At 2:30, in a shallow wadi, each rifleman dumped his overcoat and collected two extra bandoliers of ammunition. Colonel Ray C. Fountain, a former federal bankruptcy referee in Des Moines who now commanded the 133rd Infantry, informed his officers: “I have been told that there will be tremendous aerial bombing support which will flatten everything—something we haven’t seen to date.”
There would be no bombing, tremendous or otherwise. Poor communications and confusion over the new attack time led to cancellation of the air strikes. As the two assault regiments pressed forward on a two-mile front, a battalion on the far left got lost in the darkness, veered into the river bottoms, and so completely undid Ryder’s timing that not until 5:30, the original H-hour, did the assault begin in earnest.
They found themselves in the beaten zone almost immediately. “A wave of flying dust and steel and lead was always before us,” one soldier recalled. Daylight revealed 6,000 American infantrymen creeping through tuft grass too short to hide a cat. “We were like a pea on a plate,” a sergeant reported. At 7:30, as plunging fire from Rhorab on the left and Haouareb straight ahead intensified, orders came to pull back 2,000 yards for another bombing raid that never materialized. By the time the troops moved forward again the Germans had their range. Gales of artillery swept the field; machine-gun rounds snipped the long-stemmed poppies, and antitank shells ricocheted end over end through the cactus like a buzzsaw. “We continued to move forward toward the enemy, standing erect like the British regulars charging up Bunker Hill,” a young officer wrote.
Not for long. By noon all forward movement had stopped, 700 yards from Djebel Haoureb. Frantic men scraped at the dirt with bayonets and mess-kit lids, then lay motionless except to flick away the hot shell fragments burning through their twill uniforms. “The mere raising of an eyebrow attracted enemy fire,” one sergeant in the 135th Infantry reported.
It never got better, not for two days. Tanks rumbled up in the early afternoon to inspirit the infantrymen, but instead attracted more fire. Within minutes four Shermans were flaming and the rest pulled back. Renewed attack orders at three P.M. went unheeded; the men “did little more than look up…and dig a little deeper,” a lieutenant noted. Fifteen more tanks arrived at five P.M., but no rifleman would follow them, and soon another half-dozen burning hulls brightened the valley’s long shadows.
General Crocker was fixated on when to unleash the 6th Armoured Division toward Kairouan, and he persuaded himself that perhaps Djebel Rhorab had been neutralized or even abandoned. It had not. By midafternoon, enemy skirmishers halted British infantrymen more than a mile from the crest. Throughout the next day—April 9—a Guards battalion fought a ferocious “boulder-to-boulder” battle that left every officer in two British companies dead or wounded. At 3:30 P.M., thirty-four hours after the Allied attack began, Djebel Rhorab fell. More than one hundred German prisoners were captured, but a like number escaped. The Welsh Guards’ losses alone totaled 114, a hefty price for a hill considered inconsequential.
A hard night for Ryder’s men had been succeeded by another hard day. “The hill looked bigger than ever,” a lieutenant in the 133rd Infantry wrote of Djebel Haouareb. In the American ranks, “not a soul could be seen moving.” Troops went to ground and would not rise except to skulk rearward on various pretexts. “There was no cover or concealment,” a company commander in the 135th Infantry reported. “Mortar and artillery fire was so heavy that the dust cloud formed by the shell fragments looked like a smoke screen.” Three American tank attacks outran all artillery and infantry cover, and were forced to beat a quick retreat. One battalion commander asked to be arrested rather than press the fight another hour; his request was granted. Acts of valor were as conspicuous for their singularity as for their gallantry. “We are going to get on top of that mountain and brew tea on the backs of those dead Germans,” one private bellowed. His platoon leader replied, “Private, you are now a sergeant. Let’s go.”
They went—but there would be no tea-brewing, not yet. Alexander himself broke the impasse by ordering Crocker to crash the pass with an armored spearhead, the faltering Americans be damned. Word filtered down the ranks that the “gap must be forced…like a covey of partridges flying over the guns.” “Goodbye,” one squadron commander told a comrade. “I shall never see you again. We shall all be killed.”
Not all, but enough, including the prescient commander. No sooner had the 17th/21st Lancers pressed forward a few hundred yards—the unit’s heritage included an alarmingly similar charge at Balaklava in 1854—than the lead Sherman radioed: “There’s a hell of a minefield in front. It looks about three hundred yards deep. Shall I go on?” The reply came immediately: “Go on. Go on at all costs.” Mines ripped the front ranks, and fifteen German antitank guns took most of the rest. Crews spilling from their flaming turrets were machine-gunned before they touched the ground. Thirty-two tanks were lost. Two surviving Shermans clattered to the rear with dazed Tommies clinging to the hulls. Some men were burned so badly that their smoldering battle dress set fire to blankets in the armored carriers hauling them to an aid station.
Foolhardy or not—tank men would debate the matter for years—the audacious assault won through. Another squadron, the 16th/5th Lancers, followed on, veering to the left along a narrow, navigable lane that angled into the Marguellil wadi. “The tank rocked like a tug in the high sea,” a British captain wrote. “On we went, engines revving, Browning rattling, guns crashing, being flung backwards and forwards and from side to side.” Bulling through the fenny bottoms, the tanks began to emerge late Friday afternoon more than a mile beyond Fondouk village. American infantrymen trailing far behind on the southern slopes were amazed to see the Tommies pause to build tea-brewing fires in the lee of their Shermans even while shrapnel rattled off the hulls. The unhinged enemy—seven Axis battalions eventually fought at Fondouk, including the rehabilitated though much reduced convicts—slipped away at dusk through the wheat and wildflowers. Others remained at their guns, stone dead and half-buried in spent brass. “Their faces were as smooth and white as marble statues,” one Yank lieutenant recalled.
Once again, the breakthrough came too late. The retreating Italians in Messe’s army had tramped past Kairouan on the night of April 8–9, silhouetted against the domes and minarets. Feeling little pressure from Montgomery or Patton, the Germans trundled through the next night, looting local hotels of linen, cutlery, and mattresses as they went. After learning that remnants of the 10th and 21st Panzer Divisions lurked somewhere ahead, Crocker chose to lay up for the night rather than push into the coastal plain in darkness. By ten o’clock on Saturday morning, April 10, more than a hundred British Shermans had cleared Fondouk Pass to grab 650 prisoners and destroy fourteen enemy tanks. But the bulk of the enemy army escaped to the north in another of those tawny dust clouds that receded just beyond artillery range.
That evening Kairouan fell, and Allied troops marched through the five gates piercing her crenellated walls. “Lovely fluted domes looked like white velvet on a scarlet carpet, so thick were the poppies in the fields beneath them,” wrote the correspondent Philip Jordan. A British sergeant offered a less romantic view of the city, though it dated to A.D. 671 and was considered the fourth holiest in all Islam: “To us it looked just the usual wog town.” Arabs stared impassively from shops in the labyrinthine souk, but French children handed sprays of pink mimosa to the liberators, and Jews wept with joy at being told they could remove their yellow stars. Tommies pinned the discarded stars to their own caps or handed out matches so the Jews could burn them.
Burial details combed the Fondouk battlefield to collect the dead before looters stripped them; grave robbers had become so bold that chaplains carried carbines. The British had lost thirty-nine tanks and an uncertain number of men in addition to the Welsh Guard casualties on Djebel Rhorab. “Always that terrible, torpid stench of burned flesh,” wrote the Reverend G. P. Druitt, chaplain of the 16th/5th Lancers. He had just removed a charred corpse
from a wrecked Sherman. “It seems to hang in one’s nostrils for days.”
American losses in the past three days totaled 439, including more than one hundred killed in action. Wrapped in white mattress covers, the dead were lined up for trucking to another new cemetery. “It is only by the grace of God that I am here to write this today,” a soldier in the 135th Infantry told his parents in Minnesota. In the evacuation hospital, surgeons worked all night, steam rising from each incision in the cold air. The stoicism of British tankers particularly impressed the medicos. “You couldn’t make them complain even when you had to strip the burned skin off their hands and faces,” the 109th Medical Battalion reported. Among the wounded Americans was Robert Moore, commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 168th Infantry, who had been tossed from a slit trench by the German bomb that killed his radio operator. Temporarily blind and deaf, Moore was evacuated to the rear where a soldier who had known him in Villisca described him a week later as “still very dazed and shaky…a sad and worried man. He spoke several times of his wife Dorothy and of daughter Nancy and wondered if he would ever see them again.”
A great opportunity had been lost. Messe’s troops closed on the Tunis bridgehead at Enfidaville, forty miles south of the capital and the most formidable position occupied by the Axis since the loss of El Alamein five months earlier. Now the Tunisian campaign would become a siege. How long it would last was anyone’s guess, and the setting wanted only battering rams and boiling oil dumped from the ramparts to complete the medieval ambiance. Fondouk had been an ugly battle for the Allies, particularly after the frustrations of Mareth, Médenine, El Guettar, Maknassy, and Wadi Akarit. Alexander’s strategy had been plodding, Crocker’s tactics impoverished, American battleworthiness suspect. A bad plan was badly executed, and the long stern chase up the Tunisian littoral had come up short despite the capture of 6,000 Germans and 22,000 Italians in the past month.
Yes, a great opportunity had been lost, but there was always time for recriminations. Crocker fired first. In an ill-advised philippic to a group of officers visiting from Algiers on Sunday morning, April 11, he declared that “all commanders from Major General Ryder downwards in the 34th U.S. Division were too far in the rear of the troops they commanded” and that leadership “by junior officers was very weak indeed.” Holding the 34th wholly responsible for the failures at Fondouk, he recommended it be withdrawn from combat duty for retraining in the rear “under British guidance.” One of the visiting American generals, Harold R. Bull, was so alarmed at Crocker’s “severe and caustic” comments that he immediately flew back to Algiers to warn Eisenhower.
Worse yet, Crocker or someone close to him had fed similar remarks to four war correspondents. Dispatches soon published in the United States suggested that “Rommel” had again made fools of the Allies. Time magazine reported in its April 19 issue that Fondouk was “downright embarrassing” for the Americans and had “afforded a sharp comparison between British and U.S. troops…. All day the British worked their way efficiently along the ridges; all day the U.S. troops tentatively approached but never stormed the first of their heights.”
Ryder declined to rise to the bait, saying only, “The British were damn good.” But bad feelings percolated through all ranks. Crocker’s battle plan was likened to the Light Brigade’s charge or the costly British frontal assault against General Andrew Jackson at New Orleans in January 1815. “I do not believe the British know any more about how to fight an armored division or how it should be organized than we do,” said Ernie Harmon, the new commander of the 1st Armored Division. Chaplain Druitt of the 16th/5th Lancers evinced little Christian charity in telling his diary that the Yanks “have failed to take their objective as usual…. It is infuriating. We’re missing the bus completely owing to the American failure.” A British gunner passing an American convoy flipped an obscene gesture and barked, “Going to fuck up another front, I suppose?” And Tommies at mess sang a new ditty:
Our cousins regret they’re unable to stay
For the Germans are giving them hell.
Eisenhower was both depressed and angry. The undeniable defects in American combat skills, while hardly as irredeemable as British caricatures suggested, left him feeling as low as “whale tracks at the bottom of the sea,” Patton reported. The failure of military censors to suppress the damaging reports in Time and elsewhere so infuriated the commander-in-chief that he briefly advocated sacking his censorship chief. But he took no action against Crocker. To Patton and Bradley, he wondered aloud whether his orders to American commanders to accommodate the British “had been taken so literally that they had been too meek in acquiescing without argument to orders from above, which they felt involved use of poor tactics.” Ryder’s supposed “soft-heartedness” in refusing to cashier incompetent subordinates also bewildered him. And Eisenhower was not above a little petty spite. “Ike says Alex isn’t as good as he thinks he is,” his deputy Everett Hughes wrote in his diary. “He is up against some real fighting now.”
There was irony in all this carping, visible only from the high ground of history. On average nearly a thousand Axis prisoners were tramping into Anglo-American cages every day. Allied forces were about to secure their fifth great battlefield conquest in a year, with a triumph that would join Midway, El Alamein, Guadalcanal, and Stalingrad as a milepost on the road to victory. More than 200,000 Axis troops were now penned like sheep in a Tunisian fold measuring roughly fifty by eighty miles, just large enough to bury two enemy armies. An entire continent would soon be reclaimed and an entire sea, the Mediterranean, converted into an Anglo-American lake. If American troops still seemed callow at times, one need only consider how far they had come since the bumblings of TORCH and imagine how far they would go once the greatest industrial power on earth had fully flung itself into total war.
That Eisenhower felt dispirited simply affirmed Wellington’s maxim that “nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” To Marshall, he wrote: “I realize that the seeds of discord between ourselves and our British allies were sown, on our side, as far back as when we read our little red school history books.” There was sense in that, just as there was in Eisenhower’s prediction that “this war is not going to be won until we are in the heart of Europe.” Between now and then, however many months or years it took, the task of keeping the Allied coalition unified in pursuit of a common goal would remain among the great military challenges of modern history. Chauvinism, vainglory, frustration, and grief—all these were centrifugal forces, pushing the alliance apart. As Eisenhower had only begun to appreciate, unity required perpetual vigilance and the skills of a master diplomat.
As for the troops at Fondouk, they glanced at the windrows of corpses in their white shrouds and looked away. Yesterday had never happened. There was only tomorrow, and the killing required tomorrow in order to reach the next day. Sergeant Samuel Allen, Jr., a former college student who had led his own swing band in the palmy days of peace, tried to explain in a letter home the flinty nihilism that made young men at war seem so old when they contemplated the dead.
“We have found that it is best to forget about those friends, not to talk about them,” he wrote. “They don’t even exist.”
12. THE INNER KEEP
Hell’s Corner
ONE hundred thousand strong, the Americans pounded north on four trunk roads beginning Sunday, April 11, as the Allies maneuvered to attack the Tunisian bridgehead. Dust whitened the convoys, giving the troops a spectral pallor despite their sunburns and the grit that blackened every frayed collar. They needed haircuts and shaves and baths, but more than anything they needed rest. The veterans—and most of them now qualified—possessed what Lincoln had inelegantly called “the tired spot that can’t be got at.” Ernie Pyle, who was with them as usual, wrote: “They were dead weary, as a person could tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies spoke their inhuman exhaustion…. They were young men, but the grime and whi
skers and exhaustion made them look middle-aged.” A sergeant wrote to his family in Iowa: “It’ll soon be five months that a pup tent has been our home. Five months since I’ve even so much as sat at a table while eating.”
North they pounded for 150 miles, another vehicle roaring by every thirty-seven seconds around the clock, precisely as planned, 30,000 vehicles all told, on highways that had carried Carthaginian elephants, Roman chariots, and Byzantine chargers. The desert fell behind. Once again, they were back in the northern hills where many had fought in November and December. The mid-April wheat was thigh high. Rock roses and ladies’ fingers bloomed along the roads, and poppies spread like flame on the slopes in “hilarious, shouting bands of color.” Gorgeous banks of blue convolvulus resembled wood smoke in the middle distance, or, to the jaded eye, a foaming mortar barrage. Hawthorne budded. Apples blossomed. The songs of cuckoos spilled from the thickets.
God’s bounty meant nothing to these men. Beneath the vernal landscape every soldier now saw topography, just as a pathologist can see the skull beneath a scalp. A streambed was not a streambed but defilade; pastures were not pastures but exposed fields of fire. Laurel thickets became ambush sites, and every grove of cork trees might hide a German 88. No soldier could look at this corrupted terrain without feeling that it had become sinister and deeply personal.
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