An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  Harmon had nearly overtaken the jeep on the poplar-shaded road when the rush of German artillery split the air. A shell exploded a few feet behind Robinett, shredding his left leg and flinging him and his driver from their seats. More rounds crashed through the trees as soldiers appeared from the CCB encampment and bundled their wounded commander into an ambulance, which zigzagged through shell fire to the camouflaged command tent around the next bend.

  Minutes later, Harmon pushed aside the canvas flaps and walked in “looking hard as rock.” A glance at the mangled leg told Harmon that Robinett’s war was over. Robinett looked up with glassy eyes. He had already relinquished command of CCB to Colonel Benson. In an hour he would be driven to the field hospital in Béja, vomiting in agony; a regimental band waited to serenade him with “The Missouri Waltz.” A flight to Algeria and evacuation to the United States would be followed by many months of medical rehabilitation and a lasting hitch in his bantam strut.

  “You are about to win a great victory,” Robinett told Harmon thickly before stretcher bearers carried him to the ambulance, “and I only regret that I cannot be present to share the battle with my men.”

  Harmon shook his head. “Poor bastard,” he muttered, then turned and strode from the tent.

  Tunisgrad

  THE most intense artillery barrage ever seen in Africa erupted in gusts of white flame at three A.M. on May 6. More than 400 Royal Artillery guns cut loose simultaneously on targets along Highway 5, five miles south of the Medjerda River. Here First Army had concentrated for the great lunge on Tunis, now code-named Operation STRIKE. “The muzzle flashes lit up the gun pits with a dancing yellow light, and the shells, tearing overhead at a rate of five or six hundred a minute, burst a few seconds later on the opposite slope like the flowering of a field of ruby tulips,” a young officer wrote.

  Determined to bury the enemy beneath “stunning weights of metal,” gunners plotted one shell for every six feet of enemy frontage. (At El Alamein, the figure had been one shell for every thirty feet.) Shells shrieked “over our heads in an endless stream, so close, it seemed that you could almost strike a match on them,” a witness declared. After half an hour the barrage lifted momentarily, then fell with redoubled vigor, marching eastward by 100 yards every three minutes. Seventy-two suspected enemy artillery batteries that had been pinpointed by gun flashes or aerial surveillance received lavish attention: each hostile battery was hammered on three occasions with two-minute concentrations by as many as thirty-two guns. The effect was “a roof of shells…destroying every living thing that moves.” More than a few inanimate targets were also destroyed, including, as a scout sorrowfully reported, an oak vat containing 8,000 gallons of red Tunisian wine.

  Behind the guns at 5:40 A.M. came the planes, again with a bombardment unprecedented on the continent. More than 2,000 Allied sorties would be flown this Thursday, beating a path from Medjez-el-Bab to Tunis. Fighters and bombers so thick they eclipsed the rising sun concentrated on a four-mile square around Massicault and St. Cyprien along Highway 5. Insult followed injury: clouds of propaganda pamphlets warned enemy survivors that they had been duped by “Rommel” and left to die alone in Africa.

  Well before dawn, the infantry had surged forward on a 3,000-yard front, guided by a Bofors gun that fired three red tracers on a fixed line every five minutes. At Alexander’s insistence, First Army had been reinforced with two divisions and a Guards brigade from Montgomery’s horde. They had arrived more than 30,000 strong from Enfidaville over the past few days, fire-blackened tea tins banging against their yellow fenders; although headlights were authorized for the move, after years of blackout not one vehicle in five had working bulbs. No fraternal love was lost between the mountain tribe and the desert tribe—the two British armies were “as different as chalk from cheese,” General Horrocks conceded—and Tommies in the 78th Division went so far as to paint signs on their vehicles: “We have no connection with the Eighth Army.” But the added weight lent irresistible momentum to Anderson’s attack, and by daybreak the British 4th Division and the 4th Indian Division had pried a gap two miles wide through enemy defenses.

  Four tank battalions rushed through. Defenders not killed by artillery or air attack died at their posts or broke for the rear, tossing aside their rifles as they ran. Despite advance knowledge from intercepted radio messages about where the British would likely attack, Arnim was powerless; the Fifth Panzer Army had been reduced to fewer than seventy tanks, little ammunition, and even less fuel. By eleven A.M., British armor had penetrated 5,000 yards beyond the gap, with light losses. Anderson initially had proposed having his tankers linger to mop up stragglers, but Alexander overruled him. The tanks were to “drive with all speed and energy on Tunis,” Alexander ordered. “The rapier,” he later explained, “was to be thrust into the heart.”

  “The whole valley before us became a heaving sea of flame,” wrote the American journalist John MacVane. “Over a dozen roads and trails, plumes of floury dust rose from the columns of vehicles.” The stink of cordite and crushed wheat was nauseating enough to bring some men to their knees. Through “a thick pall of smoke and dust resembling ground mist,” drivers bumped along in second gear, navigating by compass heading. The correspondent Alan Moorehead described seeing Alexander racing forward “at almost reckless speed, both his hands tight on the wheel and his face whitened like a baker’s boy with white dust.”

  Allied eavesdroppers intercepted German radio messages sending medics into the line as riflemen; the walking wounded soon were ordered to join them. Another message, from Arnim’s quartermaster, requested that no more ammunition be dispatched from Italy because there was no fuel with which to distribute it in Africa. A third message reported that the 15th Panzer Division had been “laid low…. Its bulk must be considered as annihilated.” As German resistance disintegrated, the British vanguard was urged to press on with a prearranged code word: “Butter.” Soon radios across the front were chirping: “Butter, butter, butter.” By dusk, two armored divisions had reached Massicault, eight miles beyond the infantry and a day’s march from Tunis. On a hilltop west of the capital a British colonel reported, “I can see the lily-white walls of that blasted city.”

  Eighteen Royal Navy destroyers patrolled the Sicilian Straits to prevent any last-moment Axis decampment. The ships’ superstructures had been painted an unmistakable royal red after three accidental bombings by overzealous Allied planes. All waters within five miles of the Tunisian coast were declared a free-fire zone, and Eisenhower’s naval chief soon reduced his order of the day to seven words: “Sink, burn, and destroy. Let nothing pass.”

  The righteous wrath of such orders fell heavily on 464 American and British prisoners-of-war embarked on the freighter Loyd Triestino for passage to Italian stockades. Marched through the wrecked docks of Tunis on the night of May 5, each man before boarding received a quarter-loaf of sour bread, a tablespoon of canned meat, eight prunes, and a scoop of Red Cross macaroni. Among the Yanks were Lieutenant Colonel Denholm and the 150 men from the 16th Infantry who had been captured on Hill 523. German guards confiscated the prisoners’ cash—always tendering a proper receipt in return—and limited their interrogations to wistful queries about whether captured Axis troops were being sent to camps in Canada or the United States. The 3,000-ton scow cast off at five A.M. on May 6, slowly steaming from a harbor so crowded with the protruding masts of sunken ships that one prisoner thought it looked “almost like a forest.”

  Three hours later the first Allied planes attacked, sinking a destroyer escort and driving Triestino to a cove sheltered by cliffs on Cap Bon’s northwest shore. Terrified prisoners cowered in the dank hold as near misses opened seams in the hull and cannon fire riddled the upper decks. German anti-aircraft crews answered, and after a second attack blue smoke draped the listing vessel. Suffering from dysentery and limited to three filthy heads on the exposed weather deck, the men ripped up planks in the hold so they could defecate into the bilge. “The air,�
�� Denholm later reported, “was very bad.”

  With his ship slowly sinking, the Italian captain hauled anchor and wallowed back toward Tunis early on May 7. A third Allied attack put a bomb into the forecastle; it was a dud. More marauders swarmed above the ship as she neared Tunis harbor, with each near miss bringing frenzied shouts from the soldiers locked in the hold. “The ship seemed to jump out of the water, then settle back with a kind of quiver, which wasn’t good,” a lieutenant later recalled. “Not one of us doubted the transport was going to sink. We began beating the cage and yelling to be released.” A fourth attack was too much for the thirty Italian crewmen, who “went completely to pieces,” cut away the lifeboats, and—“hopping around like fleas”—dove into the water after them. The crewless captain steered for La Goulette, a fishing village below Carthage, and beached the Triestino on an even keel several hundred yards from shore. He and the German gunners freed the howling prisoners and then rowed off in the remaining lifeboat.

  At least half a dozen more attacks occurred through the long afternoon. Only poor marksmanship and extraordinary good fortune spared the ship: more than one hundred bombs fell and every one missed except the dud. Tommies struck the Italian flag and Denholm’s men laid out large red crosses on the weather deck with upholstery ripped from the ship’s saloon. Pilots either failed to see the warnings or considered them a ruse; the attacks continued, forcing the men back into the fetid hold. A crude raft was launched toward La Goulette, but the wind blew it seaward. That night several Tommies swam ashore seeking help, and an intrepid Frenchman in a motorboat carried a plea to approaching Allied forces to stop the attacks. At last Triestino’s ordeal was over. Denholm reported more than four thousand cannon and machine-gun holes in her hull. Miraculously, only one man had been killed, three wounded.

  Harmon’s 1st Armored surged east in a light rain on the late afternoon of May 6. CCA angled toward Ferryville on the southwest shore of Lake Bizerte, while CCB sliced due east to control the roads between Bizerte and Tunis. German antitank guns were rooted out one by one; having predicted the loss of fifty tanks, Harmon in the event lost forty-seven. North of the two lakes, Eddy’s 9th Division clattered down Highway 11 with orders from Bradley to “get the hell into Bizerte” and prevent sabotage of the port.

  By Friday morning the enemy was reeling, leaving a wake of incinerated vehicles and charred German corpses. The reporter A. B. Austin recorded that “the women of Tindja and Ferryville were loading their perambulators with the bright, brassy German shell-cases. Flower vases? Umbrella stands?” A U.S. tank commander rumbled into Ferryville playing the William Tell Overture on his ocarina over the radio network. Cheering crowds waved tricolors at both the passing Shermans and Harold V. Boyle of the Associated Press, who stood in a jeep, waving and declaiming: “Vote for Boyle / Son of toil / Honest Hal / The Ay-rab’s pal!” More cheers followed, and the slogan “Vote for Boyle!” became a standard greeting from the curbside throngs to baffled troops trailing the vanguard. Also puzzling was an enigmatic graffito soldiers began noticing on walls and road signs. Of uncertain origin, as ambiguous as it was ubiquitous, the phrase would follow them to the heart of Germany two years later. It read: “Kilroy was here.”

  With the 9th Division headed for Bizerte and 1st Armored tanks effectively cutting the Axis bridgehead in half, the Big Red One had little to do in the Tine River valley eight miles south of Mateur, and there lay trouble. Terry Allen was a fighting man with a compulsion to fight; inactivity was his bane. Ordered by Bradley to hold in place and prevent a counterattack by the Barenthin Regiment across the Tine, Allen on the night of May 5 concocted a plan to root enemy troops from the hills east of the river. His 18th Infantry Regiment commander opposed the scheme; so did Ted Roosevelt and several senior staff officers who argued at eleven P.M. that if left unmolested the Barenthin troops would feign a counterattack and withdraw east to flatter terrain. Allen wavered, prayed over the matter, and at midnight ordered the attack forward.

  At 4:20 A.M. on May 6, the 18th Infantry surged from the Tine across Highway 55 and up the grain-gilded slope marked on Army maps as Hill 232. By 5:30 a flanking battalion was lost in the dark and several assault companies had been pinned down by scything machine-gun and mortar fire. “Bullets were singing all around now,” Private Max B. Siegel of the 3rd Battalion told his diary. “Our boys were not doing so good. Many were hit and calling for medics…. I seen a few boys running back. I tried to keep low.” Engineers finished bridging the Tine at seven A.M. but the span collapsed with a great crack after only four tanks had crossed. The 3rd Battalion commander stumbled back with fewer than three dozen shocked, silent men. Others lay motionless in the wheat until nightfall, to avoid drawing artillery fire. By four P.M. all battalions and tanks had splashed back across the Tine. Losses in the 18th Infantry totaled 282 men. The Barenthin slipped away in the night.

  Allen was chastened, and even loyalists doubted his judgment. “My bloody foolish commander,” complained Lieutenant Colonel John T. Corley, who in a storied combat career would win the Distinguished Service Cross twice and the Silver Star eight times. “We got the shit beat out of us…. It’s the vanity of the commander. He wanted to be in on the kill.”

  Early on Friday afternoon, Bradley and Eisenhower arrived in the leafy glen west of the Tine where the 1st Division had moved its headquarters. A warm drizzle slicked the roads, and camouflage netting billowed in the breeze. A shot-up farmhouse across the swale had served as a German supply dump, and the yard was strewn with gray tunics and Afrika Korps sun helmets. This was Eisenhower’s third trip to the front since the Good Friday offensive began, and Harry Butcher thought he resembled “a hen setting on a batch of eggs…wondering if they will ever break the shell.” He had approved the final plan for Sicily on May 3, and now awaited concurrence from the combined chiefs in London and Washington. With more time to devote to the endgame in Tunisia, he had seen a great deal that was heartening. “We are learning something every day,” he wrote a friend, “and in general do not make the same mistakes twice.” While admitting to Marshall only the slightest need for rest—“When this affair is all cleared up, I am going to take a twenty-four-hour leave where no one in the world will be able to reach me”—to Butcher he proposed getting “good and drunk when Tunisia is in the bag.”

  In truth he was sleeping badly, often waking at four A.M. to pace and fret, puffing through a pack of cigarettes before breakfast. Although victory in Africa approached, there was still much to unsettle a commander. “The fighting since April 23 has had a definite influence on our thinking and calculations,” he wrote Marshall. “Even the Italian, defending mountainous country, is very difficult to drive out, and the German is a real problem.” The portents were unmistakable, for Sicily and whatever battlefields lay beyond. “The Tunisian fight appears to offer a good indication of what we can expect when we meet the German in defensive positions,” Eisenhower added, “especially where the terrain is favorable to him.”

  But only to his closest confidants did Eisenhower acknowledge the deeper impact of his extended stay at the front. Here, where the consequences of combat were most vivid, the weight of command felt heaviest. To his brother Arthur he wrote of visiting “the desperately wounded” and of seeing “bodies rotting on the ground and smell[ing] the stench of decaying human flesh.” He had ordered so many men to their deaths, thousands upon thousands, with many thousands yet to die. He sought refuge in duty and pro patria resolve, as commanders must. “Far above my hatred of war is the determination to smash every enemy of my country, especially Hitler and the Japs,” he told Arthur. He also immersed himself in nitty-gritty decisions concerning supply and personnel, as if his own willful intercession in minutiae could hurry the war to its end. That very week, he had proposed the Army quartermaster design a better winter uniform of “very rough wool, because such material does not show the dirt.” To Marshall on Wednesday he noted, “We have discovered that our older men—that is the 50- to 55-year-old fel
low—does not wear out physically as quickly as might be imagined.”

  Now the fifty-five-year-old Terry Allen stumbled from his tent, where he had been roused from a dead sleep on the ground. He looked not only worn out but catatonic, and he spoke in monosyllables. His eyes were glazed, his hair mussed. As Eisenhower and Bradley slipped on their reading glasses to study the map, Allen tersely described the previous night’s attack on Hill 232. Casualties were high. Some companies were hardly bigger than platoons. His men were tired after months of combat.

  Eisenhower peered over his spectacles. The British, he pointed out, had chased Rommel across the desert for several months from El Alamein to the Mareth Line, with little water or rest. They, he added, had “taken it.” Allen replied irrelevantly that his unit in the Great War had attacked every day for weeks. The conference ended. Allen tossed a weary salute as the two generals left. “How much better it would have been if Allen had been thoroughly cheerful, buoyant, and aggressive,” Butcher scribbled in his diary.

  Eisenhower shrugged off the unfortunate encounter. “I found the II Corps in wonderful spirit. The 1st Division has suffered a great deal of attrition,” he wrote Marshall a few hours later. But Bradley seethed. The attack on Hill 232 was “a foolish one and undertaken without authorization,” he later declared. While Allen was among the Army’s most competent leaders—Alexander would go so far as to tell Drew Middleton he “was the finest division commander he had encountered in two wars”—Bradley found him “the most difficult man with whom I have ever had to work,” an incorrigible rebel “fiercely antagonistic to any echelon above that of division.” He was disturbed by Allen’s truculent independence and the Big Red One’s self-absorption—the “Holy First,” some called it—particularly because the 1st Division was expected to play a pivotal role in Sicily.