mid-December, the Council of the Jewish Community was told that as “allies of the Anglo-Saxons,” Jews were expected to provide 20 million francs to cover bomb damage in Tunis. A rapacious Tunisian bank loaned the money at 8 percent interest, taking Jewish land and
property as collateral. The Germans also began plundering Jewish gold, jewelry, and bank deposits. Meanwhile, the clang of picks and shovels could be heard in the rugged hills above the Medjerda valley.

  Prodded by Eisenhower, Anderson sent word to Algiers that the Allied offensive would resume on the night of December 23–24. By then, enough supplies could be stockpiled at the Tunisian railhead for a week of hard fighting, and a full moon would light the way. Evelegh’s 78th Division, with American help, would secure the left flank on the high ground above the Medjerda, while the British 6th Armoured Division, just arrived from Britain, blasted through to Tunis on the southern lip of the Medjerda valley.

  “This means a most un-Christian Christmas, but perhaps this will be forgiven in view of all the facts,” Anderson told the commander-in-chief. He agreed with Eisenhower that the Allies could not allow “passive acceptance of a strong Hun bridgehead,” although he put the odds of seizing Tunis at “not more than 50–50, I think. But it is also certainly not an impossible task. Far from it. With good planning and execution, stout hearts and fair weather, we will do our utmost to gain success. If we deserve God’s help, we will gain it.”

  At the same time, Anderson urged Eisenhower to keep his eye fixed on Tunis. Several schemes had floated from Allied Forces Headquarters for operations in southern Tunisia; none would contribute to the paramount objective of capturing the capital and severing the Axis lifeline to Italy. First Army was already “living hand to mouth, with reserves temporarily exhausted,” Anderson warned, and he planned to throw 80 percent of his strength into the Christmas Eve offensive. “The essence of any plan,” he advised Eisenhower, “must be to concentrate maximum strength at the chosen point of attack.”