An Army at Dawn (91 page)

The 34th Division had redeemed itself, although such fine notions seemed vacant in the immediate aftermath. Ryder put his losses at 324 men. The American dead were hauled from the hill in truck beds. “All you could see,” an artilleryman later remembered, “was their shoes hanging off the tail gate.” Across the valley, a staff officer in the 16th Infantry summoned a lieutenant preparing to lead a patrol back up Hill 523. “I don’t believe I would take any prisoners on 523.”

“No,” the lieutenant agreed, “no prisoners will be taken.”

But except for dead men and Colonel Denholm’s map, the hill was empty. The enemy was gone. As Bradley had foreseen, the capture of Hill 609 unhinged enemy defenses across the entire front, from the Mediterranean to the Mousetrap. American troops bayed in pursuit. A reporter watching from 609 wrote, “At our feet every road was thronged with troops, guns, and supplies, pouring northward.”

Outside Béja, Bradley sat on a metal stool in his tent, reading dispatches. He studied the map on the easel, now crisscrossed with blue and red crayon marks showing an enemy in full retreat and pursuers close behind. He was in good humor, chuckling often and, as his aide later recounted, “smoothing the sparse gray hair on his head and thinking aloud.” Fresh reports arrived from the 9th Division in the north, the 34th and 1st in the south, and the 1st Armored Division, preparing to blow down the Tine valley on two mine-cleared routes named Broadway and Riley Street. The enemy appeared to be falling back as much as fifteen miles to the far side of Mateur. When another dispatch noted signs of a possible counterattack, Bradley nodded.

“Let ’em come,” he said. “We want to kill Germans.”

Mateur fell on May 3, three days ahead of Alexander’s estimate. The 91st Reconnaissance Battalion entered the deserted town from the south and west at 11:30
A.M.
just as German demolitionists blew up the last bridge across the Tine to the east; by early evening, Army engineers had a new span in place. A dozen roads and rail lines converged at Mateur, and its capture ended any Axis hope of concentrating against the British, who were still struggling in the Medjerda valley twenty miles to the south.

The land here flattened out before rising again in a final set of foothills that cradled two large lakes between Mateur and Bizerte. Swallows scissored the brilliant air, rich with the odors of manure and fresh-cut hay, and poplars marched along the road shoulders in perfect ranks. In a white manor house flanked by cypresses, troops found a biography of Bismarck open on the desk; soon they surmised that the mansion for months had served as General Hasso von Manteuffel’s division headquarters. American scouts sat on a knoll overlooking the Tine, singing “Moonlight on the River Colorado.” Others got drunk in a Mateur wine cellar, and the 1st Armored commander ordered them shot at sunset. “General,” a staff colonel urged him, “I think we ought to let the men live until sunrise. It’s customary.” General Harmon reluctantly agreed, and on reflection commuted the sentence. Wounded Americans and captured Germans shared a farmhouse aid station near Mateur, “smoking, cursing, or grimacing.” A GI who arrived by ambulance with a bullet in his lung gestured at a column of prisoners and murmured, “Tell the sons of bitches to go to hell.”

Many thousands had retreated to the last bastion, the Lake Ichkeul hills. American gunners, wearing Barbasol shave cream as sunblock and head nets against the swarming flies, plastered them with artillery that ignited the dry grass. “Arab shacks and straw burned with great fury, sending clouds of smoke into the air,” an officer noted. A company of Shermans from the 13th Armored Regiment was sent to overrun trenches sheltering a German rear guard. “Some of the enemy were buried alive when the side of the trenches collapsed under the weight of the medium tanks,” another officer reported. “Others were mowed down by the tankers’ machine guns.” Commanders urged them forward. “Here is our chance,” Eddy told the 9th Division. “Don’t let it slip away—push on!” Harmon ordered his tank crews to drive “like shit through a tin goose.”

The 1st Armored Division had been held on a very short leash for weeks, and its hour was about to arrive. The terrain now favored a pursuit by Old Ironsides’ 200 tanks, and Alexander scheduled the final assault on Bizerte for May 6, at the same time as a massive attack by First Army to break through to Tunis. Once again, though, the German defenses looked formidable, with antitank gunners on the approaches to Bizerte said to be “dug in to their eyebrows.” Hamilton Howze, who had returned to a line unit after Ward’s departure, later wrote: “In the time of waiting I confess I found out what fear is: it is a monkey’s paw that squeezes your liver in a heavy grip.” On a visit to Harmon’s command post southwest of Mateur, Bradley stood in a grainfield scanning the countryside. “Can you do it?” he asked Harmon.

“Yes, but it’s going to be expensive,” Harmon replied. “I’d guess fifty tanks to finish the job.”

“Go ahead. It’ll cost us less in the long run if we cut him to pieces quickly.”

Yet Harmon nursed his own doubts. If the 34th Division had been the Army’s most troubled combat unit before the victory at Hill 609, Old Ironsides after Kasserine and Maknassy was a close second. Harmon had spent his month in command trying to rebuild what he deemed “a crybaby outfit,” still fractured by divided loyalties to Ward and Robinett and “honeycombed with dissension.” But he had alienated many with his brusque approach, exemplified by a memo in mid-April that castigated the division for “lack of discipline, lack of system, and a general sloppy appearance.” And at dusk on April 13 he had summoned every officer to the slopes of Djebel Lessouda, where the charred wreckage from Sidi bou Zid lay scattered in the shadows. Harmon delivered a shrill rebuke, which, in Robinett’s description, “damned all past performance of duty, sparing none.” He concluded with a raspy warning: “The division will get to Mateur, but maybe you won’t.” Some men had the temerity to boo; most trudged off in dejection. “His speech was not very well received,” a lieutenant later wrote. “We all went to bed that night very much hurt.”

Now they had reached Mateur; but the biggest prize still lay ahead, in Bizerte. On May 5 Harmon drove to Robinett’s headquarters and led the CCB commander into an open field for a private conversation. With his massive skull and barrel chest, Harmon towered over his pint-sized subordinate. “Will the damned tanks fight?” he demanded.

“Damned right they will fight, as some are doing now,” Robinett snapped. “They have always fought and will fight again.” Never content to leave well enough alone, he then berated Harmon for questioning “the courage of these men.” Harmon turned on his heel and returned to his jeep, while a furious Robinett tromped back to the tent and composed a message to all ranks: “Towards the rear anonymous individuals have said that we are ‘not battle worthy.’ This insult to our glorious dead and to you, the courageous living, shall not be forgotten nor left uncontested.”

After that unpromising prelude, Harmon held a final planning conference for his lieutenants at the division command post a few hours later. The attack was set for first light the next morning, Thursday, May 6, with CCB in the vanguard. But Robinett’s behavior during the past month continued to gnaw at Harmon. Robinett “seems to think only in terms of defense and is definitely casualty conscious,” Harmon privately informed the War Department. “I do not feel that he has the qualities of leadership that are necessary in an armored division.” Six months of combat had worn him down. As he watched Robinett drive away from the conference toward his own command post, Harmon muttered to himself: “Hell, that fellow isn’t going to fight for me tomorrow.” The judgment was harsh and probably wrong, but Harmon’s mind was made up. Summoning his driver, he raced after Robinett to relieve him of command.

Harmon had nearly overtaken the jeep on the poplar-shaded road when the rush of German artillery split the air. A shell exploded a few feet behind Robinett, shredding his left leg and flinging him and his driver from their seats. More rounds crashed through the trees as soldiers appeared from the CCB encampment and bundled their wounded commander into an ambulance, which zigzagged through shell fire to the camouflaged command tent around the next bend.

Minutes later, Harmon pushed aside the canvas flaps and walked in “looking hard as rock.” A glance at the mangled leg told Harmon that Robinett’s war was over. Robinett looked up with glassy eyes. He had already relinquished command of CCB to Colonel Benson. In an hour he would be driven to the field hospital in Béja, vomiting in agony; a regimental band waited to serenade him with “The Missouri Waltz.” A flight to Algeria and evacuation to the United States would be followed by many months of medical rehabilitation and a lasting hitch in his bantam strut.

“You are about to win a great victory,” Robinett told Harmon thickly before stretcher bearers carried him to the ambulance, “and I only regret that I cannot be present to share the battle with my men.”

Harmon shook his head. “Poor bastard,” he muttered, then turned and strode from the tent.

Tunisgrad

T
HE
most intense artillery barrage ever seen in Africa erupted in gusts of white flame at three
A.M.
on May 6. More than 400 Royal Artillery guns cut loose simultaneously on targets along Highway 5, five miles south of the Medjerda River. Here First Army had concentrated for the great lunge on Tunis, now code-named Operation
STRIKE
. “The muzzle flashes lit up the gun pits with a dancing yellow light, and the shells, tearing overhead at a rate of five or six hundred a minute, burst a few seconds later on the opposite slope like the flowering of a field of ruby tulips,” a young officer wrote.

Determined to bury the enemy beneath “stunning weights of metal,” gunners plotted one shell for every six feet of enemy frontage. (At El Alamein, the figure had been one shell for every thirty feet.) Shells shrieked “over our heads in an endless stream, so close, it seemed that you could almost strike a match on them,” a witness declared. After half an hour the barrage lifted momentarily, then fell with redoubled vigor, marching eastward by 100 yards every three minutes. Seventy-two suspected enemy artillery batteries that had been pinpointed by gun flashes or aerial surveillance received lavish attention: each hostile battery was hammered on three occasions with two-minute concentrations by as many as thirty-two guns. The effect was “a roof of shells…destroying every living thing that moves.” More than a few inanimate targets were also destroyed, including, as a scout sorrowfully reported, an oak vat containing 8,000 gallons of red Tunisian wine.

Behind the guns at 5:40
A.M.
came the planes, again with a bombardment unprecedented on the continent. More than 2,000 Allied sorties would be flown this Thursday, beating a path from Medjez-el-Bab to Tunis. Fighters and bombers so thick they eclipsed the rising sun concentrated on a four-mile square around Massicault and St. Cyprien along Highway 5. Insult followed injury: clouds of propaganda pamphlets warned enemy survivors that they had been duped by “Rommel” and left to die alone in Africa.

Well before dawn, the infantry had surged forward on a 3,000-yard front, guided by a Bofors gun that fired three red tracers on a fixed line every five minutes. At Alexander’s insistence, First Army had been reinforced with two divisions and a Guards brigade from Montgomery’s horde. They had arrived more than 30,000 strong from Enfidaville over the past few days, fire-blackened tea tins banging against their yellow fenders; although headlights were authorized for the move, after years of blackout not one vehicle in five had working bulbs. No fraternal love was lost between the mountain tribe and the desert tribe—the two British armies were “as different as chalk from cheese,” General Horrocks conceded—and Tommies in the 78th Division went so far as to paint signs on their vehicles: “We have no connection with the Eighth Army.” But the added weight lent irresistible momentum to Anderson’s attack, and by daybreak the British 4th Division and the 4th Indian Division had pried a gap two miles wide through enemy defenses.

Four tank battalions rushed through. Defenders not killed by artillery or air attack died at their posts or broke for the rear, tossing aside their rifles as they ran. Despite advance knowledge from intercepted radio messages about where the British would likely attack, Arnim was powerless; the Fifth Panzer Army had been reduced to fewer than seventy tanks, little ammunition, and even less fuel. By eleven
A.M.
, British armor had penetrated 5,000 yards beyond the gap, with light losses. Anderson initially had proposed having his tankers linger to mop up stragglers, but Alexander overruled him. The tanks were to “drive with all speed and energy on Tunis,” Alexander ordered. “The rapier,” he later explained, “was to be thrust into the heart.”

“The whole valley before us became a heaving sea of flame,” wrote the American journalist John MacVane. “Over a dozen roads and trails, plumes of floury dust rose from the columns of vehicles.” The stink of cordite and crushed wheat was nauseating enough to bring some men to their knees. Through “a thick pall of smoke and dust resembling ground mist,” drivers bumped along in second gear, navigating by compass heading. The correspondent Alan Moorehead described seeing Alexander racing forward “at almost reckless speed, both his hands tight on the wheel and his face whitened like a baker’s boy with white dust.”

Allied eavesdroppers intercepted German radio messages sending medics into the line as riflemen; the walking wounded soon were ordered to join them. Another message, from Arnim’s quartermaster, requested that no more ammunition be dispatched from Italy because there was no fuel with which to distribute it in Africa. A third message reported that the 15th Panzer Division had been “laid low…. Its bulk must be considered as annihilated.” As German resistance disintegrated, the British vanguard was urged to press on with a prearranged code word: “Butter.” Soon radios across the front were chirping: “Butter, butter, butter.” By dusk, two armored divisions had reached Massicault, eight miles beyond the infantry and a day’s march from Tunis. On a hilltop west of the capital a British colonel reported, “I can see the lily-white walls of that blasted city.”