An Army at Dawn (66 page)

This farrago of bad tidings had the virtue of being wrong. The enemy was near but not
that
near, certainly not with almost a hundred tanks. (And no panzer was yet within eighty arduous road miles of Speedy Valley.) Enough stalwarts had chosen to stand fast that the German advance was checked in midcareer. “Strong enemy resistance,” the 21st Panzer reported after several skirmishes. With just sixty-five tanks, the panzer commander decided to await daybreak before pressing his attack. Further weakening the Axis cause, Arnim chose this moment to peel away part of the 10th Panzer Division for a thrust twenty-five miles to the northeast, where his tanks would find nothing but grief from mines and screaming sheets of Allied artillery fire.

Better yet from Ward’s perspective, his division had been reunited for the first time since Northern Ireland. Finally convinced that the main Axis attack had indeed come through Faïd Pass, Anderson authorized Fredendall to shift CCB and other American units sixty miles toward Sbeïtla.

“Move the big elephants to Sbeïtla, move fast, and come shooting!” Fredendall told Robinett. In two pachydermal columns they pounded south. Ward placed CCB on his right just east of town, and across Highway 13 the remnants of CCA anchored the left. CCC provided a rear-guard reserve just west of town. Robinett tromped about throughout that long Tuesday night, emplacing his tanks, clucking at the faint-hearts, and displaying all the swagger of a man keen to fight. When a fretful artilleryman voiced fear that his guns had been overrun, Robinett paraphrased Sherman: “When things are going badly at the rear, go to the front—they are always better up there.”

In truth, things were not so fine at the front either. CCA had buckled beyond repair, and so had the confidence of the high command. “Everything is going badly at Sbeïtla,” Anderson told a French general. At 1:30 on Wednesday morning, the British commander authorized Fredendall to abandon Sbeïtla, while asking that Ward hold until the next evening so fallback fortifications could be dug at Kasserine Pass in the west and at Sbiba in the north. Fredendall protested that by the next evening Old Ironsides would be reduced to smoking scrap. Anderson agreed to compromise by setting eleven
A.M.
on Wednesday as the decampment hour. Before dawn, the plan changed yet again to give Fredendall more discretion, and Ward was instructed to hold at all costs until hearing otherwise.

“I have had another argument with the big boss here,” Fredendall told Truscott, who now had a stenographer listening in on his phone conversations. “He wanted me to hold all day at Sbeïtla…. It would have been all tangled up in another dog fight. Finally I got them to agree to let me go ahead. They not only want to tell you
what
to do but
how
to do it. Anyway, I think we are going to get our tail out the door alright.”

As for Drake, Fredendall added, “We have to write him off.”

“Reference to Waters?” Truscott asked.

“No, we don’t know a damn thing about Waters.”

Fredendall’s tone softened. The tunneling sounds at Speedy Valley had been supplanted by the clamor of men striking their tents and loading their trucks. His corps was in tatters, already thrown back fifty miles with 2,500 casualties and no end in sight. His career, too, seemed wrecked. For over thirty-five years he had served in uniform, built a name, earned his stars. But surely Eisenhower would need a scapegoat.

“When do you think the old man would like to have my suit?” Fredendall asked.

Truscott hesitated. “He knows that you are doing the best you can do.”

“Sometimes,” Fredendall said, “that is not good enough.”

Ward and Robinett braced for an attack at dawn on Wednesday, February 17, but no attack came. Position, numbers, and morale lay with the Axis, yet they held back, snuffling cautiously rather than slamming into the disordered Americans. Kesselring remained in East Prussia. Arnim chased his wild goose to the northeast. Rommel ate couscous in Gafsa and drafted petitions to Comando Supremo. Although Luftwaffe squadrons battered Sbeïtla and other Allied strongholds, there was no galloping urgency. The Axis seemed afflicted with the same languor that had marked Allied movements early in the Tunisian campaign, and each passing hour permitted reinforcement and repositioning.

Ward regained his swash. “We stood in the cactus patch all morning and on into the afternoon,” a sergeant told his parents. “With the glasses and then with the eye, you could see the dots of the armored fighting vehicles. The general, one of the finest men, stood on the skyline smoking a cigar, very calm, which was good on the nerves of a number of very jittery people, including me.”

Fifteen minutes before noon, the attack resumed. Wehrmacht infantry advanced down Highway 13 and panzers struck CCB on the American right, where Robinett had strung a tank destroyer battalion in a picket line several miles east of town. A few crews fired on the converging panzers, but most broke for the rear; then all did. Rather than leapfrogging back by company as planned, the half-tracks “just turned and kept going,” one soldier later recalled. “Everybody was throwing out smoke pots, so it made a dramatic scene.”

At 1:15
P.M.
, the panzers sidled toward the 2nd Battalion of the 13th Armored Regiment, whose commander, Henry Gardiner, had fought with gallantry around Tébourba nearly three months before. Gardiner’s tankers still mounted the antique M-3 General Lee, but they had been given time to burrow into a wadi and to camouflage artistically with wet clay. “I counted thirty-five enemy tanks come rolling over a rise in the ground almost to the direct front, a distance of about three miles,” Gardiner reported. Waiting; waiting; and then at point-blank range he cried, “Boys, let them have it!” Fire leaped from the wadi, striking fifteen panzers and destroying five. The volley “stopped the attack cold,” Gardiner added.

For an hour. Then the panzers came again, angry now, with a sweeping attack around the American right five miles south of Sbeïtla. Artillery gun chiefs screamed for more ammunition, their open mouths bright red O’s in faces black with grime and powder. Between shellings, men at the last pitch of exhaustion napped sitting upright. “We were all very shaky after the battle of the night before because we had little or no sleep and because we had lost quite a few men,” one artilleryman recounted.

Gardiner warned Robinett that his tanks would “soon be in serious trouble.” At 2:30
P.M.
, Ward authorized CCB to withdraw behind her two sister combat commands. For three hours Gardiner’s men fought a deft rearguard battle at a cost of nine General Lees, including the battalion commander’s. With his driver dead and his tank in flames, Gardiner hid until sunset, then fled west in the wake of his retreating army.

At dusk, German and Italian troops edged into Sbeïtla. It was rubble, an empty, burning, stinking place of demolished bridges and dribbling water mains. Only the Roman temples and St. Jucundus’s crypt, ruins already, had escaped destruction. Robinett might have invoked another Sherman aphorism: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Darkness slipped down on the Allied column winding west into the thick forests beyond Kasserine Pass, the defile that would give this two-week sequence of battles its name. “The night was heavy with low cloud, and always that intolerable wind…and all the inevitable turmoil and confusion of night movement,” wrote A. D. Divine. “Clouds were red with the burning of the Sbeïtla dumps.”

Again the Allies had been drubbed. But in the glooming a spark kindled among those who had stood fast and fought well at the end. Pride, vengeance, anger came, yes, and a sense that enough was enough, that from this havoc a ruthless killing spirit could emerge. The war was coming inside them now. Among those trudging beneath the dark towering peaks of the Grand Dorsal was Ernie Pyle, who considered the retreat “damned humiliating” even as he wrote of the soldiers around him:

You need feel no shame nor concern about their ability…. There is nothing wrong with the common American soldier. His fighting spirit is good. His morale is okay. The deeper he gets into a fight, the more of a fighting man he becomes.

Pyle was telling his readers what he knew they wanted to hear. Oddly enough, it was the truth.

“This Place Is Too Hot”

T
HE
Grand Dorsal extends northeast to southwest for 200 miles before petering out beyond Fériana. Three gaps pierce the range in the south, connecting Tunisia’s interior plateau to the Algerian highlands. The second and most dramatic of these is Kasserine Pass, twenty-five miles west of Sbeïtla, just beyond the scrofulous village of Kasserine. For millennia it has offered an invasion alley, west to east and back again. Where it is most constricted, at 2,000 feet above sea level, the pass is barely a mile wide.

Two formidable sentinels stand on the pass’s flanks. Djebel Chambi on the south is Tunisia’s tallest mountain at 5,064 feet, a forbidding massif that is thickly wooded almost to the crest. Djebel Semmama on the north, 4,447 feet high, turns a sheer face to the pass while offering gentler, scalable approaches from the east. The meandering Hatab River bisects the defile on a northwest-to-southeast heading; significantly, the steep-banked stream, which runs dry in summer but very wet in February, impedes movement between the northern and southern halves of the pass. Fissured with wadis and infested with cactus, Kasserine has an ambience familiar to anyone who has traveled in the American Southwest. It is a badlands.

Traveling west just beyond Kasserine village in the throat of the pass, the road forks. Highway 13, the left tine, continues westerly along the Hatab for another thirty miles to the Algerian border near Tébessa. Both road and river traverse the Bahiret Foussana, a broad valley of scattered farms, as well as zinc, lead, and phosphate mines. The Hatab terrain has been described as “a gigantic, crudely corrugated shed roof draining into a badly bent and twisted gutter.” The right tine, designated Highway 17, skirts Djebel Semmama to ramble due north for thirty miles to the hilltop town of Thala and then another forty to Le Kef.

Kasserine Pass is not impregnable—nothing is, short of heaven’s gate—but an Army history notes that it “offers such advantages to defense that a sufficient force could exact an exorbitant price.” Fredendall’s II Corps possessed a sufficient force, but unfortunately for the Americans that force was not arrayed at the pass. The remnants of Ward’s 1st Armored Division had been ordered to reassemble in the uplands south of Tébessa to protect the supply dumps; the rest of the corps was scattered, as usual.

“I am holding a lot of mountain passes against armor with three and a half battalions of infantry,” Fredendall told Truscott just before two
P.M.
on February 17. “If [the enemy] get together any place a couple of infantry battalions, they might smoke me out.”

“The artillery of the 9th Division are on the way,” Truscott replied.

“If you can get me a combat team of infantry—I haven’t got a damn bit of reserve.”

“I will do the best I can.”

“I need a combat team of infantry worse than hell,” Fredendall repeated. “All I have got is three and a half battalions of infantry. They are not enough.”

Fredendall sounded like a man running out of tether. Eisenhower was shipping 800 soldiers daily from Casablanca—roughly a battalion a day—but few would arrive in Tunisia before the end of February. “There isn’t any hope of getting a combat team up here for a number of days,” Truscott said slowly. “The infantry of the 9th Division is moving just as fast as it can now.”

“We can expect a little reinforcement?”

“Not a hell of a lot.”

Thus the initial defense of Kasserine fell to the 19th Combat Engineer Regiment, 1,200 men singularly miscast for the task. Since arriving at the front six weeks earlier, the engineers had worked almost exclusively on road construction, except for those diverted to dig the now-abandoned tunnels at Speedy Valley. The regiment had failed to complete rifle training before shipping overseas, and only one man had ever heard shots fired in anger. The regimental arsenal included fifty-four dump trucks and half a dozen air compressors.

At nine
P.M.
on February 17, in chill fog and spitting rain, these ersatz infantrymen finished forming a three-mile skirmish line across the throat of the pass just west of the road fork. For the next thirty-six hours, while the Germans consolidated their winnings down the valley, they waited, lying at night like spoons in a drawer to stay warm, prey to anxiety and tactical pathos. Machine guns were badly sited, foxholes were too shallow, and barbed wire remained mostly on the spools. Nearly every man had entrenched on the floor of the pass, rather than the adjacent heights. Most commanders knew, at least in theory, that a valley could not be held without also controlling its shoulders. But, as one officer later observed, much of the American campaign in Tunisia involved “trying to draw a line between what we knew and what we did.”

Just beyond the Roman ruins west of Sbeïtla, Rommel tried to draw his own line between what he wanted to do and what he had been told to do. Hands clasped behind his back, goggles perched on his visor, he studied the distant peaks of Semmama and Chambi. That way led seventy miles to Tébessa and the great supply dumps he had hoped to despoil before following the glory road to Bône. But it also offered, via Highway 17 through Thala, a backdoor route to Le Kef, the objective ordered by Comando Supremo.

A more direct and slightly shorter path to Le Kef could be had by taking Highway 71 north for eighty miles from Sbeïtla along the eastern flank of the Grand Dorsal. The enemy would certainly contest both routes. Where would the defenses be softer? Left, through Kasserine Pass, or right, directly toward Le Kef? Rommel studied the terrain with his field glasses while staff officers in slouch hats toed the ground with their double-laced desert boots.

His choice had been complicated by Arnim, who instead of giving Rommel the entire 10th Panzer had held back half the division’s tanks, including the Tigers, on a thin claim of needing them in the north. While denouncing the “pigheadedness” of his two African commanders, Kesselring had yet to return from East Prussia to adjudicate their squabble. Kesselring believed the order from Comando Supremo contained enough ambiguity to permit Rommel a full attack on Tébessa before he turned toward Le Kef. But Kesselring was not here and Rommel—demonstrating an atypical obedience possibly infused with spite—chose to believe that Le Kef must be his first objective.