by Harry Yeide
Task Force Green overran the La Sénia airfield the morning of 9 November and captured five hundred prisoners and ninety aircraft. At the beachhead, meanwhile, a new column under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Bruck was formed consisting of two medium tanks, five light tanks, and the M3s of Lt Arthur Edson’s 2d Platoon, Company B, 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion. Once again, the tank destroyers were put in the lead. After several changes in orders, the column—now less two M3s detached to provide security in La Mecta—was directed toward La Sénia.21
As the day ended for the men in North Africa, thousands of miles to the rear the U.S. Army ordered the replacement of the light platoons in TD companies with heavy platoons. The decision did not affect the battalions already in action. Instead, they would fight with a now officially obsolete configuration.22
Both B/701st platoons participated in Task Force Red’s capture of the town of La Sénia early on 10 November. Advancing from the south, they came under heavy sniping and artillery fire. One M3 in Lt Whitsit’s 3d Platoon was struck by a shell and demolished, and the battalion suffered its first five deaths in action.
Waters ordered his flying column to bypass La Sénia and charge into Oran, and 3d Platoon TDs maneuvered around the town. Bruck, however, ordered his command to continue into La Sénia. When resistance continued, he called his column back to follow Waters around the outskirts.
Lieutenant “Ace” Edson in the 2d Platoon command M3 did not receive the transmission because of the notoriously unreliable radio. Edson, a former civil engineer who had joined the army as a private and risen to sergeant before accepting a commission, was following a tank, which was hit at a roadblock and began to burn. Edson’s halftrack provided covering fire for the escaping crew but became stuck in the roadblock debris until the next vehicle in line pushed it free. Edson proceeded through the town under small-arms fire and out the other side. The brakes had been damaged by the roadblock, and the vehicle was smoking as it raced ahead. Edson suspected that the defenders thought he was already on fire.
Three miles down the road, Edson encountered a column of French trucks where drivers were standing in vineyards to the side of the road. As the halftrack barreled by the Frenchmen, someone in the vehicle yelled out, “Hey, Lieutenant, there’s nobody behind us!” Sure enough.
Edson ordered the driver to turn around and head back. As the halftrack raced by the French trucks again, it broke down near the end of the column. Edson decided he had better shoot at the enemy, which he did. The French drivers decided to surrender. Edson arranged for four French trucks to tow his halftrack and carry his fifty prisoners back to La Sénia, where he negotiated the surrender of another three hundred combatants. The French officers did not want to capitulate to a mere lieutenant, but Edson told them, “Well, we have contact with a general.” That sufficed to convince the officers to approach him one-by-one, salute, and surrender their pistols while the men stacked arms.23
* * *
Both Task Forces Red and Green entered Oran on 10 November, seized the city center, and linked up with elements of the 1st Infantry Division as it pushed in from the other direction. After suffering constant French small arms fire on the way into the city, the tank killers were surprised to be met in the streets by clapping civilians.24 Recon Company, 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion, followed the Big Red One into the city but saw no real fighting.25 The men would later suggest off the record that they had probably accidentally expended most of their ammunition shooting at each other as they nervously ducked into and out of hallways hunting for French snipers.26
The French commander of the Oran area surrendered to BrigGen Lunsford Oliver, commanding general of Combat Command B.27
That night, Captain Paulick’s reconnaissance troops from the 601st slept on the sidewalks of Oran. The city was dilapidated and down-at-the-heels in November 1942: “Trolley tracks, the odor of automobiles burning alcohol, wine doped with a sort of hashish, chic French women and slovenly dressed men, dirty Arabs and dirty streets,” recalled a history of the 1st Infantry Division.28 Even after six weeks of occupation the Center Task Force special service officer would note, “The only forms of amusement for men in Oran on pass are movies in French at the civilian theaters and the cheap French bars.”29 Paulick’s men were awakened by the whack of oranges the natives were dropping out of windows by way of welcome. “Hi-Ho, Silver!” was the first password, and within a day, it seemed that every Arab street urchin was shouting, “Hi-Ho, Silver! Away! Bon-bon! Cigarette! Choo-gum!” “Chief” Gomez, Recon’s first sergeant, thought the password undignified and was almost shot when he refused to respond “Away!” when challenged by a sentry.30
With the fall of Oran, the campaign in Algeria ended. The tank killers had “seen the elephant,” as the British called the first experience of combat. Lieutenant Colonel Waters obtained a captaincy for Whitsit in recognition of his performance, although with most of the battalion still in England, Bob Whitsit remained a platoon commander. Waters cautioned his men, however, “We did very well against the scrub team. Next week we hit the Germans. Do not slack off in anything. When we make a showing against them, you may congratulate yourselves.”31 He was not alone in his view. Patton told observers from Washington that had the landings been opposed by Germans, “we never would have gotten ashore.”32
On 11 November, the 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion and elements of Combat Command B were detached and ordered to proceed to Tunisia to join the British First Army. The tank killers of Company C were among the first to move. They arrived in the vicinity of Medjez el Bab by 24 November, at which time the command was attached to the Blade Force, British 78th Infantry Division.33
* * *
Several days later, the rest of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion (except for Company B, which was delivered to Algiers by mistake) joined Recon Company at Oran under the watchful eye of LtCol Hershel Baker. The two-hundred pound, roly-poly CO had a cherubic face, but he spoke with a foghorn voice and was a ball of fire. The World War I veteran had scheduled a beer party for the entire battalion the day he took command in December 1941. He had a taste for booze and gambling, and he was both a showman and something of a martinet with his officers. But Baker was “proud as hell” of his outfit.34
The battalion bivouacked at St. Lucien, where the men had their first taste of the exotic: “prowling, vino-peddling, cigarette-buying natives and howling native dogs,” according to the outfit’s unofficial history. The local gendarmerie also demonstrated its quaint custom of encouraging people to move along with a touch of a whip. Baker threw a big party for his old friends, MajGen Terry de la Mesa Allen and BrigGen Theodore Roosevelt Jr., commanding general of the 1st Infantry Division and his deputy, respectively.35
Tunisia: The War Begins in Earnest
Major General Orlando Ward, 1st Armored Division’s commanding general, described Tunisia in a letter to Armored Force chief LtGen Jacob Devers. “First, the country is bigger than anyone can imagine—great wide expanses of plains and jagged, rugged mountains, and in many cases up-turned rocks standing up in the middle of the plains. Many of the hills and plains are tank-proof, although some are rolling and smooth, over which tanks can pass without difficulty. Dry wadies cut the plains, which are dotted with Arab huts and adobe houses. There are a good many trees on the mountains but few elsewhere.”36
German combat aircraft and a handful of troops began landing at an airfield near Tunis on 9 November, the first of fifteen thousand reinforcements—including one hundred tanks—that arrived by the end of the month. Nine thousand Italian troops also moved in, most having shifted west from Tripoli. British forces, meanwhile, advanced from Algiers by land and short seaborne and airborne hops. Thanks in part to the Axis incursion, the Allies persuaded the French in North Africa to join their cause as combatants on 13 November. On 17 November, a German parachute battalion encountered French holding forces and the British spearhead at Medjez el Bab. The bold German commander bluffed the Allied forces into pulling b
ack.37
Medjez el Bab lay only ten minutes flying time from the hard-surfaced German airfields around Tunis. Allied reinforcements, supplies, and air support had to make a three hundred fifty-mile journey to the new front. Allied fighters could loiter only ten minutes over the battlefield and operated off dirt airstrips, which any rain quickly turned to muck.38 And starting in late November, there were downpours aplenty in Algeria and Tunisia as unseasonable wet weather preceded the expected rainy season by two months.
* * *
For Combat Command B and the elements of the 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion, the trek was even farther to Medjez el Bab: seven hundred miles from Oran. Departing on 16 November, Companies B and C of the 701st arrived the following day in Algiers where, much to their surprise, the company COs were greeted by Eisenhower. The Allied commander explained to Capt Frank Redding and Capt Gilbert Ellmann—commanding Companies B and C, respectively—that he had wanted to meet the first American troops sent to the Tunisian sector. The next morning, the company commanders met with British LtGen Kenneth Anderson, commander of the British forces pushing toward Tunis. Anderson told them that transportation bottlenecks were dramatically slowing the deployment of tank units to the front, while the tank destroyers were light enough to make the journey on their own. The pressing need for additional forces was why such high-level officers were so personally interested in the activities of two humble companies.39
Companies B and C of the 701st traveled together over curved mountain roads as far as Souk Aras, where Company B turned aside for Tebessa on 21 November.
The Main Effort: Fighting Around Medjez el Bab
Company C continued to Souk el Arba and arrived mid-afternoon on 22 November. The men received a warm welcome from the Luftwaffe: Twelve Me-109 fighter-bombers and six Ju-87 Stuka dive-bombers bombed and strafed the company assembly area, as well as the headquarters of the British 78th Infantry Division and a nearby airfield. Six Me-109s attacked again forty-five minutes later as the company drove to its bivouac at Bulla Regia. The company lost one halftrack.40
Indeed, the famous bent-winged Stuka, the screaming terror of the blitzkrieg in Poland and France, was very much in evidence from the front all the way back to Algiers, as were Ju-88 bombers. The Stuka had yet to become the sitting duck for Allied fighters that it would when the Luftwaffe lost air supremacy. For now, Germany’s Me-109 and FW-190 fighters enjoyed the edge. Moreover, invasion planners had given low priority to antiaircraft formations, often removing them from convoys to make room for other units, a philosophy that resulted in a general shortage of antiaircraft artillery (AAA) into 1943. The AAA units that landed were often unfamiliar with just-issued equipment, poorly trained, and had not exercised with other arms.41 Official observers reported an “almost complete lack of air-ground cooperation” on the American side.42
On 23 November, Capt Frank Redding reported to Brigadier Cass, commander of the British 11th Infantry Brigade. The brigade group made up the southernmost of a three-prong British advance toward Tunis. The 36th Infantry Brigade was pushing eastward on a road roughly ten miles inland from the coast, while Blade Force advanced along the center axis. All three British commands were to receive help from elements of CCB. Cass informed Redding that his forces had made contact with unidentified German units of unknown strength somewhere east of Beja in the broad Oued Medjerda Valley. The command was preparing to advance, and Cass expected the American tank destroyers to participate in an attack the next day. During the conversation, three enemy fighters attacked the brigade CP.43
Arriving in Beja by mid-day on 23 November, Company C received orders to secure the high ground west of Medjez el Bab with the help of two British bren carrier-mounted infantry platoons from the Surrey Battalion. The Americans determined that they would not be able to communicate by radio with the British because of incompatible gear. No reconnaissance of the area had been conducted by the British, which meant that the small mixed command would function as brigade reconnaissance. Lacking effective protection against air attack, Redding decided to space his thirty-five vehicles out over the length of some five miles.44
The command moved out at 1300 hours. On either side, rolling hills gave way to steep heights cut by wadis. The bren carriers led. The M6 light TDs followed by some two hundred yards and conducted reconnaissance by fire to the flanks with machine guns and 37mm cannons. Just past the crest of the last rise before the town of Medjez el Bab, the advancing force encountered a roadblock, which at first appeared to be undefended. Heavy and accurate 81mm mortar fire quickly disabused the men of their mistaken impression. Four of the thin-skinned bren carriers were disabled in the initial barrage, and the rest scuttled to cover.
Nobody could determine the source of the enemy fire. Redding deployed his three platoons to shoot at likely points. German fire soon zeroed in on the TDs and forced them to begin shifting about after firing. As the command group gathered to discuss next steps, the German fire adjusted to their location and forced the men to scatter. The incident, at least, demonstrated that the German observation post was located on a low mountain that provided line-of-sight to the location of the command group. Redding reasoned that the German mortars would be located on the reverse slope, which he had no means to engage. An attempt to maneuver the M6s into position to fire from the flank while the infantry advanced came to naught.
Help arrived in the form of a British artillery observer in a radio-equipped vehicle. His battery had not yet come into range, however, and the task force settled in to wait.
German aircraft again dive-bombed and strafed the tank destroyers repeatedly while mortar rounds pounded the position. German pilots were enjoying brilliant flying weather over their Tunisian bases, while bad weather was playing hob at Allied air bases.45 Miraculously, only one man was killed.
Shortly before dark, the battery was ready to execute fire missions. The observer had only a 1:200,000-scale French road map and did not know his own or the artillery’s position with any accuracy. The battery loosed a single round, and Redding and the observer rose to their feet to spot the impact. They quickly hit the dirt as the 5-inch shell landed only thirty feet in front of them. By the time the fire was corrected to the suspected German position, it was too dark to see or to support a planned night attack by the Surries.
The British tried valiantly anyway, but the Germans caught them on the slope with flares and badly shot up the attacking troops, who fell back. The next day, as the task force endured renewed strafing and dive-bombing attacks, the still unseen German force withdrew from the mountain.46
* * *
British troops set out to take Medjez el Bab under a bright moon the night of 24–25 November. The plan called for two battalions to simultaneously enter the town from the north and south, but the German paratroopers—now buttressed by two 88mm guns, seventeen tanks, and an Italian antitank company—threw the British back with heavy losses. At 1730 hours, Captain Redding received orders to take his TDs into Medjez el Bab to eliminate the antitank guns. Considering what had happened to the British force, the orders appear bizarre in retrospect. Even more bizarre, perhaps, is that the tank destroyers were able to enter the outskirts of town. Darkness was falling already, however, and the TDs navigated the final distance by heading toward the sound of gunfire. Redding and his men could see little more than a few fires in town and the flash of tracer rounds, and they were unable to distinguish enemy from friend. It was the Americans’ first real experience with the fog of war. Redding later noted, “Abysmal ignorance became our prime noteworthy characteristic.”
That night, while British artillery pounded the town, the Germans slipped out and withdrew to Djedeida, only ten miles from Tunis.47
When the Allies advanced again Thanksgiving Day to seize Medjez el Bab, the TDs were attached to the 2/13th Armored Regiment. The tanks passed Company C’s bivouac in the first gray light of dawn, and the TDs swung into their place in the column. Redding noted the flash of light reflecting off aircraft w
ings to the right front as one German and one Italian plane began a strafing run against the exposed Americans. His spirits lifted when he spotted eleven twin-boom P-38 Lightning aircraft racing toward the column—the first friendly air cover he had seen since near Beja. The Axis aircraft fled but left behind three wounded men from a Company C gun crew.
As the column pressed forward, Redding nervously eyed a large flight of Ju-88s that had appeared to the east. Suddenly, the vicious roar of aircraft cannon and machine gun fire came from the rear. Aircraft were diving at the column, pulling up, and circling to strike again. Redding and his men saw twin booms and American stars on the fuselages as the planes tore fifty feet overhead, engines snarling.
The P-38 squadron from the 14th Pursuit Group of the U.S. Twelfth Air Force raked the column five times, spitting explosive shells and bullets at men running for cover. The Lightning, its nose packed with a 20mm cannon and four .50-caliber machine guns, was if anything more terrifying than the Stuka to men on the ground in its sights. The P-38s finally pulled away, their mission apparently accomplished. Seven of the “enemy” soldiers lay dead and twelve wounded. Every vehicle in the company except for one M3 and one M6 had been knocked out, and nine of the vehicles were in flames.
The Twelfth Air Force would later admit to an official observer mission that its pilots were not well trained in ground-troop identification. The air arm noted that to a pilot in a speeding aircraft, American and German halftracks, trucks, tanks, and helmets—especially dirty ones—looked pretty much alike. The risk was high in that policy was for pilots over the front to attack any ground targets “not clearly identified” as friendly.48
