An Army at Dawn (62 page)

Crews broke for the rear, belatedly. Only one of four guns escaped, jouncing across the desert. Pirnie followed at the wheel of a careering ammunition half-track. The Germans reminded him of wild dogs hunting in a pack. When they again drew close he sabotaged his last tube with thermite grenades stuffed down the muzzle. As in every catastrophe, petty inconvenience would remain as vivid in memory as the blackest strokes of tragedy: Pirnie would always recall his shoes, purchased from an Irish cobbler before
TORCH
. They hurt like the devil.

One after another the American units fell. A platoon of tank destroyers was itself destroyed by tanks. The 2nd Battalion of the 17th Field Artillery—armed with eighteen World War I–vintage 155mm howitzers and somehow forgotten in the confusion—waited east of Sidi bou Zid for orders to decamp. The German attack on the battalion “erased it, getting every gun and most of the men,” a staff officer reported. Battery A of the 91st Field Artillery fired in a smoking frenzy from Sidi bou Zid until all forward observers were killed or wounded, blinding the gunners. “We didn’t know exactly where to fire,” one lieutenant said. “There was artillery fire, machine gun fire, armor-piercing tank shells whizzing through the town.” Tossing their dead into an empty trailer, the artillerymen leapfrogged west.

Enemy bullets and tank shells sheeted across the desert. Soldiers scooped shallow foxholes with their helmets or clawed at the ground until their fingers bled. “All around me comrades were being machine-gunned from tanks,” one soldier recalled. “Their screams were faintly heard due to the terrific explosions.” Another soldier stumbled upon a cowering group of troops too frightened even to speak. “I broke down and went off by myself,” he later confessed. A third soldier leaped into a jeep and cranked the ignition so insistently the key snapped in half. An anti-aircraft platoon leader, having “lost his sense of direction in the confusion and stampede of other units,” unwittingly bolted southeast to deliver himself and his men into German hands. Enemy outriders also seized four ambulances, each jammed with wounded GIs; most of the medical detachment of the 168th Infantry and the collecting company of the 109th Medical Battalion would fall prey, with the loss of 100 men, including ten physicians. Wehrmacht medics passed out oranges to savagely burned American prisoners.

The enemy without question had made “a hostile debouchment,” as a clerk scribbled in the CCA war diary. General McQuillin, trying from his command post on the southeast edge of Sidi bou Zid to make sense of the shrieking radios and billowing smoke, believed the morning could still be made right with a brisk counterattack. At 7:30
A.M.
he ordered the commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Armored Regiment to “clear up the situation.” Lieutenant Colonel Louis V. Hightower, a thirty-three-year-old West Point classmate of John Waters, emerged from McQuillin’s tent with his briefcase in hand. He climbed onto his Sherman tank—named
Texas
, she flew the Lone Star flag from a radio antenna—and cantered toward the Oasis. With the early destruction of Company G, he had three dozen Shermans left.

Two miles north of Sidi bou Zid, the first Stukas attacked. Little damage was done to Hightower’s tanks, but the bombs “smoked us up so that we couldn’t see through the dust,” he later recounted. Then green fireballs ripped into the formation, “close to the ground like a ricocheting stone in water.” Shermans left and right burst into flame. “Sometimes two or three men got out,” one sergeant reported. “Sometimes no one got out. Most of the tanks burned when hit.” A shell snipped the head of the H Company commander from his shoulders. The platoon commanded by Lieutenant Laurence Robertson, sent on patrol to the southeast the previous night, abruptly roared through a gap in an American minefield to join the mêlée. Chased for miles by thirty panzers, Robertson had bought enough time to escape by firing smoke rounds at his pursuers to simulate artillery fire. It was now apparent that the attack from Faïd Pass was complemented by the 21st Panzer Division spilling from Maïzila Pass twenty miles south. The enemy intended to snare all of CCA in a double envelopment.

Hightower pulled the remnants of his battalion back into Sidi bou Zid in a zigzagging retreat, and clattered out the south side on the Gafsa road. Behind them, Luftwaffe squadrons methodically obliterated the town. A captain in a jeep raced through the olive groves that sheltered the CCA supply trains. “Take off, men!” he bellowed. “You are on your own.” Some bolted; others desperately cranked engines that refused to start—lint from camouflage nets had clogged the fuel filters on many jeeps and trucks. A major sprayed the Sidi bou Zid fuel dump with machine-gun bullets as appalled tankers, their Shermans nearly dry, darted among the flames to salvage a few five-gallon tins.

Uncertainty yielded to confusion, confusion to panic. A horizontal avalanche of men and vehicles slid west across the desert, making for the intersection of Highways 13 and 3, ten miles from Sidi bou Zid and almost halfway to Sbeïtla. (This junction soon would be known as Kern’s Crossroad after the battalion commander sent to secure it, Lieutenant Colonel William B. Kern.) Thomas E. Hannum, an artillery lieutenant, was reminded of the Oklahoma land rush, except that “the air was full of whistles” from enemy projectiles. Another gunner watched as several half-tracks “suddenly blossomed out with red and black, like the first puff of fire in oil, and then seemed to settle down like a sinking ship.” Indefatigable Tunisian peddlers stood along the road holding up eggs, tangerines, and tiny gasoline stoves.

Now reduced to a dozen tanks, Hightower’s battalion also swung west at fourteen miles per hour to provide a screen for those in flight. Hightower soon spotted panzers half a mile to the south; one pincer from the 21st Panzer Division was closing in on Sidi bou Zid. An even larger enemy tank force—the number swelled with each report—bore down from the north after looping around Djebel Lessouda. “It looks,” suggested one tanker, “like a dryland Dunkirk.”

Hightower angled south with four Shermans to buy time while the rest of his force continued toward the crossroads. At 700 yards,
Texas
hit two enemy tanks with well-aimed shots from her 75mm main gun. Watching with field glasses from an open hatch, Hightower cheerfully reported that a panzer turret “broke into flame like a flower.” A German shell drilled
Texas
through the bogey wheels, and darted out the other side “like a rabbit.” Other rounds glanced off the Sherman’s turret and hull. “Each shell that hit sounded like a giant anvil or tremendous bell,” Hightower later recalled. After shooting two more panzers,
Texas
was struck from the left by a round that punctured the fuel tank and landed spinning on a hatch cover. Above the crackle of flaming gasoline Hightower roared, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” The crew “boiled out like peas from a hot pod before the tank had stopped running.” Five men sprinted west as their tank blew up behind them.

Of fifty-two Shermans in action, six survived the afternoon. At 1:45
P.M.
half a dozen Tigers bulled through the rubble on Sidi bou Zid’s northern outskirts. At 5:05
P.M.
, tanks from the 21st Panzer in the south and those from the 10th Panzer in the north met two miles east of town on Highway 125. The double envelopment had taken less than twelve hours.

The disaster was all too evident from the shaley brow of Djebel Lessouda, where John Waters watched the attack with both dismay and professional discernment. The folly of the Allied battle plan was clear: after losing Faïd Pass in late January, the Americans should have either recaptured the Eastern Dorsal—at whatever cost—or retired to defensible terrain on the Grand Dorsal. Instead they had dispersed across a vulnerable open plain where the enemy could defeat them in detail. Lessouda, like Djebel Ksaira in the hazy distance, was so steep, with such a commanding vista of the dun world below, that the Americans had been bewitched by an illusion of security. In fact, the hill provided Waters only with a panorama of his own imminent destruction.

When the first wave of eighty German tanks and half-tracks had looped north around the hill at dawn, a combination of glare, dust, and wishful thinking prevented Robert Moore and his 900 infantrymen from shooting, on the remote chance that the force was friendly. Colonel Hains had radioed Waters from Sidi bou Zid. “There must be something going on,” Hains said in one of the war’s premier understatements. “There is an awful lot of firing out there in front of you now.”

Better visibility and dire reports from routed forces to the east soon clarified the predicament. By 8:30
A.M.
, German officers in peaked caps stood on their tank turrets just beyond rifle range, raking Lessouda with field glasses. Led by motorcycle troops, an enemy column on the east pressed up the lower slopes through a narrow wadi. At a range of 300 yards Moore gave the command to fire. A stabbing red volley rippled from the rocks and the Germans fell back, leaving a trail of dead and wounded. Two Wehrmacht officers and six enlisted men were taken prisoner.

At noon the enemy tried again, this time pressing up the southern face where Waters’s command post was tucked into a gulch. Gray-clad figures darted through the olive trees and tuft grass below. Unable to reach Moore by radio, Waters sent his driver up the hill to find him. A few minutes later the soldier stumbled back, ashen, blood bubbling from a hole drilled through his chest by one of Moore’s nervous infantrymen. “Sir, I couldn’t get up there,” he told Waters, “and I got shot.” Waters wrapped him in a bedroll with two shots of morphine, and soon the young man was dead.

Waters radioed Hains. “Pete, I’m going to shut this thing off,” he said. “They are all around here and looking for me now, but I don’t think they’ve discovered this half-track yet.” Not only were German patrols closing in, but locals had begun combing the battlefield to strip the dead and betray the living. Moore was marooned with his infantry on the upper slope. “I’m going to dismantle the radio and I’ll hide the parts,” Waters added. “I will go into the next little ditch and hide out there until dark.”

Try to hold on, Hains urged. “Good luck to you, John.”

“Never mind about me,” Waters said. “Just kill those bastards at the bottom of the hill.”

At four
P.M.
Waters heard footsteps on shale. Assuming that it was one of his own officers, he rose from his hiding place beneath an overhanging ledge. Fifteen feet away, seven German soldiers led by two Arabs whirled around; a short burst of Schmeisser bullets fired from the hip missed Waters by inches and pinged off the rocks. Delighted to capture such a high-ranking officer—soon enough the enemy would learn he was also Patton’s son-in-law—the Germans marched him half a mile down the hill. Several Wehrmacht officers sat in a makeshift command post listening to dance music on a big radio. Waters was plopped in a motorcycle sidecar and driven through Faïd Pass to begin a voyage that would take him to Tunis by truck, to Italy by transport plane, and finally over the Alps by train to a Bavarian prison camp. For John Waters, the war was over.

Ten miles to the southeast the war went on, badly, for Drake and his men. With nearly a thousand troops already dug in on Djebel Ksaira, Drake decided to herd the rest of his command—now bivouacked in various wadis southeast of Sidi bou Zid—onto Garet Hadid, a slightly loftier escarpment four miles west of Ksaira. Soon 950 riflemen, musicians, cooks, and clerks were perched on the barren rock like nesting birds. Nearly one-third lacked weapons. After watching the artillery flee near Djebel Lessouda, Drake had called McQuillin at eight
A.M.
on a field phone to report the makings of a rout. When Old Mac disputed his characterization, Drake snapped, “I know what I’m talking about. I know panic when I see it.” McQuillin hesitated, then told Drake: “You are on the spot. Take command and stop it.”

The arrival of the 21st Panzer Division precluded any chance to “stop it.” Half the panzers swung cross-country far to the west for the backdoor attack on Sidi bou Zid, which Hightower would only briefly disrupt. The rest drove straight north along Highway 83, into the gap between Djebel Garet Hadid and Djebel Ksaira. American troops on the two hills spattered the enemy with enough steel to delay this prong of the German advance six miles from Sidi bou Zid. Enemy gunners answered with artillery, mortar, and tank fire. “It seems like everything the enemy uses is designed to harass a man,” one American private concluded.

Drake soon recognized that his position was desperate if not hopeless. Enemy tanks near Sidi bou Zid appeared to be methodically pirouetting over the slit trenches to crush the remaining defenders. Several American units around Djebel Ksaira tried to steal away before officers hectored them back into the line with threats and curses. At 11:30, McQuillin at Sidi bou Zid reported by radio to General Ward’s headquarters in Sbeïtla: “Enemy tanks closing in and threatening both flanks and…Drake. Any orders?” Ward replied: “Continue your mission.” At 12:08
P.M.
McQuillin reported: “Enemy right on top of us.”

Drake was scanning the battlefield from a rocky knob on Garet Hadid when a staff officer approached. “General McQuillin is on the telephone,” the officer said. “He is pulling out and you are to stay here.” Drake flew to the phone only to find the line dead. Two signalmen followed the wire to the abandoned CCA headquarters outside Sidi bou Zid. The command post had temporarily moved seven miles west, then joined the ragged exodus toward Sbeïtla. McQuillin “fled so fast he even left the codebook” behind, Drake later complained.

At two
P.M.
, Drake reached McQuillin by radio. Swallowing his anger, he asked permission to pull his men off Djebel Ksaira. McQuillin passed the request to Ward, who relayed it to Fredendall. At Speedy Valley, a hundred miles from the shooting, life looked less bleak. Within eight minutes, McQuillin was told: “Too early to give Drake permission to withdraw.” McQuillin radioed the message to Garet Hadid: “Continue to hold your position.”