by Harry Yeide
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On 14 February, the 1st Armored Division operations report recorded, “Enemy tank attack started on wide front. Djebel Lessouda surrounded by more than forty tanks. Our positions held even though Djebel Ksaira surrounded by more tanks and infantry. The whole operation was supported by continuous and heavy air bombardment.” By the end of the day, American commanders realized that the Germans had broken out of Faid Pass, and that strong enemy thrusts were directed at Sidi bou Zid and out of Maizila Pass.
Combat Command A estimated that it had been hit by a tank force twice its own size. Division intelligence identified elements of the 10th, 15th, and 21st Panzer divisions and Panzer Abteilung 601 (Tigers) in the attacking force. The 15th Panzer Division was not there, and the Schwere Panzer Abteilung was actually the 501st, but the division correctly deduced that it faced a substantial portion of all German armor in North Africa.19
This was the very scenario imagined by the brain trust back in the Tank Destroyer Command. Now was the time for the tank destroyer battalions to sweep to the penetration and annihilate the panzers. There was only one problem. The companies and even platoons of the only battalions in the vicinity—the 701st, 601st, and newly arrived 805th—were scattered like thrown pebbles across the front.
Responding to battle reports during the morning hours, II Corps shifted a single company—A/805th Tank Destroyer Battalion—and an attached reconnaissance platoon from Feriana to Sbeitla.20
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At 1930 hours, 1st Armored Division artillery reported that one of its officers had established contact with the 805th Tank Destroyer Battalion. They were discussing a plan for offensive operations by the outfit to back up the shaky line.21
The remnants of CCA rallied at dusk near Djebel Hamra and reorganized for the defense of Sbeitla. Allied commanders underestimated the size of the German offensive and decided to keep CCB near Fondouk. Nevertheless, in accordance with previous assessments that Gafsa could not be held against a major assault, they ordered an orderly evacuation of the town for the night of 14–15 February. The tank destroyers of B/805th had only just arrived in the vicinity on 9 February, their first deployment at the front. The TDs had taken up positions at Zannuch Station about twenty miles east of Gafsa. Almost daily, a few enemy tanks appeared at a distance and retired after exchanging a few rounds with the M3s. The company screened the evacuation of Gafsa and was the last unit to leave the town.22
Just after noon on 15 February, CCC/1st Armored Division, reinforced by the 2d Battalion of 1st Armored Regiment and led by Reconnaissance Company of the 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion, counterattacked from assembly areas northeast of Djebel Hamra in the direction of Sidi bou Zid thirteen miles away.23
Lieutenant Arthur Edson and the men of B/701st mounted their vehicles. “Glasscock, follow Milo!” Edson bellowed. The TDs would move so frequently over the next ten days—and Edson yell that order as many times—that the phrase would become a company slogan.
Combat Command C advanced through clear, dry afternoon air, raising clouds of dust behind it. Tanks took the lead. The tank destroyers of 3d Platoon, under Capt Robert Whitsit, took up position on the right flank, while Lieutenant Edson’s vehicles swung behind the center with orders to move to the left flank if needed. 1st Platoon protected the rear.
Repeated German air strikes slowed the advance. The official U.S. Army history records that one of the TD platoons was destroyed in a Stuka attack on the village of Sadaguia. If men died there, they were not from the tank destroyer force.
The tanks became engaged in a wild battle against emplaced 88s and panzers. The Germans executed a well-conceived multi-pronged envelopment, striking around the flanks toward the American rear. Whitsit’s platoon engaged German tanks that appeared on the south flank. A few moments later, a panzer column led by Tigers maneuvered to cut off escape from the north. German practice was to put a Tiger at the center of an attacking formation with lighter tanks on the wings; one flank of the formation would be stronger than the other.24 Edson ordered his M3s into action. They could see the panzers, but the only passage across an intervening wadi was blocked by a crippled American tank. The tank killers took up position under some trees and opened fire at long range. Whitsit’s TDs returned to help deal with this more serious threat.
A third German tank column appeared, and the command found itself under fire from four different directions. Fortunately, the radios worked this time, and Company B received orders to extricate itself.
All elements that were not too far forward beat a hasty retreat westward. During what the TD men would later characterize as a rout, one M6 and one jeep were abandoned. Remarkably, only one man in Company B had been hurt, a gun commander in Edson’s platoon who fell victim to a shell that burst over the hood of his M3. When the day was over, only four American tanks had returned from the inferno. The 1st Armored Division had lost an entire tank battalion.
Late on 15 February, Lieutenant General Anderson instructed II Corps to withdraw to the Western Dorsale mountain range and insure the security of Sbeitla, Kasserine, and Feriana.25 Accordingly, the 1st Armored Division gave ground, under orders from II Corps to use tank destroyers from the 701st and infantry as the rear guard. That night, LtCol John Waters was captured as his command tried to exfiltrate from Djebel Lessouda.
Delaying Actions: Sbeitla and Feriana
By 16 February, the 1st Armored Division had pulled back to Sbeitla, where it prepared to make a stand. It had already lost nearly one hundred tanks, almost two hundred men killed or wounded, and nearly one thousand men missing or captured.26
Combat Command B—with the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion (less Company C and Reconnaissance Company) in tow—rejoined the division and rushed to shore up the other battered elements gathered at Sbeitla. Combat commands A and C manned the northern half of the division’s defensive arc before Sbeitla, and CCB moved into positions to the south. Fredendall verbally ordered Ward to hold the line there at all costs until 1100 hours, 17 February, an order subsequently amended to an indefinite period. The Allies needed time to move British forces and the American 34th Infantry Division to Sbiba and Thala, northwest of the breakthrough; bring the American 9th Infantry Division’s artillery forward to support them; and concentrate the 16th Regimental Combat Team (RCT) of the 1st Infantry Division at a new line to the rear.
As panzers probed the defenses late on 16 February, Lieutenant Colonel Hightower commanded a screening force in front of the CCA and CCC units just moving into position. Two platoons of Company B, 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion, participated in an effort to extricate the 6th Armored Infantry, which had been unable to disengage from the enemy. The maneuver succeeded, but the TDs became embroiled in a rear-guard action against three German tank columns, during which the tank destroyers were cut off.
The rest of Company B had spent the day searching out firing positions until ordered to deploy in a cactus patch with no field of fire whatsoever. Hidden by the plants, Lieutenant Edson and the rest of men were unaware that German armored columns passed to the north and south in the evening gloom.
Lacking orders to withdraw and unable to contact combat command headquarters where the battalion CO had gone in search of instructions, the battalion executive officer, Major Walter Tardy, ordered battalion elements to escape if they could. He could not reach Company B by radio, so he told Company A to find a Company B patrol to pass the instructions. About midnight, the tank destroyers dispersed and filtered back to American lines under heavy machine-gun fire. Following a route scouted by the pioneer platoon, the men drove through or around various obstacles and wadis that they never would have attempted in daylight. Machine-gun tracers paralleled one column on both sides. Most of the TDs crept into Sbeitla by dawn. The town presented a picture of crowded confusion as the TDs worked their way through the streets amidst exploding German shells.27
Captain Redding led Company C into Sbeitla somewhat later and found the town deserted. He contacted division head
quarters to offer the services of his six remaining guns but was told to get off the net. He next radioed the combat command, which instructed him to take up positions at a spot that by now was behind German lines. Redding wisely joined the rest of the battalion west of Sbeitla.28
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At 0314 hours on 17 February, 1st Armored Division transmitted to all subordinate units, “We are going to hold. Use every available trick you know. We are going to stick here. We will lick those bastards yet.”29
German troops attacked in force at 0900 hours.30 CCB had deployed the men of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion in an outpost line a few miles east of the main line of resistance.31 The tank killers were strafed there by Allied aircraft and shelled by American artillery during the morning.32 About 1145, the 601st reported that its command post was under attack by fifty tanks from one direction and a combined tank-infantry force from another. Lieutenant Colonel Herschel Baker requested reinforcements but was told to fall back on American lines, fighting a delaying action as he came.33 Some of the TDs fired smoke and were able to shift about and maintain fire for about half an hour, but the battalion gave way under overwhelming pressure.34 The informal battalion history recorded what happened next: “Confusion was king that day. There was no communication between units, no traffic control, no organization, and no order. It was every man for himself, and Heinie take the hindmost. Halftracks went sailing by jeeps as if the jeeps were standing still, and M4s tore down the road, three abreast, in chariot race style! It was a sad day for the new, inexperienced American Army.”35
Several hours later, men from the 601st were spotted passing the CCB CP. Upon questioning, they said that the battalion had been dispersed, and that they had been ordered to regroup at Kasserine. Staff officers regrouped all the TD men they could find on the spot and turned them over to Baker when he reappeared.36
The Americans held their ground at Sbeitla until 1500 hours. II Corps now ordered the 1st Armored Division to withdraw through Kasserine Pass—except for CCA, which departed northward via Sbiba. Combat Command B screened the main retreat. The remnants of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion, supported by a company of infantry, was ordered to act as rearguard. They were nearly overrun. As German fighters strafed the retreating Americans, the 601st’s CP radio halftrack stalled. Sergeant Jagels dismounted, calmly extracted the air filter, held it up to the sunlight, and observed, “Look at the dirt in that goddamn thing!” The last American troops cleared the pass at about 0300 hours on 18 February. By its own admission, the 1st Armored Division had suffered defeat in detail.37
The 701st screened the withdrawal of CCA, with its remaining guns falling back in leap-frog fashion. When darkness fell, the command disengaged and slipped away. It lost one M3, but no men, during the action.
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Rommel’s attack on Gafsa, meanwhile, had found the town abandoned, so Rommel advanced with his detachment from the Afrika Korps and some twenty-five tanks from the Italian Centauro Division toward Feriana. As of 16 February, Stark Force (built around the 26th RCT, 1st Infantry Division, commanded by Col Alexander Stark) was dug in around Feriana protecting the withdrawal of units into positions on the heights north of Thelepte.
The green 805th Tank Destroyer Battalion had moved into Feriana on 10 February,38 and its recon men quickly became the eyes and ears of Stark Force; they conducted daily patrols of likely approaches to the town. Company A had left the battalion for Sbeitla on 14 February, but Company B returned following the evacuation of Gafsa.
The battalion’s reconnaissance jeeps the morning of 16 February rolled down the road toward Gafsa, and the men noted that the usual Allied military traffic had disappeared. At 1130 hours, the patrol reported that it had sighted the enemy. Shortly thereafter, the first shells fell on a Stark Force outpost at Djebel Sidi Aich. TDs from Company B deployed beside the road to Gafsa to cover the recon team as it barreled back into Feriana.
Captain William Zierdt of Company C had deployed one TD platoon supported by a recon platoon to guard the pass leading to Feriana. A German fighter flew low over Zierdt’s position. When its pilot waved, Zierdt waved back. Weeks later, after experiencing combat and learning to fear aircraft, Zierdt would accidentally shoot down a Spitfire.39
In the early afternoon, Stark ordered Zierdt to destroy the guns that were thought to be firing on the American outpost. The company sent two platoons through the pass, but the crews could spot no guns. Stark now ordered the two platoons to take up positions along the Feriana-Gafsa highway. Unable to reach the company by radio, the battalion operations officer had to deliver the order in person.
The Company C TDs came under fire from the north, and the men became a bit excited as it was their first time in combat. The M3s engaged what the crews thought to be 75mm guns. Months of training and demonstrations for congressmen and senators while back at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, paid off, and the crews performed extremely well.40
Perhaps because they had revealed their position, the tank destroyers soon were taking fire from the rear, as well. The TDs withdrew closer to Feriana. Company B, meanwhile, spotted approaching tanks and opened fire. After a brisk fight during which two TDs were knocked out, the company pulled back somewhat on orders from Stark.
Late in the day, Colonel Stark issued orders for a counterattack the following morning. The tank destroyers were instructed to execute a flank attack from the east in support of the main effort. Inasmuchas Company C still could not be reached by radio, the instructions were passed to the battalion operations officer over a field telephone located at an outpost near the tank destroyers. Colonel Anderson Moore, meanwhile, was instructed to take elements of his 19th Engineer Combat Regiment and a battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment to Kasserine Pass and organize a defense.41
Company C mounted up at dawn on 17 February and moved out for the flank attack. The reconnaissance platoon at about 0830 reported that there were approximately fifty Italian tanks supported by 88s advancing along the highway from Gafsa. As the TDs pulled into sight of the highway, platoon commander SSgt John Spence saw German and Italian tanks and other vehicles driving bumper-to-bumper toward Feriana. There was no main American attack from the north in sight. Spence realized something had gone awry almost immediately. A few crews opened fire, but the order came almost at once in the face of such overwhelming odds: Pull back!42
Zierdt still had no radio contact with higher command. The battalion operations officer, who was still with the company, raced to the Stark Force outpost to use the field telephone. The outpost—and its phone—were gone.
Stark had changed his mind and ordered that Feriana be abandoned. The outpost pulled out per orders, but nobody thought to tell the men of Company C. Battalion headquarters, which had had received its movement orders at 0300 hours, was unable to raise Company C by radio, so it sent a recon platoon to inform Zierdt. By the time the platoon tracked the company down, the tank killers appeared to have been surrounded.
Shortly after noon, Zierdt realized that he was almost completely encircled, so he ordered a withdrawal toward Kasserine. Gas and oil supplies were low, so he instructed vehicle commanders to destroy all faulty machines. As the halftracks, M6s, and jeeps pulled out, the enemy spotted the movement and machine-gun fire lashed the column. Recon took the lead, followed by Staff Sergeant Spence’s M3s. Soon, tank fire howled in from the west.
The recon men and Spence’s platoon returned fire to cover the rest of the column. One TD was knocked out, and several crewmembers were wounded. Almost immediately, heavy gunfire came crashing in from the east, and the other two platoons were committed. Company C had circled the wagons. The tanks to the west pulled back, evidently intending a flanking maneuver to the north.
Just as things looked hopeless, a flight of sixteen friendly aircraft strafed the enemy lines. The Germans were caught by surprise, and the fire slackened. The planes flew over the company, and each airplane waggled its wings as the flight swooped away to the north. “Look!” someone sh
outed, “They’re trying to show us the way!” Indeed, along the line indicated by the fighters’ flight Spence saw a cow path over a mountain that blocked the way. (The official operations report says that the planes did not attack the enemy, but Spence remembers that the air strike saved the company.)43
The Germans had recovered, so the two platoons facing east had to disengage separately under cannon fire. They were last seen heading northeast. The remainder of Company C traversed the rough high ground into the next valley. On the way across, the lead jeep tipped over and blocked the escape route; men grabbed the vehicle and righted it.
After coming under fire again near Thelepte airfield, the column turned toward Kasserine Pass. About 1515 hours, Zierdt finally reestablished radio contact with battalion headquarters, which ordered the company into positions at the foot of the pass. Company C had to borrow 75mm ammo from Sherman tank crews for its last two M3s.44 Patrols were sent out to find the missing platoons, but to no avail.
By the end of the day, Company C had lost one officer killed, seventy-four men captured or missing, and most of its vehicles.
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The Allies enjoyed a bit of a respite on 18 February as German commanders argued over how to exploit their initial successes. Rommel wanted to continue his thrust deep into the Allied rear, an idea von Arnim strongly opposed. Comando Supremo late in the day split the difference and authorized a less sweeping envelopment—a maneuver that would unknowingly send the Germans into the strong Allied defenses building up in the Thala area. The immediate consequences were in many ways the same for American troops at Kasserine Pass: Rommel ordered the Afrika Korps strike force to break through and then swing north toward Le Kef.45
