Allen nodded vigorously, head swiveling to keep the cigarette smoke from his eyes. Anderson squinted at the map for a long minute, then also nodded. As for the loan of an infantry regiment, Bradley refused. “We’d like to help you, but you’re asking me to do something I will not agree to without direct orders from Ike.” To his staff he added, “This campaign is too important to the prestige of the American Army to take such risks.” Eisenhower soon concurred, telling his corps commander, “Stand your ground, Brad.”
To seize the hill, Bradley turned to troops whose self-esteem and reputation may have been the lowest in the U.S. Army. Since the fiasco at Fondouk three weeks earlier, the 34th Division had spent every day in intense remedial training, practicing night attacks, tank-infantry tactics, and—led by the division commander, Charles Ryder—marching fifty yards behind rolling artillery barrages. Now Bradley told Ryder: “Get me that hill and you’ll break up the enemy’s defenses clear across our front. Take it and no one will ever again doubt the toughness of your division.”
Nine battalions from the 34th swept toward Sidi Nsir along a 6,000-yard front on April 27. A mendacious German deserter had claimed that Hill 609 was held by only a war-worn rear guard, which could be overrun by a determined platoon of fifty men. “There was excitement in the air and the tone was for an immediate attack,” one captain later recalled. But Ryder recognized that what he called the “checkerboard of interlocking defenses” required that his men reduce the adjacent hills before attacking 609 itself.
Troops picked at their C rations, filled their canteens, and smoked last cigarettes. At dusk, each soldier tied a white cloth to the back of his helmet so the man behind could follow him in the dark. Engineers marked paths through enemy minefields with white tape or rocks wrapped in toilet paper. Every few minutes, platoon leaders huddled under their blankets with red-lensed flashlights to check their compasses. “For the love of heaven and hell,” a company commander’s voice called in the darkness, “get going.” As they edged into the killing zone, the ripping-canvas sound of a German machine gun split the night, joined by a second and a third. “Our men were crouched gray shapes, running, falling flat, firing, running again,” one witness reported. Mortar rounds burst in the saddles between the hills, and yellow flares blossomed overhead. The men again fell flat, still as death except for the writhing wounded. Mines and booby traps detonated with a short, flat pop; more men writhed. “We lay there awaiting dawn, listening to the cries of a wounded man about a hundred yards down the side slope,” a soldier later recalled. “[He] weakened and finally became silent.”
Two attacks failed with heavy casualties, but by midday on Wednesday, April 28, Hills 435 and 490 had fallen between Sidi Nsir and 609. Four German counterattacks were repulsed. All day the valleys rumbled with artillery fire; the crack of shells splitting rock carried from the hilltops. Hundreds of men fell sick in apparent reaction to Atabrine, a synthetic antimalaria drug dubbed “yellow magic” and recently distributed in lieu of quinine, the world supply of which Japan controlled almost exclusively. Many would have preferred malaria. Weak and nauseated, they vomited down the front of their uniforms and fouled their trousers with uncontrollable diarrhea before rising on command in Thursday’s wee hours to stumble forward again.
Fog muffled every footstep as the 3rd Battalion of the 135th Infantry advanced 2,000 yards from Hill 490 to El Kradra, an Arab hamlet beneath the south wall of 609. Watching at first light, Drew Middleton reported that he could trace “the path of these soldiers through the wheat just as you would follow the path of Pickett’s charge through the summer wheat at Gettysburg.” But an attack against Hill 531 on the right was thrown back—the defenders wired together bundles of “potato masher” grenades and dropped them on GIs scaling the escarpment—and delays on the other flank left the battalion at El Kradra vulnerable to a German counterattack. Muzzle flashes erupted across the face of 609 like “tiny sparks, and the wind brought us the angry chatter of a machine gun,” Middleton noted. In disarray, the battalion retreated 400 yards from the village to shelter in the olives. Fleas from the village huts so tormented some men that they stripped to their shoes, helmets, and ammunition belts, then dunked their infested uniforms in gasoline. Hundreds of shells crashed across the crest of Hill 609—“it resembles an erupting volcano,” one soldier said—but the Germans held fast and the American momentum ebbed.
Ryder’s troubles at 609 had increasingly discomfited Terry Allen, who complained that his 16th Infantry was catching “unshirted hell” in artillery and mortar salvoes fired from the hill. At two P.M. on April 28, he had ordered all three 1st Division regiments to halt until the 34th Division could better protect his left flank. In a querulous phone call to Ryder, Allen asked how much longer the 34th needed to capture Hill 606.
“Don’t you mean Hill 609?” Ryder replied.
“No, I mean Hill 606. My division artillery has put enough fire on that hill to knock it down three meters.”
Another morning of inactivity on Thursday was more than Allen could bear. The corps’ casualties in the offensive now exceeded 2,400 men, and nearly half of those came in the Big Red One; while enemy losses were uncertain, only 400 prisoners had been captured since Good Friday. The 34th Division had been reduced to firing white phosphorus shells into the bunchgrass around 609 so that sharpshooters could pick off Germans flushed by the flames. Convinced that his own division’s fortunes were being dragged down by Ryder’s failure, Allen on Thursday stopped pacing long enough to order the 16th Infantry forward again. The unit was to seize Hill 523, another fortified butte a mile due east of 609. Allen proceeded despite trenchant protests from the regimental commander, Colonel George A. Taylor, who considered the attack rash.
Impatience cost Allen dearly. In a moonless drizzle shortly after midnight on Friday, April 30, the 1st Battalion of the 16th Infantry crossed a wheat field from the south, climbed Hill 523, and by 4:45 A.M. had captured eleven Germans while killing or routing several dozen more. But dawn brought a quick reversal: in the gray light, figures in coal-scuttle helmets darted through a nearby earthquake fissure to surround the hill. The subsequent mêlée with Barenthin Regiment troops was “more like a street fight than a battle at any distance,” one survivor reported. “We couldn’t call for artillery because the forces were so close.” The brawl, he added, disintegrated into “fist fights, coupled with grenades.”
When the crack of artillery finally carried to Colonel Taylor’s command post, a clerk noted in his log that “the sound is sweet to our ears”—then realized that those were German guns. Ted Roosevelt ordered a tank company up the hill, but mines and 47mm fire destroyed three Shermans in a narrow draw—the lead tank took more than two dozen hits—and others were repulsed short of the crest. Through breaks in the smoke, the bitter end could be seen from a nearby observation post, which at noon reported to Taylor: “The Heinies are all over that hill.” By 12:30 the Germans had marched away more than 150 prisoners, including the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles J. Denholm; another hundred dead and wounded Americans were left behind. In the next twenty-four hours, Hill 523 was to change hands three more times.
Hill 609 would change hands only once, finally. Despite skepticism from his armor commanders—“No one in his right mind would consider putting tanks in mountains,” one colonel warned—Bradley persuaded Ryder to order seventeen Shermans up the west slope at dawn on April 30. Clouds of infantrymen trailed behind, often grabbing the skirt of a tank with one hand while firing their rifles with the other. “God bless all of you,” a company commander from the 133rd Infantry told his men. “We must succeed or die trying.” Some did die: Private First Class Edward S. Kopsa of Grundy Center, Iowa, fell with a shell wound so gaping that his heart could be seen beating. “Tell my mother,” Kopsa said, and the beating stopped. But within two hours, the tanks had covered almost a mile, machine guns rattling and main guns roaring. The reek of gunpowder saturated air that was already full of primitive shrieks an
d cries for help. By midafternoon, American soldiers had scrambled up a goat trail to gain the summit, where they winkled the defenders from their breastworks. Additional battalions enveloped the hill from both flanks, and among the first reinforcements to top the crest were Iowans from the 2nd Battalion of the 168th Infantry, including Company F of Villisca and Company E of Shenandoah. Feeble German counterattacks on May Day were shattered with artillery and automatic-weapons fire, and all along the line scouts reported enemy forces retreating or surrendering.
“Jerries approach our troops, some run, some fall on their faces, most of them are weary, haggard, wild-eyed, terrified men who swing arms above heads,” the 16th Infantry reported. “A panorama of defeat, as vehicles, mules, and men walk toward the [GIs] with white flags fluttering.” Others feigned surrender with white-flag ruses—Staff Sergeant Clarence T. Storm, whose wife worked in the Villisca five-and-dime, was among those killed by such treachery—and the GIs’ disdain for the enemy grew murderous. “For twenty-four hours,” Bradley noted, “few prisoners came in from the 34th Division’s front.”
The summit of 609 resembled hell’s half-acre, a fire-scoured wasteland of spent brass, bloody bandages, and, oddly, family photos, as if those about to die had pulled them from their wallets for a last farewell. The dead Germans in their rock redoubts reminded one soldier of Civil War photos showing bloated corpses along the rail fences at Antietam. The tabletop “was literally covered with bodies,” another wrote. “The stench was terrible.” Although the hill was “pitted with shell craters, thick as currants in cake,” few holes were deeper than six inches: solid rock underlay the thin soil. After futilely trying to bury the dead in these shallow craters, GIs tossed them into earthquake rifts and a bulldozer plowed them over. “Those who went through it,” wrote Ernie Pyle, “would seriously doubt that war could be any worse than those two weeks of mountain fighting.”
The 34th Division had redeemed itself, although such fine notions seemed vacant in the immediate aftermath. Ryder put his losses at 324 men. The American dead were hauled from the hill in truck beds. “All you could see,” an artilleryman later remembered, “was their shoes hanging off the tail gate.” Across the valley, a staff officer in the 16th Infantry summoned a lieutenant preparing to lead a patrol back up Hill 523. “I don’t believe I would take any prisoners on 523.”
“No,” the lieutenant agreed, “no prisoners will be taken.”
But except for dead men and Colonel Denholm’s map, the hill was empty. The enemy was gone. As Bradley had foreseen, the capture of Hill 609 unhinged enemy defenses across the entire front, from the Mediterranean to the Mousetrap. American troops bayed in pursuit. A reporter watching from 609 wrote, “At our feet every road was thronged with troops, guns, and supplies, pouring northward.”
Outside Béja, Bradley sat on a metal stool in his tent, reading dispatches. He studied the map on the easel, now crisscrossed with blue and red crayon marks showing an enemy in full retreat and pursuers close behind. He was in good humor, chuckling often and, as his aide later recounted, “smoothing the sparse gray hair on his head and thinking aloud.” Fresh reports arrived from the 9th Division in the north, the 34th and 1st in the south, and the 1st Armored Division, preparing to blow down the Tine valley on two mine-cleared routes named Broadway and Riley Street. The enemy appeared to be falling back as much as fifteen miles to the far side of Mateur. When another dispatch noted signs of a possible counterattack, Bradley nodded.
“Let ’em come,” he said. “We want to kill Germans.”
Mateur fell on May 3, three days ahead of Alexander’s estimate. The 91st Reconnaissance Battalion entered the deserted town from the south and west at 11:30 A.M. just as German demolitionists blew up the last bridge across the Tine to the east; by early evening, Army engineers had a new span in place. A dozen roads and rail lines converged at Mateur, and its capture ended any Axis hope of concentrating against the British, who were still struggling in the Medjerda valley twenty miles to the south.
The land here flattened out before rising again in a final set of foothills that cradled two large lakes between Mateur and Bizerte. Swallows scissored the brilliant air, rich with the odors of manure and fresh-cut hay, and poplars marched along the road shoulders in perfect ranks. In a white manor house flanked by cypresses, troops found a biography of Bismarck open on the desk; soon they surmised that the mansion for months had served as General Hasso von Manteuffel’s division headquarters. American scouts sat on a knoll overlooking the Tine, singing “Moonlight on the River Colorado.” Others got drunk in a Mateur wine cellar, and the 1st Armored commander ordered them shot at sunset. “General,” a staff colonel urged him, “I think we ought to let the men live until sunrise. It’s customary.” General Harmon reluctantly agreed, and on reflection commuted the sentence. Wounded Americans and captured Germans shared a farmhouse aid station near Mateur, “smoking, cursing, or grimacing.” A GI who arrived by ambulance with a bullet in his lung gestured at a column of prisoners and murmured, “Tell the sons of bitches to go to hell.”
Many thousands had retreated to the last bastion, the Lake Ichkeul hills. American gunners, wearing Barbasol shave cream as sunblock and head nets against the swarming flies, plastered them with artillery that ignited the dry grass. “Arab shacks and straw burned with great fury, sending clouds of smoke into the air,” an officer noted. A company of Shermans from the 13th Armored Regiment was sent to overrun trenches sheltering a German rear guard. “Some of the enemy were buried alive when the side of the trenches collapsed under the weight of the medium tanks,” another officer reported. “Others were mowed down by the tankers’ machine guns.” Commanders urged them forward. “Here is our chance,” Eddy told the 9th Division. “Don’t let it slip away—push on!” Harmon ordered his tank crews to drive “like shit through a tin goose.”
The 1st Armored Division had been held on a very short leash for weeks, and its hour was about to arrive. The terrain now favored a pursuit by Old Ironsides’ 200 tanks, and Alexander scheduled the final assault on Bizerte for May 6, at the same time as a massive attack by First Army to break through to Tunis. Once again, though, the German defenses looked formidable, with antitank gunners on the approaches to Bizerte said to be “dug in to their eyebrows.” Hamilton Howze, who had returned to a line unit after Ward’s departure, later wrote: “In the time of waiting I confess I found out what fear is: it is a monkey’s paw that squeezes your liver in a heavy grip.” On a visit to Harmon’s command post southwest of Mateur, Bradley stood in a grainfield scanning the countryside. “Can you do it?” he asked Harmon.
“Yes, but it’s going to be expensive,” Harmon replied. “I’d guess fifty tanks to finish the job.”
“Go ahead. It’ll cost us less in the long run if we cut him to pieces quickly.”
Yet Harmon nursed his own doubts. If the 34th Division had been the Army’s most troubled combat unit before the victory at Hill 609, Old Ironsides after Kasserine and Maknassy was a close second. Harmon had spent his month in command trying to rebuild what he deemed “a crybaby outfit,” still fractured by divided loyalties to Ward and Robinett and “honeycombed with dissension.” But he had alienated many with his brusque approach, exemplified by a memo in mid-April that castigated the division for “lack of discipline, lack of system, and a general sloppy appearance.” And at dusk on April 13 he had summoned every officer to the slopes of Djebel Lessouda, where the charred wreckage from Sidi bou Zid lay scattered in the shadows. Harmon delivered a shrill rebuke, which, in Robinett’s description, “damned all past performance of duty, sparing none.” He concluded with a raspy warning: “The division will get to Mateur, but maybe you won’t.” Some men had the temerity to boo; most trudged off in dejection. “His speech was not very well received,” a lieutenant later wrote. “We all went to bed that night very much hurt.”
Now they had reached Mateur; but the biggest prize still lay ahead, in Bizerte. On May 5 Harmon drove to Robinett’s headquarters and
led the CCB commander into an open field for a private conversation. With his massive skull and barrel chest, Harmon towered over his pint-sized subordinate. “Will the damned tanks fight?” he demanded.
“Damned right they will fight, as some are doing now,” Robinett snapped. “They have always fought and will fight again.” Never content to leave well enough alone, he then berated Harmon for questioning “the courage of these men.” Harmon turned on his heel and returned to his jeep, while a furious Robinett tromped back to the tent and composed a message to all ranks: “Towards the rear anonymous individuals have said that we are ‘not battle worthy.’ This insult to our glorious dead and to you, the courageous living, shall not be forgotten nor left uncontested.”
After that unpromising prelude, Harmon held a final planning conference for his lieutenants at the division command post a few hours later. The attack was set for first light the next morning, Thursday, May 6, with CCB in the vanguard. But Robinett’s behavior during the past month continued to gnaw at Harmon. Robinett “seems to think only in terms of defense and is definitely casualty conscious,” Harmon privately informed the War Department. “I do not feel that he has the qualities of leadership that are necessary in an armored division.” Six months of combat had worn him down. As he watched Robinett drive away from the conference toward his own command post, Harmon muttered to himself: “Hell, that fellow isn’t going to fight for me tomorrow.” The judgment was harsh and probably wrong, but Harmon’s mind was made up. Summoning his driver, he raced after Robinett to relieve him of command.
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