An Army at Dawn (70 page)

A West Point classmate of Eisenhower’s, Irwin was a tall, russet-haired cavalryman who had switched to artillery in 1917 because calibrating gunnery seemed more challenging than guessing the proper mix of hay and oats for horses. Witty and urbane, a Virginian, he was a skilled watercolorist who loved poetry almost as much as he loved massing fires. By first light on February 22—despite wretched maps, squally weather, and British misapprehension over the enemy’s whereabouts—Irwin had emplaced his guns in a three-mile arc so that the first German shells of the morning were answered in kind. The lines were barely a thousand yards apart, and snipers discouraged forward observation, so much of the American gunnery involved blindly dumping hundreds of shells on the reverse slope of the next ridge.

It served. At seven
A.M.
Broich phoned Rommel, who had returned to Kasserine. The panzers had planned to attack, but now Allied shells were raining down. Also, at five
A.M.
the British had launched an armored sally against a salient on the German right. (“I’m sorry,” the British tank commander told his men, “but we’ve got to go out on a forlorn hope. I doubt whether any of us will come back.”) The attack had been repulsed, with seven of ten British tanks destroyed, but the raid implied unexpected fortitude. A more serious counterattack could follow. Perhaps they should wait? Rommel agreed.

The field marshal had shot his bolt. Despite captured stocks, his army was low on ammunition, with but four days’ rations left, and only enough fuel to travel less than two hundred miles. Arab spies and Luftwaffe reconnaissance reported Allied reinforcements headed to Thala. After Broich’s call, Rommel drove to the front. He scanned the shell-plowed terrain outside Thala, then returned to his tent in a thicket between Djebel Chambi and the Hatab River. At noon, Kesselring landed at Kasserine in his little Storch and motored to the command post in Rommel’s staff car.

True to character, Kesselring felt optimistic. Early in the weekend, he had feared the offensive was sputtering. But reports filtering into his headquarters near Rome the previous night seemed satisfactory, “even promising of success.” True, Arnim’s refusal to send all of the 10th Panzers was “a very serious failure…which could not be made good again,” and Kesselring had reproached him. Yet the Allies were reeling, Kesselring believed.

Rommel wasted no time in disabusing him of this notion. In an hour-long conference frequently interrupted by a jangling telephone, he insisted on “stopping the attack and withdrawing the attack group.” Rommel lashed out at Arnim, the Luftwaffe, the Italians, even the “poor combat value” of his own men. His left flank was exposed to attack from the west, where the American defense “had been very skillfully executed.” The assault on Thala, rescheduled for one
P.M.
, would be postponed again. A staff officer recorded Rommel’s cooler arguments:

It appears futile to continue the attack in view of the constant reinforcing of the hostile forces, the unfavorable weather, which renders the terrain impassable off the hard roads, and because of the increasing problems caused by the mountain terrain, which is so unsuited to the employment of armored units. All this add[s] to the low strength of our organization.

“Rommel was in a depressed mood,” Kesselring observed. “I noticed in him a scarcely concealed desire to go back to his army on the southern front as soon as possible…. I thought it best to raise his self-confidence by expressing my confidence in him, citing his former accomplishments which were achieved under much more aggravating circumstances.” Montgomery’s army was “still far away” and no threat. “We have the initiative,” Kesselring added. “Tébessa is within easy reach.”

No use. The old warhorse would not answer the bugle again. He showed “nothing of his usual passionate will to command,” Kesselring noted. “Rommel was physically worn out and psychologically fatigued.” The Desert Fox had “undoubtedly turned into a tired old man.”

Thala would prove the high-water mark of the Axis campaign in northwest Africa. Shelling by both sides continued the rest of that rainy Monday. By sunset, American gunners had only a fifteen-minute supply of 105mm ammunition left; Irwin later deemed February 22, 1943, “the toughest day [I] experienced during World War II”—strong words from a man who would see much combat in the next two years. But the tide had swung. The reprieved Tommies at Thala chattered “as if they had been enjoying a bath after a polo match,” reporter A. B. Austin wrote. “Absolute Gilbert and Sullivan.”

Back in Rome, Kesselring formally authorized the withdrawal. On Monday night, Axis troops left their trenches and slipped back through Kasserine Pass, unhurried and unbowed. The 21st Panzer served as a rear guard, but there was nothing to guard against. “The enemy follows only hesitantly,” the Panzer Army Africa war diary noted on February 23. “The day passes without fighting of any consequence.” Broich waited near Kasserine village until the last vehicle had rolled through a gap in a freshly laid minefield and sappers had plugged the exit with a few final Teller mines. Rommel was already speeding through Gafsa on his return to Mareth in the southeast. He took a moment to write home: “I’ve stood up well so far to the exhausting days of battle. Unfortunately we won’t be able to hold the ground we’ve gained for long.”

The enemy follows only hesitantly.
On February 22, Eisenhower sent Fredendall an unctuous cable, voicing “every confidence that under your inspiring leadership current advances of the enemy will be stopped in place and…your forces will, when the proper time comes, play an effective part in driving the enemy from Tunisia.” That night the commander-in-chief followed up with a phone call. The “proper time” had come. Intercepted German radio traffic suggested a broad withdrawal. Fredendall would be “perfectly safe” in counterattacking immediately to catch Rommel in the open. Eisenhower was so certain of this that he offered to “assume full responsibility.”

Fredendall demurred. The enemy had “one more shot in his locker.” It would be wiser, he insisted, to spend another day on the defensive as a precaution. Army intelligence officers had recruited Tunisian agents to scout the enemy’s movements, only to find that “the inability of most Arabs to read or write, to count accurately over twenty-five, or to tell time” limited their espionage value. No one knew exactly where Rommel was.

Hesitation gripped both II Corps and First Army. Having been knocked about for more than a week, senior commanders wanted only to put some distance between themselves and their tormentors. General Alexander remained closeted in Constantine, trying to make sense of the morass he had inherited three days before. Little effort was made to seize the initiative.

Several more convoluted command changes further impeded Allied pursuit. Eisenhower had been mulling Fredendall’s request to relieve Ward, and was about to accede when he heard from Truscott that Ward had “brought order out of chaos” during the retreat. From Morocco, the commander-in-chief summoned Major General Ernest N. Harmon, one of Patton’s lieutenants during
TORCH
. In Algiers, Eisenhower told Harmon to assume command of either II Corps or 1st Armored, whichever seemed appropriate. Harmon—a burly cavalryman once described as “a cobra without the snake charmer”—snapped, “Well, make up your mind, Ike. I can’t do both.” He then went to bed only to be rousted by Eisenhower, who helped lace his boots before packing him off to the Tunisian front.

At three
A.M.
, Tuesday, February 23, Harmon arrived at Le Kouif. He was to serve as “a senior assistant” to Fredendall, who also received a pointed message from Eisenhower: “I have no thought of your replacing Ward who, it seems to me, on two occasions at least, rendered a very fine account of himself in actual battle.” Slumped in a chair next to the stove, Fredendall scratched out a letter of credence introducing Harmon as a deputy corps commander authorized to oversee the 1st Armored Division and British forces. This made Harmon the eighth tactical commander of Allied forces in less than a week. “Here it is,” Fredendall said. “The party is yours.” Concluding that the man was drunk, Harmon stuffed the paper into his pocket and motored off to Thala in a jeep.

There he found Brigadier Nicholson little impressed by him or his letter. Nicholson politely explained that he intended “to fight this battle out”
then
Harmon could take over. “[Harmon] was a little surprised at first but soon was cooperating whole-heartedly,” Nicholson reported, adding: “We gave them a fucking bloody nose yesterday and we’ll do it again this morning.” Harmon growled his approval, then drove to see Ward. “Nobody goes back from here,” Harmon declared.

In a Thala cellar on the morning of February 23, a breathless young officer dashed up to Nicholson and Dunphie. “The Germans have gone!” An excited murmur rippled through the command post. Cautiously, the brigadiers drove in a scout car to the sanguinary ridge once held by the Leicesters. “We could see nothing in front of us,” an officer reported, except for Arab looters. Nicholson could hardly believe his force had survived. He thought of Kipling’s lines:

Man cannot tell but Allah knows

How much the other side is hurt.

Surely Rommel still held the pass with a covering force, waiting to ambush overzealous pursuers? At 11:30
A.M.
, Nicholson, who later chastised himself for timidity, ordered reconnaissance forward but “not unduly to hasten.” With his approval, scouts waited until three
P.M.
before edging toward Kasserine.

Rommel had gone and his trail was stone cold, but it took more than a day for Allied troops to cross the Grand Dorsal in numbers. “Our follow-up was slow,” Harmon later conceded, “and we let them get away.” Ward had graciously offered Harmon his staff, then scribbled a terse note to Beetle Smith at AFHQ headquarters. He could no longer work under Fredendall. Mutual distrust had become intolerable. Dejected and silent, reduced to two staff officers and a driver, he set up a tent near Robinett’s command post to await a reply from Algiers. An aide noted that Ward “feels very low and needs rest.”

Light snow fell on the American and British soldiers picking their way through Kasserine Pass on the morning of February 25. The desolate landscape was “cluttered with wrecked German and American airplanes, burned out vehicles, abandoned tanks, [and] scattered shell cases,” Robinett reported. Ration tins, unfinished love letters, a pair of boxing gloves: the detritus of battles lost and won. Italian prisoners in black-plumed helmets dug graves for bodies now ripe beyond recognition; an American soldier sat guard in a jeep, chewing gum and reading a Super-man comic. Severe orders were issued against looting, and the throaty sound of tommy guns echoed in the snow. Tunisians ran, or fell.

Even if Allied troops had been roused to hot pursuit, Rommel’s sappers discouraged audacity. All nine bridges between Sbiba and Sbeïtla had been demolished, as had thirteen others around Kasserine. More than 43,000 German mines had been planted. East of the pass, Allied “vehicles were blowing up on the minefields in all directions,” said one British officer. “A most unpleasant and windy business.” Battery-operated mine detectors shorted out in the damp weather, forcing engineers armed with bayonet probes to “spread out like caddies and golfers looking for a lost ball.” Soldiers also watched for the telltale sign of dismembered camels, whose flat feet usually provided enough pressure to detonate the eleven pounds of TNT in a Teller mine.

A precise tally of casualties at Kasserine remains elusive, in part because of uncertainty over the French, Italian, and Tunisian tolls. American losses exceeded 6,000 of the 30,000 men engaged in the battle. Of those, half were missing. (German records, ever precise, listed 4,026 Allied soldiers of all nationalities captured.) Fredendall’s corps lost 183 tanks, 104 half-tracks, more than 200 guns, and 500 jeeps and trucks. British losses were relatively light, apart from the poor Leicesters and a few dozen tanks, and the Germans suffered fewer than 1,000 casualties, including 201 dead.

Some American units were mauled nearly beyond repair, among them the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 1st Armored Regiment—temporarily combined to form the understrength 23rd Battalion. The 3rd Battalion of the 6th Armored Infantry, so badly carved up at Oran during Operation
RESERVIST
, was again gutted at Kasserine, shrinking from 750 men to 418. Half the survivors lacked shoes, like ragamuffin Valley Forge soldiers. “Our people from the very highest to the very lowest have learned that this is not a child’s game,” Eisenhower told Marshall.

“The proud and cocky Americans today stand humiliated by one of the greatest defeats in our history,” Harry Butcher scribbled in his diary. “There is a definite hangheadedness.” From Faïd Pass to Thala, the Americans had been driven back eighty-five miles in a week, farther than at the infamous “bulge” in the Belgian Ardennes nearly two years later. At least in terms of yardage lost, Kasserine may fairly be considered the worst American drubbing of the war.

Grievous as the past ten days had been, the Allies had suffered a tactical, temporary setback rather than a strategic defeat. Rommel had failed to reach the Allied supply depots, failed to force the British First Army to withdraw from northern Tunisia, failed to gut the offensive capacity of Allied forces, who would soon make good their losses. Seasoned German soldiers proved themselves wily and ruthless, and Axis commanders demonstrated the battlefield virtue of leading from the front. But the Axis high command was more riven with rivalry and inefficiencies than even its Allied counterpart—a poor standard indeed.

Both sides had violated key principles of war to the detriment of their respective causes; they had, among other errors, failed to maintain contact with a retreating foe to exploit his derangement. The Axis had made this mistake at both Sidi bou Zid and Thala. Rommel, moreover, had violated the cardinal precept of concentration by twice dividing his force and attacking at too many places at once. Arnim had been right: the anabasis in mountainous country with a modest, footsore force
was
too ambitious, particularly without Arnim’s wholehearted support.