An Army at Dawn (87 page)

Bradley took a few questions, climbed back into his jeep, and vanished down the hill. Reduced to half a page with a single map, his battle concept was sent to the British V Corps, which abutted the American zone on the south. General Allfrey studied it and then shook his head. “This chap Bradley,” he was reported as saying, “obviously knows nothing about commanding a corps.”

Although the endgame was just beginning on the ground, it had been under way for weeks in the air. Overwhelming Allied air superiority might be hard to see from the bottom of a slit trench at Béja, but it was all too visible to the Axis wretches caught in Allied bombsights. Thousands of tons of high explosives had been dropped on ports, airfields, and marshaling yards across northeast Tunisia, Sicily, and southern Italy, with thousands more to come. Bizerte had been hit so hard that not a single structure in the city was habitable. “We attacked Bizerte with the intention of blotting it off the map,” said one Army Air Forces general. That was not boast but fact. Raids on Tunis concentrated on docks and airfields, but the pummeling still killed 752 civilians and wounded more than a thousand; pinpoint accuracy was out of reach for B-17s flying at 23,000 feet through flak so heavy the route became known, bitterly, as the Milk Run. A single raid on Palermo blew up an ammunition ship, sank seven other freighters, and generated waves powerful enough to toss two coastal lighters onto the quay; the port was immobilized for weeks. In another raid, three Italian destroyers ferrying a panzer battalion to Tunisia were sunk. Six men survived to tell the tale.

Allied minelayers north and east of Tunisia became so proficient that Axis vessels were forced to cross the Sicilian Straits through a single swept channel a mile wide and forty miles long. Ultra eavesdropping revealed ship manifests and sailing times in such detail that Allied targeteers could select their prey on the basis of which cargo they most wished to see on the Mediterranean floor any given day. A solitary, pathetic scow carrying fuel or tank shells might draw fifty attacking planes. American aircrews calculated that on average twenty-eight tons of bombs sufficed to sink a midsized merchantman; a typical formation of eighteen Flying Fortresses dropped twice that tonnage, and crews came off the target singing “It’s Better to Give Than to Receive” over their intercoms. In March alone, more than three dozen Axis ships had been sunk on the Tunisian run, and with them nearly half the military cargo and fuel intended for Arnim’s forces.

Consequently, Kesselring turned to air transport more and more. By early April, 200 or more flights a day—organized in wave-skimming convoys called
Pulks
—carried men and matériel to Africa. The Allies responded, beginning on April 5, with Operation FLAX, a series of ruthless fighter sweeps and bombing raids. On their first FLAX mission, U.S. pilots bushwacked fifty Ju-52 transports and their escorts; in what was described as a “general air mêlée,” seventeen German aircraft were shot down at a cost of two American planes. Bombers also dropped nearly 11,000 twenty-pound fragmentation bombs on targets in Bizerte and Italy. By day’s end, Luftwaffe losses reached thirty planes in the air and many more on the ground.

Worse was to come. On April 18, Palm Sunday, four squadrons of the American 57th Fighter Group—the Black Scorpions, the Fighting Cocks, the Exterminators, and the Yellow Diamonds—joined a Spitfire squadron over Cap Bon for the final patrol of the day. Sixty fighters were “spaced up into the sky like a flight of stairs, each line of four planes abreast making a step,” according to a contemporary account by Richard Thruelsen and Elliott Arnold. “The bottom of this flight was at four thousand feet. The Spits, at the top, were at fifteen thousand feet.” Purple shadows were stretching across Cap Bon when the pilots suddenly spotted several V-formations of Ju-52s and six-engine Me-323s six miles off the coast. “They were flying the most beautiful formation I’ve ever seen,” one pilot said later. “It seemed like a shame to break it up.”

Splitting into pairs, the marauders attacked from the right rear, quickly disarranging the perfect Vs and picking off the stragglers. A pilot described his first victim: “A short burst left his port engine burning. The flame trailed the whole length of the plane. The center or nose engine was also on fire.” Blazing planes cartwheeled into the violet water or crashed on the Tunisian beach. “The sea turned red and a great circle of debris bobbed in an oily scum,” a witness reported. “From the beaches rose the tall black columns of a dozen funeral pyres.”

Thirty-eight Luftwaffe planes were destroyed. Twenty more were shot down the next morning, then another thirty-nine on April 22, including many carrying cargoes of fuel that burned like winged hellfire during the languid, corkscrew descent into the Mediterranean. In less than three weeks, FLAX destroyed 432 Axis aircraft at a cost of thirty-five Allied planes; the losses included more than half the German air transport fleet. A flyboy cockiness invested Allied airfields. “If Kesselring goes on making mistakes like this, we’re not going to get much of a reputation,” Air Marshal Tedder observed. At Göring’s insistence, Axis flights took place only in darkness; with spring days ever longer, there were only about sixty sorties each night to bring Arnim supplies and reinforcements.

Although a quarter-million Axis men crowded the bridgehead, only one-third of them were genuine combat troops. Most others were noncombatants from the Italian logistical tail that had been organized for an army with pretensions to a vast colonial empire, or rear-echelon soldiers from divisions destroyed in Rommel’s long retreat across Africa’s northern rim. Reduced to fewer than a hundred guns, the Italian army “was in agony,” one general observed. Arab black-marketeers did a brisk business in safe-conduct passes sold to Italians keen on slipping across no-man’s-land. Allied pilots and artillerymen papered the Axis ranks with propaganda sheets encouraging defection and dissent; these were the initial barrages of nearly 4 billion leaflets—equivalent to 4,000 truckloads—that would be printed in the Mediterranean in the next two years.

Axis reserves were still ferried to Tunis at a rate of about 2,000 men each day, but most frontline units were beyond reconstitution. The 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions had roughly 5,600 men each, while the 90th Light Africa was down to 6,000 and the 164th Light Africa numbered only 3,000. The Italian Centauro and Spezia Divisions had been obliterated, and three others had been reduced, collectively, to eleven scarecrow battalions. General Messe warned that “the repulse of a large-scale enemy attack is impossible with the amount of ammunition on hand.” By late April, a Luftwaffe anti-aircraft unit had trouble scrounging the thirty-five gallons of fuel a day it needed for its radar sets. A German staff officer noted that “an armored division without petrol is little better than a heap of scrap iron” an armored division without tanks was even less. The Axis armor fleet numbered fewer than 150 tanks, barely a tenth the Allied force. The 15th Panzer had four tanks fit for battle. Arnim rejected several counterattack proposals as pointless “butting at the mountains.” When a senior officer visiting from Berlin accused Army Group Africa of “squinting over its shoulder,” Arnim tartly replied that he was “squinting for ships.”

As early as December, the German high command had discreetly considered what transport would be needed for a complete evacuation of the Tunisian bridgehead, but those contingency plans had been shelved in light of Kesselring’s unflagging optimism. When Kesselring later proposed a “comb-out” of extraneous personnel, Hitler refused on grounds that selective evacuation would hurt morale. Although Allied intelligence estimated that in early April the Axis could still remove 37,000 men a day from Tunisia, not until mid-month did a limited, belated evacuation begin of the
mangiatori
—“useless mouths.” Mouths unfortunate enough to be considered essential got little to eat: an Italian soldier’s diary indicated that his daily ration comprised half a mess tin of cold rice, a couple of potatoes, and a slice and a half of bread.

If his virtual abandonment of the African army seems daft in hindsight, Hitler as usual could spin a logically coherent strand within the larger web of his lunacy. On April 8, he and Mussolini met in a castle near Salzburg to conspire. Il Duce’s former strut was gone. Every Allied step closer to Tunis was a step closer to Rome. Naples and other cities in the south were being pummeled from the air. Strikes and peace demonstrations racked Turin and Milan. Depressed and feeble, Mussolini renewed his plea for a separate peace between Berlin and Moscow; the Axis could then turn full force toward the Mediterranean, holding Tunisia while falling on the enemy rear through Spain and Spanish Morocco.

Hitler dismissed this scheme. Of Mussolini’s proposals, only standing fast in Tunisia interested him. After the disaster at Stalingrad, recent German successes in the Kharkov counteroffensive—three Soviet armies had been obliterated in less than a month—had revived the Führer’s craving for complete victory over the hated Russians. As long as the Anglo-Americans concentrated their strength on the periphery of the Axis empire, they could not attempt major operations elsewhere. Tunisia, he told Mussolini, was shielding Italy and the rest of southern Europe. The Führer also recognized that the final loss of North Africa would further undermine Mussolini at home, perhaps fatally, imperiling both the defense of the Italian homeland and the Axis itself. Tunisia must be defended to the last ditch.

Il Duce’s backbone was stiffened by Hitler’s rhetoric. He agreed that the bridgehead should hold “at all costs”—that portentous phrase used so glibly by those far removed from the firing line. “Everything can happen if we persist,” he told Kesselring in Rome on April 12, “and therefore we shall hold.” The next day—Tuesday, the thirteenth—Arnim was told there would be no mass evacuation.

Appalled at what he called “this liquidation,” Arnim later acknowledged “the greatest desire to call it quits and to ask to be relieved.” Instead, he saluted the order, began cobbling together infantry battalions from his cooks and clerks, and turned to the task of digging that last ditch.

Hammering Home the Cork

A
S
the Allied armies converged on the bridgehead, their engagements increasingly occurred simultaneously. For narrative simplicity, they may be considered one at a time, beginning with Eighth Army in the south.

Montgomery’s horde swaggered toward Tunis as cocksure as a street fighter eager to put an opponent on the pavement one last time. Tommies sorted through booty abandoned by retreating Axis troops, including American swimsuits captured at Kasserine and a box of Italian regimental silverware left on the road like an oblation. A cool swank pervaded the ranks and even the muddle-headed cries of
“Vivent les Américains!”
from liberated villagers failed to prick the high spirits of an army that had its quarry’s scent.

Montgomery had known since April 11 that Alexander intended First Army to make the main Allied thrust toward Tunis. Gentler terrain clearly favored an armored blow from the southwest rather than due south, where the coastal plain narrowed to a funnel barely a mile wide and frowned upon by hills that were high, steep, and twenty miles deep—“bald rock faces, gullies, and abominations,” as the official British history put it. This Montgomery could accept; he had urged Alexander to “concentrate all your strength” for
“an almighty crack”
in one spot, and as requested he donated his own 1st Armoured Division and an armored car regiment to First Army toward that end.

But Montgomery was not a man to relinquish laurels easily, particularly to those he considered his military inferiors, which included virtually everyone. “It would be all right if Anderson was any good, as he could do it all,” he wrote in his diary on April 12. “But he is no good.” To Alexander on April 16 he cabled: “All my troops are in first-class form and want to be in the final Dunkirk.” Although, under Alexander’s plan, Eighth Army was to contribute little more than a hearty feint, Montgomery still hoped to beat Anderson to the Tunisian capital by “gate crashing” the Axis bridgehead with a four-division assault on the rocky massif above Enfidaville.

It is axiomatic in mountain warfare that the second-highest crest is often worthless ground, but Eighth Army now launched a campaign to capture a chain of second-highest hills. After years in the desert, the abrupt change in topography was pleasing to the eye—for 1,800 miles these men had dreamed of green hills and wildflowers—but tactically confusing. Montgomery’s increasing reliance on brute force played badly here: even overwhelming firepower had a limited effect on sloping, fissured terrain that sheltered defenders and swallowed vast tonnages of bombs and artillery shells. Eighth Army units were badly understrength after the travails of the past year, and up to one-quarter of the remaining infantrymen would be needed to haul ammunition over ground often too rugged even for mules.

Such handicaps seemed manageable to the British, because their intelligence had concluded that the Enfidaville fortifications were lightly held, with six or eight demoralized German battalions and some hapless Italians supposedly facing the X Corps sector. (Soon that estimate of enemy forces would triple.) But Montgomery was convinced he could “bounce the enemy out of Enfidaville,” just as he believed he had little to learn from the amateurs in First Army and II Corps, despite their six-month apprenticeship in Tunisian hill fighting. Now arrogance and error would reap the usual dividends.

Even the second-highest crests had substantial foothills that served as watchtowers shielding the inner keep. Among these, three miles west of Enfidaville, was Takrouna, a 600-foot limestone knob crowned with a domed mosque, an old Berber fort, and adobe houses on three levels. General Messe himself took a hand in arranging its defenses, manned by 300 Italian infantry troops. “In an endeavor to rouse the spirit of emulation,” Messe later explained, “I included a platoon of Germans in the garrison.” Freyberg’s New Zealanders—specifically, the Maori tribesmen of his 28th Battalion—attacked this “rotting stalagmite” just before midnight on Monday, April 19. For two days, the battle scorched Takrouna’s pale faces, up and down rough-hewn steps, through secret tunnels, and in and out of one blood-spattered room after another.