An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  Wreathed in gray smoke, the panzers closed to within 300 yards. Siglin’s Iron Horse and the other surviving Stuarts scooted up and back, their drivers blinded by smoke and dust as they wrestled their gearshifts and steering levers. Compared to the German tank guns, the Stuart 37mm “snapped like a cap pistol,” a platoon leader observed. “Jerry seemed annoyed.” Lieutenant Daubin on the right flank pumped more than eighteen rounds at a single German Mk IV; the shells simply bounced off the bard plates, which shed “sparks like a power-driven grindstone.” Daubin tap-danced furiously on his driver’s shoulders and shouted instructions to zigzag backward. At less than fifty yards, a panzer round struck the forward hatch and the Stuart’s front end buckled like a tin can hit with a hammer. The blast killed the driver and blinded the bow gunner. Bullets cut down the loader as he climbed from the hatch. Wounded but alive, Daubin tumbled to the ground and crawled into a ditch. His tank continued to roll backward from the battlefield, swallowed in flames.

  In ten minutes half of Captain Siglin’s twelve tanks had been destroyed. But now Waters sprang the trap for which Company A had been bait. In their zeal to attack Siglin’s Stuarts, the Germans failed to notice Major Tuck’s Company B hidden behind the ridge just north of the entrance to Chouïgui Pass. As the Axis formation passed, less than a hundred yards away, Tuck and his tanks came pounding over the crest of the hill to fall on the enemy flank and rear. At point-blank range even the squirrel gun’s two-pound shell could punch through the thin armor on panzer engine doors and docks. The enemy tried to wheel around but it was too late. Dozens of American rounds ripped into the German tanks. Seven panzers were destroyed, including a half-dozen of the new Mk IVs.

  The Axis survivors fled down the Tine, pursued by yelling, vengeful Americans. German infantry and two surviving tanks took refuge in the walled farm compound that Siglin’s company had unsuccessfully attacked the day before. This time the Americans forced the gates and rampaged through the garrison, shooting up the parapets before retreating back outside the wall. Other Axis troops were hunted down and killed in the vineyards above the river. After dark, the German commander withdrew the remnant of his force eight miles north to Mateur, where he was sacked and court-martialed for retreating without orders. “Our losses,” the German war diary for November 26 noted, “were considerable.”

  So, too, were American losses, although Waters had essentially traded tank for tank. This first armored battle had ended in a draw. In the final mêlée at the farm compound, the intrepid Major Siglin had been killed by a tank round through the turret of Iron Horse. His body was returned to St. Joseph’s Farm for burial, a stark refutation of the old lie that the weakest fruit drops to the ground first. Perhaps the greatest tribute came from the British Lancers who arrived after the skirmish to find Happy Valley choked with pillars of black smoke from burning tanks. “The Americans had done well,” the Lancers’ historian later wrote. “A gallant effort.”

  Once again the Allies had a sense of momentum. On the left flank, the 36th Brigade broke loose and cantered forward. In the center, Blade Force had cleaned out the Tine valley; Mateur, the key to Bizerte, lay just over the horizon. And on the right flank the race for Tunis would be decided by a series of pitched battles that now began almost within artillery range of the capital.

  Ten miles south of Happy Valley, British infantrymen from the 1st Battalion of the East Surreys captured the Medjerda valley town of Tébourba before daylight on Friday, November 27. Tommies found half-cooked eggs and a beefsteak still sizzling in a police station kitchen vacated by enemy pickets. Two weeks earlier, Tébourba’s population had been 4,000; now a quick census tallied half a dozen Arabs, three Italians, a pig, a donkey, and some chickens. Bombs and artillery had smashed every building except for a few squat hovels and the Hôtel de France, facing the central square. Tébourba, the correspondent Drew Middleton reported, was “dusty and empty, as such towns are when war has rolled through them.”

  Tucked into an oxbow of the Medjerda, Tébourba lay midway between Medjez-el-Bab and Tunis, within olive groves of beguiling geometric precision. The Surreys posted a company at the stone Medjerda bridge a mile south of town. Another company scrambled up Djebel Maïana, a steep, barren hill a mile to the east and soon renamed Point 186 for its height in meters. From it, the railway, the river, and Highway 50 could be seen running roughly parallel toward Djedeïda and beyond, as could Stukas landing at the reoccupied Luftwaffe airfield less than four miles away. The distant minarets of Tunis were also visible with the naked eye: thin, graceful fingers poking through the Mediterranean haze. Officers trooped up the hill amid the thistles and darting bank swallows to behold a view that “was to remain a haunting memory through many tough days ahead,” an American armor commander later wrote.

  The Surreys were spread thin across a seven-mile arc, but euphoria was the order of the day. General Evelegh spoke of entering Tunis in twelve hours. Another British brigade—the 1st Guards—would soon arrive from Algiers with three battalions to fill out Evelegh’s 78th Division, and more American units from the 1st Armored Division were drawing close from Oran. The Surreys grabbed their blankets from trucks in the olive groves and agreed that a short rest was warranted before they pushed on. Visiting officers were guided up the hill for the inspirational vista. Among the tourists was the prime minister’s son, Randoph Churchill, a plumpish toff in a commando uniform who paused long enough to rebuke a soldier digging a foxhole in an olive grove: “My good man, do you realize that by digging a trench in that spot you may be killing a tree well over a thousand years old?”

  At 11:30 A.M. the Germans returned—“Tanks! Tanks!” someone yelled—and euphoria vanished with the tourists. Seventeen panzers swarmed through the olive groves on both sides of Point 186 and shot up the Surreys’ trucks. For two hours, fighting raged from ranges of a hundred yards to a few feet. Shell fire and machine-gun bullets chewed through branches and into Tébourba, riddling the high cactus hedges and the few hovels previously spared. Eight British field guns defended the town; one by one they fell silent. So did the smaller 2- and 6-pounders. Welsh gunners danced over the dead to shove another shell into the breech and yank the lanyard. A Tommy promised a mortally wounded comrade: “We’ll be in Tunis eating bloody great oranges in a week.”

  The British line buckled, then held, and at two P.M. the firing ebbed. Seven of eight guns had been knocked out, with the sole functioning 25-pounder now manned by a single sergeant. Eight wrecked panzers stood in a semicircle, the bent barrel of one just a few feet from the muzzle of the shattered British gun that had destroyed it. Debris littered the ground, including Chianti bottles and tins of Portuguese sardines blown from the German hulls. Nine surviving panzers lumbered back down the railway line toward Djedeïda, and Wehrmacht tankers who had escaped their burning wrecks darted among the cactus patches, firing pistols over their shoulders like fleeing robbers. Wreckage discomposed the perfect groves, and the shell-riddled corpses of thousand-year-old olive trees lay among those of Surreys killed in action.

  There was not a moment to be lost, but a day passed before a counterattack could be organized. As the Surreys buried their dead, two more battalions—one British, one American—pushed forward. Their orders were to seize Djedeïda—the troops now called it “Deedahdeedah”—and punch on to Mateur the same day. Many soldiers skipped breakfast and lunch, believing that an empty digestive tract lessened the chance of contaminating a gut wound. At one P.M. on Saturday, November 28, two companies from the 5th Battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment, known as the Northants, climbed onto nineteen tanks from the U.S. 2nd Battalion of the 13th Armored Regiment. A dozen or more Tommies clung precariously to each tank, and two more companies of Northants trailed on foot, 300 yards behind. They set off for Djedeïda along the rail embankment the retreating Germans had followed the day before.

  For two miles the Anglo-Americans rolled in an attack wedge across undulating terrain dotted with orchards and gum trees. Larks and red partridg
es flushed from the underbrush in a whir of wings, but the only sign of human life was the clutch of officers watching with field glasses from Point 186, like spectators at a racetrack. Troops on the right flank almost brushed the Medjerda with their sleeves as the low, white profile of Djedeïda came into view. The American tankers drove General Lees—double the Stuart’s weight, with a 75mm gun in the hull, a 37mm squirrel rifle in the turret, and four machine guns. If bigger and more lethal, the Lee had distinct flaws. At more than ten feet tall “it looked like a damned cathedral coming down the road,” as one tanker complained. The larger gun could traverse just a few degrees—which meant it could fire only in the direction the tank was heading—and was set so low that virtually the entire hull had to be exposed in order to shoot.

  Perfectly camouflaged, the German ambushers waited until the lead American platoon—four tanks abreast—drew to within three hundred yards. Then gashes of fire leaped from the hidden revetments. Half a dozen antitank guns rocked the General Lees and the cackle of machine guns swept the landscape. Tommies dove from the tanks; some ran for a shallow ditch fifty yards behind, while others sheltered behind the armor hulls or simply fell dead. Soon five Lees were burning and the rest pulled back, firing at cactus copses and gun flashes. Major Henry E. Gardiner, a thirty-seven-year-old Montanan commanding the tank force, dashed forward in a half-track with a medic to one of the stricken tanks. Opening the rear door, they dragged out one boy—he was “horribly wounded,” Gardiner reported, “having a huge chunk torn from his back and shoulder”—then retreated under searing fire when other wounded men on the battlefield waved them away.

  The Northants swung to the right to outflank the enemy through the gum trees by the river. Gusts of German fire stopped them cold, and Stukas drove them to cover. Several tanks sought to force the same flank by following the rail line hugging the north bank of the Medjerda. As Lieutenant Eugene F. Jehlik searched for enemy gun pits from his open hatch, a German shell decapitated him. His headless corpse toppled into the tank onto his horrified crew, and the flanking attack collapsed. The ubiquitous Major Gardiner laid Jehlik behind a hillock, marking the body with a pair of upright shell casings for later retrieval.

  There was nothing for it but retreat. The counterattack had failed completely, undone by a lack of surprise, of airpower, of artillery, of tactical nuance. Brits and Yanks “fought in each other’s presence rather than in close coordination,” the 1st Armored Division later concluded. After nightfall, Gardiner led two British medics and several stretcher bearers back onto a battlefield so well illuminated by burning General Lees that ambulances immediately drew German fire. Each tank, an American soldier observed, “burns like twenty haystacks.” The smell of charred flesh enveloped the flaming hulls—medics had yet to learn to approach these crematories from upwind—and across the killing ground, pleas for water mingled with whimpers from men too ruined even for thirst.

  At an aid station in Tébourba, the dead were stacked in the shadows, and ranks of stretchers with wounded soldiers awaited evacuation. Burn victims lay with faces raw and black, their eyebrows gone and their skin hanging in curly shreds. Among those Gardiner brought out was Private Roy Bates, a twenty-two-year-old West Virginian who had waited nine hours for rescue in the company of dead crewmates. From a four-inch hole in his right thigh, a surgeon pulled a one-pound shell fragment, which Bates now clutched. “As soon as I get well,” he promised, “I’m going back up there and cram this down somebody’s throat.”

  British soldiers, stone deaf from the din and with tears streaking their grimy cheeks, drifted back to a farm west of Point 186 designated as a rallying point for the Northants. “When they reached the farm they stumbled blindly toward the barn and pitched forward on their faces,” Middleton reported. An infantryman tormented by Stukas all afternoon shouted, “Who’ll give sixpence for a Spitfire?”—cynically echoing a Battle of Britain slogan that had encouraged schoolboys to donate pocket money for more fighters. Soldiers listening to the BBC hooted at reports that Allied troops were surging toward Tunis. One listener compared such communiqués to Alice in Wonderland: “a pack of lies but very interesting in spots.” Correspondent A. D. Divine reported seeing on a Roman column the inscription “D.M.S.,” an abbreviated supplication which he translated as “The dead salute the gods.” The sentiment seemed germane.

  Toward midnight, a feeble attempt was made to reorganize the Northants for a night attack on Djedeïda, but the order was recognized as witless and soon cancelled. Evelegh’s two brigades had already suffered 580 casualties, exclusive of the Americans killed, wounded, and missing, and he considered it prudent to wait until morning before he tried again.

  Regrettably, this decision by the British commander was not relayed to the U.S. 5th Field Artillery Battalion, which hurried toward the battlefield on November 28 with a dozen badly needed long-range howitzers and the conviction that Djedeïda belonged to the Allies. Luftwaffe pilots above Highway 50 dropped flares “so evenly spaced they looked like street lights,” an American officer wrote. A command tent outside Tébourba reminded one battery commander of “an old Frederic Remington painting my father had of the Civil War, all done in black and gray, of tense, hard-faced officers poring over a map.” There, at nine P.M., the gunners learned that German troops still held Djedeïda. But the British artillery chief, under whose command the Yanks now fell, insisted the town would capitulate by midnight. Lieutenant Colonel Warren C. Stout, commander of the 5th Field Artillery, was told to reconnoiter the terrain north of Djedeïda with an eye to placing his guns near the airfield.

  At 9:30, Stout drove forward in a small convoy with four staff officers, three battery commanders, and ten enlisted men. His orders were clipped and precise: “Radio silence. Come forward on foot at all halts. This is our first mission under British command.” A rising moon in the east drenched the olive groves with light. In a stand of trees beyond Point 186, a British sentry flagged them down with a warning: “Tank battle at the next turn. Bad show, sir.” Moonlight glinted off Stout’s spectacles and gave his face a greenish hue. He told his men to “move forward according to plan.” A mile farther east the convoy halted again. Several charred General Lees burned south of the road. “It looks as if there’s been a major change in the situation,” a staff officer observed. Stout shook his head with the resignation of a man embracing his fate. “I have my orders,” he said.

  Less than a mile from Djedeïda, Stout told his battery commanders to wait in the olive trees while he scouted ahead with a driver and two staff officers. The dim shape of his command car melted into the night. Half a minute later, the distant tree line “erupted in blue-white sheets of flame,” one of the battery commanders, Captain Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, later recalled. Yellow tracers converged on the road from both flanks. The wide-eyed officers heard the crack of an antitank gun, then silence. For forty-five minutes they waited, debating their course in voices pinched with anxiety, unable to raise Stout on the radio and unaware that in Tébourba, moments before the rest of the battalion was to start toward Djedeïda, the British had canceled the move on grounds that “the town was unsafe.”

  At midnight, three gallant, foolish captains agreed to press ahead to search for Colonel Stout. Each took a jeep with a driver and a machine-gunner. A fourth officer declined to follow. “I wish you luck,” he said, “but I sure as hell disagree with you.” Creeping into the tree line, the jeeps had nearly reached the wreckage of Stout’s car when German gunners opened up again from both flanks.

  “The world exploded in my face,” Captain Frelinghuysen later wrote. “The air reeked with raw gasoline mixed with cordite and TNT.” In less than a minute, the ambush was over. Several dozen German soldiers surrounded the jeeps. To Frelinghuysen, who had miraculously survived without injury, “their deep-flanged helmets and gray faces had a death’s head aspect.”

  He and nine others were taken prisoner. Colonel Stout, his driver, and the two staff officers with him lay dead. The 5th Field Artill
ery had been stripped of its leaders before firing a single shell. The Germans also captured the 1st Armored Division’s radio frequencies, as well as secret recognition signals and documents detailing the American order of battle.

  Dawn on November 29 brought a renewed attempt by Evelegh to punch through to Djedeïda. The battered Northants again attacked past Point 186 with a dozen American tanks. German defenders yielded the high ground they had occupied the previous day, but when the American tankers rushed forward, an ambush of antitank guns set four General Lees aflame and scattered the rest. On the left the Northants’ D Company took a ridge and disappeared; nothing more was seen of the unit until a few men strayed back an hour later. “Drag ass outta here,” a tall American gunner hollered. “There’s thirty German tanks comin’ this way.”

  Not yet, but the point was taken. Bloody and bent, the Anglo-Americans fell back. The tank battalion had been reduced to twenty-five Lees, less than half strength, and the Northants were as undone as the Surreys had been two days earlier.

  This Sunday—precisely three weeks after the TORCH landings began—marked the apogee of the Allied offensive for the next six months. For now, Tunis would come no closer than that mesmerizing white vision on the horizon. The attackers had been too few, too weak, too dispersed, too tardy. Now they were dispossessed of the initiative, which slipped like a turncoat across the battlefield from west to east. Churchill in London declared that Djedeïda had been captured. Soldiers who had failed to do just that guffawed at the BBC again, and the Tunisian theater edged into that inevitable condition of war in which anything might be believed, except what was uttered by persons in authority.