An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  The tanks came, but at Robinett. General Buelowius surged forward along the Hatab’s south bank at two P.M. on February 21 with forty panzers followed in trace by lorried infantry. Italian troops from the 5th Bersaglieri Battalion joined the attack, recognizable in their plumed pith helmets and distinctive running march. But within an hour, the weight of massed American howitzers began to tell. Shells burst around Axis formations tacking for cover where no cover existed. German 88s answered from the riverbank but Buelowius lacked enough guns for effective counterbattery fire. By four P.M. the attackers had drawn within range of American tanks and plunging fire from antitank guns hidden in the rocks. Even for the Afrika Korps it was too galling: at six P.M. Buelowius broke off the attack, still four miles short of Djebel el Hamra. Shades in feathers and coal-scuttle helmets backed into the dusk until searching shell fire could no longer range them. Buelowius had lost ten tanks, Robinett but one.

  Repulsed on the right, Rommel ordered Buelowius to make a wide envelopment to the left. He meant to flank the Americans in the south and catch them from the rear. In darkness and teeming rain, Buelowius sidled across the mud; by first light on the twenty-second, his men were not only drenched and disorganized but lost, having wandered seven miles south of Djebel el Hamra.

  Undeterred, two grenadier battalions attacked at dawn where they found themselves, just above Bou Chebka Pass. By eight A.M., five American howitzers and three lesser guns had been captured, along with thirty vehicles. The American line buckled and fell back, leaving a knobby, fog-shrouded salient known as Hill 812 covered with howling German grenadiers.

  It seemed all too familiar: high hopes after a credible initial clash; an indefatigable enemy who pressed the attack; a brittle defense that fractured under stress. By chance, the Afrika Korps had struck the seam where Robinett’s authority ended and Allen’s began. Thirty-five miles away, the II Corps command post was feverishly packing for Constantine and Le Kef in the fear that Le Kouif would soon be overrun. Spooked by the German advances on what one Tommy dubbed Panic Sunday, officers joked about preparing their Oflag—prison camp—bags.

  Yet something had hardened in this army. Even as violent death swept the ranks, men stood their ground. The line stiffened. The Afrika Korps was twenty-three air miles from Tébessa; it would come not an inch closer. At nine A.M. the fog lifted, exposing hundreds of grenadiers now marooned on Hill 812. Buelowius ordered two dozen panzers and the 5th Bersaglieri to push northwest at Djebel el Hamra as a diversion from his trapped infantry; the force came within two miles of the ridgeline before stalling under American fire from three sides.

  “The air was full of hardware and smoke and the sounds of a real scrap,” Clift Andrus later recalled. If ever a man appeared propitiously it was Andrus, the imperturbable 1st Division artillery chief known as Mr. Chips: a bemused, bespectacled figure with a pipe, a walking stick, and a small mustache.

  “The most skillful and practical artillery officer I know,” Allen called him, and now Andrus lived up to that praise. The Americans had many guns but no one to direct them in concert. Andrus rounded up wandering gunners and put them into the line. “Eyes at the back of their heads, whiskers, mud, and every sign of utterly exhausted men,” he wrote of one battery. Told that the Americans were about to counterattack, “most of them started to cry” in sheer relief. Ax-swinging gunners felled pines on the djebel’s front slope to clear fields of fire. And what fields they were. “An artilleryman’s dream,” Andrus reported. “The valley floor was covered with targets of every description, from tanks and eighty-eight batteries to infantry and trucks.”

  A single battalion, the 27th Field Artillery, fired more than 2,000 rounds, and others were nearly as prodigal. By two P.M., the milling Afrika Korps was in retreat. Soon a headlong rout of terrorized soldiers heaved eastward. Enemy dead lay like gray flagstones across the Bahiret Foussana. The 16th Infantry drove the grenadiers from Hill 812, recapturing intact every gun and vehicle lost that morning. Henry Gardiner, who again found himself in the thick of the fighting, described “one of the most exhilarating sights…. A column of prisoners came marching around a bend in the wadi with their hands held high, led by one of our tankers with a tommy gun.”

  An American soldier strolled through a makeshift POW cage filling a helmet with aluminum stars—rank insignia of the Italian private—then announced to Robinett that he had “captured a whole flock of Italian brigadier generals.” Robinett plucked two from the pile for his own shoulders. He had been looking for stars since his promotion to general officer before Christmas.

  “Lay Roughly on the Tanks”

  AS this action in the west played out, the final act in the Kasserine saga unfolded on Highway 17, where Rommel’s main attack rolled toward Thala, past the wreckage of the exterminated British rear guard. Exhausted and spattered with mud, the field marshal had felt, in the past two days, moments of exhilaration that rivaled the happiness he had known as a young officer in the Great War. An aide described Rommel’s arrival at the front early on Sunday, the twenty-first: “He suddenly appeared, just like the old days, among the very foremost infantry and tanks, in the middle of their attack, and had to hit the ground just like the riflemen when the enemy’s artillery opened up!”

  By midafternoon all euphoria had leached away. Rommel saw that his Afrika Korps troops, long accustomed to the freewheeling combat of the open desert, had much to learn about seizing high ground and avoiding vulnerable valleys in hill country. And the 10th Panzer, now pressing up the Thala road with a spearhead of thirty tanks, twenty guns, and thirty-five infantry half-tracks, seemed sluggish. German intelligence had expected only Americans north of Kasserine Pass, but a pesky British armor force harassed the advancing German column through midday without offering decisive battle. Of Broich and the other panzer commanders Rommel would later complain, “They did not seem to realize that they were in a race with the Allied reserves.” For more than four hours, the German attack crept forward, Rommel in a staff car left of the highway and Broich on the right. Arabs in wool robes with pointed cowls flitted across the hills, stripping the dead of even their socks. Bodies lay spread-eagled, shockingly white.

  The British had their own problems. Brigadier Nicholson, dispatched by Anderson to oversee Dunphie and the other defenders, failed to reach Thala until 3:15 Sunday morning, after spending six hours plowing through axle-deep mud in his Humber Box. Upon arriving, he found “no full-blooded orders” from Anderson but vague, irritating instructions to “act offensively” without risking the loss of armor that “might be wanted elsewhere.” Dunphie’s fifty tanks were mostly obsolete Valentines, no match for the panzers. His largest infantry unit—the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Leicestershire Regiment—had just arrived from England and “had no conception of what was coming to them,” Nicholson later noted. “I found it difficult to get a sense of urgency into them.” Except for five U.S. tank destroyers who joined the fight, a British officer reported that he had been unable to rally American stragglers passing by “at speed” with—as a Yank officer observed—“the usual story of being the only survivor.” All day long, hundreds of fleeing soldiers from Stark’s wrecked command drifted through Thala yelling, “He’s right behind us!” No one needed to ask who “he” was.

  Absent full-blooded orders from Anderson, Nicholson issued his own to Dunphie: “You will ensure at all costs that the German armoured force on your front does not reach [Thala] before 1800 hours.” Twelve miles south of Thala, Dunphie stopped backpedaling at four P.M. and dug in. A mile away, the enemy assault line massed on a ridge with a precision that, as one Tommy reported, “was beautiful to watch but very frightening.”

  With Rommel now in direct command, the panzers rumbled through the dismounted grenadiers, and the German line surged forward. Tank fire boomed across the hills. The outgunned Valentines, often suckered into betraying their positions with premature return fire, simply blew apart. After an hour of exceptional courage, Dunphie sounded retreat, minus fifteen
tanks.

  Back the British fell, scooting between cactus patches until they reached the ridge held by the Leicesters three miles south of Thala. “Machine gun fire could be seen snaking up the road straight for us,” one officer recalled. Dunphie stood “erect in his scout car, calmly conducting the battle over the wireless” before following the last Valentine into the perimeter behind billows of man-made smoke. It was 6:30 P.M. Darkness and rain draped the battlefield.

  Dunphie was a gunner by trade, and he belatedly realized his mistake in not positioning artillery closer to the front. He had almost no guns available. Thala was held by a weak French battalion and a few other reinforcements quartered in the local brothel, “empty but heavy with cheap scent.” At an elevation of 3,300 feet, Thala had the feel of a highlands bastion, but holding it against a determined assault would be difficult with this feeble force. North of town the road straightened, the land flattened, and the route to Le Kef—forty miles away—lay undefended. “I felt strategic fear,” Juin later confessed, “for if Rommel broke through, all of North Africa was doomed.”

  Almost on Dunphie’s heels, an armored column led by a Valentine clanked toward the British perimeter on Highway 17. Hatless soldiers lay smoking on the fenders of these apparent stragglers. The Leicesters, whom Nicholson had just berated for their half-dug foxholes and unlaid minefields, glanced up from their digging at the familiar turret silhouette. In better light they might have seen the name Apple Sammy stenciled on the Valentine’s flank. Apple Sammy had been captured at Tébourba three months earlier. “Keep away from my bloody trench,” a rifleman hollered at the passing tank. “You’re knocking it in.”

  Like Greeks from a wooden horse, grenadiers spilled off the tanks and fell on the astonished defenders. Eight panzers, plus the duplicitous Apple Sammy, were inside the British harbor. Germans sprinted down the Leicester trench line, heaving grenades and spraying machine-pistol fire. Tank rounds destroyed the battalion signals truck, and pleas for help went out as dead air. German crews slewed their guns in a murderous crossfire. “Hands up, come out,” an accented voice called in the darkness. “Surrender to the panzers.” In minutes the Leicesters were undone, and 300 stunned prisoners vanished into the night.

  Two thousand yards north, Dunphie’s remaining tanks sheltered in a grassy hollow just below the town. Dismounted crews had settled down for supper when “German tracers began to float over our heads,” wrote one soldier. “A flare shot up into the air…. Six German tanks were right upon us, greenish-yellow flame flickering from their machine gun muzzles.” A fuel truck exploded to lave the hollow in light, projecting weird shadows against the ridge.

  “Lay roughly on the tanks!” a troop commander ordered, and for three hours a chaotic brawl surged across the tuft grass. “It was a tank fight in the dark at twenty yards’ range and under,” reported Dunphie. A few intrepid Tommies slapped passing panzers with “sticky bombs,” grenades covered with adhesive and fuzed for five seconds. At 9:30 a headquarters clerk scribbled in the war diary: “Situation confused.” Dunphie radioed Nicholson to warn that the Leicesters had been overrun and that a like fate threatened the tanks. But when he proposed pulling back to the edge of Thala, Nicholson refused: “Hold at all costs.”

  At all costs they held, and the cost was dear. Dunphie’s original fifty tanks had been pared to twenty-one when the last German fired a last burst at midnight before skulking off; Rommel now occupied the ridge once held by the Leicesters, who now mustered forty able-bodied men, short by 800. Dunphie ordered every cook, driver, and batman in Thala to the line. Barely a mile away, Rommel—whose losses included nine panzers—massed his remaining force of fifty tanks, 2,500 infantrymen, and thirty guns. For the balance of the night “alarms were many and firing profuse,” one chronicler noted, and the British braced for the death blow, which would surely come at dawn.

  Dawn came; the blow did not. Better still for the British, another providential American artilleryman showed up, this one with 2,200 men, forty-eight guns, and a killer’s heart. Brigadier General Stafford Le Roy Irwin, artillery commander of the 9th Infantry Division, had covered 735 miles in a four-day motor march across the icy, rutted Atlas. Irwin’s arrival in Thala at eight P.M. on Sunday night was “dramatic and effective,” Dunphie later declared. “Irwin himself was a tonic. Artillery was the one thing we lacked and the one thing we wanted.” For his part, Irwin judged the predicament at Thala “extremely critical.”

  A West Point classmate of Eisenhower’s, Irwin was a tall, russet-haired cavalryman who had switched to artillery in 1917 because calibrating gunnery seemed more challenging than guessing the proper mix of hay and oats for horses. Witty and urbane, a Virginian, he was a skilled watercolorist who loved poetry almost as much as he loved massing fires. By first light on February 22—despite wretched maps, squally weather, and British misapprehension over the enemy’s whereabouts—Irwin had emplaced his guns in a three-mile arc so that the first German shells of the morning were answered in kind. The lines were barely a thousand yards apart, and snipers discouraged forward observation, so much of the American gunnery involved blindly dumping hundreds of shells on the reverse slope of the next ridge.

  It served. At seven A.M. Broich phoned Rommel, who had returned to Kasserine. The panzers had planned to attack, but now Allied shells were raining down. Also, at five A.M. the British had launched an armored sally against a salient on the German right. (“I’m sorry,” the British tank commander told his men, “but we’ve got to go out on a forlorn hope. I doubt whether any of us will come back.”) The attack had been repulsed, with seven of ten British tanks destroyed, but the raid implied unexpected fortitude. A more serious counterattack could follow. Perhaps they should wait? Rommel agreed.

  The field marshal had shot his bolt. Despite captured stocks, his army was low on ammunition, with but four days’ rations left, and only enough fuel to travel less than two hundred miles. Arab spies and Luftwaffe reconnaissance reported Allied reinforcements headed to Thala. After Broich’s call, Rommel drove to the front. He scanned the shell-plowed terrain outside Thala, then returned to his tent in a thicket between Djebel Chambi and the Hatab River. At noon, Kesselring landed at Kasserine in his little Storch and motored to the command post in Rommel’s staff car.

  True to character, Kesselring felt optimistic. Early in the weekend, he had feared the offensive was sputtering. But reports filtering into his headquarters near Rome the previous night seemed satisfactory, “even promising of success.” True, Arnim’s refusal to send all of the 10th Panzers was “a very serious failure…which could not be made good again,” and Kesselring had reproached him. Yet the Allies were reeling, Kesselring believed.

  Rommel wasted no time in disabusing him of this notion. In an hour-long conference frequently interrupted by a jangling telephone, he insisted on “stopping the attack and withdrawing the attack group.” Rommel lashed out at Arnim, the Luftwaffe, the Italians, even the “poor combat value” of his own men. His left flank was exposed to attack from the west, where the American defense “had been very skillfully executed.” The assault on Thala, rescheduled for one P.M., would be postponed again. A staff officer recorded Rommel’s cooler arguments:

  It appears futile to continue the attack in view of the constant reinforcing of the hostile forces, the unfavorable weather, which renders the terrain impassable off the hard roads, and because of the increasing problems caused by the mountain terrain, which is so unsuited to the employment of armored units. All this add[s] to the low strength of our organization.

  “Rommel was in a depressed mood,” Kesselring observed. “I noticed in him a scarcely concealed desire to go back to his army on the southern front as soon as possible…. I thought it best to raise his self-confidence by expressing my confidence in him, citing his former accomplishments which were achieved under much more aggravating circumstances.” Montgomery’s army was “still far away” and no threat. “We have the initiative,” Kesselring added. “Tébessa is with
in easy reach.”

  No use. The old warhorse would not answer the bugle again. He showed “nothing of his usual passionate will to command,” Kesselring noted. “Rommel was physically worn out and psychologically fatigued.” The Desert Fox had “undoubtedly turned into a tired old man.”

  Thala would prove the high-water mark of the Axis campaign in northwest Africa. Shelling by both sides continued the rest of that rainy Monday. By sunset, American gunners had only a fifteen-minute supply of 105mm ammunition left; Irwin later deemed February 22, 1943, “the toughest day [I] experienced during World War II”—strong words from a man who would see much combat in the next two years. But the tide had swung. The reprieved Tommies at Thala chattered “as if they had been enjoying a bath after a polo match,” reporter A. B. Austin wrote. “Absolute Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  Back in Rome, Kesselring formally authorized the withdrawal. On Monday night, Axis troops left their trenches and slipped back through Kasserine Pass, unhurried and unbowed. The 21st Panzer served as a rear guard, but there was nothing to guard against. “The enemy follows only hesitantly,” the Panzer Army Africa war diary noted on February 23. “The day passes without fighting of any consequence.” Broich waited near Kasserine village until the last vehicle had rolled through a gap in a freshly laid minefield and sappers had plugged the exit with a few final Teller mines. Rommel was already speeding through Gafsa on his return to Mareth in the southeast. He took a moment to write home: “I’ve stood up well so far to the exhausting days of battle. Unfortunately we won’t be able to hold the ground we’ve gained for long.”