An Army at Dawn (78 page)

Fortunately for our fame as soldiers, our enemy is worthy of us. The German is a war-trained veteran—confident, brave, and ruthless. We are brave. We are better-equipped, better fed, and in the place of his blood-glutted Woten, we have with us the God of Our Fathers Known of Old…. If we die killing, well and good, but if we fight hard enough, viciously enough, we will kill and live. Live to return to our family and our girl as conquering heroes—men of Mars.

He was rolling now. On March 16 Patton summoned all staff officers to his dank command post in a shot-up Fériana hotel. With a scowl made even fiercer by the cold sore erupting on his upper lip, he announced: “Gentlemen, tomorrow we attack. If we are not victorious, let no one come back alive.” He excused himself, then retired to pray. To Bea he wrote, “I am always a little short of breath before a match.”

That night, military policemen wielding flashlights hooded with red cellophane waved the convoys down rain-slick Highway 15 on the forty-five-mile approach march to Gafsa. The floor of each vehicle was sandbagged, to absorb mine blasts. Arab tents on the hillsides glittered like cobwebs in the dim moonlight. “The hardest thing a general has to do,” Patton told his diary, “is to wait for the battle to start after all the orders are given.” At eleven
P.M.
he heard the rumble of artillery. “Well, the battle is on,” he scribbled. “I am taking off my shoes to go to bed.”

There was no battle, although the American press in its eagerness to forget Kasserine would tout Operation
WOP
as if it
were
Second Manassas. Twelve hundred Italians and a German reconnaissance battalion slipped away to the east at dawn, unmolested by Ward’s CCA, which was delayed by heavy rain and failed to sever the escape road to Sened Station as planned. Ted Roosevelt waited on a low ridge while bombers plastered Gafsa and scouts drove sheep over the road to test for mines. After hours of listening to confused voices crackle from the radio, Roosevelt impatiently bolted forward.
Rough Rider
led a convoy of jeeps—“like a small flotilla of ships bumping through the wadis,” one witness wrote—into Gafsa to find the enemy gone. By 12:30
P.M.
the town was declared secure.

“The Dagoes beat it,” Patton wrote. He and Allen, who wore riding breeches and a field jacket, drove down from Fériana to find only stunned civilians emerging from their cellars. An old woman in black wailed on a broken balcony, her grief sweeping across the ruined town. A month of Axis occupation and the morning’s bombardment had finished the destruction begun by American demolitionists during the Kasserine retreat. Italian and Arab pillagers had wrecked nearly every house belonging to Gafsa’s 500 French residents and 800 Jews—smashing furniture, tearing doors from their hinges, and stealing rugs, faucets, and bathtubs. Cattle and camels had been driven off; not for months had date caravans arrived in the
fondouk,
and the grain market in the Halle aux Grains stood forlornly empty. Items not stolen or smashed had been thrown down cisterns, including family photo albums. After the previous Axis occupation, French troops had shot Arab looters and left their bodies in the square; now they began rounding up the usual suspects again.

Within hours, the Americans had once more made the town theirs. Chaplains celebrated a mass to honor St. Patrick’s holy day. Later in the week, Patton claimed as his headquarters the yellow brick gendarmerie with its blue tile floor. In an abandoned mine shaft, soldiers on patrol discovered ore cars, which they rode down the tracks like a roller coaster, shrieking in merriment. Madame LaZonga and her “daughters” soon returned from Tébessa to reopen the bordello, contributing to venereal disease rates in Tunisia that had reached 34 cases per 1,000 white soldiers and a staggering 451 per 1,000 black soldiers. Patton ordered the brothel off-limits to U.S. units, but French colonial troops offered to rent their helmets and tunics as disguises. The II Corps provost marshal and intelligence chief both reported that when asked by a sentry if he was out of uniform, one patron in a kepi answered, “No, suh, ah sure isn’t. I’se a Moroccan.”

Patton knew the value of publicity, and he wasted no time wooing the correspondents who trailed him to Gafsa. Charming and voluble, he hosted press dinners featuring Viennese steak and good coffee; each hack received a dessert pack of cigarettes and a roll of Life Savers. A radio report broadcast to the United States just before midnight on March 17 told listeners: “If any American officer ever had the will to win, that man is Lieutenant General George S. Patton. He certainly won the first round today…. Apparently the Nazis saw him coming and ran.”

But even Patton could hardly persuade himself that this was the campaign of a Stonewall Jackson. “The great and famous battle of Gafsa has been fought and won,” he sarcastically informed his diary. To reporters he said, “I’d feel happier if I knew where the Germans were. As long as I know where they are I don’t mind how hard they fight.” Already frustration had set in. On the evening of March 17 he called Terry Allen and snapped, “You should have kept going until you found somebody to fight.”

On the nineteenth, as Montgomery prepared to attack Mareth, Alexander modified his orders to the Americans. Patton was to extend his two-pronged offensive to the east. After seizing Sened Station, Ward’s tanks and an infantry regiment were to press on twenty miles to Maknassy, then dispatch raiders to shoot up a Luftwaffe airfield across the Eastern Dorsal at Mezzouna. Farther south, Allen’s Big Red One would edge into the hills beyond Gafsa. Darby’s 1st Ranger Battalion had already captured El Guettar, a palmy oasis ten miles southeast of Gafsa on Highway 15. Italian troops melted into the rugged djebels along a gravel track dubbed Gumtree Road, which ultimately led a hundred miles to Sfax.

No one who met him ever doubted that Bill Darby was born to command other men in the dark of night. He exuded certainty, one officer said, “that he could lead anyone into combat and bring them back safely.” Handsome and good-humored, he often joked that he hailed from an Arkansas family so poor that his father had slopped the children at a hog trough. Except for minor missions at Arzew in November and at Sened in February, his battalion had seen little fighting, and many bored Rangers had transferred to conventional units for fear the war was passing them by. Some had sold their British mountain boots in Algeria to pay for wine or harlots. Now they would regret it, because Terry Allen had a dark-of-night mission for them. After falling back from Gafsa, several thousand Italians had occupied an impregnable defile in the hills east of El Guettar. A frontal assault by the Big Red One down Gumtree Road would cost hundreds of casualties, and American units veering southeast on the paved road to Gabès would also expose a flank to enemy artillery from the same defile. Isn’t there some way, Allen had asked Darby, to loop behind them without attacking into the teeth of Italian defenses?

On the evening of March 20, a serpentine column of 500 Rangers and seventy mortarmen veered northeast off Highway 15 three miles outside El Guettar. They had taped their dog tags to prevent clinking and blackened their skin with dirt and spit. Up the scree they tramped, stumbling over unseen obstacles on an unblazed trail. More than a thousand boots scraped the rock with a soft hiss that one soldier likened to “the sighing of the sea.”

For ten miles they snaked over the fissured shoulder of Djebel Orbata, a 3,700-foot bluff looming above Gumtree Road. They crossed flumes and saddles; to scale the sandstone cliffs, they clasped wrists to form human chains. Their hands were bloodied, their fatigues shredded. At one
A.M.
, the moon rose. Among those struggling to keep up was a bald, middle-aged socialite named Ralph M. Ingersoll, who had been managing editor of
Fortune
and
The New Yorker,
and then general manager of Time, Inc. Now he was just another footsore engineer lieutenant.

No one will ever believe how beautiful it was on that march after the moon came out [he wrote]…. The deep valleys, the jagged peaks, the play of moonlight and shadow in the gorges, the delicate translucent puffs of clouds that drifted slowly across the edge of the moon as it rose higher and arched across the sky—all these were themes in a symphony in gray and silver tones…. Going over the saddle of a hill, you could see the line of men for several hundred yards ahead, winding down the hillside, figures in soft silver armor.

By first light on the twenty-first, Ingersoll and the mortarmen had fallen behind; the night seemed less enchanting after more sweaty miles lugging the heavy tubes. But the Rangers were where they wanted to be: a thousand yards above Gumtree Road, overlooking the sleeping Centauro encampment. The Italians in the narrow gorge had left their flank unguarded. Some Rangers dozed while awaiting the attack order, and when Darby woke them they “scrambled to their feet…rubbing fists in their eyes like sleepy children.” He studied the tents and trenchworks below, then announced, “Okay, men, let’s have a shoot.” The Rangers fixed bayonets and scuttled down the hill. “You wait and see,” another soldier murmured, “they won’t bring no prisoners back.”

The brisk bugle notes of “Charge” echoed along the sierra, now aglow with the ferrous tints of dawn. Morning shadows limned the valley with blue piping. “Give them some steel!” Darby cried. The Rangers clattered forward in a whooping semicircle. Bullets scythed the Italian officers’ mess, set for a breakfast no one would eat. Soldiers in their underwear poured from the tents, flushed by grenades. “Nice shooting,” Darby called over the radio. “We need a little cold steel over there on the hill mass to the south…. They are making a nuisance of themselves up there.” Ingersoll arrived in time to hear mortar rounds belch from their tubes. Rangers kneeling behind the rocks reminded him of soldiers in a Civil War print shooting along “a tumbledown stone fence in Virginia instead of Tunisia.”

Along the valley’s north wall, white flags began to flap. Prisoners
were
taken, and an Italian-speaking Ranger chaplain persuaded more to surrender. Blue smoke draped the valley, thick with “odors of hot guns and dust stirred from the muzzle blasts,” one Ranger reported. Dead Italians littered the camp, their waxy faces frozen in surprise. A few German artillery rounds replied, but by noon the fight was over. The delayed arrival of the heavy mortars had allowed some Italians to escape up the road, but many others, in ragged overcoats patched with coarse twine, were captured. Between the Rangers and Allen’s troops, now pressing up Gumtree Road, the prisoner haul exceeded a thousand.

Kitchen trucks drove up with a barrel of hot stew, which the men ladled into their canteen cups or helmets. By four
P.M.
, the Rangers were back in their bivouac. Allen’s three infantry regiments continued forward along a fifteen-mile crescent southeast of El Guettar before digging in for the night.

“Few Germans in front of II Corps,” Patton’s intelligence officer, Monk Dickson, reported. “Rommel [
sic
] probably will attack us with whatever he has left after dealing with Eighth Army. Probably not earlier than 24 March.”

In five days, the Americans had covered seventy-five miles, taking Gafsa, El Guettar, and Sened Station, while reclaiming more than 2,000 square miles of territory—at a cost of fifty-seven battle casualties. “It’s all going like maneuvers,” Terry Allen mused. “It can’t be right.”

Ted Roosevelt woke on Tuesday, March 23, to the harsh cough of machine-gun fire. Flipping the blanket from his bedroll, he sat up with the creaky deliberation of a fifty-six-year-old man nursing a bum knee, arthritic joints, and a fibrillating heart. He had kept his boots on for the scant warmth they offered. For months he had been miserably cold, “the cold of the desert,” he called it. To Eleanor he had written three days earlier: “There’s but one thought I keep to me: Aren’t we too old to be called on to grapple with the enemy? Should not flaming youth leap into the breach—shouldering us aside—so that we can sit in the sun?”

Leaning on a cane, he stumped up the ridge with his gamecock hobble. He could tell by the high rate of fire that the machine guns were German; their sound now mingled with the answering chatter from American weapons. A sentry barked the password challenge—“Three?”—and was answered with the countersign: “Strikes!” Moonlight coated the landscape in quicksilver, and fog drifted across the desert pan below. But a rosy glow in the east showed that dawn was coming fast. Gun flashes rippled like heat lightning. Roosevelt found the 18th Infantry Regiment’s command post on Hill 336—“Wop Hill”—and lowered himself into a chest-deep slit trench.

“The battlefield lay at my feet, a circular plain about seven miles in diameter,” he would write Eleanor two days later. “I could see it all.” The American line formed a fifteen-mile fishhook. The 1st Division’s three regiments—16,000 men—occupied Keddab Ridge from north to south. The 26th Infantry held the north flank near Gumtree Road, on Roosevelt’s left. Part of the 16th Infantry and a battalion from the 18th Infantry held the center. A few hundred yards to his right, the ridge petered out in a narrow valley bisected by Highway 15, which ran from El Guettar eight miles in the rear past the American line and on toward Gabès over the horizon. Across the highway to the south, the land lifted again and the American line resumed. Only a few hours earlier, Roosevelt had dispatched two battalions from the 18th Infantry to extend the line onto the lower slopes of 3,000-foot Djebel Berda. On ground so rugged that guns had to be winched into position, the battalions tied in with Darby’s Rangers, whose entrenchments swung to the west and provided the long American shank with its barbed hook.

The chink of tools caught Roosevelt’s attention. Soldiers were furiously hacking slit trenches out of the rocky ground, regardless of the ants and scorpions infesting the ridgeline. Small white-petaled daisies covered the slope, straining toward the rising sun. The Big Red One had planned to attack this morning, under yet another change of orders from Alexander. Eighth Army’s difficulties at Mareth had caused Montgomery to reconsider his contempt for the Americans. Just three days before, he had dismissed the Yanks in his diary as “complete amateurs.” Now he needed their help.