An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  Heatstroke felled many of those the German shells missed. Soon half the battalion was down. The other half was exhausted, but enraged after a Wehrmacht prisoner whipped out a concealed machine pistol and gunned down several Jocks before being riddled with bullets himself. For the next several days, few prisoners were taken. “The Argylls had been roused to a state of berserk fury,” observed Major J. T. McK. Anderson, who would win the Victoria Cross for his heroics at Longstop. “We just had a hate—at the Germans, the hill, and everything.” Major Anderson’s bayonet charge with thirty howling comrades finally captured el Ahmera; with the piper dead, the men settled for a windy harmonica player. But Longstop’s second crest—Djebel el Rhar, every bit as recalcitrant as it had been in December—fell only on Easter Monday, after British tanks crawled toward the summit. “The hill was an infernal sight, smoking and reeking,” a reporter wrote. Three hundred grenadiers were permitted to surrender, their Zeiss binoculars and tins of beef tongue immediately seized as spoils of war.

  Longstop had fallen, this time for good, but V Corps was running out of steam as surely as IX Corps had in the south. The Argylls had been reduced by two-thirds. More than five hundred men of the British 1st Infantry Division were killed, or wounded, or went missing in a Good Friday assault along the right bank of the Medjerda, and 329 more were lost the next day in just two battalions. Twenty-nine of forty-five tanks reinforcing the infantrymen were destroyed or damaged; they were among 252 British tanks the Germans claimed in the last ten days of April.

  Nowhere in Africa was the fighting more ferocious than on Djebel Bou Aoukaz—the Bou—a 700-foot hogback ridge four miles from Longstop and across the Medjerda. Three Guards battalions attacked the Bou and its spurs for more than a week while the Germans “threw everything but their cap badges at us.” Day after day the rush of artillery and the cackle of machine guns rocked the hill; soldiers lay at night in their slit trenches with their pathetic parapets, hand-built of scree, inhaling the “pungent scent of rosemary and evergreen torn by shell splinters and freshened by the rain.” When grenade supplies ran out the Tommies tossed rocks at the enemy, “just to keep them on the move.” Bodies in the Bou’s ripening fields were marked with rifles stuck bayonet-first in the ground, with a soupbowl helmet hung from the butt; the grave-diggers sent to collect the fallen one night reported that a hay field had sprouted “a forest of rifles.” By the end of April, the 1st Irish Guards had been reduced to eighty men including a stretcher bearer who would eventually lose his wounded leg to a surgeon’s knife but for now hobbled up and back, declaring, “I have no time for the gangrene.” The 5th Grenadier Guards suffered almost 300 casualties in holding one ridge, including thirteen of sixteen officers, under shelling of such intensity that one lieutenant was reduced to observing: “There is no doubt about it: they are very keen to get this hill.”

  The hill remained in British hands, but the rest of the bridgehead still belonged to the enemy. By April 29, both Alexander and Anderson recognized that the V Corps offensive had stalled. Allfrey had advanced six miles in an arc on either side of the Medjerda, roughly the same distance gained by Crocker’s corps, but he was still twenty-five miles from Tunis. The next day—Friday, the thirtieth—Anderson told Eisenhower that First Army in the past week had suffered 3,500 casualties, including roughly 900 killed. VULCAN had cost one man for every three yards gained. Many companies were reduced to fewer than two dozen soldiers of all ranks.

  If British losses were heavy, so were German and Italian, and there was always consolation in that. Arnim now had sixty-nine functioning panzers in all of Africa. His reserves consisted of a single depleted tank battalion.

  But still there was no Allied breakthrough, only heartache and death. Anderson rejected a truce proposal from the Hermann Göring Division to collect the dead, and at night the chinking of shovels from surreptitious burial details could be heard across the fields and orchards of the no-man’s-land. A British chaplain who found a long-dead Guardsman near the Bou later described trying to inter the man quickly before dawn. “One arm was sticking straight up,” the chaplain wrote. “We couldn’t get it in the shallow grave. Every time we forced it down, it jumped up again, a gleaming white hand in the darkness.

  “It is terribly hard to break a dead man’s arm.”

  “Count Your Children Now, Adolf!”

  WITH both British armies brought to a standstill, the final drive in the Tunisian campaign may fairly be said to have begun with the Americans. Omar Bradley’s initial assault in the north was no less frustrating than those of the British—and certainly no more valorous. But once started the attack was never stopped, even when daily progress was measured in inches, and the drive that began Good Friday can be seen as a continuous, two-week victory march to the sea that finally brought the U.S. Army battle honors fairly won.

  “We are sitting in an old busted farmhouse, writing by candlelight,” Terry Allen wrote Mary Fran on April 22. His black hair tousled, cigarette dangling from his lips, he wore the same frayed green shirt and trousers he had worn at Gafsa and El Guettar, now so mended by his orderly that the ensemble looked more like a quilt than a uniform. The aluminum stars on his shoulders were still those plucked from an Italian private two months ago. Even candlelight could not soften the tension in Allen’s face or erase the crow’s-feet etched deeper than ever around his eyes. Having turned fifty-five on April 1, he looked older. He had been to mass to pray for himself and his men, including those whom he inevitably had ordered to their deaths. “I’m hoping and praying that my scheme of maneuver is OK,” he wrote. “The strain is rather tough and I’ll be glad when this mess is over.”

  The guns finished his thought. Searing white flashes leaped from the pits and rippled along the ridgelines like heat lightning. The barrage, A. B. Austin wrote, “[filled] the hollows with light. It was if the hill waves really were pitching and rolling.” A single 105mm howitzer firing at its maximum rate could lob 4,000 pounds of shells in an hour over a 43,000-square-yard area; American gunners now massed more than 300 guns, spitting eleven tons of steel each minute. The shells were fitted with new radar sensors that made the rounds detonate forty feet or so above the target, for optimal killing dispersion. After every concentration the gunners whooped, “Count your children now, Adolf!”

  The infantry surged forward in Friday’s first light, “a long, slow line of dark-helmeted forms silhouetted in the flash,” Ernie Pyle wrote. As Eddy’s 9th Division swept across a broad, twenty-eight-mile front on the left flank, Bradley threw the heft of his attack against the right with the 34th and 1st Infantry Divisions and the 6th Armored Infantry Regiment forming a thirteen-mile crescent on a northeasterly vector. The Big Red One shook out three regiments abreast, each with a two-mile frontage, lurching toward hills designated only by their height in meters, plucked from a map—350, 407, 400, 469, 575, 394, 346, 444. Ten enemy battalions awaited the assault, backed by Tigers. Guns boomed, mortars crumped, great gouts of orange and red streaked the hilltops, and smoke lay in dirty banks across the battlefield.

  Within two hours they were in trouble if not in perdition itself, and Allen’s prayers appeared to have gone unheard. Hill 350, looming above the southwest entrance to the Mousetrap, proved especially grievous for the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry, which suffered 224 casualties on Good Friday alone. Her sister battalion, the 3rd, tallied another 138 assaulting Hill 407 two miles to the north; the commander wept at his losses. In the division center, artillery fell short for a long hour, inadvertently killing or wounding seventy men in the 16th Infantry. Soldiers found every slope seeded with antipersonnel mines, many of the kind known as Castrators or Bouncing Bettys because they sprang belt-high before detonating. In one company of the 26th Infantry, all the officers and the first sergeant were killed or wounded. A soldier in the 26th, hearing agonized shrieks from a wounded comrade, later reported: “I rolled over to him and he looked at me and pleaded, ‘Help me. Please shoot me.’” The boy soon died, unassisted.r />
  Into this maelstrom on Friday morning rode a short, sharp-featured visitor from Washington who promptly concluded that the troops lacked the requisite passion for closing with the enemy. Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair had come to Tunisia to assess American battleworthiness, for which he was responsible as commander of U.S. Army ground forces. Unsociable, enigmatic, and half-deaf, a blue-eyed Scot from Minnesota, McNair had been the youngest American general in France in 1917. An artillerist and accomplished mathematician who carried a slide rule as other men carried pipes or Bibles, he liked to describe himself as a simple “pick-and-shovel man,” but one associate likened him to “a Presbyterian pulpit speaker—all irony and intellect.” “You may do the wrong thing,” McNair often advised, “but do something.”

  Now McNair did something, and it was indeed the wrong thing. Arriving at Allen’s “old busted farmhouse” at five A.M., he strode past the steaming manure pile in the courtyard, gulped down a cup of coffee, then argued bitterly with Ted Roosevelt—who showed up in Rough Rider—over the prudence of a three-star general’s continuing closer to the battlefront. Undeterred, McNair eluded the officer assigned to escort him and pressed forward in a jeep with a large three-star placard on the bumper, bouncing toward the sound of the guns. After sweeping through the 26th Infantry on the left flank, he sped south to the 16th Infantry, grousing that “nowhere did I find anything other than 100 percent lethargy. There was not a bit of fight in the entire outfit.”

  McNair grew more liverish that afternoon, when he found much of the 2nd Battalion pinned down behind a hill and soldiers braying at him to “get the jeep the hell out of the area.” Muttering at this “sorry picture of a fighting outfit” and ignoring more advice to stay back, McNair climbed the ridgeline to an artillery observation post, where he opened a large map to study the terrain. A dozen German shells landed harmlessly behind him before the thirteenth burst with a fierce crack on the crest, killing a company first sergeant. One steel fragment sliced through the rear lip of McNair’s helmet, slowing enough so that it lodged in his skull instead of penetrating his brain; another gouged an eight-inch gash in his neck and shoulder, severing an artery. As blood soaked his open map, McNair observed, “I miscalculated my defilade.” Rushed by jeep to the division clearing station for treatment with plasma and sulfa—the general grumbled when a surgeon scissored away his $16 tailored shirt—he was then hauled by Dodge ambulance over a camel track to an evacuation hospital north of Béja. Bradley soon appeared to pin a Purple Heart—accidentally upside down—on McNair’s pajamas. Flown to a hospital in Oran before evacuation to Washington, McNair continued to complain that “American soldiers are not fighting.”

  That was untrue—a damned lie, really. Some 500 U.S. soldiers would be killed in Tunisia during Easter week, with another 2,000 wounded; no Pentagon calumny could diminish their sacrifice. While Allen’s men struggled in the south to advance a few thousand yards a day, on the left flank General Eddy’s 23,000 troops—his own 9th Division and 4,000 from the Corps Franc d’Afrique—pushed forward in vegetation so dense the men often had to crawl.

  The 47th Infantry bulled through the sword grass along Highway 7 until Green and Bald Hills loomed into view. Charred wreckage from the three failed British attacks on the Jefna fortifications littered the roadbed and lower slopes. Rather than launch yet another frontal assault, the 47th began to gnaw at the German fringes on the morning of the twenty-third, demonstrating and distracting while her two sister regiments looped north to outflank the enemy in terrain long considered impassable.

  Impassable it proved to be, at least at first. Division von Manteuffel—5,000 Axis soldiers in nine battalions—held the twenty-mile front between Jefna and the sea in fortifications so deep that some bunkers required ladders to enter. The 39th Infantry’s attack north of Highway 7 started poorly when a German patrol bushwacked and captured 150 men, including the regimental commander, Colonel J. Trimble Brown. Less than an hour later, an intrepid captain, who had seen Brown and his band led away after surrendering their rings and watches, counterattacked with Company G, killing or wounding forty-five Germans, freeing the prisoners, and saving the day if not Colonel Brown’s battle plans, which unfortunately disappeared with the fleeing enemy. Shortly before midnight Eddy relieved Brown, who collected his bag and bedroll before heading to the rear.

  So it went day after day. Savage fighting raged across more nameless hills—432, 438, 513, 382—at such close quarters that soldiers struggled to stay awake for fear their snores would attract grenades. Peaks were captured and lost, captured again and lost again. Fog hugged the hollows, making them even more opaque and sinister. One officer likened the terrain to “being led into a dark theater after the movie had started.” American gunners shattered enemy counterattacks with barrages of white phosphorus shells dumped so near to friendly lines that GIs stumbled out of the smoke with chemical specks burning holes in their uniforms. Muezzins’ calls to prayer from hilltop mosques drew gunfire from skittish troops convinced that the criers were signaling the Germans. Taking no chances, U.S. counterintelligence agents created a zone “free from Arabs” by forcibly evacuating a 400-square-mile swath east of Béja. Eddy’s victualers procured 350 mules and fifty tons of fodder to haul supplies where no jeep could travel, and each pack train returned with dead boys trussed over the saddles.

  The enemy held fast to Green and Bald, but north of Highway 7 the line slowly bent back. By April 27, the 39th Infantry was two miles north of Green Hill and threatening to envelope the entire Jefna redoubt. The 60th Infantry—though still licking its wounds from Maknassy a month earlier—pressed even farther east on the other side of the Sedjenane River; by month’s end the regiment would cover twelve miles, almost half the distance to Bizerte. The Corps Franc d’Afrique edged along the coast with three battalions of men considered too politically volatile for the main French army; among the commanders were a reputed Spanish admiral, a Jewish doctor, and an anti-Vichy colonel who had been jailed in Morocco for helping Patton during TORCH. But most colorful by far was a company of goums, Moroccan tribesmen in filthy robes and sandals cut from old tires. As conventional soldiers the “goons”—as the Americans inevitably called them—were hopeless, routinely raiding Arab villages and carrying off native women. Still, they had their uses, particularly when word spread among the enemy that goums received a bounty for every ear collected, reportedly flicking them onto the paymaster’s table as if counting off ten-franc notes. Many an Axis corporal slept with his cap pulled low. Silently the goums returned from their midnight raids with sandbags full of what may have been dried figs, though GIs eager to trade for souvenirs preferred to believe they were Axis ears.

  “One more hill!” the American officers told their men each morning, always with the ironic inflection required when comrades lie to one another. Every captured pinnacle brought better artillery observation and thus a better opportunity to pulverize the next ridge with well-aimed fire. The infantry—having learned the hard lessons of El Guettar and Maknassy—maneuvered around the flanks to force the enemy back yet again.

  “One more hill!” It was not true, not yet, but every man could sense truth beneath the fiction.

  No hill loomed larger than the flattop called Djebel Tahent locally but better known to the Americans as Hill 609. Arnim’s troops had retreated half a dozen miles across the II Corps front only to dig in deeper than ever, and by Monday, April 26, Bradley recognized that 609 was the linchpin of Axis defenses. Three miles northeast of Sidi Nsir on the American right, 609 dominated the countryside by virtue of its height and location: almost two thousand feet above sea level, it frowned down on all direct approaches from Béja to Mateur. A desolate mesa 800 yards long and 500 yards wide crowned the hill, which was dramatically faced with fifty-foot limestone cliffs on the south and east. From the summit, a man with a telescope could pick out individual house windows in Mateur twelve miles away and the hazy smudge of Bizerte another twenty miles beyond.

  Ex
cept for a small olive grove 500 yards from the southern slope, the terrain offered little cover to attackers, while the limestone palisades provided countless knobs and crevices to hide defenders. Storks nested in fissures that formed natural chimneys up the cliff walls; machine guns now nested in scree at the base. Wind tossed the yellowing wheat on the lower slopes, making the hill undulate like a great breathing thing. Neighboring heights—461, 490, 531, 455—provided intertwined fields of fire manned largely by Barenthin Regiment soldiers drawn from the Wehrmacht’s parachute and glider schools, who, in Alexander’s assessment, were “perhaps the best German troops in Africa.”

  Anderson proposed simply ignoring the hill. In a phone call to Bradley’s Béja command post on Tuesday morning, the British commander advised: “Never mind the enemy opposing you at Sidi Nsir. When you have him on a hilltop, try always to get around him. I don’t want you only to push the enemy back, but to get behind him and capture him before he can establish a bridgehead around Bizerte.” Almost as an afterthought, Anderson requested the transfer of an American infantry regiment to reinforce the stalled First Army farther south.

  Bradley was appalled, and privately concluded that Anderson was “in far over his head as an army commander.” In a hastily arranged rendezvous that afternoon at Allen’s battered farmhouse, Bradley clipped his map to an easel and explained to Anderson why 609 could not be wished away. The Big Red One had made enough progress to have an exposed left flank just a couple of miles southwest of the hill, from where German gunners had now begun to flay Allen’s troops with fire. The 1st Division was more than two thousand men understrength, including a shortfall of sixty officers; new lieutenants received a fifteen-minute orientation lecture, then were shoved straight into the line. Allen lacked the muscle to bull ahead against the five enemy battalions on his front without risking a catastrophic counterattack from Hill 609 that would roll up his left wing. Furthermore, bypassing the hill meant returning to the vulnerable valleys and again drawing fire from every hilltop Gefreiter with a mortar tube. “All this depends upon our taking Hill 609,” Bradley concluded.