An Army at Dawn (41 page)

“Jerry Is Counterattacking!”

I
N
late November, Eisenhower and Clark made a two-day visit to what they stoutly referred to as “the front,” although getting there did not even involve venturing into Tunisia. The expedition—Clark called it “a Boy Scout trip”—began badly on November 28, when the jeep leading the generals’ armored Cadillac struck and killed a twelve-year-old Algerian boy who stepped into traffic. Regrets were issued, and the convoy drove on. Unable to find Anderson’s headquarters before sunset, the group blundered about in the dark until the same star-crossed jeep skidded into a ditch, injuring five soldiers. Eisenhower and Clark spent the night with a bewildered French family in Guelma, forty miles south of Bône, then tracked down Anderson at first light. After several hours of earnest discussions in a farmhouse, the American generals piled back into the Cadillac and returned to Algiers. Miserably ill and wheezing like a man who had been gassed, Eisenhower fell into bed to run the war from his room at the Villa dar el Ouard.

He had much to think about. Foremost was the shocking news from the Toulon naval base, where seventy-seven French ships had been scuttled in one of the greatest acts of self-immolation in military history. In occupying Vichy France on November 11, German forces had stopped short of the base and, for more than two weeks, sought the fleet’s voluntary submission. Darlan at the same time continued to urge his old rival, Admiral Jean de Laborde, to sail his fleet to North Africa and throw in his lot with the Allies. De Laborde temporized until German patience snapped. In the early hours of November 27, SS panzer troops stormed the Toulon base gates. De Laborde ordered signal blinkers on the yardarms to flash the fatal message: “Scuttle! Scuttle! Scuttle!”

French sailors opened the sea cocks, grenaded their boilers, and smashed all radios and navigation instruments. The intruders finally reached the fleet flagship at Jetty No. 6, where an interpreter on the wharf yelled in broken French: “Admiral, my commander asks you to give up your ship intact.” An indignant de Laborde gestured to the deck settling beneath his feet and roared, “The ship is sunk!” Among the vessels lost were three battleships, seven cruisers, and thirty-two destroyers. Eisenhower characteristically saw the silver lining: at least the prize had not fallen into enemy hands.

Of greater concern to the commander-in-chief was the Tunisian front, which he better understood after viewing it, albeit from a distance of 120 miles. Eisenhower concurred in Anderson’s decision to suspend the offensive, but he harbored doubts about his First Army commander. He could look past Anderson’s brooding reticence—that “queer thing, human nature,” in the Scottish general’s phrase. But Anderson’s Caledonian pessimism cut against the American grain and contributed to the mood swings that so buffeted the Allied camp. Anderson “is apparently imbued with the will to win, but blows hot and cold by turns, in his estimates and resulting demands,” Eisenhower wrote Marshall on November 30. Clark had been particularly offended by what he called “the Anderson setup.” American troops, Clark urged, “should be withdrawn from his command and organized in a separate sector of the front under their own commander.” For now, Eisenhower resisted such a blow to Allied unity. He was learning, as he would later write, that “nothing is more difficult in war than to adhere to a single strategic plan” and to resist the “constant temptation to desert the chosen line of action in favor of another one.” To Marshall he added, “Everything is coordinated to the single objective of taking Tunisia. We are devoting everything to Anderson’s support.”

Some things about the war had become clearer, including Allied intelligence miscalculations. Before
TORCH
, planners had estimated that the Germans would have 515 warplanes available to help defend Tunisia; the actual number exceeded 850, plus nearly 700 transport planes. By contrast, Anglo-Americans in the forward areas had only two small British fields and, at Tébessa, fifty-four U.S. P-38s, of which only forty could actually fly. A new battlefield ditty, sung to the tune of “The White Cliffs of Dover,” included this verse:

There’ll be Stukas over the vale of Tébourba

Tomorrow when I’m having tea.

There’ll be Spitfires after, ten minutes after,

When they’re no bloody use to me.

To Eisenhower’s surprise, American tanks and armored tactics also seemed wanting. U.S. Army doctrine held that tanks ought not fight other tanks, but should leave that job to specialized tank destroyers while armored formations tore through defenses and ripped up the enemy rear. Regulations had prohibited the development of tanks heavier than thirty tons, and until 1941 tank armor was constructed only to stop small-arms fire. Allied armor was simply overmatched. The inconsequential M-3 Stuart caused one American general to muse that “the only way to hurt a Kraut with a 37mm is to catch him and give him an enema with it” the half-track mounted with a 75mm gun was already known as a “Purple Heart box.” American tanks were so flammable they were dubbed Ronsons, after a popular cigarette lighter advertised with the slogan “They light every time.” American armor crews, moreover, knew little about reconnaissance, worked poorly with the infantry, and showed an alarming propensity for blind charges, now known as “rat racing.”

All of these issues required the commander-in-chief’s urgent attention, as soon as he could rise from his sickbed. For the moment, he dictated a wheezy message to Marshall: “My immediate aim is to keep pushing hard, with a first intention of pinning the enemy back in the fortress of Bizerte and confining him so closely that the danger of a breakout or a heavy counter-offensive will be minimized.”

Even as this pretty delusion flew to the office of the Army chief of staff in Washington, the “heavy counter-offensive” Eisenhower intended to forestall was already in motion. On the same day that he and Clark drove east from Algiers, Kesselring flew south from Rome. In Tunis, he upbraided Nehring for excessive caution and for the abandonment of Medjez-el-Bab, which he called “a definite change for the worse.” Axis troops were pouring into Tunisia at a rate of a thousand a day, but aerial reconnaissance on November 29 counted 135 British and American tanks in Tunisia east of Béja. Soon the Allies would be too strong to unseat. After inspecting the Medjerda valley on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, Kesselring issued orders at 5:45
P.M.
that “every foot of ground must be defended to the utmost, even dying for it.” The bridgehead must be widened, he added, to “play for time.”

Nehring gave the task to the newly arrived commander of the 10th Panzer Division, Major General Wolfgang Fischer, who had been training in France after combat duty in Russia. “Attack the enemy troops in the vicinity of Tébourba,” Nehring told Fischer, “and destroy them.” Tanks rolled directly from the Bizerte quays to the front. Mules and horses pulled captured French 75s toward Djedeïda. German 88mm guns used for anti-aircraft protection were stripped from the airfields, to be used as antitank weapons in the west. Fischer scurried about the countryside in an armored car that served as his command post; his staff rode motorcycles. Quickly they fashioned four strike groups with sixty-four tanks and fourteen armored cars for a spoiling attack scheduled to open on December 1. Only thirty German soldiers remained in Tunis. Everything would be risked on this throw of the dice.

From decrypted German messages on Monday, November 30, Anderson learned that the Germans intended to take the offensive. At 4:52 on Tuesday morning, a “special priority signal” notified Allied commanders that the 10th Panzer Division had been ordered to attack Tébourba at dawn. If the warning ever reached frontline troops, it had little effect. At eight
A.M.
, two V-shaped German formations personally led by Fischer slammed into the village of Chouïgui from the north and northeast. Blade Force—including John Waters’s tank battalion—crumpled under the assault and fled south to the Medjerda valley.

“All around us men were running back down the road shouting, ‘Jerry is counterattacking!’” a British private recalled. Fischer followed with the deliberation of a natural killer. From a hill to the west, the journalist A. D. Divine watched the approaching dust clouds—“incandescent, enormous, and beautiful”—and listened as the heavy throb of engines drew closer. Then the panzers lurched over a ridgeline and, “using the folding of the ground, raced from one dead area to another” as they spilled into the river valley.

Fischer’s tanks had closed to within a few hundred yards of Highway 50 west of Tébourba when British artillery opened fire. Standing outside their tanks for a cigarette break, German crews cocked an ear at the tearing-silk sound of incoming shells; unhurried, they stubbed out their butts, remounted, and trundled off in search of defilade. At least for the moment, Fischer’s attack from the north had been checked.

Two German infantry groups attacked Tébourba early Monday afternoon from the east and southeast. The first pushed out of Djedeïda only to be stopped by the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Hampshire Regiment, which had replaced the decimated Northants two days earlier. Fischer vented his disgust at the Wehrmacht infantry in a scathing message to Nehring: “Not the slightest interest existed, no aggressive spirit, no readiness for action…. It is impossible to fight successfully with such troops.” Nor did the attack from the southeast succeed in capturing the stone Medjez bridge at El Bathan. There the East Surreys held their ground, with little help from the American 5th Field Artillery Battalion, whose officers now mostly lived in a German prison camp. Out of ammunition and unable to raise the British artillery commander for orders, the Americans retreated to Medjez-el-Bab without permission rather than risk the capture of their guns.

As darkness fell on December 1, the Allied hold on Tébourba was more precarious than Fischer’s pique implied. German forces invested the town from three sides. If the panzers from the north severed Route 50, three Allied battalions around Tébourba would be cut off. To forestall such a disaster, Evelegh ordered forward 4,000 troops from Combat Command B (CCB) of the 1st Armored Division, the first sizable American force to reach the Tunisian front.

They came running. After two tedious weeks on the road from Oran, the CCB troops were truculent and confident, even though most of the division was still en route from Liverpool. For 700 miles across Algiers and into Tunisia, wherever British traffic controllers had posted road signs warning of soft shoulders—“Keep clear of the verges”—pranksters with black paint altered them to “Keep clear of the virgins.” As reinforcements poured into Medjez-el-Bab, a British staff officer thrust his head into a command vehicle and exclaimed, “Thank God you’ve arrived!” Yes, reinforcements had arrived in strength, including the Americans: Germans and virgins beware.

The CCB commander was Brigadier General Lunsford E. Oliver, a fifty-three-year-old, Nebraska-born, West Point–trained engineer known as Bugs. His brigade—designated a “combat command” as part of an Army organizational brainstorm—comprised six battalions, two of which were already in northeast Tunisia as part of Evelegh’s armored spearhead. Oliver put his headquarters in a red-roofed farmhouse five miles north of Medjez. John Deere machinery stood in the barnyard, and the irrigated fields were full of lemon, almond, and apricot trees. On the morning of December 2, he dispatched the commander of his 13th Armored Regiment, Colonel Paul McD. Robinett, with orders to organize Allied tank units around Tébourba and repulse the German counterattack.

Robinett was delighted to take over. Battlefield command would give him a chance to demonstrate his personal credo: “Always do whatever you can to keep your superior from making a mistake.” At five feet four inches, with a cavalry strut and a cowcatcher chin, he was known alternately as Little Napoleon, Little Caesar, and Robbie. His Army career included membership on the Olympic equestrian team, study at the French cavalry school at Saumur, and service as a strategic planner and intelligence officer for George Marshall. He had long offered a dollar to any soldier who could outshoot him; only one man—a deadeye pistoleer from the 3rd Infantry—had ever collected. A prodigious cusser in his youth, Robinett now prided himself on having “learned to cleanse my mouth.” A forty-eight-year-old bachelor from the Ozark foothills of Missouri, he was arrogant and querulous—“fussy like an old maid,” a 1st Armored officer said. “He annoyed everyone.” Within days he would annoy the British high command, which considered him “all talk and grouse.” The dismissal sold him short: for all his niggling, he was a capable tactician who knew the art of war.

Robinett arrived on a ridgeline four miles west of Tébourba just in time to see the Americans butchered. Before General Fischer could resume his attack, thirty Stuart tanks had barreled forward without artillery support. German pilots saw them coming, and the attack was repulsed with heavy losses at a cost of only four panzers. Then a company of General Lees had been ordered by a battalion commander to make a frontal assault despite the bitter objections of the company commander. Following the rail line two miles west of Tébourba, the tanks charged at midday across open ground without reconnaissance against an enemy of uncertain strength.