An Army at Dawn (40 page)

Another captured officer turned to Frelinghuysen. “People who fight a war like that,” he said, “will be hard to beat.”

The southern prong of the First Army’s drive on Tunis had been parried, but the northern thrust toward Bizerte still offered hope. After more than a week of little progress, Evelegh’s 36th Brigade abruptly found itself racing eastward through the village of Sedjenane on November 27 and into the wild heath of the coastal uplands. At dawn on the twenty-eighth, the brigade was told to seize a crossroads ten miles west of Mateur by sunset; the order meant covering twenty-six miles on Route 7 at speeds unprecedented if not improvident.

Four thousand British troops gobbled a breakfast of bully beef and quickly broke camp. Led by the 8th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, they climbed through the morning on a road barely as wide as a single lorry and tortured with hairpin turns. The cork harvest had left black scars around the tree trunks; stacks of curing bark awaited transport to market. Women in magenta robes thrashed their laundry in trickling creeks, while children wearing filthy kaftans rode the rumps of spavined donkeys. Squalls blew in from the Mediterranean, thickening a mud the Argylls likened to “a mixture of putty and glue.” Every few hundred yards, soldiers with shovels climbed down from their personnel carriers to scrape the wheel wells. Sappers exhumed a few mines planted by the retreating Germans. Despite such delays, the column had traveled fifteen miles by midday, pleasing the officers. Dotted with isolated crofts beneath a scudding sky, the countryside resembled the dramatic terrain at Inverness or Fort William. The Highlanders felt much at home.

Shortly before one
P.M.
, the battalion pushed into a valley formed by two imposing hills on either side of Highway 7. On the left, Djebel el Azzag rose 1,300 feet. Olive trees covered the lower flanks, yielding at altitude to grasses through which the wind snaked like a thing alive. Lieutenant Colonel J. G. Mackellar, the Argylls’ commander, christened this slope Green Hill. On the right, south of the road, Djebel el Ajred soared even higher, to 1,800 feet, its summit shingled with bare rock. This, Mackellar called Bald Hill. At the far end of the valley the hamlet of Jefna perched in the crotch between the hills where the narrow-gauge rail line vanished into a tunnel. It was there that British scouts spied a few figures in field gray scurry into foxholes. The hills seemed “no more menacing than those previously passed that day,” an Argyll wrote, and the enemy troops appeared to be a small patrol of the sort seen all week.

Both presumptions were fatally wrong. Jefna and the adjacent hills had been meticulously prepared for battle with sheltered gun pits, interlocking fields of fire, and excellent camouflage. A German account called it “a Tunisian Verdun on a minor scale.” The valley was defended by five Italian antitank guns and the 21st Parachute Engineer Battalion, commanded by Major Rudolf Witzig. Boyish and rosy-cheeked, with eyes set so deep he appeared to be squinting from the cavern of his skull, Witzig had fought on Crete, in Russia, and in France. His greatest exploit, for which Hitler had personally handed him the Knight’s Cross, was the May 1940 assault on Eben Emael, a supposedly impregnable fortress vital to Belgian defenses. With several dozen new explosive devices called shaped charges, Witzig and seventy-seven men landed on the fort in ten gliders, and in twenty minutes routed the garrison of 800 defenders at a cost of twenty-six casualties. The fall of Eben Emael allowed German panzers to surge through a gap in the Belgian line, driving British and French forces toward Dunkirk. Now Witzig and his paratroops waited in ambush at Jefna and on the flanks of both hills.

The Argylls stopped for lunch. At 1:30
P.M.
, Colonel Mackellar, a chipper man with a dimpled chin, ordered A Company to push into the valley. Because of the stress on speed and on reaching the crossroads by dark, the Argylls sent no pickets up to the heights and ordered no reconnaissance scouts—precautions even the greenest subaltern should have taken. A few machine-gun bursts at suspected enemy positions failed to stir the disciplined Germans. The Argylls’ A Company edged down the draw with eight armored Bren carriers on the road and dismounted infantry stumping through a plowed field on the left. Mackellar followed with his other company commanders.

The column had nearly reached Jefna when, on Witzig’s signal, a solitary antitank round ripped into the lead carrier and the fusillade began. An Italian gun destroyed the last carrier, blocking retreat. Then machine-gun and mortar fire raked the column from west to east and back again, quickly demolishing the rest of the carriers and laying Argylls in bloody windrows. Within ten minutes, A Company was destroyed; only eight men would return to fight another day. Mackellar ordered his Y Company into the valley, where it was immediately pinned down. B Company then surged forward on the left with ambitions of cresting Green Hill, but it, too, was immobilized by fire, as was X Company after brief progress on the skirts of Bald Hill. With his entire battalion imperiled, Mackellar inched back down the road. There, in one of those win-some moments characteristic of British men-at-arms for centuries, his second-in-command whispered cheerfully, “Look, George, partridges!” A covey of seven birds fled into the brush.

Only darkness saved the Argylls from obliteration. Mackellar ordered his companies to rally half a mile back of the western mouth of the valley. Among the 150 casualties were three company commanders, shot respectively in the shoulder, chest, and thigh. A courageous battalion medical officer walked down Highway 7 with his stretcher bearers, calling into the gloom: “Is anyone there?” They brought back eight men, including a driver found in a carrier cab with both feet shot away. “If only I had even one foot, I could drive this damn thing out,” he said, and died, faithful to his stripes.

The brigade regrouped for a day, then tried again with a two-battalion assault at dawn on November 30. Shouting and waving, the Royal West Kents reached the scalded peak of Bald Hill at a cost of 161 casualties, only to be driven off by Witzig’s men, who had been reinforced during the lull. On Green Hill, a commando battalion failed even to reach the crest. Fighting was bitter, and some bayonets were thrust with such ferocity that they could not be pulled out again.

A British brigade of more than four thousand had been stopped by a force one-tenth its size. German casualties totaled fourteen killed, twenty wounded, and a man missing. Another high-water mark could now be chalked on Allied maps. For six months, the Jefna position would remain as impregnable in fact as Eben Emael had been in reputation.

Exhausted Tommies collapsed in their open bivouacs and slept on their arms in the streaming rain, slack-mouthed and undreaming. On Green Hill and Bald Hill, the scent of juniper and damp earth soon soured with rotting bodies; by spring they would be bleached clean, speaking bone to bone. Eight Bren carriers stood rusting on Highway 7 for half a year, spaced as evenly as kilometer posts. The 36th Brigade commander, described as a “gaunt and gangling figure who lacked joviality,” was sent home for being too old and too tired. He was fifty-three. Given the dual setbacks at Djedeïda in the south and Jefna in the north, General Anderson authorized Evelegh to suspend his attack while the First Army tried to gather itself, again.

Word of the aborted offensive reached every Allied unit except those that needed the information most.

In a pretty moment of optimism during the first drive on Djedeïda, Evelegh conceived two flanking attacks intended to distract an enemy believed to be buckling. On the north coast, 500 seaborne British and American commandos would land near Bizerte on various missions of mayhem. South of Tunis, a paratrooper battalion was to overrun an airfield and shield the right wing of the Allied drive into the capital. Both forces set off in buoyant spirits, unaware that the offensive had been canceled and that the brigades they were relying on for reinforcement would be nowhere near.

The commandos departed at last light on November 30 from the mossy fortress at Tabarka, on the coast near the Algerian border. Six British and four American troops, each comprising fifty men—plus eight Algerian donkeys engaged to carry the mortars—filled thirteen landing craft. Recruited mostly from the Iowa and Minnesota men of the 34th Division, the American commandos had trained with their British mentors so long that they smoked Players, drank Twinings, and wore British battle dress like lads from Yorkshire or Chelsea.

“Never give the enemy a chance,” the British
Handbook of Irregular Warfare
advised. “Every soldier must be a potential gangster.” Major Jack A. Marshall, an American troop leader, later recalled, “Commando duty attracted malcontents. About half of my men had been court-martialed at least once…. Several had been busted more than once.” The requirements for commandos included fitness, intelligence, the ability to swim, and immunity to seasickness.

Unfortunately none of these manly virtues inhered in the donkeys, which after sixty miles across choppy seas in a small boat were in no condition to walk, much less pack mortar tubes up the coastal hills. As the landing craft neared the beach at Sidi el Moudjad, the braying, biting, kicking, vomiting beasts were heaved over the side with commando curses so vivid that even the coxswains blushed. Three donkeys promptly sank; the rest somehow made shore, where they contributed nothing to the expedition.

Sixteen miles west of Bizerte, soaked to the armpits, the commandos headed inland at 3:15
A.M.
on December 1. After being assigned sectors on the map in which to operate, the ten troops split up. Within minutes, they discovered what no map had disclosed: the hills were covered with heather so dense that one soldier likened himself to “an ant in a hairbrush.” Only by dropping to all fours and nosing along trails made by wild goats could the men cover even a mile in an hour.

For three days, the commandos blundered along the north coast, waiting for an Allied juggernaut that never arrived. Tipped off by locals to the intruders, German troops reacted with swift fury. Two troops—one British and one American—were ambushed shortly after landing, and only five Americans escaped. A German officer reported to Tunis that the commandos “were decimated in a short fire fight. We took fifty-two prisoners.” So impenetrable was the undergrowth that men simply knelt and fired by earshot, like Civil War soldiers in the Wilderness. Four commando teams raided a Bizerte airfield, destroying gasoline stocks and several parked aircraft; German soldiers newly arrived from Italy, still wearing their fine uniforms and singing as they counterattacked, drove them away. A troop captain who had edged to within four miles of downtown Bizerte was killed on the second afternoon; another was shot a day later. Unable to move his legs, he was carried on a stretcher rigged from two rifles and cotton rope. “Get the men away from this position,” he urged, and then died. His soldiers buried him on a lonely ridge.

The captain’s advice was finally heeded by Lieutenant Colonel Claire Trevor, the expedition commander, “a tall, Dracula-like figure with a bushy mustache” who “treated all men with equal contempt.” The surviving commandos rendezvoused north of Garaet Ichkeul, a shallow salt lake outside Bizerte. “Failure of the British attack from the south left us in confusion,” reported Jack Marshall, the American troop commander. “Radio silence could not be broken.” The men were exhausted and reduced to emergency rations. Soldiers listening to a radio receiver heard the propagandist Axis Sally promise the annihilation of “renegade U.S. and British commandos” in northern Tunisia; more disturbing was her accurate recitation of the names of men captured or killed in the past three days. Colonel Trevor proposed a final night raid on Bizerte, but after heated debate his troop commanders balked. On December 4, the men turned west, walking at night along a track so faint they sometimes had to grope for it with their hands. Two days later the commandos closed within Allied lines. The raid had cost 134 men killed or captured, more than half of them American.

If the commando foray had been “essentially fruitless,” in Major Marshall’s phrase, the paratrooper mission south of Tunis was a foolish, wanton mistake. Five hundred and thirty British paratroopers, dropped from forty-four American transport planes, were to “spread alarm and despondency.” Aerial reconnaissance, however, failed to disclose that the targeted German airfield had been abandoned, and no attempt was made to ring up sympathetic French farmers for intelligence even though the telephone system worked well. Nor could Anderson or Evelegh explain why an entire battalion should be risked on a target that could easily be bombed from the relative safety of 20,000 feet. “The fact of the matter was that the British army had no idea of how or when the new airborne capability should be used,” the mission commander subsequently concluded.

That commander was Lieutenant Colonel John D. Frost, who two years later would win renown at the disastrous “bridge too far” in the Dutch town of Arnhem. “We were not the least worried,” the tall, mustachioed Frost later wrote. “We imagined ourselves being
Primus in Carthago,
gloriously.”

There was no glory, of course, no triumphant entry into Carthage at the head of the Allied legions. Parachuting twenty-five miles below Tunis on November 29, the battalion then headed northward with a few commandeered donkey carts—“looking like a fucking traveling circus rather than a parachute battalion,” as one soldier later recalled. “There was a medieval look about us,” another man wrote, “with helmets slung at saddle bow, the jerkin-look of our belted smocks, and my Sten slung over my back like a crossbow.” Within hours, German panzers had cornered the paratroopers, who escaped one predicament only to fall into another and then another, each time losing more men to enemy fire. Tormented by thirst, Frost’s men licked split cactus leaves and sucked rainwater from their uniforms as they tacked to the west for three days in search of the Allied line.

Down to less than a hundred rifle rounds among them, the surviving Tommies at noon on December 3 flagged down an American patrol eight miles from Medjez-el-Bab. “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” Frost asked a puzzled Yank. At five
P.M.
, the 180 men still able to stand formed ranks and marched into Medjez. Two hundred and eighty-nine paratroopers were dead, wounded, or missing. More than half the battalion had been destroyed in what would be the last significant airborne mission in the North African campaign, a harrowing, heroic gesture of singular futility.