An Army at Dawn (65 page)

The debacle was complete. Of Van Vliet’s men from Djebel Ksaira, some 800 were captured, along with another 600 from Garet Hadid. A burial detail stacked the dead in a mass grave, then joined the column of American prisoners stretching east as far as the eye could see. A few hundred GIs—including the tagless, ecumenical Berlovich—reached Allied lines, many having survived a week or more on stolen eggs and fried cactus leaves. Drake’s second-in-command and the only officer to escape, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald C. Line, staggered into the American camp and later wrote his wife, “I haven’t found out for sure whether I am sane or insane.”

For all military intents and purposes, the 168th Infantry Regiment—Iowa’s finest—had been obliterated. “It is pardonable to be defeated,” observed Lieutenant Luttrell, who would spend the rest of the war in a German prison, “but unpardonable to be surprised.”

Their triumph at Sidi bou Zid left the Germans off balance.
FRÜHLINGSWIND
had been a stunning success, and the Allied abandonment of Gafsa made
MORGENLUFT
—Rommel’s thrust in the south—superfluous. Now what?

Atrocious Allied communications security helped answer this question. Uncoded radio transmissions broadcast in the clear provided German eavesdroppers with ample evidence of Allied turmoil and intentions. Security in Ward’s 1st Armored Division later was judged “unbelievably low,” the worst in any American unit in Tunisia; transmissions included such bald disclosures as “If the enemy attacks again I will have to withdraw.” Following Anderson’s order at 10:40
A.M.
on February 16 that II Corps was to forgo further counterattacks, German commanders soon knew with certainty that American troops would fight only a delaying action at Sbeïtla as part of a general retreat. With Kesselring’s approval, Arnim ordered his troops on to Sbeïtla, the gateway to Kasserine Pass and the Grand Dorsal.

Rommel’s staff car wheeled into Gafsa on Tuesday morning, the sixteenth. Those Tunisians not busy digging out survivors from the American demolitions looted the town with festive abandon, ripping out pipes, window frames, and sinks. Wearing his long leather duster, Rommel watched in amusement as a crowd gathered around the car chanting, “Hitler! Rommel! Hitler! Rommel!” Peasants pressed forward with gifts of eggs and flapping chickens, while German soldiers divvied up cartons of Lucky Strikes found in an abandoned U.S. Army truck.

Arnim had marching orders of a sort, but what was the Desert Fox to do? Kesselring’s original scheme called for the 21st Panzer Division to join Afrika Korps troops in the assault on Gafsa, but Arnim had informed Rommel this very morning that he no longer saw any reason to transfer the division. Instead, he had notions of swinging northeast from Sbeïtla to bag more American and British troops around the Ousseltia Valley. Rommel pushed his men on to the abandoned airfields at Fériana and Thélepte, but his eyes were again fixed on the western horizon and the huge depot at Tébessa. Kesselring, conferring with Hitler in East Prussia, was unavailable to referee between his ever more antagonistic commanders in Africa. The Americans were reeling, but Axis momentum now slowed perceptibly for want of a unified command and an overarching offensive vision. A ragged uncertainty took hold. To the Allies’ enormous good fortune, more than two days would be wasted by bickering in the German high command.

“I had never gambled,” Rommel later wrote, “never had to fear losing everything. But in the position as it was now, a rather greater risk had to be taken.” The weaker force must take the longer chance. A thrust to Tébessa and then on another 140 miles to Bône would unhinge the entire Allied line and “force the British and Americans to pull back the bulk of their forces to Algeria.” It could “change the entire complexion of the North African theater of war.” In a message to Kesselring and Comando Supremo in Rome, he requested that both the 10th and the 21st Panzer Divisions be placed under his command for “an immediate enveloping thrust of strong forces…on Tébessa and the area north of it.” Awaiting a reply from Rome, Rommel dined in Gafsa on couscous and mutton with a local sheikh.

Arnim disagreed, in a phone call to Rommel and in messages to Kesselring. “The terrain would be against us,” he warned. Tébessa was mountainous and easily defended; such an attack would take at least two weeks, with uncertain fuel supplies and Montgomery’s Eighth Army banging on the back door at Mareth. Better to veer north in a shallow envelopment to relieve the pressure building west of Tunis.

Allied intelligence detected part of this protracted debate. Thanks to Ultra, eavesdroppers heard a message from Rommel on February 17 indicating that he could hardly risk attacking Tébessa with just the fifty-two German and seventeen Italian tanks currently under his command. But other, more critical messages were not decrypted—including Rommel’s request for the two armored divisions. Once again Ultra decrypts proved misleading.

Kesselring dithered, then concluded that opportunity outweighed risk and threw his weight behind Rommel’s plan in a message to Comando Supremo: “I consider it essential to continue the attack toward Tébessa.” After more exasperated prodding by Rommel, who pleaded that the operation had “a chance for success only if the attack is launched without delay,” approval would come from Rome at 1:30 on Friday morning. Rommel could have the two panzer divisions “to force a decisive success in Tunisia.” There was a catch, however. Rather than lunging as far west as Tébessa, he was told to aim seventy miles due north of Kasserine, at Le Kef, where the roads were better and he could cut off Anderson’s First Army. The envelopment would be narrowed by at least fifty miles, roughly splitting the difference between Rommel’s proposal and Arnim’s.

Rommel ranted at “an appalling and unbelievable piece of shortsightedness” by superiors who “lacked the guts to give a whole-hearted decision.” Then, calming himself, he ordered a bottle of champagne. North or west hardly mattered. He was on the attack. Suddenly, he told his aide, he felt “like an old war horse that had heard the music again.”

Not since
A.D.
647, when the caliph’s soldiers burned Sbeïtla and put its Byzantine inhabitants to the sword, had the little town suffered a night like that of February 16–17. “There was indescribable confusion,” wrote one officer. “The road was jammed as far as one could see [with] remnants of a beaten force hurrying to the rear.” Sbeïtla had already been crowded with hundreds of French colonial troops driven from Faïd Pass two weeks earlier, as well as rear-echelon American soldiers growing more and more edgy at reports of disaster in the east. Now hollow-eyed survivors from a half-dozen shattered battalions stumbled into town, enemy artillery thudding behind them. Most assumed that Rommel rather than Arnim commanded the three armored columns baying at their heels; there was a perverse thrill at being routed by the famous Desert Fox, who, one artilleryman conceded, “was slapping us around like schoolboys. It was discouraging and humiliating but, more than that, it was fantastic.”

Panic built slowly. Nurses evacuating a French hospital gave away everything that could not be heaped onto a dray cart, and GIs took off with alarm clocks, letter openers, and bottles of peach brandy. At the American 77th Evacuation Hospital more than 600 burned and otherwise wounded men lay head to foot in green ward tents to avoid breathing in one another’s faces. Pallid medics donated pint after pint of their own blood for transfusions until word came to “pack and run.” They packed and they ran in the moonlight. Patients swaddled in Army blankets were hoisted into open trucks, lightless except for hooded lanterns on the rear bumpers. As the convoy rumbled west toward Kasserine Pass, snow dusted the olive-drab lumps in the truck beds. “Retreat,” said one surgeon, “is a ghastly word.” A sardonic GI supplied the perfect reply in a letter home: “Americans never retreat but
withdraw.
”

Night deepened. Battle sounds drew closer. Tracer fire flicked into the olive groves three miles east of Sbeïtla. “Shooting. Have to go,” a soldier scribbled in a letter, then added, “Never so scared in my life.” More units fled, some with orders and many without. French officers again harnessed men to carts, horses to gun carriages, and mules to broken trucks, all of which further clogged traffic on Highway 13. Howze implored Carleton Coon and his OSS colleagues to crouch in foxholes and flip Molotov cocktails at passing Tiger tanks. “We didn’t want to,” Coon later reported. “It was not OSS work.” Instead they played poker, using rifle cartridges for chips, and planted a few exploding mule turds. Joining the refugees was a Signal Corps pigeon platoon that had arrived in Sbeïtla on February 11 to supplement radio and telephone communications. No messages had yet been sent by wing; the handlers needed a week to settle their birds before they would home properly. Now 1,500 decidedly unsettled pigeons headed west in a swaying, cooing loft balanced on a truck bed.

At 8:30
P.M.
, engineers without warning blew up the pump house that fed the aqueduct to Sfax. Subsequent detonations demolished a railroad trestle east of Sbeïtla as well as road culverts and the aqueduct itself. Although most enemy tanks were still miles from Sbeïtla, the ammunition dump soon went up in a thunderous yellow roar heard across central Tunisia.

Retreating soldiers are always predisposed to believe the worst, and the men credited the blasts to enemy infiltrators. Panic that had been isolated now became general. Flight ensued. Terrified drivers tore through the narrow streets, crumpling fenders or veering into ditches. On Highway 13, vehicles raced three abreast like chariots. Arm-flapping officers tried to flag down their men only to be brushed aside, and soldiers unable to hitch a ride hied cross-country. Finding an infantry squad firing wildly into the night a young officer asked what the men were aiming at. One soldier looked up from his smoking M-1 long enough to answer, “I’ll be damned if I know, Lieutenant, but everyone else is shooting.” Others deepened their shame with casual cruelty. “We were next to a group of Arab houses,” a reconnaissance battalion soldier later wrote. “We decided to see what the inside of one of the houses was like so we ran into it with the half-track and knocked off the corner. Five women came out of the house and went over to another.” Tommies summoned to reinforce Sbeïtla fought their way through the floodtide. “Get that junk off the road,” snarled a British officer, “and let an army through.”

The fog of war lay thick on Orlando Ward, and had since the hostile debouchment at Faïd four days earlier. He rarely ventured from the 1st Armored Division command post, and he was hard put to conjure an accurate picture of the battlefield from the shrill dispatches filtering into his Sbeïtla cactus patch. Yet Ward remained calm, even cheerful, despite evidence that the Americans had lost two armored battalions, two infantry battalions, two artillery battalions, and sundry smaller units. Only Fredendall’s order on Tuesday evening to destroy the ammunition dump “annoyed and rattled” him. The blast seemed premature, a clear signal to foe and to friend of another American retirement.

Ward was further discomposed by reports that among those stampeding west were McQuillin and many CCA troops not already dead or captured. Old Mac had been awakened at 10:45
P.M.
by flares and then machine-gun fire stitching the orchards east of town. Like a chessboard knight, he hopped rearward to the sprawling Roman ruins on the western outskirts, and kept right on hopping past the tomb of the martyred saint Jucundus. Colonel Stack, the CCC commander, watched McQuillin amble past with a French horse cavalry unit, then went to find Ward. “I told General Ward,” Stack recounted, “that if he thought that CCA was his front line, he was mistaken.” The general radioed McQuillin and found him “some miles in the rear,” Stack added. “Ward ordered McQuillin to stop the retreat of CCA and return to his original position.”

At one
A.M.
on February 17, Ward phoned Fredendall in Speedy Valley to warn of barbarians at the gate. The spearhead of perhaps ninety panzers, including nine Tigers, had pierced the American left flank three miles east of town. Ward did not know how long his division could stand and fight.

Fredendall immediately phoned Truscott in Constantine. The II Corps commander earlier had reported that “the picture…does not look too good,” but now his warning was dire. “[Fredendall] considered situation extremely grave, and uncertain of ability to hold,” Truscott wrote, scratching notes as fast as he could. Thirty minutes later, Fredendall called back: “Fears that we have lost 1st Armored Division,” Truscott scribbled. “Feels that First Army has not given credit to his reports as to gravity of situation.”

Truscott had his own spy at Sbeïtla, a colonel who sent him lyrical if poetically licensed private intelligence missives. Shortly after one
A.M.
the colonel reported that “tanks were fighting in the moonlight in Sbeïtla, and were all around Ward’s command post.” Truscott now concluded that Old Ironsides would soon be overrun. Fredendall took such counsel of his fears that he soon ordered Speedy Valley abandoned for a new corps headquarters in the primary school at Le Kouif, seventeen miles northeast of Tébessa. The tunnel project was forsaken forever, its incomplete shafts left as dank monuments to an American Ozymandias.