The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Ya, ve iss der Supermen, super-dooper Supermen…

  A few escaped, in dinghies or by lashing themselves to the undercarriages of the last overloaded Axis planes to leave. Ultra eventually disclosed that only 632 men were evacuated in the final days; Allied sailors netted another 700 at sea, including a German platoon that had cut down telegraph poles “on which,” a Grenadier Guards account noted, “they sat astride and began to paddle hopefully” toward Italy. Stragglers from the 15th Panzer Division across the Medjerda River were persuaded to surrender by a couple of well-placed warning shots; finding the water too deep to wade, the men were ferried into custody on the dray horses of Arab farmers, who charged the Germans fifty francs per trip.

  Into the stockades they swarmed—“the Herrenvolk like chickens in a yard,” A. D. Divine wrote. To each new batch of prisoners, General Koeltz, the French corps commander, proclaimed, “The anguished of yesterday salute the vanquished of today!” Among the booty seized by King’s Dragoon Guards were instruments from the 21st Panzer Division band, including a piano with all but two of its eighty-eight keys intact. German musicians serenaded the camps with “Roll Out the Barrel,” and Wehrmacht officers organized songfests and soccer leagues and vaudeville troupes with costumes improvised from camouflage netting.

  As recently as May 5, Eisenhower had assured Marshall that “the Axis cannot have more than a total of 150,000 men in Tunisia.” That was wrong by nearly half; the surrendering host included acres of rear-echelon troops and Italian colonial officials. Within a week the prison population would grow to 225,000 and beyond, stuffed into camps built to hold 70,000. For reasons ranging from shipping shortfalls to poor delousing facilities on the piers of New York, the Allied system for transporting prisoners to Algeria and Morocco, and then to Britain or the United States, had showed signs of strain even before Tunis collapsed. Now things got much worse.

  Carefully calibrated guard-to-prisoner ratios—one for every twenty Italians and three for every twenty Germans—were immediately scrapped; even so, the hordes eventually required 8,600 guards, equivalent to half a division. Prisoners were shoehorned into boxcars without latrines or sufficient water for the tortuous trip across Africa. One GI described Italian troops in trucks “packed together like sardines, urinating and vomiting.” Liberty ships became prison barges, with life rafts improvised from empty oil drums, but many prisoners were also crammed onto Algerian coasters, where they were tormented by thieving Senegalese guards and overwatched by French officers who nibbled chocolate on the bridge and tossed morsels to the lunging men below.

  For some, that was the least of it. U.S. Army provost marshals documented at least twenty-one Axis prisoners shot dead in the summer of 1943, some by American guards, others by French colonial guards; some accidentally, others trying to escape, and a few under circumstances never adequately explained. An Army investigation of mistreatment in French camps also documented Italian prisoners forced to work fourteen-hour days as railroad laborers. Among other allegations: “constant threat of attempted sodomy by Arab guards” “no blankets for three months…forty men without shoes for three months…eleven men in a cell with one window. Arabs and children spat through the window and threw stones.” Italian prisoners who managed to escape “prefer anything, even death, to being returned to the French,” the investigators added. “At Camp #131, when 58 prisoners were ordered returned to the care of the French, men groveled on the ground, begging that Americans intercede and refuse their return. One asked to be shot. Finally had to be forced into French buses.” A British general also observed French jailors “using their prisoners to clear minefields, while we consider it contrary to international law. They don’t worry too much about feeding them either.”

  Neither starvation, nor mine-clearing, nor spittle, nor sodomy would befall the Axis generals, only the ignominy of defeat in a bad cause. In late April and early May, certain senior officers had conveniently fallen ill with maladies that required their return to Germany for treatment; among the invalids were division commanders Friedrich Weber and Hasso von Manteuffel. A few were also ordered home or otherwise escaped. But the Allies bagged more than a dozen generals. Four from the Wehrmacht and two from the Luftwaffe surrendered to II Corps. They were fed C rations and beans on May 10 before being ushered into Bradley’s intelligence tent—known as the Playhouse—where Monk Dickson plied them with whiskey and cigars during a long chat around a plywood mapboard. The commander of the 15th Panzer reportedly wept as he observed, “The Americans have fought like sportsmen.”

  The biggest fish were caught farther south. At 11:15 A.M. on May 12, Mussolini authorized the capitulation of the First Italian Army. He offered Giovanni Messe the consolation of promotion to field marshal, then added in a message: “As the aims of your resistance can be considered achieved, your Excellency is free to accept an honorable surrender.” Dickering followed, with white-flag emissaries dispatched to coax terms from the British, who offered the choice of unconditional surrender or annihilation. Ten minutes before the British deadline, Messe struck his colors. Taken into custody, he complained bitterly about the small size of his prison-camp tent. One witness described him slumped in the back seat of a staff car, “heavy and stern. He had tried standing up in his car and saluting as his captured countrymen marched past, but soon got tired and sat down again and let the endless stream of Italian soldiers go their way without a nod of recognition.”

  With fuel scavenged from a barrel found washed up on the beach, Arnim and his coterie had retreated to remote Ste.-Marie-du-Zit, twenty miles north of Enfidaville, where they camped with General Hans Cramer and the remnants of the Afrika Korps. Hitler’s orders to “fight to the last bullet” had provoked animated theological discussions. “What does the last bullet mean in a modern war?” Arnim asked his staff. As Gurkha riflemen swarmed over the next hill on May 12, Arnim decided it meant the last tank shell, which had long been expended. White flags sprouted across the encampment. Cramer sent a final radio message informing Berlin that the Afrika Korps “has fought itself to the condition where it can fight no more.” Arnim personally put a torch to Rommel’s trailer, which the Desert Fox had bequeathed him in April, and dispatched a bullet-headed colonel to find the British headquarters.

  He soon returned with Generals Allfrey and Tuker—commanding, respectively, the British V Corps and 4th Indian Division—in his staff car. Hundreds of Wehrmacht soldiers stared impassively, their heads swiveling as the British commanders climbed from the car and walked through the camp. In a narrow ravine, Arnim and Cramer stood erect outside the last intact Afrika Korps caravan, still camouflaged with artfully arranged branches. Both German generals wore long-waisted tunics with green breeches, high-peaked caps, and polished riding boots. Especially compared to Tuker—who sported threadbare drill trousers and scuffed desert boots, and who impishly introduced himself as “General von Tucher”—Arnim looked as if he had “turned out for a Potsdam parade, spotless and immaculate,” one witness said.

  Declining to use his capable English, Arnim spoke French to inform the British that he “could not alter Hitler’s orders” by surrendering all remaining forces in North Africa. Allfrey brusquely promised to “blow them off the map,” and gave Arnim fifteen minutes to pack for prison. All personal weapons were to be surrendered immediately. “He took this badly,” Allfrey later recalled, “pulling out his automatic and throwing it down in a temper.” Tuker cheerfully demanded his pocket knife, which Arnim, now “very red in the face,” tossed on a table with a clatter. As his staff officers formed ranks at a right angle to the caravan, Arnim delivered a brief speech, his voice cracking, then walked down the formation to offer handshakes and Heils.

  “He then got in his car and stood up in front, saluting his men as he was driven off,” Allfrey recalled. “I did not like the man…and was glad to see his back.” Down the valley the car sped with a British escort before turning onto the Tunis road, past the charred ruins of a once-mighty army and the tramping
columns of prisoners, who tossed stiff-armed salutes and chanted, “Von Arnim! Von Arnim!” He was flown to Algiers and a camp erected on a muddy soccer field. Eisenhower snubbed Arnim by refusing him an audience, thus establishing a precedent of not speaking to a German general until the final surrender at Reims two years later. A British lieutenant colonel commandeered Arnim’s limousine—a Steyer Daimler said to have twenty-eight forward and six reverse gears—while the surviving trailer was shipped to India for display as a curiosity during charity fund-raisers. As for Arnim, a GI bard composed a quatrain that perfectly captured the scorn Allied soldiers now felt for their conquered foe:

  Jürgen T. von Arnim wore an iron-plated monocle

  But he could not see behind him—now wasn’t that ironicle?

  He fought a rear-guard action and he did it very bitterly

  With booby traps and Teller mines and gallant sons of Iterly.

  His petulant refusal to surrender the final forces mattered little; the Axis army had imploded. At 1:16 P.M. on Thursday, May 13, Alexander sent Churchill a message of singular grace: “Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over. All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.”

  EPILOGUE

  ROSES perfumed the morning air in Tunis on Thursday, May 20, 1943. A brilliant sun climbed through a cloudless sky, and shadows melted to narrow black stains on the pavement. By eleven A.M., the temperature in the shade was ninety-two degrees—“too damn hot to cuss,” one soldier wrote—but crowds six deep lined Avenue Maréchal Gallieni and the broad, palmy Avenue Jules Ferry for the victory parade that would end the North African campaign. Children squirmed to the front or shinnied up trees. Sidewalk vendors peddled little French, British, and American flags. An anticipatory hum ran through the throng “like a jolly football crowd,” Harold Macmillan told his diary. “Every street was packed; every window in every house was packed; every roof was packed.”

  Shortly before noon, the massed pipes and drums of the Scottish regiments hove into view with a great wheezing of bags and swishing of tartans. In stately half step the pipers advanced to the still empty reviewing stand, then wheeled in a countermarch to take positions across the boulevard, skirling for all they were worth. The clack of hobnails on pavement followed, and an honor guard of immensely tall Grenadier Guards marched into position with, an American officer reported, “the same precision and utter indifference as to what was going on around them as they used to show while changing the guard at Buckingham Palace.” Heat soon began to thin the Grenadier ranks as those weak with dysentery dropped to one knee or abruptly heeled over. The regimental sergeant major “used all his cunning to remove each sick man in turn without any spectator becoming aware of it,” the Guards historians noted.

  A convoy of limousines and open sedans pulled up to the reviewing platform. In riding breeches and knee boots, clutching a swagger stick, his arms akimbo, Eisenhower took his place in the front row next to the immaculately vacuous General Giraud. The commander-in-chief’s principal lieutenants—Cunningham, Alexander, Tedder, Anderson—arrayed themselves behind him. Macmillan and Robert Murphy occupied a final rank, beaming and waving in their tropical suits like civil servants on holiday. Lesser lights filled lesser platforms on the flanks. Bradley and Patton were relegated to a peripheral bleacher crowded with minor French bureaucrats; Patton sourly noted that he was assigned a spot next to a “very large French ecclesiastic with a purple sash around his middle, which was probably necessary to support his well-developed stomach and also act as a background for a tremendous cross with an amethyst in it.”

  At noon, the crowd’s mood darkened momentarily when booming gunfire was mistaken for an air raid, but the cannonade simply signaled the start of the parade. Redoubled cheers greeted the Foreign Legion band, which tramped past in white hats and red epaulets, playing a suitably martial march, and the appearance of a color guard triggered an ecstasy of saluting across the reviewing stands. General Juin followed at the head of the French troops, a contingent deliberately inflated to impress Arabs and other suspected disloyalists. For more than an hour they marched past ten abreast, a vivid comic-opera procession of képis and berets, turbans and peaked caps, scarlet pantaloons and wasp-waisted blue tunics. Crimson-cloaked spahis stood in the stirrups of their white chargers, saluting with upraised sabers. Algerians and Moroccans and Senegalese tirailleurs padded past, some shod and some not. Behind them came shambling, bearded goums in striped robes—their leather pouches provoked nudges from GIs determined to believe that each sack held a cache of enemy ears—and high-stepping Legionnaires whose ranks were full of blond Germans and Poles.

  After the French came the Americans. A band crashed through “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and the 34th Division’s 135th Infantry Regiment—chosen for their valor at Hill 609 to represent all American infantrymen—swept past, rubber-soled shoes clapping softly on the pavement. The men had burned their vermin-infested combat uniforms and now wore new, olive-drab wool blouses, buttoned at the collar with the sleeves rolled down. Steel helmets half hid their faces. General Harmon thought the troops shuffled like “Arkansas backwoodsmen,” and Patton complained that “our men do not put up a good show in reviews. I think that we still lack pride in being soldiers, and we must develop it.” Thousands of spectators disagreed. From the sidewalks and the balconies came shrieks of “Vive l’Amérique!” and young men dashed into the street to pump the hands of their liberators.

  Then pipers, again. The faint strains of “Flowers of the Forest” trailed the last Americans, and the British wheeled into view, almost 14,000 men arrayed nine abreast and led by General Evelegh. Each marcher had received instructions as meticulous as a battle plan, including the commandment: “Brasses will be polished.” They were gleaming. The men wore shorts and knee socks, with berets or forage caps, and their blouses were open at the throat and rolled to the elbow to give an effect of sinewy limbs and tanned faces. Macmillan beamed at the “swinging striding outstepping men,” and an American colonel admitted that “the British made much the better show.” On they came, nine by nine by nine, Maoris and Aussies and Sikhs and Coldstreams, a precise twenty yards separating each contingent. Commanders snapped a smart “eyes-right” salute as they clapped past the main reviewing stand, and great flocks of Spitfires and Flying Fortresses roared overhead, wagging their wings in homage.

  The parade straggled to a merciful finish with yet another refrain of “Glory of the Trumpets” and Sherman tanks clanking behind the British infantry. As the last gun tubes and limbers passed the reviewing stands, hoarse spectators shinnied down from the trees and emptied the balconies. Hundreds of Italian prisoners-of-war who had been paroled to watch the parade—cheering each new formation with manic enthusiasm—complained bitterly as guards herded them back behind barbed wire. Eisenhower and his lieutenants climbed into their cars for the short trip to the resident-general’s mansion, where Juin would host a luncheon for seventy people sitting at one long table; afterward, they would meet the new bey, uncle of the ousted collaborator, in a ceremony described by Harry Butcher as “complete with gold throne, eunuchs, and native Tunisian troops.” Patton and Bradley, still miffed at their exclusion from the main reviewing stand, headed back to Algeria to resume training for Sicily. The parade, Patton grumbled, had been “a goddamned waste of time.”

  Even after two and a half hours in the molten sun Eisenhower showed no sign of wilting. A reporter described him as “lean, bronzed, and loose-limbed. He was happy as a schoolboy…taking the salutes as the units passed. When the parade drew to an end he smoked, laughed, and joked with the various leaders.”

  In truth, he had been peevish and distracted, notwithstanding the gleeful announcement from his West Point classmates that they were renaming him Ikus Africanus. “All the shouting about the Tunisian campaign leaves me utterly cold,” he confided to Marshall. The concept of a victory parade appalled him, and he had tried without success to convert the event int
o a sober commemoration of the dead. He still slept badly. If he seemed jolly, jolliness was among the many masks the commander-in-chief had learned to wear.

  No soldier in Africa had changed more—grown more—than Eisenhower. He continued to pose as a small-town Kansan, insisting that he was “too simple-minded to be an intriguer or [to] attempt to be clever,” and he retained the winning traits of authenticity, vigor, and integrity. He had displayed admirable grace and character under crushing strain. But he was hardly artless. Naïveté provided a convenient screen for a man who was complex, shrewd, and sometimes Machiavellian. The Darlan affair had taught him the need to obscure his own agency in certain events even as he shouldered responsibility for them. The failings of Fredendall and other deficient commanders had taught him to be tougher, even ruthless, with subordinates. And he had learned the hardest lesson of all: that for an army to win at war, young men must die.

  “One of the fascinations of the war was to see how Americans developed their great men so quickly,” a British general later observed. None more than Eisenhower. In the fall of 1942, the general continued, he had been “a well-trained and loyal subordinate” to his more experienced British colleagues. Now he was a commander. His son, John, later wrote: “Before he left for Europe in 1942, I knew him as an aggressive, intelligent personality.” North Africa transformed him “from a mere person to a personage…full of authority, and truly in command.”

  Even as victory was claimed and commemorated, a few loose ends remained to tie up.

  The tiny Mediterranean island of La Galite was liberated by a battle flotilla sailing from Bône; a British naval officer reported that a shipboard ceremony with the islanders was repeatedly interrupted “by the need to salvage firstly the delegates’ hats, which they kept throwing into the air and the wind blew into the sea, and secondly the mayor, who fell overboard.” Allied salvage crews combed Tunisia for scrap and abandoned Axis matériel, but reported finding “not a great deal of value. Most of the weapons have been effectively rendered useless.” Mine-clearing occupied thousands of engineers, and mines would continue killing civilians and soldiers, including Colonel Richard R. Arnold, Kay Summersby’s fiancé. Arnold died in an explosion at Sedjenane on June 6. Sixty years later, Tunisian authorities were still digging up an average of fifty unexploded bombs, shells, and mines every month.