The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  The Maknassy heights also fell, finally, and American pursuers had a bit more luck near Mezzouna and along Gumtree Road. Colonel Lang got away, but a half-dozen U.S. tanks raked a German rearguard convoy, and marauding Allied fighter-bombers tormented the retreating columns. Among those caught in the open was the 10th Panzer Division operations officer, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a tall, brilliant aristocrat who during duty in the Soviet Union was so alienated by German barbarism that after arriving in Africa in February he had quietly begun agitating for a military coup to oust Hitler. On Wednesday afternoon, fighters strafed Count Stauffenberg’s staff car with 20mm cannon fire. Gravely wounded, he was rushed to a field hospital in Sfax, where his right hand was amputated at the wrist and tossed into the garbage still wearing a ring; surgeons also removed his left eye and took two shattered fingers from his left hand. Evacuated to Italy, Stauffenberg was placed on a hospital train bound for Munich. His long recuperation gave him time to concoct the bomb plot that nearly killed Hitler on July 20, 1944.

  Within an hour or two of Stauffenberg’s wounding, American scouts and British Eighth Army troops spied one another across the desert for the first time. “Hello, Limeys!” the Yanks shouted, notwithstanding that the troops so hallooed were Indian. No matter: the army of the west and the army of the east had joined, despite a five-month Axis campaign to keep them apart. As other British and American troops met, they seemed unlikely kinsmen. Two weeks at El Guettar had reduced the Americans’ uniforms to tatters and the men wearing them to scarecrows. Two years in Africa had made the bleached and bronzed British resemble “Ay-rabs in jeeps,” as the Yanks called them, garbed in a heterogeneous array of khaki shorts, short-sleeve blouses or bare backs, and headgear that ranged from berets to burnooses.

  That first meeting produced handshakes and broad grins but few memorable utterances. “This is certainly a pleasant surprise,” a British sergeant said amiably. To which Private Perry Searcy of Kentucky replied, “Well, it’s good to see somebody besides a Nazi.”

  The cousins were together, and no enemy would sunder them again.

  Eisenhower was jubilant. “We are at last operating on a single battle line and have placed the enemy in a position that, to say the least, is highly embarrassing for him,” he wrote to his son, John. “I have been aiming for this for a long time and, frankly, I must say that I experience a definite feeling of happiness and delight.”

  Success in Tunisia reinforced Eisenhower’s conviction in the righteousness of the Allied cause, a theme he articulated most ardently to his closest correspondents with robust, primitive patriotism. “My single passion is to do my full duty in helping to smash the disciples of Hitler,” he told John. Although his men fought—as all men at arms fight—primarily for one another, Eisenhower saw other, “priceless things for which we are fighting.”

  It seems to me [he wrote in early April] that in no other war in history has the issue been so distinctly drawn between the forces of arbitrary oppression on the one side and, on the other, those conceptions of individual liberty, freedom, and dignity, under which we have been raised in our great Democracy…. I do have the feeling of a crusader in this war.

  He was just as fervent in championing Allied unity, which he considered the keystone of imminent victory in Tunisia and the eventual larger victory beyond. “We are establishing a pattern for complete unity in Allied effort—ground, air, navy—that will stand the Allied nations in good stead throughout the remainder of this war,” he wrote to General A.D. Surles at the War Department. Again and again he reiterated “my policy of refusing to permit any criticism couched along nationalistic lines.”

  Enforcing this policy was not easy. Proximity to the British had only deepened the latent Anglophobia of many American generals—Patton, Clark, and Bradley among them. If the British were more circumspect in their disdain, the Yanks suspected with good cause that they were being patronized. “The only way in which we can get things really tidied up,” Air Marshal Tedder wrote on March 26, “is by showing the Americans the right way to do things and letting them see where they are wrong.” Alexander concurred, telling Montgomery three days later: “I have taken infinite trouble with them—and mind you one has to deal very carefully with them because they are not one of us…. I have grave doubts that these soldiers are really doing their duty as we understand it.”

  Even Eisenhower had to swallow hard. On March 30 he flew to the Eighth Army command post south of Gabès to confer with Montgomery. Both men followed their public display of conviviality with private binges of character assassination. “His high-pitched accent and loud talking would drive me mad,” Montgomery complained to Alexander. “I should say he was good probably on the political line; but he obviously knows nothing whatever about fighting.” For his part, Eisenhower warned Marshall that Montgomery “will never willingly make a single move until he is absolutely certain of success.” The hostility—and it had just begun—was aggravated by Montgomery’s juvenile demand that he be sent an American B-17 Flying Fortress for his personal use: he had occupied Sfax ahead of schedule and thus won a gentleman’s wager with Beetle Smith. “Montgomery to Eisenhower. Entered Sfax 0830 this morning. Please send Fortress,” he cabled on April 10. The plane was sent (it would crash three months later), but the commander-in-chief seethed. “Goddam it, I can deal with anybody except that son of a bitch,” he complained. Montgomery was “a thorn in my side, a thorn in my side.”

  As if to compensate for such forbidden sentiments, Eisenhower proselytized like a man possessed by the true faith. “Every subordinate throughout the hierarchy of command will execute the orders he receives without even pausing to consider whether that order emanated from a British or American source,” he decreed. In a conference with Alexander and Patton, he confided that he did not think of himself “as an American but as an ally.” Patton told his diary, “Ike is more British than the British.”

  Yet in his ecumenical zeal, Eisenhower neglected the role his countrymen were to play in the last act of the Tunisian drama. II Corps officers had long speculated that the British intended to have Anderson’s First Army capture Bizerte and Montgomery’s Eighth Army capture Tunis. Those suspicions were confirmed when Alexander’s staff unveiled a plan for the endgame that excluded II Corps except for the 9th Division, on the assumption that it would be too hard to supply British and American forces simultaneously around the shrinking Axis bridgehead. “Both Patton and I were speechless with rage,” Bradley later wrote. “But since we were under strict orders from Ike to do what Alexander told us to do, we raised no objections.”

  Incapable of holding his tongue for long, Patton sent Bradley to Algiers in late March for a private talk with his old West Point classmate. Eisenhower seemed unaware of the British plan and, in Bradley’s view, not terribly interested. Bradley offered several arguments: that leaving three experienced American divisions on the sidelines was tactically foolish; that seconding the 9th Division meant returning to the bad habit of mixing national units; that the United States and its army had earned the right to be in on the kill.

  “This war’s going to last a long time, Ike. There’ll be a lot more Americans in it before we’re through,” Bradley added. “Until you give us the chance to show what we can do in a sector of our own, with an objective of our own, under our own command, you’ll never know how good or bad we really are.”

  Eisenhower nodded and studied the wall map in his St. Georges office. That afternoon he cabled Alexander, urging “a real effort to use the II U.S. Corps right up to the bitter end of the campaign.” Over the next two weeks a new plan evolved in which part of the American force—but not the 1st Division, and only half of 1st Armored—would capture Bizerte. Demonstrating his skills as a staff courtier, Eisenhower deftly took credit for the revision. Alexander’s original plan “seemed to me a bit on the slow, methodical side,” he wrote Marshall, “and, in addition, appeared to contemplate the eventual pinching out of the U.S. II Corps…. Alexander sees eye
to eye with me.”

  To Patton on April 5, Eisenhower wrote: “General Alexander has told me that your corps is not to be pinched out of the coming campaign.”

  Well laid though the plans were, they would not survive contact with the enemy. The greatest threat yet to Eisenhower’s vision of Allied comity had begun to unfold in a dusty village called Fondouk.

  One final chance remained to intercept the fugitive remnant of General Messe’s army before it reached the sanctuary of the Tunis defenses.

  Midway between El Guettar and Tunis, the Marguellil River threaded a narrow pass through the Eastern Dorsal where Fondouk—a few adobe hovels and a mosque—straddled Highway 3 as it sliced toward Kairouan twenty miles to the northeast. Less than a thousand yards wide, the defile was bracketed on the north by a stony pinnacle named Djebel Rhorab and on the south by an equally stony escarpment named Djebel Haouareb. The shallow river wandered in muddy braids through the pass within the steep-banked wadi it had worn. Prickly pear and drooping olives dappled the 300-foot hills; so, in the splendor of a North African April, did marigolds, and crimson poppies like blood pooling on the rocks.

  Germans infested these slopes, and had for months. They had blasted gun positions from the shale and built bivouac dens in the cliffs, appointed with stoves, beds, and occasional crucifixes. Gunners registered their artillery on the open approaches from the west and calibrated their mortars on all the dead spaces below the ridges. Fields of fire were nearly perfect. The defenders included two battalions of the 999th Africa Division, whose ranks were filled with court-martialed soldiers considered “suitable for rehabilitation” by fire. Many were convicted black marketeers, demoted officers, or Schwarzschlächter, “black butchers,” who had illegally slaughtered livestock for food. Forbidden to wear national emblems, they sported no breast or cap eagles, no cockades or collar patches, no belt buckle insignia of “Gott Mit Uns.” Discounting the formidable rehabilitative powers of German sergeants, British intelligence considered the units inferior.

  This was a mistake, as American troops could attest. One halfhearted effort had already been made in late March to force Fondouk Pass. In harmony with the II Corps demonstrations at Maknassy and El Guettar, which were intended to siphon Axis forces from Montgomery’s front, Patton on March 25 had ordered the 34th Infantry Division to “go out in that area and make a lot of noise, but don’t try to capture anything.” The division’s three infantry regiments—the 168th, 133rd, and 135th—had finally been reunited, and a homebody strain of Iowa and Minnesota still ran through them. But rough handling at Kasserine left residual scars both physical and psychic. In a March 11 message to his officers, Major General Ryder, the tall Kansan who commanded the 34th, decried “this military creeping paralysis present in our division” and the want of “offensive spirit.”

  The first foray at Fondouk had proved Ryder’s point. Moving forward on a night so impenetrable—“dark as a stack of black cats,” one soldier said—that a guide with a lit cigarette walked ten feet in front of each vehicle, the division attacked with four battalions on a 3,000-yard front at six A.M. on March 27. By midafternoon, after struggling uphill beneath the frowning guns, the assault stalled 500 yards short of Djebel Haouareb. German machine guns roared through the next night, spitting lime-green tracers so thick that soldiers claimed to have read a newspaper by the light. A renewed attack on the morning of the twenty-eighth collapsed, as did various infantry maneuvers over the next three days. At the 15th Evacuation Hospital near Sbeïtla, every square inch of the admissions tent, four ward tents, both surgical tents, and the evacuation tent was covered with bleeding boys from Fondouk, and nurses turned away more ambulances. As Patton had requested, the division made a lot of noise and captured nothing, at a cost of 527 casualties. Most losses fell on the star-crossed 168th Infantry, just replenished after the Sidi bou Zid debacle. Now its ranks needed filling again.

  Belatedly, Alexander realized that only a much bigger force could crack the Fondouk gap. Caution and conventionality—jabs, short hooks, and frontal assaults—had characterized the six weeks of his generalship in Tunisia. Nearly 90,000 Americans had been used to peck at the Eastern Dorsal in three different spots, while a comparable force in Anderson’s First Army had mostly sat on its haunches for the past month. Just as Colonel Lang had concluded that a more forceful American attack at Maknassy heights would have unhinged the defenders there, so senior Axis commanders came to believe that the African campaign could have ended a month sooner had Alexander struck a quicker, bolder blow at Fondouk.

  Now he tried to make amends. The 34th Division would join with the British IX Corps and French troops, more than tripling the Fondouk force. Infantrymen would prise open the gap along the Marguellil River, allowing the British 6th Armoured Division to sweep onto the coastal plain toward Kairouan. Messe’s army, fleeing Montgomery and Patton in the south, was to be intercepted and destroyed before it merged with Arnim’s Fifth Panzer Army in the north.

  At eleven A.M. on Tuesday, April 6, trailing a banner of dust, Lieutenant General John Crocker arrived at Ryder’s camouflaged tent in an orchard nine miles southeast of Fondouk. The British corps commander had arrived in Africa a few weeks earlier with a reputation that had grown steadily since his capable command of a tank brigade in France in 1940. Direct and sane, Crocker nevertheless harbored prejudices against the Americans. Some were trivial: he was credited with a caustic bon mot—“How green is our ally”—and he disliked the common Yank habits of eating only with a fork and smoking at table. More important, he considered U.S. forces so weighted with equipment that it “handicapped their strategic mobility.” American officers tended to be “very ignorant and the staff had little idea of how to operate forces.” Americans also seemed given to fantasy, retrospectively elevating the Kasserine debacle into a victory. To his wife a few weeks earlier, Crocker had written that in dealing with Americans “it is necessary to watch your step and wrap anything that one has to say which is the least critical or which savours of advice in the most tactful language.” They were “a queer lot with many nice ones…. So far as soldiering is concerned, believe me, the British have nothing at all to learn from them.”

  It was regrettable that Crocker thought so, because his plan for Fondouk was flawed. Earlier in the week, he had proposed seizing Djebel Rhorab in the north with the British 128th Infantry Brigade, while Ryder’s men attacked in the south toward Djebel Haouareb, scene of their recent repulse. Now, however, fifteen officers in Ryder’s stuffy tent huddled around a large map mounted on plywood—colored paper squares represented the various battalions—to find that Crocker had amended the scheme in hopes of accelerating the armored push toward Kairouan. Djebel Rhorab was only weakly held, Crocker asserted, so British infantrymen would initially swing farther north, “denying” the hill to the enemy but not actually occupying it until the American attack was well under way. American artillery could blanket the hill with smoke shells, but not with high explosives lest they hit the arriving British troops.

  Ryder was stunned. Just a week earlier, his division had been blistered with fire from Rhorab, which jutted to within 500 yards of Crocker’s proposed avenue for the American attack. Surely the Germans had since reinforced an already formidable position. “I had a plan based on our conference of a few days ago,” Ryder replied evenly, “but now I have none.” He pointed out the vulnerability of his troops, which would face galling fire from both north and east. Crocker waved away these objections. Speed and maneuver would overwhelm the thin defenses. Ryder stared at Crocker with pursed lips, then shrugged. Eisenhower’s orders seemed clear enough: subordinates were to salute and carry on, disregarding nationality.

  Now another officer spoke up, en français. General Louis-Marie Koeltz, commander of the French XIX Corps, knew this ground from personal heartache. The Germans had routed his troops here in January to capture the high ground they now occupied. In his sky-blue uniform and gold-spackled red kepi, Koeltz pointed out that the American ap
proaches were “entirely flat and completely exposed except for a row of cacti.” His own reconnaissance showed that a frontal attack would fail. Blue eyes flashing, tidy mustache twitching in his ruddy face, Koeltz added, “We could take out Djebel Rhorab from the north, because in this region the infantry could be supported by tanks.” The rolling terrain and dense olive groves there would offer attackers more cover than the naked ground approaching Djebel Haouareb.

  Crocker listened politely, then reaffirmed his plan. “My intervention had no effect,” Koeltz later said. “Having to express myself in French, I may not have been well understood.”

  It went badly, of course. Fatalism settled over the 34th Division, which collectively bought $26 million in life insurance that spring, mostly on the eve of the Fondouk offensive. Chaplains stayed busy hearing confessions or ministering to the doubtful. A head count at church services one Sunday in April tallied almost 7,000 worshippers, nearly half the division. In a handwritten note, Alexander told Eisenhower that troops in the 34th Division “seem reasonably confident about tomorrow’s operation, and I do hope it will go well.” To Brooke, however, he pronounced them “soft, green, and quite untrained…. Is it surprising then that they lack the will to fight?”

  As the 135th Infantry commander later conceded, no officer in the division favored this attack, “but no one was saying so to the others.” British planning was derided as “brittle and axiomatic…inflexible.” Ryder had been wary of the British since the invasion of Algiers and now, unjustly, he believed that they “wished to win the war with American troops and matériel.” At Fondouk, that meant expending the 34th Division so the 6th Armoured could bust through to Kairouan unscathed.

  Perhaps, Ryder mused, the division could tiptoe past Djebel Rhorab before dawn. He successfully petitioned Crocker for permission to advance his attack from 5:30 A.M. on April 8 to three A.M. His men laced toilet paper in their helmet nets so they might see one another in the dark, while rehearsing the challenge—“Grocery?”—and countersign—“Store.” They picked at a final meal of hardtack and “thousand-bone” oxtail soup, then nibbled the single slice of white bread served each man for dessert. At eight P.M. on Wednesday night, the regiments packed into trucks for assembly areas west of Fondouk. A half-ton truck for carrying out the dead trailed the convoy, bold white letters on its side proclaiming: “The Stuka Valley Hearse—Death Rides with Us.”