An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  Anderson’s most ambitious timetable on the eve of TORCH called for Allied paratroopers to be in Tunis and Bizerte by November 12, with reinforcements following immediately. The exigencies of invasion—including French resistance and the broadcast of American paratroops across half the continent—knocked that schedule askew. Instead, the slow overland movement of troops by road and rail would be paralleled in a series of shallow envelopments by seaborne forces along the Mediterranean coast.

  A battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment landed without opposition early on November 11, 100 miles east of Algiers, at Bougie, where the candle was said to have been invented. But heavy surf caused the Royal Navy to scuttle a similiar landing thirty miles farther east, at Djidjelli. This small setback carried large consequences. The inability to bring fuel to the Djidjelli airfield kept RAF Spitfires there grounded for two days, leaving the exposed force at Bougie virtually without air cover.

  At 4:40 P.M. on November 11, thirty Ju-88s attacked Bougie harbor from the cover of low clouds, closely followed by German torpedo planes. Four bombs punctured the transport Awatea, followed by a torpedo that lanced her port side; at a 40-degree list she soon burned with greater fury than any Bougie chandler could have imagined. The destroyer Bicester picked up twenty-five survivors and played hoses on the transport’s glowing plates, pressing so close that flames caressed the destroyer and Awatea’s portside davits briefly fouled the bridge. After twenty minutes, even the doughty Bicester stood off. Gutted by a colossal final explosion, Awatea sank at eleven P.M.

  Two bombs hit the monitor Roberts, wounding her badly. Worse befell the transport Cathay, which had 1,200 British soldiers aboard. Battered by near misses that dimpled her hull, Cathay then took a dud in the galley. That was enough to panic the quailing crew; they lowered boats without orders and rowed away from the abandoned and terrified troops. A rescue flotilla of landing craft managed to get nearly everyone off, although one lighter was bombed and a surgeon reported seeing a soldier with both legs blown off “swimming frantically using only his arms.” Shortly before midnight, Cathay caught fire; she burned all night before sinking.

  November 12 was also bad. To better prepare for more air attacks at dawn, the anti-aircraft ship Tynwald weighed anchor at 4:45 A.M., only to strike a mine sown by a German plane. She sank in seven fathoms. A dawn attack did materialize. Bombs hit the transport Karanja, whose decks were packed with survivors from the Cathay; they again promptly lowered boats without orders. Sensing that the morning belonged to the enemy, Karanja’s captain ordered his vessel abandoned at 8:30 A.M. She soon sank.

  Most soldiers and sailors demonstrated pluck. But no élan could obscure the fact that four British ships had been sunk and a fifth damaged before the strike force was barely beyond Algiers. Several vessels pressed into duty as hospital ships returned to Algiers harbor with the dead sewed up in canvas sacks and the wounded making a shambles of the mess deck tables. The British troops ashore at Bougie pivoted eastward with an occasional wistful look over their shoulders; among other losses, their greatcoats lay at the bottom of Bougie bight—with the wintry Tunisian Atlas looming ahead.

  Things went better at Bône, 125 miles east of Bougie, where in the year 393 a council of bishops had first recognized the canon of the New Testament. Two destroyer transports landed an unopposed force of British and American commandos who sang the French anthem as they disembarked. Three hundred paratroopers, commanded by the infelicitously named Major R. G. Pine-Coffin, soon leaped to join them; a hard landing killed one man and injured a dozen others, including a concussed paratroop officer who would lie in a coma for four days, murmuring, “I’ll have a little more of the turbot, waiter.” As the sun set on November 12, this Allied force was only 185 road miles from Bizerte.

  Unfortunately, Bône was also comparably close to Kesselring’s airfields in Sicily and Sardinia. Bombs blew up the rail station, the cinema, and the sidewalk bistro with its striped umbrellas. Bombs eviscerated the port elevator—a golden cascade of grain spilled across the wharf—and sent mothers scurrying for shelter across the cobbled streets with their grocery bags and perambulators. Of twenty-two piers in the port, eighteen were soon wrecked. The attacks so terrorized the locals that when six Allied coasters put in later in the week no Tunisian labor could be found to unload them. British soldiers pressed into service as stevedores composed a bit of doggerel for the occasion:

  In this force we’ve just one moan:

  Too little meat—and too much Bône.

  Having chased Napoleon Bonaparte into exile, the British Army perhaps felt justified in ignoring certain of l’Empereur’s precepts. For example: the dictum that the most difficult maneuver involves marching widely separated columns against an enemy who has time to strike at them one by one before they can converge. Such an assault across a broad front was precisely what General Anderson and his lieutenants proposed. Moreover, they intended to do so with few tanks and little artillery in hilly terrain congenial to defense and ambush.

  On November 14, Anderson ordered all available Allied troops eastward in hopes of attacking Bizerte and Tunis within a week. The British 36th Brigade—4,500 men from the 78th Division—would hug the coast on the Allied left. An equivalent contingent in the 11th Brigade would follow a parallel route twenty-five miles to the south, on the Allied right. In the Allied center a patchwork group of 2,600 tankers, riflemen, and parachutists, known as Blade Force, was to work the broken high ground between the two brigades.

  The British plan would cut the Axis bridgehead in half and isolate Bizerte, which was to be captured after Tunis had fallen. American units would be fed into the attack as they arrived. For now, Anderson’s army numbered just over 12,000 men; “all available” troops amounted to barely one-tenth of those landed in TORCH. British armor featured the Valentine tank, an obsolete can with a three-man crew, a cross-country speed of eight miles per hour, and a gun that fired two-pound shells comparable to heaving loaves of hard bread at the enemy.

  The plan was made; the plan was fixed; and amending the plan—despite evidence that thousands of veteran Axis troops were extending their bridgehead westward—“had no appeal to the orderly British mind.” Precisely what Anderson could have done otherwise, given his paltry force and stringy logistics, is debatable; but gathering his scattered troops into a compact, clenched fist would have been a start.

  And then, they were in Tunisia. Crossing out of Algeria along the ancient border between Numidia and Carthage, the road switchbacked through stands of cork oak and mountain ash rich with the mossy scent of mist and wood smoke. The nights turned bitter, with icy winds and hail that forced men to tip their helmets over their faces like a knight’s beaver. Letters home began stressing the “north” in North Africa, which soldiers now described as “a cold country with a hot sun.” Slightly larger than the state of Georgia, Tunisia in winter seemed more like Michigan. On the rare occasions when open fires were allowed, the Americans huddled close in their blankets, dusted with snow. The shivering British pined for their lost greatcoats.

  As marauding Messerschmitts became increasingly common, campfires vanished. Breakfast was eaten facing east, so every man could scan for fighters on strafing runs out of the sun. Supply was patchy, with absurd surpluses of hair oil and other inessentials, and desperate shortages of artillery rounds, fresh food, and commodities like cutlery. “The most important thing,” a British tanker advised, “is never to be parted from your spoon.”

  To protect Anderson’s far southern flank, Eisenhower dispatched Edson Raff, whose American paratrooper battalion had regrouped after its dispersion across the Mediterranean in Operation VILLAIN. Raff’s Ruffians jumped—successfully this time—from thirty-three planes on the east Algerian town of Tébessa. He then herded them onto green passenger buses fueled by charcoal and placed a machine gun in each rooftop baggage rack. On a perfectly plumb Roman road they drove past pink stucco farms and neo-Palladian French villas to the remote Tunisian oasis of Gafsa, where
the force soon grew to 2,500 men. Behind them, American combat engineers heading through the mountain pass called Kasserine found themselves detained at a border post by French customs officials who demanded that duty be paid on all matériel. After realizing that Frenchman and Arab alike were mesmerized by the power of official stamps, the engineers fabricated their own rubber imprimatur and “just stamped the hell out of everything.”

  But most of the Allied force was farther north, in the two brigades lurching in loose tandem toward Tunis. Lancashire millworkers, Kentish clerks, laborers from Surrey—all came under the British 78th Division commander, Major General Vyvyan Evelegh. Known as Santa Claus for his ruddy face and imposing girth, Evelegh was a saddle-nosed, gap-toothed man in a beret, with the obligatory English officer’s mustache worn on his upper lip like a campaign ribbon. He was mercurial, with a loud, braying laugh that could quickly give way to scalding invective untrammeled by his tendency to stutter when enraged. Evelegh was said to be feuding with one of his subordinates, the commander of the elite 1st Guards Brigade, over the b-b-b-bloody foolish issue of seniority. It was also said that he was keen to seize Tunis before others of higher rank could swoop in and claim credit.

  With Anderson’s approval, Evelegh decided to leapfrog 500 paratroopers ahead of the meandering brigades. The British 1st Battalion boarded planes in Algiers and on November 16 jumped on the border town of Souk el Arba. Five soldiers were wounded when a fumbled Sten gun accidentally discharged, and another was garrotted in midair by his own shroud lines; the entire town turned out for the dead man’s funeral and, following local custom, all 3,000 people insisted on shaking hands with the battalion officer designated as chief mourner.

  They hurried onward by bus, forty miles to Béja, a hilltop town dotted with ruins from the days when local grain fields provided the bread to complement Rome’s circuses. After a miserable night in filthy weather, the battalion moved its command post into the local slaughterhouse on November 17. Five hundred men marched through Béja’s narrow streets in their soup-bowl helmets, then discreetly changed to red berets and marched around some more to simulate “a non-existent preponderance” for the benefit of any Frenchman or Arab of wavering loyalties. Fooled or not, the locals cheered from the balconies of their white houses and the parapets of Béja’s Byzantine towers.

  They cheered again on November 18, when a British patrol to the northeast ambushed a small German column, killing six enemy soldiers before returning to Béja with nine scuffling prisoners and a captured German staff car paraded like a centurion’s booty. The ambush had occurred barely ten miles from Mateur, the gateway city to Bizerte. How close they were now! To British and American paratroopers, and to the two brigades slogging behind them, the prize seemed within grasp.

  Then Stuka dive-bombers found Béja for the first of many, many raids—the Tommies called the attacks “bouncing”—and the cheers stopped. Bombs gilded the town with fire and peeled back the French mansard roofs along the Avenue de la Gare, exposing charred rafters and scorched wallpaper like something publicly naked and shameful. Bombs plowed the little gardens and reduced mud-wattle Arab houses to dust. Bombs ruined the ruins, Roman and Byzantine, and it became hard to tell antique reliquiae from modern wreckage. Béja was bounced so often that by the end of the week 300 Frenchmen and Arabs had been killed, and there was not enough lime in all Tunisia to unstink the dead.

  Local enthusiasm faded for the Allied cause, or any cause, and even the shadow of a large bird sufficed to send citizens howling through the streets, in search of a refuge that did not exist. As Bône and Bougie had been and a thousand other towns between here and Berlin would be, Béja was caught in the crossfire between the Allies and their Axis enemies, victimized by the total war that had begun, this week, in this place.

  Medjez-el-Bab

  “WHOEVER has Medjez-el-Bab has the key to the door, and is the master of all Tunisia,” Hannibal supposedly declared. The quotation has the tin ring of apocrypha, but the sentiment had been true in the centuries before Christ and it was true in 1942. Modern Medjez-el-Bab was a dusty market town smelling of rosemary and juniper and fed by roads from every compass point, a place for flinty merchants to sell French colons the tobacco and salt with which they paid their Arab farm-workers. Traces of Rome, Byzantium, and even seventeenth-century Spain could be found in the town, whose name means “Ford by the Gateway.” It was in Medjez that Allied and Axis forces would first collide “with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze,” in Homer’s phrase, and it was around Medjez that much of the struggle over the next seven months would revolve.

  Medjez-el-Bab’s strategic value derived from its position straddling the Medjerda River, thirty air miles from Tunis. Rising in the Algerian highlands, the Medjerda was a serpentine ditch wandering vaguely northeast for 125 miles before spilling into the Gulf of Tunis between Bizerte and the capital. It provided a rare portal through the Eastern Dorsal, the rugged mountain chain that stretched southward to wall off the coastal plain of eastern Tunisia. The Medjerda valley at Medjez was said to be among the half-dozen most fertile on earth: the fecund fields and irrigation ditches resembled California’s Central Valley. Shallow and mustard-hued, the river was less than a hundred yards wide, with sheer banks twenty feet high and dense rush brakes in the bottoms. An eight-arch bridge, built in the eighteenth century with stones from the original Roman viaduct, crossed the Medjerda at Medjez. It was the grandest of nine bridges spanning the river at intervals of six to ten miles.

  At this bucolic place, the commander of the Tunis Division, General Barré, chose to make his stand. After declining to follow the collaborationist path of the Vichy admirals Estéva and Derrien, Barré had temporized, for a week, teasing the Germans with hints of capitulation while trading space for time. His 9,000 men had eased westward from Tunis into the hills, where they retrieved small caches of fuel and ammunition hidden two years earlier as a precaution after the German invasion of France. Badly armed with a few creaky tanks and a half-dozen artillery pieces pulled by mules, they were pinched between Allied forces approaching from the west and Axis troops pressing from the east—a perfect metaphor for the Vichy commanders collectively.

  As British paratroopers on November 18 paraded their spoils through Béja, twenty miles away, the 3rd Battalion of the German 5th Parachute Regiment closed to within sight of Medjez-el-Bab. Troops in field-gray coats and coal-scuttle helmets fanned out along Highway 50, a narrow blacktop that hugged the Medjerda all the way to the stone bridge in Medjez. They drifted through eucalyptus brakes lining the river and skirted the cactus hedges that fenced the little farms east of town. Many had wrapped their rifle muzzles with newspaper to keep out the mud.

  Although they were veteran soldiers who two weeks earlier had been training in Normandy for a possible invasion of Malta, the Germans were hardly more mobile or robustly armed than the plodding British or French. Messages to headquarters in Tunis complained at the lack of shovels, radios, hot food, machine guns, and field glasses. The battalion commander was a dark, heavy-browed captain named Wilhelm Knoche, who liked quoting Frederick the Great: “I have no need in my army for officers who lack luck.” Knoche’s luck had held so far in several parleys with French officers; after reviewing a map on which he had charted the positions of entirely fictitious regiments, the French had ceded to German forces the Medjerda valley towns of Djedeïda and Tébourba. But Barré refused to forsake Medjez. Now German patience, never robust, had expired. Field Marshal Kesselring issued new demands to “throw the enemy back to Bône” and to “end an intolerable situation by sending in the Stukas against the French divisions.” Knoche warned in a final parley: “Think what’s at stake. When I go, the apple falls.”

  At four A.M. on November 19, a German diplomat carrying a truce flag drove into Medjez to a stucco house perched above the river. This time there was no parley, only an ultimatum. The French were given until seven A.M. to strike their colors. A French colonel replied in a theatrical hu
ff that his honor and that of France had been insulted. Although Barré’s men were scattered across the Eastern Dorsal and only a few hundred troops defended Medjez, they would fight. The French had enough ammunition for a day of combat, provided that they were not required to shoot much.

  Barré passed word to a British armored-car squadron near Medjez that an attack was likely in several hours. He also phoned French army headquarters in Algiers, announcing both his return to the Allied fold and the imminent destruction of his command.

  A bad British plan promptly got worse. On November 18, Anderson had ordered General Evelegh not to commit his 78th Division until he finished concentrating the force. But in a flurry of frantic, pleading calls, French generals now demanded reinforcement. Shortly before six A.M. on November 19, Anderson’s headquarters told Giraud that “while everything will be done to assist,” fighter aircraft based at Bône were too far away to effectively intercede and no tanks were available.

  Santa Claus was in a tight spot. The strategic worth of the Medjerda valley was evident. But German troops with tanks had also appeared on his left flank, a few miles from the Mediterranean coast. The fragmented Allied force was about to fragment further. Evelegh shoved several units toward Medjez, including the 500 paratroopers from Béja and twelve American howitzers of the 175th Field Artillery Battalion.

  An apricot dawn spread through the valley, heralding a gorgeous autumn day. Farmers shambled out to feed their livestock, casting anxious glances at the 200 gray-clad Germans who in the night had entrenched along the Medjerda’s east bank, a thousand yards from Medjez. Captain Knoche moved his command post into a cemetery on high ground east of town. Seven A.M. passed, then eight, then nine, and the ultimatum began to resemble a bluff. But at 9:15 rifle fire crackled, followed by the brisk notes of a machine gun. Bullets swarmed back and forth across the river. Terrified residents ran from the town. “The war,” an American artillerist recalled cheerfully, “was on!”