by Ray Lambert
Our II Corps—pronounced “two core”—was south of Anderson’s force, which remained the key fighting group on the west side of the Germans. Our area of operations was a mishmash of hills, ridges, depressions, and valleys in and between the Atlas mountains and surrounding hills. While the passes east were very limited and easily defended, if II Corps were to cut through them and out of the mountains east, we would have been able to split Tunisia roughly in half, cutting off German supply lines and making it difficult for them to escape if Montgomery’s attacks became too intense.
The Germans recognized that and decided to do something about it. We got beat pretty bad in a series of battles in the Tunisian hills and passes that January and February. The climax of those battles took place at Kasserine Pass. Our forces ended up turning back the German offensive there, but at great cost and not before the German attack had accomplished everything its architect and commander, Erwin Rommel, wanted. Not only did the Germans end up with good defensive positions, but they had taken the fight out of our commander, and not a few of the men.
Rommel is a legendary general; he needs no kind words from me to make his reputation, and he’ll get none. Plenty of people in occupied France later felt his cruelty; there are monuments to the civilians his troops killed there. But there is no denying he marshaled his forces cleverly, and whipped us good in Tunisia. When he was done with us, he turned his attention back to Montgomery, whose British force was coming at him from the south, still aiming to push his troops into the sea.
One good thing came out of these losses: General Dwight Eisenhower appointed George Patton to take over command from General Fredendall in early March. General Patton picked Omar Bradley, who’d been sent by Marshall to find out what the devil was going on, as his second in command. They were an improbable team, as different as any two generals in the war, but they ended up doing a fine job.
* * *
Why did we do so poorly from roughly December to late February? By that point we had mostly solved our logistics problems; supplies were flowing regularly. You never have enough in a war, but things were hardly as bad as they had been when we first landed. Our forces outnumbered Rommel’s both overall and in most engagements, though he and his underlings took whatever momentary advantages they could.
One of the biggest factors, in my opinion, was our inexperience. Not only did we not really know war yet, we didn’t know how to kill.
It’s more than shooting someone. It’s not something you learn in your head, not a math equation or an instruction about how to wire up a switch. It’s knowledge you need to get into your bones, into your heart. It’s a harsh thing, but without it, you and your friends are dead, your battle is lost, and what you came to fight for is forfeit.
The Germans had been fighting for years. They were warriors. They had good equipment, sometimes better than what we had, though generally not as much. Most of all, they knew how to kill. They weren’t reluctant to do it.
You’re taught all your life not to. Thou shalt not kill. Unlearning that is hard.
At some point, you get it in your mind that you are either going to kill or be killed. You see your buddies being slaughtered and realize the enemy is trying to kill you, too, and you’ve got to do the same thing to them if you want to survive.
But for many men, there’s still hesitation. Until you can overcome that, both with experience and good leadership, your army will always be inferior.
It was the hardest thing to learn. And we had to do it real quick, or the war would be lost.
* * *
We had excellent leaders at the top of the 1st Division, starting with our commander, Major General Terry Allen. General Allen was one of the best-loved generals in World War II, and he’s the one I think did more than anyone to help the guys learn how to get in there and start fighting the way they should. He’d been in World War I, where he’d been shot, won the Silver Star, and learned how to lead. He was a true soldier’s general, a man who sat on the ground next to you, who had an aggressive combat style.
A man you could imagine calling Terry, rather than General Allen—though you never would.
His second in command was Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, the son of President Teddy Roosevelt. He was another action guy who’d fought as an officer in World War I, where he’d been gassed and won the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC), the army’s highest award, one step below the Medal of Honor, for his bravery. Rejoining the army just before the outbreak of World War II, he was given command of the 26th Infantry Regiment, his old unit in the 1st Division, then promoted to be Allen’s assistant division commander. Like Allen, he liked to lead from the front.
Both generals realized our shortcomings and worked to overcome them. Once the fighting got tough, they encouraged and sometimes goaded the combat officers to do more. I ended up meeting a lot of generals—my aid station was often the place they’d stop when touring the front. No one I met—Bradley, Patton, Eisenhower, you name him—was the measure of Allen or Roosevelt.
Call Me Daddy
I found out I was a father at the end of January 1943 while I was in the Ousseltia Valley of Tunisia, west of the German lines. While Estelle had written to me about her pregnancy when I was in Great Britain, the news of our son’s birth still caught me by surprise. He’d been born January 16; almost two weeks had passed before the news arrived in the form of a Red Cross volunteer who came to our unit and told me.
My response was not carefully considered.
“It’s about time you got around to telling me,” I snapped.
Not very understanding, I know.
Estelle had named the baby Arthur, after me. To be honest, I wouldn’t have made him a “junior.” I know it was intended as an honor, but it’s the kind of thing that causes a lot of confusion later on in life with bank accounts, official records, and that sort of thing. But I had no say in the matter, being out of touch.
I was able to write a letter home, telling Estelle that I’d heard we were parents. A few months after that, I got a letter from her with the details of how big our son was at birth—about six and a half pounds. I expect he’d gained two or three times that by the time I got the letter.
I wondered how big he’d be when I got home and finally met him.
* * *
By mid-March, command of the Allied armies had been rejiggered and the offensive had started up again. One morning as our companies were moving up, I took a Jeep out with one of my medics, Bud Hays, to scout for a place we could locate the aid station. There were farms amid the hills, and water flowed through the wadis, or seasonal streams, though the day itself was dry. Sitting in the passenger seat as we drove across a field, I concentrated on the terrain, looking for a spot that would be close to the guys at the front but sheltered, if possible, from German artillery, ideally a little nook at the side of a hill.
BAM!
The world turned upside down.
The Jeep flipped and I went flying. Our left front wheel had hit one of many land mines planted by the Germans. I was lucky to be thrown free. I landed on my knees, banging the hell out of them and drawing blood, but not breaking any bones. Hays wasn’t so lucky, though he, too, got off a lot lighter than he might have, breaking his arm rather than his neck. The explosives themselves hadn’t hurt either of us.
The Jeep, though, was ruined. We gathered ourselves and walked back to our post. My wounds were the very definition of “walking wounded,” I suppose, not bad enough to report, let alone keep me from working. We’d all get banged up from time to time; we treated ourselves and moved on. Only the very serious injuries were recorded.
It was different with the soldiers we cared for. You were always concerned that an infection might develop or the injury might prove more serious than first suspected. So we kept records that would allow treatments to be followed, and to make sure nothing came back to bite us.
* * *
Our tangle with the land mine happened right around the time of the Ba
ttle of El Guettar, when the Big Red One went up against the Germans’ 10th Panzer Division. The Germans nearly overran us in the El Guettar Valley in Tunisia; their tanks rumbled close to General Allen’s headquarters at one point. But artillery and tank destroyers cut down the enemy spearhead, and for the first time in Africa, American troops defeated a front-line German unit. The Nazis fell back; while we were too battered to take quick advantage, we had finally turned the momentum around.
On maps, battles are large and small arrows, dotted lines, terse descriptions. On the ground they’re flipped-over Jeeps and busted tanks. The thick arrow might represent several weeks of fighting, during which a unit might be cycled on and off the front line several times.
The maps can’t show things like the mud that crusts on your boots or the dirt that coats your skin. It certainly doesn’t show the blood that cakes on your trousers after you’ve cleaned a dozen wounds.
This was the middle of a three-month stretch when I went without a shower. The best I could do when we had a lull in the fighting was take some water out of a canteen and pour it into my helmet, then use my undershirt as a washcloth. Lord knows how I smelled when I was done, but it probably wasn’t any worse than the other fellows.
The Pipe
We were slowly getting control of the skies, thanks to the airfields we’d captured back west. But the Germans were still very active, attacking with a variety of planes. They were also sending reconnaissance aircraft over regularly to see where we were, helping them aim their artillery and ground attacks.
One afternoon in the valley, we heard the angry rasp of an aircraft sprinting over our aid station and the surrounding olive grove. I looked up in time to see a twin-engine P-38 Lightning swoop into a dive.
The army air corps P-38s were awesome fighters, nimble and fast, and rightly feared by the Germans, who called them fork-tailed devils because of their unique boom tails. In capable hands, the American fighters or “pursuit planes” were more than a match for anything the Germans had in Africa. In this case, the Lightning had an extreme advantage—its prey was a light German observation plane we called a “Stork.”
If you’ve ever seen a Piper Cub or even a high-winged Cessna, you can visualize the basic silhouette of a Stork, whose proper name was the Fieseler Fi 156 Storch, German for stork. Unarmed, it was a narrow plane with wings that seemed disproportionately long. The pilot and whatever passenger he might have (often none) sat in tandem, one behind the other. As an observation plane, it was designed to fly low and slow. These flight characteristics were an asset near the front lines, since they allowed the Stork to take off and land from roads or even fields with no need for a long or well-prepared runway.
But it also meant that it had a low top speed and was no match for the faster, well-armed Lightning.
The Stork’s pilot knew he was flying for his life. He dove low, wheels nearly scraping the top of the olive trees. The Lightning followed, but couldn’t quite get low enough to line up and fire. The Stork banked hard and the Lightning flew by, cutting speed and twisting back behind its target.
Again and again the two planes pirouetted above us. For quite a while, the German managed to turn or dive or jerk upward a split second before the P-38 pilot could fire.
Then his luck or skill ran short. A quick burst hit the German and the Stork crashed a hundred yards away, maybe closer. The Lightning roared off, and the air was suddenly quiet again.
I ran for the plane. Now that it was down, the pilot was no longer an enemy—he was just a man who needed help.
Though shot down and mangled in the landing, the plane was intact enough that I could get to the door at the side and pull it open. Blood was everywhere. The pilot had been hit by the Lightning’s bullets or some shrapnel, and probably broke some bones in the landing, but he was still alive. He looked at me, dazed but awake. Worried that the plane would explode any second, I reached in to grab him and haul him out.
He started talking, extending his hand toward me.
There was something in his hand. I jerked back, then realized it was too small for a gun.
It was a small tobacco pipe. He seemed to be pleading with me to take it.
Was it a reward for helping him, a bequest for someone?
He kept talking in German. I finally took the pipe. Before I could make sense of anything, before I could ask, even in English, what he wanted me to do with it, he slumped down, dead.
I stuck the pipe in my pocket and walked away. There was nothing more I could do for the man in the plane. He was back to being an enemy.
* * *
Later on, I tossed the pipe in my med kit, where it stayed for the duration of the war. I guess you’d call it a memento now; it’s one of the very few I have from the war.
A few years after the war, I briefly took up pipe smoking. I used the German’s pipe a few times, to see what it was like.
Every so often, I take it out of the case where I keep it. It’s a fine piece, nicely carved with a horse and hunting scene on the bowl. Was it a family heirloom, passed down for several generations? Did he want me to give it to someone? Or was he offering it to me as a reward for helping him? Each time I hold it in my hand, I wonder what he was trying to say.
When I think of him now, he’s just a man again. Time does change some things for the better.
Death in the Family
Now as we fought, the Germans were always close by. Even at points when the two sides weren’t charging at each other in the sector, we regularly fired at each other, either with artillery and mortars or, in places where the soldiers were close enough, direct gunfire. Every day, without end.
The Germans had a large number of 88-millimeter guns, originally designed as antiaircraft weapons. First put to use against tanks when the Germans supplied General Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, they had come into their own with Rommel. Famous as the “88,” the cannons were hated and feared at the same time. They were also so famous that to us, pretty much every time we were shelled with something other than a mortar round, we’d say it was from an 88. We didn’t stop to measure the shell. There were so many 88s that the odds favored them anyway.
Because the aid stations were in fixed locations close to the front lines, they were constantly in danger. Any Geneva Conventions protecting them or the wounded had no force on the battlefront, and even if the enemy wasn’t deliberately aiming at us, the slightest error when firing could easily put us rather than another unit in the bull’s-eye.
Toward the end of March, one of my medics by the name of Blackwell got hit with shrapnel or shell fragments during an attack. The wounds weren’t life-threatening, but they were bad enough that we had to send him back to get patched up. He returned to us on March 30, full of energy and glad to be back. I suspect he’d talked the doctors into letting him come back early; like the rest of us, he was always trying to do as much as he could, going beyond what would be expected.
That day, March 30, 1943, we were in a lull, with minimal fighting in our sector. A Jeep came up to the aid station with thermos cans of food, and men from a nearby company came down for chow. We were very close to the front line but shaded from it by the hillside, which gave us a little protection.
Or so we thought.
Something whistled overhead as the guys bunched up to get food. A German shell hit with impeccable timing; Rommel himself couldn’t have aimed or timed it better.
Blackwell was among the men in the little clump that got hit. His wounds were fatal. He was our first KIA, the first death in our family.
* * *
I blamed myself. I was in charge. I felt I could have done something to prevent his death.
What could I have done? How was it my fault?
Those are logical questions, with logical answers. Nothing, and it wasn’t.
But they completely miss the point.
What I felt was guilt, and responsibility. Emotion. Not fact, and yet as true and real as any scientific
equation.
I know now, logically, that it wasn’t my fault, that it was bad luck, and a German shell after all. But that feeling then was real, and I can still taste it in my mouth talking about it, all these years and deaths later.
* * *
I’d been wounded in the attack as well, but not badly enough to keep me out of action, nor was the shrapnel that hit my left shoulder a few days later. One set of those wounds—probably the first—was recorded as a bare note lacking any details except that I had been treated for a battle injury; according to the records, it happened on April 1. Whichever it was, it earned me my first Purple Heart.
The Purple Heart is not an honor you really want when you’re signing up for the army. After you leave the service, it signals that you were in combat, and so demonstrates that you put yourself in harm’s way to do your duty. But getting shot or hit by artillery is not the object of war. Doing that to the enemy is.
* * *
While I was “earning” my Purple Heart episode, our troops were clearing a key hill held by the Italians near El Guettar, a strategic point protecting the Axis flank. Tactically, the 1st Division and its sister troops were now threatening to cut behind the Germans, who were already being battered by Montgomery to the south.
In the immediate moment on the ground, though, this wasn’t clear to us. The forces scrambled in the hills, fighting back and forth as if they were involved in a chess match where the slightest advantage in position might make all the difference.
Except this chess match was being played with guns and explosives.
On the Hill
My company men had been pushed hard, living with their units without much of a break since we’d moved into the valley. Things got even hotter for them as the Germans realized they were close to being trapped. As Rommel’s force retreated, they fought desperately against us. They’d been ordered to hold out to the last, and most of them took that order very seriously.