The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  If Wednesday had been unpleasant, Thursday was worse. Marking their own lines with white flares, the Germans greeted the day with Stuka attacks and four hours of artillery and mortar fire. By noon they had outflanked and captured Point 186. “Throughout the morning extremely fierce and confused fighting took place,” a Hampshire captain reported. Fischer’s dispatch to Tunis concluded: “Indications are that the enemy is being softened and is beginning to yield.”

  A British major, H. W. Le Patourel, led a futile counterattack to retake the hill; last seen in heroic silhouette with a pistol and grenade, he would posthumously win the Victoria Cross only to reappear, wounded but alive, in an Italian prison hospital. At dusk on December 3, two German pincers met at the Tébourba train station to complete their double envelopment. Reduced to forty officers and 200 men, Lee formed a defensive square around the battalion command post. “It was Dunkirk all over again,” a Surrey later recalled.

  General Anderson had, in fact, commanded the Surreys at Dunkirk as a brigadier, and perturbations seized him, too. In a message to Evelegh he declared:

  Commander is dissatisfied with the position 78th Division is getting itself into. It is not sufficient, indeed it is highly dangerous, for it to allow itself to become hemmed-in in a narrow sector round Tébourba…. To allow the enemy to entrench themselves on the Chouïgui ridge, overlooking Tébourba, would be very nearly fatal.

  “More elbow room,” Anderson added, “or he will have us out.”

  Too late. At seven P.M. Lee ordered his surviving men to fix bayonets and strip the dead for extra weapons. Disembodied German voices called for surrender—“We will treat you well.” A Hampshire answered: “Bollocks!” Beneath the frosty brilliance of Very flares, the men pivoted to the west and formed a line with their right flank on the rail tracks. “Give it to them when you’re close enough,” Lee advised. Then, firing his Bren, he loosed a great roar—“Charge!”—and they plunged toward Tébourba. Two German panzers and an infantry company cut down the first screaming ranks before yielding to the surge. Tommies swept past the roofless church and into the broken town. Pausing long enough to form ranks they marched down the deserted main street counting cadence—“Left, right, left!”—only to discover that enemy troops had severed Highway 50 to the west. Tébourba had been abandoned at Evelegh’s behest, but once again critical orders had failed to reach those who most needed to know them.

  Even Colonel Lee was deflated. He ordered the men to cut their way out in small groups. Into the darkness they slipped in twos and threes. Some drowned in the Medjerda; others crawled along the railbed cinders beneath the vermilion arcs of machine-gun bullets. “Looking back to Tébourba,” an officer later wrote, “we could see many fires and the streaks of tracer as the enemy tried to shoot up what survivors remained.” The once handsome market town was now as ugly as an exit wound.

  At noon on December 4, Fischer phoned his division headquarters. “Tébourba taken,” he reported tersely. “Heavy losses inflicted on the enemy. Valuable booty.” An American lieutenant who watched the Tommies drift into Medjez-el-Bab over the next couple of days reported to Robinett: “But for occasional curses and groans of the wounded, they came on in silence—damn well-trained.” A reporter for The Times of London found the survivors “savagely angry with the enemy.” “One night in Glasgow,” a soldier proposed, “and then I’ll go back to the bastards.”

  At a field hospital in the rear, dying men arrived so pale that the dirt on their foreheads stood out as vividly as Lenten ashes. Surgeons worked without pause through the night and the next day, donating their own blood for transfusions when stocks ran low. Henry Gardiner, the American major whose tankers had been fighting around Tébourba for a week, arrived with an arm full of shrapnel from the latest battle. He found a foul-smelling ward tent “illuminated by candlelight. The shadows were long and grotesque. Two men in adjoining cots were completely swathed in bandages except for one small hole” for their mouths. “From time to time they would feebly paw the air.” One soldier borrowed a long cigarette holder, “and this enabled him to smoke, since the cigarette was kept just beyond the range of the gauze.”

  Several miles to the east, a German doctor called, “Next up!” from his table, then lopped off the leg of another ruined boy. A British prisoner working in an Axis surgery later described how “with delicate respect they placed the amputated limb among the severed members in the darkest corner.”

  The East Surreys had departed England six weeks earlier with 793 men; they returned to Medjez with 343. The Hampshires, even more undone, counted 194 survivors out of 689. Yet another foreign field would remain forever England. Among the casualties was Colonel Lee, who had been wounded and captured in the final debacle. Of 74 British field guns around Tébourba, 53 were lost. Fischer’s tally of Allied losses during the three-day fight included 55 tanks, 300 other vehicles, and more than 1,000 prisoners. Reporter Philip Jordan wrote, “There is an air of uncertainty up here at advance H.Q. and staff officers half-laughingly—but only half—are wondering if we are going to be surrounded…. How rapidly the atmosphere changes.”

  Colonel Robinett, insufferably eager as always to preserve his superiors from their own folly, took it upon himself to inform George Marshall directly of Allied failings. Sitting in his command post on the heights west of Tébourba, he wrote the chief a confidential letter that would eventually find its way to an angry Eisenhower:

  The coordination of tank attacks with infantry and air attacks has been perfect on the German side. On our own it is yet to be achieved…. Men cannot stand the mental and physical strain of constant aerial bombings without feeling that all possible is being done to beat back the enemy air effort…. They know what they see, and at present there is little of our air to be seen.

  Yet for all his bumptious gall, Robinett possessed an unsparing analytical mind. He recognized that he himself was culpable in the rout, having failed to organize a night counterattack that might have saved more Surreys, Hampshires, and Americans. He “had not foreseen the possibility and had no plan for such a contingency,” he later admitted. “Frankly, I was too new at the game.”

  “My dear C-in-C,” Anderson wrote Eisenhower on December 5, “the fighting on 3 December resulted in a nasty setback for us.” With the thin satisfaction of a pessimist whose apprehensions have been confirmed, Sunshine catalogued his army’s infirmities: “heavy dive bombing attacks” “faulty use of the field artillery” “faulty handling of the U.S. medium tanks.”

  “There was abroad a sense of careless dash and a failure to adopt proper action and tactics when faced by a serious assault by tanks, until too late,” he added. “The affair at Chouïgui the day before with Blade Force should have shown the red light, but evidently did not do so.” Some battalions now mustered fewer than 350 men, while the “enemy has already [reinforced] and can continue to reinforce far more rapidly than I can.” Logistics remained spotty, with a “collection of wheezy French lorries” hauling supplies. In consequence the offensive must again be suspended for at least four days.

  “I am very sorry,” Anderson concluded, “but there it is.”

  Fischer and his 10th Panzer Division had no intention of waiting. Sensing a weak link in CCB, the Germans attacked along a one-mile front at seven o’clock on the cool, clear morning of December 6. Two waves of Stukas hammered the 1st Battalion of the 6th Armored Infantry Regiment, which had dug in three miles southeast of Tébourba, below the crest of Djebel el Guessa. Wehrmacht paratroopers worked up a saddle to gain the ridgeline, and in twenty-five minutes the American left flank had been turned. A confused, terrified .50-caliber gunner turned his weapon against one of his own platoons, and dead soldiers soon lay like sprats in a tin; a single man survived. Then panzers struck the American right, crushing soldiers in their foxholes and mortally wounding a company commander. He would die in a German ambulance and be buried in a shallow grave on the road to Tunis.

  As the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel
William B. Kern, struggled to save his unit from extermination, Battery C of the 27th Armored Field Artillery Battalion opened fire on twenty panzers at a range of just under a mile. This sally distracted the Germans, who now slewed on the gunners. Giving ground slowly, the artillerymen retreated into a rocky amphitheater with their half-track-mounted howitzers. The panzers came on, each tank trailed by a field-gray cloud of infantrymen on foot or motorcycle. At 10:50 A.M. the battery commander, Captain William H. Harrison, first radioed for help. His frantic pleas ended at 11:20 with this transmission:

  For Christ’s sake, isn’t there anything besides C Battery in this First Armored Division? We’re putting up a helluva fight, but we can’t hold out all day. Please, please send help!

  Help had been ordered forward by General Oliver at eight A.M., but for unexplained reasons the 2nd Battalion of the 13th Armored Regiment failed to get word. Not until one P.M. did Lieutenant Colonel Hyman Bruss and his tanks cover the six miles along the Medjerda to Djebel el Guessa. Compounding tardiness with tomfoolery, Bruss split his force, conducted no reconnaissance, and ordered the tanks to “charge up the valley as quickly as possible.” Reinforced with five new Shermans from Patton’s units in Morocco, the General Lees arrived at flank speed with no inkling of where Colonel Kern’s men were, much less the enemy. German gunners waited until the Shermans, five abreast, closed to a quarter mile.

  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!”