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Authors: Oliver L. North

BOOK: War Stories III
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On 14 January 1943, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill began a ten-day conference at Casablanca—on ground that had been in enemy hands only a little more than two months before. Although the city was still subject to Luftwaffe air attacks, the two Allied leaders and their staffs worked around the clock. It was at Casablanca that they decided to demand the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers and agreed to postpone an invasion of the European continent until 1944. They also concluded that Sicily would be taken as soon as North Africa was secure.
 
FDR and Churchill at Casablanca on January 22, 1943.
Both FDR and Churchill were sanguine that Operation Torch was nearly completed. The day that they convened, Rommel's desert legions, having conducted a seventy-two-day retreat from El Alamein, were trying to hold against Montgomery's 8th Army east of Tripoli, Libya. By 23 January, the day before the Allied leaders completed their strategy session, Rommel's Afrika Korps was in retreat again. This time he wouldn't stop until 4 February—deep in Tunisia, behind the “Mareth Line,” a series of defensive positions erected by the French before the war started.
Though he had no doubt about the eventual outcome, Eisenhower was far less certain than his leaders about the timing of a victory in North Africa. In briefing the president, prime minister, and the Joint Staff, he noted that German reinforcements were now flooding into Tunis and that preparations for an Axis counteroffensive appeared to be under way.
He didn't have to wait long. On 14 February, in weather so bad that it grounded the air forces of both sides, Rommel sent the 10th and 21st Panzer Divisions smashing into II Corps lines guarding the Faid Pass in Tunisia. General Fredendall's II Corps, consisting of the U.S. 1st Armored Division, and the 1st and 34th Infantry Divisions, was inadequately prepared for the Panzer assault and the poorly trained Americans fell back in disorder, more than fifty miles through the Kasserine Pass.
The German advance was finally halted on 20 February by the British 6th Armored Division, supported by the U.S. 9th Division's artillery—but not before 5,275 American GIs were dead, wounded, prisoners of the Reich, or missing in action. Corporal Duane Stone, a Browning Automatic Rifleman in the 34th Infantry Division, was one of them.
CORPORAL DUANE STONE, US ARMY
34th Infantry Division
Faid Pass, Tunisia
18 February 1943
I started my training in March 1941, but we didn't even get rifles until May. Later I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for some real training and from there, I was sent overseas on a British passenger liner that had been converted into a troop ship—along with about 1,700 other troops that were just as green as I was. We landed in Liverpool and started doing amphibious training, getting ready for an invasion—though nobody told us where. We assumed it would be some place in Europe. By July we were training for landings on beaches that were laid out exactly like the ones we'd see in North Africa on Operation Torch—but we didn't find that out until later.
In October the word came down, “We are going to take a boat trip.” Everyone in my BAR squad—all three Browning Automatic Rifle teams—knew then that we were headed for war. I think they told us we were going to North Africa three or four days before we actually landed. Our objective was to take the western part of the city of Algiers.
After we landed on 8 November, we marched twenty-plus miles before we were under fire by a Vichy French battalion. The actual battle, as far as we were concerned, was over in about two and a half hours.
Things were quiet for a few days but then, about the third night, while we were in Algiers, the Luftwaffe started bombing us. Every night thereafter the Germans would spend three, maybe four hours, bombing the ships and piers at the harbor and our camps around the city. They had plenty of aircraft—but we had almost none. Almost every night German Stukas would attack 17th Field Artillery. It was like that until we headed east from Algiers in December to attack the German lines near the Faid pass, up in the Atlas Mountains of Tunisia.
For most of December, January, and the first half of February of '43, we were in a series of back and forth fights with Rommel's forces up in the mountains. Our regiment was spread between the Faid Pass and Kasserine Pass—a distance of about fifty miles. Then, on the night of 13–14 of February, the Luftwaffe carpet-bombed our whole sector. Afterwards we could hear armor moving and we very quickly realized this was no probe—it was a major attack.
One of our officers passed the word that we were surrounded and had to try to break out—and would have to make a forced march to get to the Kasserine Pass. But, of course, you don't move at night, on foot, as fast as you do in the daytime.
By the night of the seventeenth we had been battling the Germans nonstop for three days as we retreated. We had no food, very little water, and were running low on ammunition. Our biggest holdup was trying to move an entire unit of 1,800 troops through enemy lines. So we were told to break up into small groups and start walking northwest toward Kasserine as soon as it was dark.
Just before dark, a column of American tanks headed toward us. They were probably four miles away and I watched 'em, through my field glasses. Even though they were outnumbered, they engaged the Germans—but there just wasn't anything they could do. The Panzers just devastated them. There were also some armored personnel carriers with 105s mounted on 'em that fired on the German tanks but the shells just bounced off—they couldn't penetrate the Panzer's armor plate.
There were probably twenty men in the group I was with and we started out after dark. There was no moon that night and we had to move very slowly because there were minefields all over the place.
During the night we passed through some German tank platoons that were held up on the road—but I estimated that we were still twenty miles behind the German front line. Before dawn, the dozen of us who were still together stumbled into an irrigation ditch and we decided to hole up there during the daylight hours and hope that we wouldn't be spotted.
But shortly after the sun came up, a German half-track with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on it came rumbling up through the ditch. A German officer, probably twenty-four or twenty-five years old, said in perfect English, “Gentlemen, for you, the war is over. You can go and see our homeland now.”
Fifteen German soldiers circled around us, took our weapons, and made us understand that we were to start marching east. After five or six hours we arrived at a barbed-wire fenced compound, and the English-speaking officer said, “You'll stay here, for a couple of days.”
Eventually they sent us to a prisoner of war camp, in Germany, that held POWs of every nationality—including about 1,500 American soldiers. They were brutal to the Americans, but for the Russians it was worse. Once, they brought in a whole trainload of Russian POWs, but never let 'em off that train—for forty-two days! By the time they opened the doors of the boxcars, half of them were already dead, and the other half probably wished they had died.
A couple of American POWs hung themselves—committed suicide. But a lot more died from what the Nazi guards said were “heart attacks.” I was confined in that POW camp until we were liberated—on May 6, 1945—just two days before the war ended.
The disaster that had befallen Duane Stone and his comrades began at Faid Pass and ended just a few miles to the northwest of the Kasserine Pass—the gateway through the Atlas Mountains between Tunisia and Algeria. But by 22 February, the German counter-offensive had stalled. The Panzers were running out of fuel, and the weather had cleared enough for Allied airpower to attack the German armored columns in the open countryside. Rommel knew he was about to be assaulted by Montgomery on the Mareth Line.
On 26 February, Eisenhower launched an attack on a three-division front, driving the Germans back through the Kasserine Pass and restoring Allied positions to those held prior to Rommel's offensive. The following week he relieved Fredendall, the II Corps commander, and replaced him
with Patton. From then on, it was simply a matter of time and attrition until the Allied armies could finish off the Desert Fox.
On 3 March Rommel's attempt to push Montgomery's 1st Army back from the Mareth defenses failed. Three days later Rommel was evacuated to Germany for unspecified medical treatment—leaving his deputy, Jürgen von Arnim, in command of Army Group Africa.
Von Arnim's tenure in command would be brief but violent. Between 20 March and the first week of May, with Patton pressing in from the west, 1st Army from the north, and Montgomery from the south, German and Italian troops were forced into an ever tightening noose. By then the Americans had learned the hard lessons of combat. In a pitched armor battle at El Guettar on 29 and 30 March, Patton's 2nd Armored Corps mauled the numerically superior 10th Panzer Division and sent it in retreat back across the desert with half its tanks destroyed.
By April, British motor torpedo boats were regularly interdicting German resupply craft from Sicily. American and British fighters now roamed the skies at will, shooting down German transports attempting to deliver critically needed materiel to the cornered Axis troops.
Eisenhower's strangulation strategy worked. Bizerta fell to the Americans of II Corps on 7 May and the British 1st Army seized Tunis that afternoon. By the end of the following week, the Germans and Italians, their backs to the sea and no way to escape, were through. Messe surrendered the remnants of his Italian legions to Montgomery on 12 May. The next day, von Arnim conceded defeat. More than 125,000 Wehrmacht soldiers and 115,000 Italians passed into Allied captivity.
The Allied victory in North Africa came with a terrible price: 70,000 Allied casualties. But the American army was transformed—its units were bloodied, but had proven their worth in battle. The soldiers—and their leaders—had learned valuable lessons that would soon be put to the test again on Sicily. And though they could not know it then, those who fought in North Africa had ended the expansion of the Third Reich. After 13 May 1943, Hitler would always be on the defensive.
CHAPTER 6
SICILIAN HELL 1943
P
lanning for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, began even before the Allies had secured Tunisia. Neither Marshall nor Eisenhower wanted to tie up forces that would ultimately be needed for a cross-channel offensive. But once Roosevelt and Churchill agreed at Casablanca that there would be no invasion of Europe until 1944, the two American generals relented and Eisenhower's staff commenced work on the Husky operations plan in February 1943.
As he had with Torch, Eisenhower insisted that the objectives of the Sicily operation be clearly delineated to avoid an “open-ended” commitment of his forces. After a series of acrimonious debates with the British, who were still pressing for an invasion of the continent through the Balkans—what Churchill called “Europe's soft underbelly”—the Joint Staff finally responded to his entreaties.
The issues of what was to be accomplished in Sicily—and what forces would do it—were finally resolved by Roosevelt and Churchill during their 11–27 May “Trident Conference” in Washington. Churchill himself, with Marshall accompanying, flew directly from Washington to Algiers to tell Eisenhower the goals of the Sicilian invasion. They were to secure
Mediterranean sea lines of communication; relieve pressure on the Red Army by diverting German troops and materiel from the Eastern Front; seize air bases closer to Germany for the growing bombing campaign against the Reich; and, hopefully, force Italy out of the war.
To carry out this complex and ambitious mission, Eisenhower, the overall commander in chief, would have General Sir Harold Alexander as Allied ground commander and two field armies—the U.S. 7th, commanded by George Patton, and the British 8th, led by Bernard Montgomery. Patton's forces would include the U.S. 1st and 3rd Infantry Divisions, the 2nd Armored Division, and the 82nd Airborne—all from North Africa—and the new 45th Division, sent from the United States.

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