An Army at Dawn (67 page)

At 4:50
A.M.
on Friday, February 19, Rommel issued his orders: the Afrika Korps was to drive west and capture Kasserine Pass; 21st Panzer would attack north on Highway 71 toward Le Kef; 10th Panzer—or as much of the division as could be mustered—would concentrate at Sbeïtla, ready to exploit whichever route seemed easier. With two roads diverging before him, Rommel would divide his force and travel both.

Even at his distant remove Fredendall recognized the vulnerability of Kasserine Pass. He peeled away a battalion from Terry Allen’s 1st Division and shoved it forward to join the 19th Engineers, along with a four-gun French battery and some tank destroyers. That brought the number of defenders to 2,000. In another call to Truscott late Thursday morning, he asserted that “the 1st Armored gave them a good licking”—a triumph that existed mostly in II Corps imaginations—while asking for 120 replacement Sherman tanks. Truscott could offer fifty-two, nearly enough to outfit a battalion, and he chose not to reveal that Eisenhower had decided to hold back more than 200 other newly arrived Shermans for fear of losing them all.

At eight that evening, Fredendall phoned Colonel Alexander Stark, commander of Allen’s 26th Infantry Regiment, who was south of Tébessa.

“Alex, I want you to go to Kasserine right away and pull a Stonewall Jackson. Take over up there.”

Stark hesitated. “You mean tonight, General?”

“Yes, Alex, right away.”

It took Stark nearly twelve hours to pick his way across the dark bowl of the Bahiret Foussana, alive with challenge—“Snafu!”—and countersign—“Damned right!” He arrived in the pass at 7:30 on Friday morning, just as the Germans did. Unlike the Confederate general whose military genius he was now to replicate, Stark knew little of the capacity or disposition of his troops, many of whom had never heard of him. A quick inspection of the misty pass revealed a predicament even Stonewall would have been hard put to salvage. Except for a single platoon positioned on the slopes of Djebel Semmama, all four infantry companies occupied low ground on the left side of the pass; likewise on the right, where one engineer platoon held Djebel Chambi and three companies held the flats. To shift troops from one side of the defile to the other would require a ten-mile detour to the nearest bridge over the Hatab River. Antitank mines had simply been dumped, rather than buried, on likely enemy approaches. Another 60,000 mines and 5,000 booby traps were on their way from Algeria by cargo plane and truck, but the arrival time was uncertain. Fredendall had also asked Anderson for thirty tons of barbed wire, and every platoon was pleading for sandbags, shovels, and picks.

A German attempt at dawn to seize the pass in a coup de main had been repulsed with good shooting from the French 75s; the Afrika Korps reconnaissance battalion bounced back as if brushing a hot stove. But at ten
A.M.
, enemy artillery began falling around Stark’s command tent three miles west of the Kasserine narrows. “Thirty-five to forty trucks brought up enemy infantry at 10:15,” reported a staff officer. “They are making for high ground on our left.”

And, soon, on the right. Wraiths in field gray scrambled up the rocky inclines, flopping to fire before scuttling on. Machine-gunners crouched behind them with tripods and ammunition boxes, lashing the pass with flails of tracer fire. American reinforcements arrived early in the afternoon, including the regimental band, a tank platoon, and three companies from the 9th Division’s 39th Infantry. The badly laid mines sufficed to cripple five panzers below Djebel Chambi, and Stark’s spirits lifted despite German capture of the ridgeline below Semmama’s peak.

Shadows swallowed the pass when Stark received a late-afternoon visit from Brigadier Charles A. L. Dunphie, whose British 26th Armoured Brigade straddled the Thala road twenty miles behind the Americans. Stark pronounced the battle “well in hand,” despite “slight difficulties with communication” from artillery shells severing his phone lines. Dunphie suspected that Stark was mistaken, a suspicion reinforced when the brigadier ventured forward 400 yards in his staff car for a personal reconnaissance and came streaking back to the tent beneath a swarm of German bullets. Enemy infiltration past U.S. lines was as obvious as it was ubiquitous. The Americans had no reserves, and, Dunphie reported, even the “position of [Stark’s] own troops was vague, and in particular he could not tell me where he had laid minefields beyond the fact that they had laid all they could get hold of.” In short, Dunphie concluded, Stark “had completely lost control of events…. I thought Stark a nice old boy—gallant but quite out of his depth.” Returning to Thala at seven
P.M.
, he reported to Anderson that conditions were “very poor at the pass.” For his part, Stark dubbed Dunphie “that blockhead.” Even in the face of mortal peril the cousins could not forbear their squabbling.

Stark had not yet “completely lost control of events.” That would happen in the next few hours. But Anderson chose this moment to issue a stand-or-die edict effective at eight
P.M.
: “The army commander directs that there will be no withdrawal from the positions now held by the First Army. No man will leave his post unless it is to counterattack.”

Even as this puff of gas circulated through the ranks, many a man was leaving his post, and
not
to counterattack. Enemy artillery fell with greater insistence as the night deepened. “The worst of it all was to see some of your best buddies next to you being shot down or blown up,” observed an engineer corporal. “I never knew that there could possibly be so many shells in the air at one time and so many explosions near you and still come out alive.” Compounding the terror was a new German weapon deployed for the first time, the Nebelwerfer, a six-barreled mortar that “stonked” targets with a half-dozen 75-pound high-explosive rounds soon known as screaming meemies or moaning minnies because the wail they made in flight was said to resemble “a lot of women sobbing their hearts out.”

Night fever spread through the engineer ranks holding Stark’s right. “A considerable number of men left their positions and went to the rear,” an engineer officer reported. Some were corraled and herded back to the line; more simply melted into the night. Stark’s left was even shakier. At 8:30
P.M.
, enemy patrols overran the infantry battalion command post. German infiltrators cut off the solitary company on the slopes of Djebel Semmama, then seized Point 1191, the mountain’s most important ridge. Many GIs who eluded capture were subsequently robbed of their clothes and weapons by Arab brigands. “In some instances the Arabs got the drop on the men with M-1 and ’03 rifles they had already obtained,” a chagrined company commander told the provost marshal.

Bad as the bad night had been, the foggy morning of February 20 was worse. Rommel rose early to visit an Italian Centauro Division battalion sweeping into the pass from the southeast. At 10:30
A.M.
he drove to Kasserine village, passing the bloated bodies of dead American drivers still behind the wheels of their charred vehicles. On a rail bridge spanning the Hatab River, Rommel met General Karl Buelowius, commander of the Afrika Korps, and General Fritz Freiherr von Broich, commander of the depleted and tardy 10th Panzer Division. The field marshal was displeased. Although Buelowius had ordered two grenadier battalions to resume their assault, the attack seemed sluggish. The Americans were crumbling but stubbornly refused to collapse. Unless the Germans punctured the pass
this very day,
Rommel believed, Allied reinforcements would clot the wound and prevent him from exploiting any breakthrough, particularly since the 21st Panzer had made little progress in its northward probe up Highway 71. He ordered three more battalions into action for a six-battalion attack—10th Panzer on the Axis right, Afrika Korps on the left—supported by five artillery battalions. After sharply berating Buelowius for torpor and Broich for not leading from the front—both stood glum as apprehended truants in their greatcoats and slouch hats—Rommel returned to the command post in the Kasserine train station.

The American collapse began in earnest by late morning. At 11:22 the 19th Engineers’ commander, Colonel A.T.W. Moore, warned Stark by radio that enemy infantry and tanks were forcing the pass along Highway 13. An engineer major bellowed: “Forget about our equipment and just save your life.” Artillery observers fled, explaining plausibly if ingloriously: “This place is too hot.” Companies disintegrated into platoons, platoons into squads, squads into solitary foot soldiers chased to the rear by screaming meemies. Half an hour later, Moore radioed, “Enemy overrunning our C.P.,” and bolted for high ground. He soon arrived at Stark’s tent to announce that the 19th Engineers no longer existed. In fact, with 128 casualties, the regiment had been sorely hurt but not obliterated.

The “uncoordinated withdrawal,” as Moore delicately called it, was mirrored on the American left. Stark ordered his artillery to fall back; French gunners, without tractors to move their 75s, wept as they spiked the guns and took to the hills. Colonel Theodore J. Conway, sent forward by Truscott to assess Stark’s plight, was shocked to see troops streaming past him for the rear. Briefly, he thought of Washington on horseback in the battle of New York, whacking his fleeing Continentals with the flat of his sword in a vain effort to turn them; having neither horse nor sword, Conway joined the exodus.

Stark held until after five
P.M.
, when grenades began detonating near his command post in the Hatab gulch. With his staff and two hapless Army cameramen who had just arrived in search of “some action shots,” he hurried upriver before striking overland toward Thala. “We had to crawl,” Stark later recounted, “as in some instances [German soldiers] were not more than fifteen yards away.”

Casualties just among infantrymen totaled nearly 500 dead, wounded, and missing. Italian tanks drove five miles on Highway 13 toward Tébessa without seeing a trace of the Americans except for burning wreckage. At 3:35
A.M.
on Sunday, February 21, precisely a week after the Axis offensive had begun, Fredendall’s headquarters warned: “Enemy reliably reported in possession of heights on either side of Kasserine Pass…. Attack also going towards Thala on a four-thousand-yard front and has advanced about two thousand yards beyond the pass.”

Kasserine Pass was lost. Anderson observed the occasion with another windy exhortation. “There is to be no further withdrawal under any excuse…. Fight to the last man.” That, the weary Yanks agreed, simply meant the British were willing to fight to the last American.

“Order, Counter-order, and Disorder”

D
EMOLITIONISTS
laid slabs of guncotton through the vast dumps at Tébessa and awaited orders to fire the stores. As rumors of an approaching enemy horde flew across the Bahiret Foussana, 400 quartermaster troops scurried helter-skelter. The supply depot’s arsenal consisted of two machine guns and a single 37mm cannon. Sentries paced the ancient walls and peered eastward for telltale coils of dust. A British officer marinated in the lore of Khartoum and Balaklava proposed repelling any approaching panzers with grenades flung from the parapets. Four hundred thousand gallons of gasoline in five-gallon flimsies were loaded into boxcars for evacuation, but more than a million meals’ worth of rations would be abandoned if the enemy attacked. Hatchet-wielding cooks stalked like madmen through Tébessa’s coops and hutches, slaughtering every chicken and rabbit rather than leave them for the Germans. The little garrison gorged on stew for breakfast.

As always in the great clash of armies, the small dramas draw the eye. Ted Roosevelt was helping the French near Ousseltia when word came that his son, Quentin—a twenty-five-year-old artillery officer, named for an uncle killed in the Great War—had been gravely wounded in a strafing near Kasserine. A Messerschmitt bullet had pierced his lung and lodged in his liver. The ambulance driver raced to three field hospitals before finding one not yet fleeing the German advance. Roosevelt wrote to his wife, Eleanor:

On the morning of the second day he ran a temperature of 104 and they thought he was dying. They got a message through to me. I started for there after dark. I had not slept for two days and the hospital was sixty miles away, sixty miles of night driving thinking I’d find him dead.

He found him alive. Asleep on a cot in a mud-floor tent, Quentin had made the turn. “I went over and kissed him as if he were a little boy again and indeed I did feel he was our little boy,” Roosevelt wrote. “I’m feeling buoyant.”

Little buoyancy could be found at II Corps headquarters in the school at Le Kouif. Although Fredendall fought off despondency with occasional nips of bourbon, one officer described him sitting on the school’s front steps “head in hands and giving every evidence of being both bewildered and defeated.” George Marshall had once said of Fredendall, “I like that man. You can see determination all over his face.” Now that face mostly showed despair; he had begun referring to his adversary as “Professor Rommel.” Whistling tunelessly while staring at the map, he abruptly turned to an aide and said, “If I were back home, I’d go out and paint the garage doors. There’s a lot of pleasure in painting a garage door.”

Alerted to the possible abandonment of Tébessa, General Juin hurried to Le Kouif, where he found the corps commander perched on a packing crate in an empty office. Tossing his left-handed salute, Juin urged the Americans to stand fast. Surrendering Tébessa meant offering the panzers a flat, open avenue to Constantine, a strategic prize.

Fredendall shrugged. He had no reserves. His corps was reeling. He would do whatever Anderson ordered.

Juin drew himself up. “My wife and my children are in Constantine,” he said in a fractured voice. “If you carry out this order, I shall remove from you the Constantine Division in order to defend Tébessa and we will get ourselves killed there.”

Fredendall stirred from his crate, his lethargy momentarily dispelled. “I saw his attitude change,” Juin later recounted, “and throwing his arms round my neck, he swore not to abandon Tébessa.”