An Army at Dawn (84 page)

To Patton on April 5, Eisenhower wrote: “General Alexander has told me that your corps is
not
to be pinched out of the coming campaign.”

Well laid though the plans were, they would not survive contact with the enemy. The greatest threat yet to Eisenhower’s vision of Allied comity had begun to unfold in a dusty village called Fondouk.

One final chance remained to intercept the fugitive remnant of General Messe’s army before it reached the sanctuary of the Tunis defenses.

Midway between El Guettar and Tunis, the Marguellil River threaded a narrow pass through the Eastern Dorsal where Fondouk—a few adobe hovels and a mosque—straddled Highway 3 as it sliced toward Kairouan twenty miles to the northeast. Less than a thousand yards wide, the defile was bracketed on the north by a stony pinnacle named Djebel Rhorab and on the south by an equally stony escarpment named Djebel Haouareb. The shallow river wandered in muddy braids through the pass within the steep-banked wadi it had worn. Prickly pear and drooping olives dappled the 300-foot hills; so, in the splendor of a North African April, did marigolds, and crimson poppies like blood pooling on the rocks.

Germans infested these slopes, and had for months. They had blasted gun positions from the shale and built bivouac dens in the cliffs, appointed with stoves, beds, and occasional crucifixes. Gunners registered their artillery on the open approaches from the west and calibrated their mortars on all the dead spaces below the ridges. Fields of fire were nearly perfect. The defenders included two battalions of the 999th Africa Division, whose ranks were filled with court-martialed soldiers considered “suitable for rehabilitation” by fire. Many were convicted black marketeers, demoted officers, or
Schwarzschlächter,
“black butchers,” who had illegally slaughtered livestock for food. Forbidden to wear national emblems, they sported no breast or cap eagles, no cockades or collar patches, no belt buckle insignia of
“Gott Mit Uns.”
Discounting the formidable rehabilitative powers of German sergeants, British intelligence considered the units inferior.

This was a mistake, as American troops could attest. One halfhearted effort had already been made in late March to force Fondouk Pass. In harmony with the II Corps demonstrations at Maknassy and El Guettar, which were intended to siphon Axis forces from Montgomery’s front, Patton on March 25 had ordered the 34th Infantry Division to “go out in that area and make a lot of noise, but don’t try to capture anything.” The division’s three infantry regiments—the 168th, 133rd, and 135th—had finally been reunited, and a homebody strain of Iowa and Minnesota still ran through them. But rough handling at Kasserine left residual scars both physical and psychic. In a March 11 message to his officers, Major General Ryder, the tall Kansan who commanded the 34th, decried “this military creeping paralysis present in our division” and the want of “offensive spirit.”

The first foray at Fondouk had proved Ryder’s point. Moving forward on a night so impenetrable—“dark as a stack of black cats,” one soldier said—that a guide with a lit cigarette walked ten feet in front of each vehicle, the division attacked with four battalions on a 3,000-yard front at six
A.M.
on March 27. By midafternoon, after struggling uphill beneath the frowning guns, the assault stalled 500 yards short of Djebel Haouareb. German machine guns roared through the next night, spitting lime-green tracers so thick that soldiers claimed to have read a newspaper by the light. A renewed attack on the morning of the twenty-eighth collapsed, as did various infantry maneuvers over the next three days. At the 15th Evacuation Hospital near Sbeïtla, every square inch of the admissions tent, four ward tents, both surgical tents, and the evacuation tent was covered with bleeding boys from Fondouk, and nurses turned away more ambulances. As Patton had requested, the division made a lot of noise and captured nothing, at a cost of 527 casualties. Most losses fell on the star-crossed 168th Infantry, just replenished after the Sidi bou Zid debacle. Now its ranks needed filling again.

Belatedly, Alexander realized that only a much bigger force could crack the Fondouk gap. Caution and conventionality—jabs, short hooks, and frontal assaults—had characterized the six weeks of his generalship in Tunisia. Nearly 90,000 Americans had been used to peck at the Eastern Dorsal in three different spots, while a comparable force in Anderson’s First Army had mostly sat on its haunches for the past month. Just as Colonel Lang had concluded that a more forceful American attack at Maknassy heights would have unhinged the defenders there, so senior Axis commanders came to believe that the African campaign could have ended a month sooner had Alexander struck a quicker, bolder blow at Fondouk.

Now he tried to make amends. The 34th Division would join with the British IX Corps and French troops, more than tripling the Fondouk force. Infantrymen would prise open the gap along the Marguellil River, allowing the British 6th Armoured Division to sweep onto the coastal plain toward Kairouan. Messe’s army, fleeing Montgomery and Patton in the south, was to be intercepted and destroyed before it merged with Arnim’s Fifth Panzer Army in the north.

At eleven
A.M.
on Tuesday, April 6, trailing a banner of dust, Lieutenant General John Crocker arrived at Ryder’s camouflaged tent in an orchard nine miles southeast of Fondouk. The British corps commander had arrived in Africa a few weeks earlier with a reputation that had grown steadily since his capable command of a tank brigade in France in 1940. Direct and sane, Crocker nevertheless harbored prejudices against the Americans. Some were trivial: he was credited with a caustic bon mot—“How green is our ally”—and he disliked the common Yank habits of eating only with a fork and smoking at table. More important, he considered U.S. forces so weighted with equipment that it “handicapped their strategic mobility.” American officers tended to be “very ignorant and the staff had little idea of how to operate forces.” Americans also seemed given to fantasy, retrospectively elevating the Kasserine debacle into a victory. To his wife a few weeks earlier, Crocker had written that in dealing with Americans “it is necessary to watch your step and wrap anything that one has to say which is the least critical or which savours of advice in the most tactful language.” They were “a queer lot with many nice ones…. So far as soldiering is concerned, believe me, the British have nothing at all to learn from them.”

It was regrettable that Crocker thought so, because his plan for Fondouk was flawed. Earlier in the week, he had proposed seizing Djebel Rhorab in the north with the British 128th Infantry Brigade, while Ryder’s men attacked in the south toward Djebel Haouareb, scene of their recent repulse. Now, however, fifteen officers in Ryder’s stuffy tent huddled around a large map mounted on plywood—colored paper squares represented the various battalions—to find that Crocker had amended the scheme in hopes of accelerating the armored push toward Kairouan. Djebel Rhorab was only weakly held, Crocker asserted, so British infantrymen would initially swing farther north, “denying” the hill to the enemy but not actually occupying it until the American attack was well under way. American artillery could blanket the hill with smoke shells, but not with high explosives lest they hit the arriving British troops.

Ryder was stunned. Just a week earlier, his division had been blistered with fire from Rhorab, which jutted to within 500 yards of Crocker’s proposed avenue for the American attack. Surely the Germans had since reinforced an already formidable position. “I had a plan based on our conference of a few days ago,” Ryder replied evenly, “but now I have none.” He pointed out the vulnerability of his troops, which would face galling fire from both north and east. Crocker waved away these objections. Speed and maneuver would overwhelm the thin defenses. Ryder stared at Crocker with pursed lips, then shrugged. Eisenhower’s orders seemed clear enough: subordinates were to salute and carry on, disregarding nationality.

Now another officer spoke up,
en français
. General Louis-Marie Koeltz, commander of the French XIX Corps, knew this ground from personal heartache. The Germans had routed his troops here in January to capture the high ground they now occupied. In his sky-blue uniform and gold-spackled red kepi, Koeltz pointed out that the American approaches were “entirely flat and completely exposed except for a row of cacti.” His own reconnaissance showed that a frontal attack would fail. Blue eyes flashing, tidy mustache twitching in his ruddy face, Koeltz added, “We could take out Djebel Rhorab from the north, because in this region the infantry could be supported by tanks.” The rolling terrain and dense olive groves there would offer attackers more cover than the naked ground approaching Djebel Haouareb.

Crocker listened politely, then reaffirmed his plan. “My intervention had no effect,” Koeltz later said. “Having to express myself in French, I may not have been well understood.”

It went badly, of course. Fatalism settled over the 34th Division, which collectively bought $26 million in life insurance that spring, mostly on the eve of the Fondouk offensive. Chaplains stayed busy hearing confessions or ministering to the doubtful. A head count at church services one Sunday in April tallied almost 7,000 worshippers, nearly half the division. In a handwritten note, Alexander told Eisenhower that troops in the 34th Division “seem reasonably confident about tomorrow’s operation, and I do hope it will go well.” To Brooke, however, he pronounced them “soft, green, and quite untrained…. Is it surprising then that they lack the will to fight?”

As the 135th Infantry commander later conceded, no officer in the division favored this attack, “but no one was saying so to the others.” British planning was derided as “brittle and axiomatic…inflexible.” Ryder had been wary of the British since the invasion of Algiers and now, unjustly, he believed that they “wished to win the war with American troops and matériel.” At Fondouk, that meant expending the 34th Division so the 6th Armoured could bust through to Kairouan unscathed.

Perhaps, Ryder mused, the division could tiptoe past Djebel Rhorab before dawn. He successfully petitioned Crocker for permission to advance his attack from 5:30
A.M.
on April 8 to three
A.M.
His men laced toilet paper in their helmet nets so they might see one another in the dark, while rehearsing the challenge—“Grocery?”—and countersign—“Store.” They picked at a final meal of hardtack and “thousand-bone” oxtail soup, then nibbled the single slice of white bread served each man for dessert. At eight
P.M.
on Wednesday night, the regiments packed into trucks for assembly areas west of Fondouk. A half-ton truck for carrying out the dead trailed the convoy, bold white letters on its side proclaiming: “The Stuka Valley Hearse—Death Rides with Us.”

At 2:30, in a shallow wadi, each rifleman dumped his overcoat and collected two extra bandoliers of ammunition. Colonel Ray C. Fountain, a former federal bankruptcy referee in Des Moines who now commanded the 133rd Infantry, informed his officers: “I have been told that there will be tremendous aerial bombing support which will flatten everything—something we haven’t seen to date.”

There would be no bombing, tremendous or otherwise. Poor communications and confusion over the new attack time led to cancellation of the air strikes. As the two assault regiments pressed forward on a two-mile front, a battalion on the far left got lost in the darkness, veered into the river bottoms, and so completely undid Ryder’s timing that not until 5:30, the original H-hour, did the assault begin in earnest.

They found themselves in the beaten zone almost immediately. “A wave of flying dust and steel and lead was always before us,” one soldier recalled. Daylight revealed 6,000 American infantrymen creeping through tuft grass too short to hide a cat. “We were like a pea on a plate,” a sergeant reported. At 7:30, as plunging fire from Rhorab on the left and Haouareb straight ahead intensified, orders came to pull back 2,000 yards for another bombing raid that never materialized. By the time the troops moved forward again the Germans had their range. Gales of artillery swept the field; machine-gun rounds snipped the long-stemmed poppies, and antitank shells ricocheted end over end through the cactus like a buzzsaw. “We continued to move forward toward the enemy, standing erect like the British regulars charging up Bunker Hill,” a young officer wrote.

Not for long. By noon all forward movement had stopped, 700 yards from Djebel Haoureb. Frantic men scraped at the dirt with bayonets and mess-kit lids, then lay motionless except to flick away the hot shell fragments burning through their twill uniforms. “The mere raising of an eyebrow attracted enemy fire,” one sergeant in the 135th Infantry reported.

It never got better, not for two days. Tanks rumbled up in the early afternoon to inspirit the infantrymen, but instead attracted more fire. Within minutes four Shermans were flaming and the rest pulled back. Renewed attack orders at three
P.M.
went unheeded; the men “did little more than look up…and dig a little deeper,” a lieutenant noted. Fifteen more tanks arrived at five
P.M.
, but no rifleman would follow them, and soon another half-dozen burning hulls brightened the valley’s long shadows.