An Army at Dawn (43 page)

Fifteen minutes later every Sherman and most of the General Lees stood in flames. “Shells were cutting through the wheat on either side of us,” Lieutenant Philip G. Walker later wrote. “I walked from tank to tank trying to make them fire and retire. They seemed petrified. I cursed and insulted, climbing on tanks and shouting.” An explosion killed a soldier in the turret beneath Walker’s feet. Shell fragments peppered his arm, eyelid, and right temple. “I was swearing and crying from frustration and pain. Took a shot of morphine and felt better.”

More American tanks blundered into the kill zone after giving German gunners time to reposition and reload. The disaster was complete. Wearing full-length sandwich boards painted with huge red crosses, Wehrmacht medics traipsed from hulk to flaming hulk, salvaging a few wounded. In the confusion, Kern’s battalion had escaped destruction, but still suffered 219 casualties. All five Battery C howitzers were destroyed, the last at ranges of twenty yards or less, with thirty-nine casualties among the gunners including the valiant and now captured Captain Harrison. Eighteen tanks were lost. On Robinett’s recommendation, Oliver sacked Colonel Bruss. His crippled battalion would go to Henry Gardiner, as soon as the major returned from the hospital.

Rain began that night and fell incessantly for three days. Cold, sodden soldiers wondered, as their fathers had in the Great War, whether the Germans could make it rain whenever they pleased. Although Fischer’s troops had also been stung, the galling defeat at Djebel el Guessa infected First Army with a despondency that spread at viral speed. Now known as Stuka Valley, the Medjerda glen seemed sinister, even demonic. German psychological operations spooked the men further, especially the tactic of firing all small arms at dusk and lofting flare after flare as if in prelude to an attack. The “total effect was in fact terrifying and this was a factor in the combat,” the CCB intelligence officer noted.

Latrine rumors became virulent: the Germans had shot prisoners, used poison gas, enlisted Arab cannibals. More and more Arab looters and collaborators were shot or had their houses blown up by Allied vigilantes; rarely was there a legal process that did credit to Anglo-American jurisprudence. French troops hanged Arab bodies from balcony rails in Béja as a crude warning, and commandos burned an entire Arab village in retaliation for the alleged shooting of a French forester. Anxious soldiers exchanged stories of things they had seen, or at least heard about: of a bushwhacked sentry found with his eyeballs strung like beads; of a British soldier who had dared chat up an Arab woman and was found sliced into fleshy strips laid out to spell “Beware” of a jeep driver who, decapitated by an 88mm shell, drove for another thirty feet, fifty feet, half a mile, clutching the steering wheel in a death grip. German panzers were reported “like an escaping murderer, at a score of points at once,” one correspondent wrote. Infiltrating enemy tank crews were said to be master sculptors, capable of disguising a Mk IV as a Sherman with a few handfuls of mud. Soldiers collected good-luck amulets—shrapnel was especially popular, the view being that like repelled like—and every pocket became a potential reliquary.

“In an attack half the men on a firing line are in terror and the other half are unnerved,” the British theorist J.F.C. Fuller had written. Some First Army troops confused smoke shells with billowing enemy parachutes; others betrayed their positions by trying to shoot down German flares. Disquiet seeped into the upper ranks as well. Evelegh had pulled back British and American troops another four miles closer to Medjez-el-Bab, but Oliver protested daily that CCB was too vulnerable. Anderson was ready to quit Stuka Valley altogether. He floated the idea in a “most secret” message to Eisenhower on December 8.

“Reason is necessity to rest and refit troops and make them ready to resume offensive,” Anderson wrote. “Present positions are too exposed and widespread.” Building a new line fifteen miles west of Medjez could “prove to be the wisest course,” he suggested, although “I regret giving up Medjez-el-Bab.” In a subsequent note late that night, Anderson told Eisenhower, “There are limits to human endurance.” Lest the commander-in-chief miss the point, Anderson added in another message on December 9: “The spirit is willing but the flesh has reached its limit.”

Even before Eisenhower’s reply came back from Algiers, CCB was told to prepare to retreat toward Béja under Operation
HAIRSPRING
. Thirty minutes later, the retreat was canceled. Juin and Barré had learned of the British plan. The French generals were horrified. Did General Anderson not know the strategic value of Medjez? Had he not heard the wisdom of Hannibal—that Medjez was the key to the door? Throwing his left-handed salute, Juin stalked off to phone Giraud, who then hectored Eisenhower into countermanding the order.

A new plan emerged: the British 1st Guards Brigade would move up to occupy Medjez, while CCB and Evelegh’s troops pulled back just west of the town to be, in Anderson’s phrase, “reinforced, rested, reclothed, and refitted.” The move was scheduled for the night of December 10.

Omens and auguries haunted the valley. Villagers with a few pathetic possessions bundled on their backs fled into the hills from farm hamlets near Djebel el Guessa. A drunk German deserter blundered into Allied lines with tales of grenadiers massing in the hollows. The rain stopped, but standing water drowned the trails. Every field became a quagmire. The air was heavy and unstirring.

At eight
A.M.
on December 10, General Oliver went forward to reconnoiter. Soon afterward, French pickets came pelting through the lines bellowing,
“Tank Boche! Tank Boche!”
Two panzer columns with an estimated total of sixty tanks advanced on either side of the Medjerda. By noon the enemy on Route 50 had been stopped by American tanks and a dense minefield near the village of Bordj Toum, ten miles downriver from Medjez-el-Bab. The parallel force on the south side of the river clumped through the mud to attack Colonel Kern’s 1st Battalion, now retrenched midway between Tébourba and Medjez on the craggy heights of Djebel Bou Aoukaz, known as the Bou. Kern held, and the Bou remained in American hands.

But a greater threat loomed from the southeast. Fischer dispatched his 7th Panzer Regiment with artillery and thirty tanks on a bold flanking sweep to take Medjez from the rear. Through Massicault they rolled, Tigers among them, smashing ten of John Waters’s remaining Stuarts and half-tracks. Waters retreated with his remnants through Medjez-el-Bab and across the Bailey bridge spanning the Medjerda. By early afternoon the enemy was at the gates, two miles from town, with a chance to bag the whole of Combat Command B. Only an intrepid French force of zouaves,
tirailleurs
, and artillerymen held them at bay.

Holding a poor map in his lap and a capricious radio microphone in his left hand, Robinett sat in a farmhouse three miles southwest of Medjez, trying to piece together a battle he could neither see nor hear. He had been unable to reach Oliver, and repeated pleas to Evelegh’s headquarters for reinforcement by American Shermans went unanswered. Medjez appeared doomed, but at 1:30
P.M.
Robinett ordered the 1st Battalion of his 13th Armored Regiment to attack due south from the Bou in an effort to catch the flanking Germans from behind.

It nearly worked. A company of Stuarts fell on seven surprised enemy armored scout cars and destroyed them with a smoking broadside at fifty yards. But then the panzers appeared—“the whole top of the high ground was alive with them,” an American captain remarked—and the counterblow stopped in mid-career. Squirrel-gun rounds bounced off the panzer glacis as usual, and the wider German tracks provided more purchase in the mud. Outmaneuvered and outgunned, American commanders were reduced to aiming at the panzers’ gun sights in a futile effort to blind them.

Nineteen Stuarts were lost, their crewmen machine-gunned as they climbed out of their stricken tanks. Two dozen surviving Yanks hid in a ravine, then scuttled north to swim the Medjerda. At 4:30
P.M.
, Robinett ordered all remaining American troops around the Bou to cross the one-lane bridge at Bordj Toum after dark and pull back to Medjez on Highway 50.

Moments after this order went out, Oliver returned to the command post, muddy and exhausted from a harrowing day spent dodging German patrols. Collapsing into a chair, he listened in anguish to Robinett’s account of 1st Battalion’s counterattack. His eyes brimmed with tears. “My God, why did you attack with the light tanks?” Oliver said. “You have ruined me!”

Robinett pulled himself to his full, unimposing height, jaw thrust out, gaze level and unblinking. “No, General,” he answered. “I have saved you.”

He had indeed, although salvation was ephemeral on the night of December 10. Medjez had been preserved for the moment, but more than three battalions of American troops remained at risk. Oliver chose not to venture down the valley again; bucking the traffic that would soon jam the road from Bordj Toum to Medjez seemed more than his frayed nerves could handle. Instead, the evacuation was left to the senior officer on the Bou, a forty-three-year-old West Pointer from Ohio, Lieutenant Colonel John R. McGinness. Oliver lay down on a straw mat pulled from an olive press and dozed off.

Rain was falling again, heavy as birdshot, as the long columns debouched from the ravines around the Bou. Blackout lights—cat’s-eye slits—gleamed from the trucks and half-tracks inching toward the river and the macadam highway that would carry them to safety. A flare arced across the sky a mile to the northeast, hissing for half a minute before winking out. Somewhere in the dark near the Bordj Toum rail station, 300 German infantrymen and two dozen panzers had bivouacked after a day of brutal combat so close that artillery gunners fought with rifles as infantrymen. Somewhere also in the dark two platoons of British soldiers waited for the Americans; Evelegh had first pledged to hold the bridge until at least 10:30
P.M.
, then, under pleas from CCB, had extended the deadline to four
A.M.
and eventually to dawn.

A CCB infantry platoon crossed the narrow Bordj Toum bridge, followed by a company of General Lees. Tank tracks creaked across the plank deck only inches from the edge on both sides. As the Lees swung onto Highway 50, German voices sang out near the rail station. A few yellow muzzle flashes stabbed the darkness, followed by a machine gun’s stutter. An officer ordered his infantrymen back toward the bridge for better cover until the gunfire could be sorted out.

But panic had been building for a week, fed by stories of headless drivers and eyeballs on strings. Another sputtering flare projected—as Robinett later observed—“new terrors into the minds of the weak.” If minds were weak, legs remained strong: the cold light revealed silhouetted men sprinting back across the bridge, their eyes glazed with fear. “The Krauts! The Krauts!” Fear raced down the column like a lit fuze. A panting officer splashed through the mud to Colonel McGinness’s jeep. His words tumbled out: Germans had broken through; no Brits could be seen; panzers were said to block the bridge already.

A casual stroll to the front of the column would have disproved it all. No breakthrough had occurred. The British, while modest in strength, were standing their ground not far from the bridge. The panzers were wrecks, knocked out in earlier fighting. The shots had been inconsequential.

But McGinness was not the man to vanquish bogeys. Ignoring reasoned pleas from his subordinates and taking counsel only of his fears, he issued the fateful order: “Turn the column around.” The battalions would return to Medjez on an unpaved goat path along the south bank of the river.

The first few vehicles at the column’s tail, now its head, managed to reverse course and plow west through bumper-deep mud. But each passing set of wheels and armored tracks churned the mire more. After a few hundred yards, vehicles began to bog down—first the tanks, then the half-tracks and guns and jeeps and trucks. Swearing, sweating soldiers stuffed bedrolls and ration cases beneath the wheels and tracks. They hacked at the mud with shovels and picks until their hands bled, while drivers gunned the engines and groped for traction in the muck. Clutches burned out. Axles and transmission rods broke. Tracks slipped from their bogey wheels. Gas tanks ran dry.

At 1:30
A.M.
an aide shook Oliver awake. Smelling faintly of olive residue, the general read with disbelief the radio transmission from McGinness. The column had mired. Most vehicles were stuck, and McGinness had “ordered their abandonment and destruction.” Oliver tried to raise the column by radio. No one answered.

The sopping dawn revealed a spectral, half-buried procession strung out for three miles along the swollen Medjerda. Thermite grenades had melted through engine blocks, leaving silver puddles of metal congealing in the mud. A few soldiers, ignoring the abandon-ship order, continued to rock their trucks back and forth in a stubborn search for grip. Some troops had tossed away their rifles and wandered into a boggy field; like dead men they slept where they fell, swaddled in mud. Hundreds of others staggered westward eight miles into Medjez, too weary even to watch for Stukas. Officers organized foraging parties to gather straw for the shivering troops.