An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  On the evening of March 20, a serpentine column of 500 Rangers and seventy mortarmen veered northeast off Highway 15 three miles outside El Guettar. They had taped their dog tags to prevent clinking and blackened their skin with dirt and spit. Up the scree they tramped, stumbling over unseen obstacles on an unblazed trail. More than a thousand boots scraped the rock with a soft hiss that one soldier likened to “the sighing of the sea.”

  For ten miles they snaked over the fissured shoulder of Djebel Orbata, a 3,700-foot bluff looming above Gumtree Road. They crossed flumes and saddles; to scale the sandstone cliffs, they clasped wrists to form human chains. Their hands were bloodied, their fatigues shredded. At one A.M., the moon rose. Among those struggling to keep up was a bald, middle-aged socialite named Ralph M. Ingersoll, who had been managing editor of Fortune and The New Yorker, and then general manager of Time, Inc. Now he was just another footsore engineer lieutenant.

  No one will ever believe how beautiful it was on that march after the moon came out [he wrote]…. The deep valleys, the jagged peaks, the play of moonlight and shadow in the gorges, the delicate translucent puffs of clouds that drifted slowly across the edge of the moon as it rose higher and arched across the sky—all these were themes in a symphony in gray and silver tones…. Going over the saddle of a hill, you could see the line of men for several hundred yards ahead, winding down the hillside, figures in soft silver armor.

  By first light on the twenty-first, Ingersoll and the mortarmen had fallen behind; the night seemed less enchanting after more sweaty miles lugging the heavy tubes. But the Rangers were where they wanted to be: a thousand yards above Gumtree Road, overlooking the sleeping Centauro encampment. The Italians in the narrow gorge had left their flank unguarded. Some Rangers dozed while awaiting the attack order, and when Darby woke them they “scrambled to their feet…rubbing fists in their eyes like sleepy children.” He studied the tents and trenchworks below, then announced, “Okay, men, let’s have a shoot.” The Rangers fixed bayonets and scuttled down the hill. “You wait and see,” another soldier murmured, “they won’t bring no prisoners back.”

  The brisk bugle notes of “Charge” echoed along the sierra, now aglow with the ferrous tints of dawn. Morning shadows limned the valley with blue piping. “Give them some steel!” Darby cried. The Rangers clattered forward in a whooping semicircle. Bullets scythed the Italian officers’ mess, set for a breakfast no one would eat. Soldiers in their underwear poured from the tents, flushed by grenades. “Nice shooting,” Darby called over the radio. “We need a little cold steel over there on the hill mass to the south…. They are making a nuisance of themselves up there.” Ingersoll arrived in time to hear mortar rounds belch from their tubes. Rangers kneeling behind the rocks reminded him of soldiers in a Civil War print shooting along “a tumbledown stone fence in Virginia instead of Tunisia.”

  Along the valley’s north wall, white flags began to flap. Prisoners were taken, and an Italian-speaking Ranger chaplain persuaded more to surrender. Blue smoke draped the valley, thick with “odors of hot guns and dust stirred from the muzzle blasts,” one Ranger reported. Dead Italians littered the camp, their waxy faces frozen in surprise. A few German artillery rounds replied, but by noon the fight was over. The delayed arrival of the heavy mortars had allowed some Italians to escape up the road, but many others, in ragged overcoats patched with coarse twine, were captured. Between the Rangers and Allen’s troops, now pressing up Gumtree Road, the prisoner haul exceeded a thousand.

  Kitchen trucks drove up with a barrel of hot stew, which the men ladled into their canteen cups or helmets. By four P.M., the Rangers were back in their bivouac. Allen’s three infantry regiments continued forward along a fifteen-mile crescent southeast of El Guettar before digging in for the night.

  “Few Germans in front of II Corps,” Patton’s intelligence officer, Monk Dickson, reported. “Rommel [sic] probably will attack us with whatever he has left after dealing with Eighth Army. Probably not earlier than 24 March.”

  In five days, the Americans had covered seventy-five miles, taking Gafsa, El Guettar, and Sened Station, while reclaiming more than 2,000 square miles of territory—at a cost of fifty-seven battle casualties. “It’s all going like maneuvers,” Terry Allen mused. “It can’t be right.”

  Ted Roosevelt woke on Tuesday, March 23, to the harsh cough of machine-gun fire. Flipping the blanket from his bedroll, he sat up with the creaky deliberation of a fifty-six-year-old man nursing a bum knee, arthritic joints, and a fibrillating heart. He had kept his boots on for the scant warmth they offered. For months he had been miserably cold, “the cold of the desert,” he called it. To Eleanor he had written three days earlier: “There’s but one thought I keep to me: Aren’t we too old to be called on to grapple with the enemy? Should not flaming youth leap into the breach—shouldering us aside—so that we can sit in the sun?”

  Leaning on a cane, he stumped up the ridge with his gamecock hobble. He could tell by the high rate of fire that the machine guns were German; their sound now mingled with the answering chatter from American weapons. A sentry barked the password challenge—“Three?”—and was answered with the countersign: “Strikes!” Moonlight coated the landscape in quicksilver, and fog drifted across the desert pan below. But a rosy glow in the east showed that dawn was coming fast. Gun flashes rippled like heat lightning. Roosevelt found the 18th Infantry Regiment’s command post on Hill 336—“Wop Hill”—and lowered himself into a chest-deep slit trench.

  “The battlefield lay at my feet, a circular plain about seven miles in diameter,” he would write Eleanor two days later. “I could see it all.” The American line formed a fifteen-mile fishhook. The 1st Division’s three regiments—16,000 men—occupied Keddab Ridge from north to south. The 26th Infantry held the north flank near Gumtree Road, on Roosevelt’s left. Part of the 16th Infantry and a battalion from the 18th Infantry held the center. A few hundred yards to his right, the ridge petered out in a narrow valley bisected by Highway 15, which ran from El Guettar eight miles in the rear past the American line and on toward Gabès over the horizon. Across the highway to the south, the land lifted again and the American line resumed. Only a few hours earlier, Roosevelt had dispatched two battalions from the 18th Infantry to extend the line onto the lower slopes of 3,000-foot Djebel Berda. On ground so rugged that guns had to be winched into position, the battalions tied in with Darby’s Rangers, whose entrenchments swung to the west and provided the long American shank with its barbed hook.

  The chink of tools caught Roosevelt’s attention. Soldiers were furiously hacking slit trenches out of the rocky ground, regardless of the ants and scorpions infesting the ridgeline. Small white-petaled daisies covered the slope, straining toward the rising sun. The Big Red One had planned to attack this morning, under yet another change of orders from Alexander. Eighth Army’s difficulties at Mareth had caused Montgomery to reconsider his contempt for the Americans. Just three days before, he had dismissed the Yanks in his diary as “complete amateurs.” Now he needed their help.

  Patton was asked to threaten the Axis flank by attacking down Highway 15 toward Gabès. During the night, American artillery had moved forward to provide covering fire for Allen’s infantry even as intelligence reports warned that panzers were moving toward II Corps for a possible spoiling attack. From the swelling thunder of guns and the shells now snapping overhead, Roosevelt could guess that the enemy had stolen a march and struck first. Under orders from Kesselring, who recognized that an American thrust down the Gabès highway would trap the First Italian Army at Mareth, Arnim dispatched the strongest of his three armored divisions—the storied 10th Panzer—to counterattack before Patton moved.

  A voice carried up Hill 336. “Here they come!” Roosevelt peered into the dust and glare, his weak eyes watering at the strain. The terrain along the Gabès road was brutally open, offering little cover other than tuft grass and a few olive trees. Then suddenly, as if materializing from the dust itself, the panzers ap
peared: a fleet in rectangular formation bulling up the highway. Hundreds of Wehrmacht infantrymen clattered from trucks behind the tanks, then trotted forward with their rifles at port arms. To one officer the apparition resembled “a huge iron fort moving down the valley.”

  Sheaves of orange fire leaped from the front edge of the formation. “The enemy tanks numbered in three digits,” one sergeant later recalled, “but no one had the heart to count them.” Roosevelt had the heart, fibrillating or not: on his right flank, before smoke obscured the enemy echelons, he counted twenty-four panzers breaking toward the gap traced by Highway 15. There were, in fact, more, although the entire 10th Panzer was down to fifty-seven tanks and a comparable number of armored cars and half-tracks. Two other armored prongs veered toward the American left, followed by grenadiers and a flatbed Volkswagen hauling extra ammunition. Bellowing encouragement above the battle din, Roosevelt ordered another tank destroyer battalion forward from Gafsa and then radioed commands to his artillerymen. Waves of gull-winged Stukas attacked the ridge, swooping so low that officers emptied their pistols skyward before diving for cover. “I felt I could reach up my hand and grasp them,” Roosevelt later told Eleanor. The panzers churned out banks of white smoke to hide themselves and the grenadiers. Soon even the sun vanished. “The plain,” Roosevelt reported, “became a smoky, dusty dream.”

  On the American left flank, smoke and dust were the least of it. By eight A.M., two U.S. artillery battalions—the 32nd and the 5th—were in mortal peril after being caught in the exposed forward positions they had occupied in anticipation of attacking rather than being attacked. “Many human silhouettes coming over a ridge in front,” one platoon leader reported. For reasons uncertain—simple confusion was always possible—the II Corps staff had also ordered the 1st Division to cancel plans for stacking extra ammunition with the guns; true to character, the division mostly ignored the corps order, but shells ran short anyway. Gunners sloshed cans of water to cool their glowing barrels while others struggled from the rear with ninety-six-pound rounds on their shoulders. Darting among shallow folds on the battlefield, German soldiers barked, “Hitler kommt! Surrender!” Artillerymen fired a few final point-blank salvos, spiked their guns with grenades, and fought in retreat as riflemen.

  Two infantry battalions to the left of Roosevelt’s command post also fared poorly. Panzers slammed into the 3rd Battalions of both the 18th and 16th Infantry Regiments, grinding slit trenches beneath their tracks. Both units gave ground and retreated across Keddab Ridge before stiffening at a broad wadi behind the American line; the hand-to-hand fighting was as brutal as that on Longstop Hill three months earlier. One company—K of the 18th—kept the grenadiers at bay with synchronized showers of hand grenades and shouts of “Come on, you Hun bastards!” By late morning, the company had tossed 1,300 grenades and suffered more than sixty casualties. In a small oasis near the wadi, Terry Allen—hair disarranged, necktie long ripped off—summoned reinforcements from Gafsa and supplies from as far away as Tébessa. As the sound of German tank fire drew near, a staff officer proposed moving the division command post. “I will like hell pull out,” Allen answered, “and I’ll shoot the first bastard who does.”

  Desperate as the fight was along Keddab Ridge, it was the southern German thrust down Highway 15 that most imperiled the 1st Division. Not far from Roosevelt’s perch, the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion anchored the segment of American line overlooking the road. Thirty panzers struck so quickly that one company buckled and fell back with heavy losses while another, also mauled, fought until its ammunition racks were empty. German tanks poured into the gap and had nearly broken through to turn the American flank when Company A opened fire at 2,200 yards; the 75mm volley staggered the panzers, which veered south only to mire in boggy ground and a minefield along a dry lake bed. Fire intensified from both the tank destroyers and Allen’s artillery. With each hit, the men on the ridgeline roared their approval, none louder than leather-lunged Roosevelt. By midmorning the panzers had seen enough of the gap the Americans now called Death Valley. “They hesitated, turned around, and retreated,” Roosevelt reported. “The men around me burst into cheers.”

  Twenty-four of thirty-six guns from the 601st were lost. Collectively, the battalion had fired nearly 3,000 75mm shells and almost 50,000 machine-gun rounds. The unit commander, to whom Patton had sent word that “I expect him to die if there is an attack,” survived to notify Allen that his battalion no longer existed. Lost, too, were seven new M-10 guns from the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion, which rushed into battle from Gafsa only to be ambushed on the valley floor at ten A.M. (“Gallant but green,” Roosevelt commented after watching the sally.) Yet the 10th Panzer had been cut up even worse. American artillery, tank destroyers, and mines knocked out thirty-seven enemy tanks; some were towed away by German salvage teams, but others burned furiously. The enemy retreated eastward to regroup. American soldiers huzzahed themselves hoarse.

  The first act was over, but the Germans never settled for simple one-act dramas. Allen and Roosevelt tidied up the line. Wounded men thrashed on their stretchers. More guns hurried forward. Nineteen U.S. jeeps, harried by Stukas and long-range artillery, sped to the rear for more ammunition; thirteen made it back, wallowing like overloaded scows beneath crates of bullets and shells.

  With sirens screaming from his motorcycle escort, Patton drove up from Fériana—not before taking time to berate a soldier for being ill-shaven and legging-less, although he had just left the line to fetch more ammunition. Patton had wondered where the Germans were. Now he knew. “I want to fight the champ,” he said. “If you lose, you’ve lost to the champ and it’s no disgrace. If you win, you’re the new champ.”

  At three P.M., a British radio intercept team working with II Corps deciphered a transmission from a 10th Panzer reconnaissance unit. Six German battalions would renew the attack at four P.M. At 3:45 another intercepted message warned: “Angriff bis 1640 verschoben.” The attack had been postponed until 4:40 to allow German artillery to reposition. Patton deemed the intelligence urgent enough to warn his subordinates in uncoded messages of the imminent assault and then the brief delay. At 4:15 Allen ordered his signalers to broadcast a message over a 10th Panzer radio frequency: “What the hell are you guys waiting for? We have been ready since four P.M. Signed, First Division.” Patton, who had arrived at the division’s command post, shook his head. “Terry, when are you going to learn to take this damned war seriously?”

  Patton’s uncoded warnings and Allen’s taunt alerted the Germans to their security lapses, and 10th Panzer soon changed its codes. “We couldn’t read German mail for quite a long time after that,” Allen’s intelligence officer later acknowledged. The British were furious at the American indiscretion, but for now the Yanks stood ready. At 4:45 two grenadier battalions, a motorcycle battalion, an artillery battalion, and two panzer battalions with some fifty tanks appeared on the lip of Highway 15, just over two miles from Keddab Ridge. Patton and Allen moved up to join Roosevelt in his slit trench on Hill 336, as if, one officer suggested, watching “an opera from a balcony seat.”

  This time the panzers hung back, milling in a miasma of brown dust beyond range of the tank destroyers. A. J. Liebling likened the tanks’ balky advance to “diffident fat boys coming across the floor at a party to ask for the next dance, stopping at the slightest excuse, going back and then coming on again.” The German grenadiers showed no such hesitation: straight for the American line they marched. The crackle of small arms and the deeper boom of heavy guns grew in fury. “The men walked upright, moved slowly, and made no attempt at concealment or maneuver,” one battalion commander later reported. “We cut them down at fifteen hundred yards. It was like mowing hay.”

  American gunners for the first time had experimented with ricochet fire—deliberately skittering their shells across the ground through enemy formations, with devastating results. Now they used a “scissors and search” pattern: some tubes adjusted their fire from longer
ranges to shorter, others reversed the pattern. They swept the battlefield with steel as multiple sprinklers water a garden. Darby watched from Djebel Berda in the south as American time-fuze artillery shells—set to burst a few feet above the ground—rained on the enemy formations. “Eerie black smoke of the time shells showed that they were bursting above the heads of the Germans,” he wrote. “There was no running, just a relentless forward lurching of bodies.”

  The fight descended into something between war and manslaughter. Roosevelt, who had ordered the time-fuze barrage, thought the battle “seemed unreal.” Gaps appeared in the grenadier ranks. The faces and uniforms of those still standing turned brown with grit as if the doomed men had already begun returning, earth to earth, dust to dust. Roosevelt later wrote:

  Just in front of me were four hundred men, a German unit. We took them under fire and they went to ground behind some sand dunes. The artillery went after them with time shells, air burst. In no time they were up running to the rear. Black bursts over their head, khaki figures reeling and falling.

  Enemy soldiers bunched behind one hill in such numbers that the formation seemed to spread like a shadow. Then Allied artillery found the reverse slope. “The battalion broke from cover and started to run for another wadi in the rear,” reported Clift Andrus. “But none ever reached it.” At 6:45 P.M. an 18th Infantry observation post reported: “Our artillery crucified them.” Shells fell at seven-yard intervals across the retreating shot-torn ranks. “My God,” Patton murmured to Roosevelt, “it seems a crime to murder good infantry like that.”