An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  No matter: Coldstreams held the high ground, including the highest, at Point 290. All major objectives on Longstop had been taken in two hours. The Coldstream commander chose not to bring forward his reserve company or to reattack the Halt. Soon, as planned, an American battalion from Terry Allen’s 1st Infantry Division would arrive to relieve the Coldstreams, who would get a day’s rest in Medjez before joining the main attack down the valley.

  Officers set their command post beside a small white mosque on Longstop’s south face. Word arrived that the Yanks were making their way up the hill, slowly. Occasional mortar rounds gave way to silence broken only by the raspy whispers of British sergeants and the chink of entrenching tools in the bony ground. Djebel el Rhar squatted in the darkness, unseen and unsensed, 800 yards beyond Point 290. Rain began to fall.

  An hour passed, then two. The moon set, the darkness deepened, the rain intensified. Finally, at three A.M. on December 23, the sound of the American challenge and countersign carried up the hill in stage whispers: “Brooklyn?” “Dodgers.” “Brooklyn?” “Dodgers.” A Coldstream sergeant shushed the newcomers as they emerged from the gloom. Bulling through the waist-high heather, each GI was as wet as if he had fallen into a lake. The Americans, one Tommy complained, always seemed as noisy as “Blackpool beach on a summer Sunday afternoon.”

  The relief in combat of one battalion by another is difficult for kindred units in daylight and fine weather; between strangers of different nationalities at night in a downpour, the task is infinitely harder. The British guides posted to intercept the American companies either missed them completely or were uncertain where they should go. The commander of the 1st Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. York, lost his way near the Halt and was pinned down by enemy machine-gun fire. He eventually stumbled into the Coldstream command post near the white mosque, but with his staff officers still wandering the night and 800 of his infantrymen scattered across the hill. At 4:30 A.M., their duty done as they defined it, the Coldstreams decamped. Back through Medjez-el-Bab they hiked in squelching boots, sleepless and hungry. A thousand men sang “Good King Wenceslas” as they marched.

  Dawn on Longstop revealed the full peril of the American battalion. Half the hogback remained in German hands. The Coldstreams had abandoned several forward positions before American troops arrived, and enemy soldiers quickly reoccupied them. Told by the British that only a few Wehrmacht troops remained to be mopped up, Colonel York learned from enemy prisoners that in fact an entire battalion of panzer grenadiers invested Longstop, with reinforcements coming. Flashes of field gray and an occasional coal-scuttle helmet could be glimpsed among the boulders to the east.

  Then the enemy struck. “They just appeared out of nowhere,” Captain Irving Yarock later recalled. Panzer grenadiers on the right flank near the Halt surrounded Company A, which in the night had become separated from the rest of 1st Battalion. Grenadiers built fire lanes with their mortar and machine-gun fire, paring away and destroying one piece of the company at a time before starting on another wedge. One American officer and thirteen enlisted men escaped death or capture.

  Along the hill crest, German gunfire rattled “like a boy drumming a stick along an endless iron fence,” wrote one chronicler. Brown mortar smoke foamed over ridges “leaping with light” from enemy artillery. Rock splinters sliced the eyes and noses of men unable to dig in more than a few inches. Shell fire severed telephone wire; messengers dispatched from the battalion command post simply vanished. “The mud would foul your rifle after a few clips, and you’d throw it down and crawl around hollering for another rifle,” Sergeant Charles C. Perry of Company C later said. “There were extra rifles—by the dozens—after the first day and night of Longstop.”

  Pinned in a cactus patch a thousand yards behind his Company B, York pleaded for artillery counterfire. British gunners responded slowly, uncertain of the Yank positions and hampered by the incompatibility of British and American radios. A few shells finally detonated in delicate white puffs that reminded an observer of “a gigantic white chrysanthemum.” Hardly deterred, the Germans by three P.M. had seized all positions held before the original Coldstream attack, including Point 290. By last light, the 1st Battalion had edged back into defensive positions on Longstop’s west and south faces.

  The Coldstreams had just finished a late breakfast on December 23 when the first call for help came from the Americans. Disbelief yielded to angry disgust. Couldn’t the Yanks even hold a hill that had been gift-wrapped for them? Impenitent, the 18th Infantry commander, Colonel Frank Greer, appeared at the British command post near Medjez-el-Bab to warn that York’s exhausted, depleted men were at risk of losing the hill altogether. There was no alternative: the only available reserves were the exhausted, depleted 2nd Coldstreams, who trudged back toward Longstop with what one man described as “the…bored indifference of a man who goes to work he does not love.”

  Not until dusk did the British vanguard reach the col below Longstop’s northwest face. Rain had transformed the Medjerda valley into a vast brown sea too quaggy even for mules. A brace of bullocks was harnessed to pull a few guns forward. Wheeled vehicles bogged down 5,000 yards from the hill. Even tracked carriers could get no closer than Chassart Teffaha, a farm hamlet two miles away. There, in a damp cellar that stank like a slaughterhouse, surgeons worked by candlelight over boys beyond surgeoning; stretcher bearers dumped another load and headed back into the night without even bothering to fold stretchers stiff with blood. One in every four riflemen was converted into a coolie, shouldering heavy green ammunition boxes and crates of mortar rounds. Up the scree they trudged in the rain. Dead men slumped in their shallow trenches, some already green and bloated, others as alabaster and dignified as lunar princes. A Coldstream officer later in the war would speak for the living in describing “the release of fear, the release of the bird under the ribs” that every sane man felt on the slopes of Longstop Hill that night.

  A lull persisted past dawn and into Thursday afternoon, December 24. Then Allied artillery opened again, with a barrage calculated to dump 750 shells in a hundred-yard square around Point 290. In the valley below, one witness wrote, “guns flashed from every cluster of trees. The shells shrieked through the rain and clouds.” At five P.M., the Coldstreams attacked on a 1,200-yard front with modest help from American riflemen. Stalking and grenading, the troops swept across the ridgeline, bellowing at the enemy, who bellowed back. Those watching from below followed the Coldstreams’ progress by the ascending rivulets of red tracers. Tiny figures vanished into hollows, then reappeared, climbing steadily. A white flare bright as a nativity star signaled the recapture of Point 290.

  From that pinnacle, in the failing light, the Coldstreams at last saw Djebel el Rhar: half a mile across a deep gully. The final peak, a Coldstream major lamented, “had never been appreciated.” There was nothing for it but to press on. A gallant platoon skittered down the ravine and up the far slope to the crest. German defenders killed the officers and sergeants, and shredded the rest with mortar fire.

  The German shelling paused briefly, then resumed with a cannonade that would continue until morning. Too much had been wagered to stop now. Eight British and American companies occupied all of Djebel el Ahmera and one flank of Djebel el Rhar, ground that had cost them more than five hundred casualties, including the Coldstream battalion commander and adjutant. German losses also had been heavy, but Arnim and Fischer drove to Colonel Lang’s command post east of the hill to demand resistance to the last man: the Tunisian bridgehead itself was at stake. More Wehrmacht infantrymen, and tanks from the 7th Panzer Regiment, had been ordered forward.

  At 7:15 P.M., General Evelegh reported to the British high command that Longstop was “in our possession, in most places.” He was confident—as only Santa Claus could be—that the rest of the hill would fall by Christmas morning.

  The rain slowed to a drizzle, then stopped for the first time in two days. A monstrous, blood-oran
ge moon drifted behind the breaking clouds. Backlit by desultory shell fire, British victualers darted up with tins of cold plum pudding for men who spooned it down behind their pathetic fieldstone parapets. Flares rose to define the dead. Another mortar barrage crumped across Point 290—German gunners had the range to the inch—and a Cockney voice shrieked, “Get this man out! Get this man out!” Medics hurried forward with stretchers rigged from rifles and phone-wire lashings.

  A hunched figure in a trench coat scuttled from foxhole to foxhole, handing out razor blades. “Muddy Christmas,” the American chaplain murmured. “Muddy Christmas.”

  Eisenhower had yet to set foot in Tunisia, but an acerbic message from Marshall on December 22 had sent him hurrying eastward:

  Delegate your international problems to your subordinates and give your complete attention to the battle in Tunisia.

  At 6:15 A.M. on the twenty-third, unable to fly because of foul weather, Eisenhower climbed into the armored Cadillac and sped from Algiers in a five-vehicle convoy. Rain tattooed the highway blacktop, already slick with mud from trucks shuttling to the front. The commander-in-chief wore what he called his goop suit: overalls hiked to the armpits, with cuffs buttoned around his shoes; a heavy field jacket; and a knit cap with a hooded visor. He carried a zippered purse with his lucky coins, and a swagger stick that concealed a wicked dagger in the handle. Slumped in the rear seat with reading glasses perched on his nose, he flipped through a stack of reports or stared morosely at the sopping countryside.

  He suspected that the Tunisian campaign had already stalemated. The thought grieved him: deadlock would be broken only by a static, protracted slugging match. That was precisely what the combined British and American chiefs had urged him to avoid in a message earlier in December: “Losses in the initial assault may be heavy but should be less than those that are bound to occur if you become involved in a long, drawn-out attrition battle.” Did anyone in Washington or London really understand what a close-run thing the race for Tunis had been? In a note to Churchill, Eisenhower suggested that if the Allies had landed in Africa with an extra half-dozen transport companies—perhaps 600 additional trucks—“this battle could have been over.”

  He hardly bothered defending the deficiencies in his army and his own generalship. “The best way to describe our operations to date,” he wrote his friend Major General Thomas Handy, “…is that they have violated every recognized principle of war, are in conflict with all operational and logistic methods laid down in textbooks, and will be condemned, in their entirety, by all Leavenworth and war college classes for the next twenty-five years.”

  Even so, he continued “praying steadily to all the Gods-of-War.” Perhaps Anderson’s new offensive would turn the tide. If not, he would have to consider the advice Churchill had offered in a private message on December 16: “Engage and wear [the Germans] down, like Grant and the Confederates in 1864.” Grant’s casualties in 1864, as Eisenhower well knew, had exceeded 200,000. Was the prime minister ready for the Wilderness? Spotsylvania Courthouse? Cold Harbor?

  As always, he contemplated the art of generalship through the lens of his own shortcomings. “Through all this I am learning many things,” he wrote in a mid-December note to himself. One lesson was “that waiting for other people to produce is one of the hardest things a commander has to do.” Even more important, “an orderly, logical mind [is] absolutely essential to success”:

  The flashy, publicity-seeking type of adventurer can grab the headlines and be a hero in the eyes of the public, but he simply can’t deliver the goods in high command. On the other hand, the slow, methodical, ritualistic person is absolutely valueless in a key position. There must be a fine balance…. To find a few persons of the kind that I have roughly described is the real job of the commander.

  Shortly after noon, the convoy rolled into Constantine, ancient seat of Numidian kings. The city resembled a Tibetan lamasery, with great limestone walls—described by one visitor as “cubes of frozen moonlight”—and a thousand-foot gorge, the most dramatic in the Atlas Mountains. Constantine supposedly had withstood eighty sieges in antiquity, but it was helpless before the onslaught of Allied clerks, camp followers, and brass hats who were building a vast supply dump. Eisenhower stretched his legs, gaped at the ravine—the stench of tanneries wafted from the bottom—and drove on.

  Even as they neared the Tunisian border, the worries of Algiers were hard to leave behind. His problems with the French persisted, despite Marshall’s facile advice to “delegate your international problems.” On December 17, General Giraud had again demanded supreme command in North Africa; he still refused to allow French soldiers to obey Anderson’s orders, and without informing Eisenhower he kept shipping colonial troops to a front that could not sustain them. The logistics pipeline was so sclerotic that all rail loadings at ports and supply depots had been suspended for four days in mid-December. Inventories were hopelessly muddled, a problem compounded by the mingling of British and American units. To calculate ammunition needs, World War I data had been used until ordnance officers discovered that modern divisions, although comprising half the manpower of their Great War counterparts, used more than twice as many shells and bullets. And absurd problems continued to arise. A convoy had just arrived from Britain with a huge consignment of tent pegs—and no tents. One AFHQ message to Washington pleaded, “Stop sending stockings and nail polish.” As if Eisenhower did not have enough worries, Marshall this very day had asked him to find a suitable meeting place in Morocco for Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Allied military brain trust. “Do not discuss any of this with British until clearance is given from here,” the chief added.

  Increasingly, the strain showed in the furrows on Eisenhower’s broad brow and in the violet rings beneath his eyes. “It is easy for a man to be a newspaper hero one day and a bum the next,” he wrote his son on December 20. One aide described him as “a caged tiger, snarling and clawing to get things done.” Staff officers treated him with the hushed deference usually reserved for convalescents or lunatics. “I am very much worried over the terrific pressure being put on him more or less to do the impossible,” Marshall had written the week before. Privately the chief wondered whether Eisenhower hesitated to drive his troops because a majority of casualties would necessarily be British. Roosevelt’s impatience was less nuanced: “Why are they so slow?” he asked.

  The strain on Eisenhower also revealed itself more sharply. When the American air chief, Major General James H. Doolittle, who had won the Medal of Honor for leading a retaliatory raid against Japan earlier in the year, tried to explain why Axis planes dominated the Tunisian battlefield, Eisenhower snapped, “Those are your troubles—go and cure them. Don’t you think I’ve got a lot of troubles, too?” During a recent lunch at the Hôtel St. Georges, Eisenhower had asked a staff officer to call diners and waiters to attention. “Tell everybody here,” he added, “that anyone who wants my job can damned well have it.” On December 17—the day Giraud had demanded his job and a day after Churchill’s Civil War analogy—he told his aide Harry Butcher, “Damned if I’m not about ready to quit. If I could just command a battalion and get into a bullet battle, it would all be so simple.”

  Following an overnight stop at Guelma, the motorcade pressed into Tunisia the next morning. At two P.M. on Thursday, December 24, after picking up General Anderson in Aïn Seymour, Eisenhower arrived at a remote farmhouse outside Souk el Khémis on the north bank of the Medjerda, twenty miles west of Béja. Soldiers peered through teeming rain from their haystack burrows. Harrows and a tractor had been conspicuously positioned to suggest agricultural rather than military purposes. Jeeps and the Cadillac were banned from the barnyard lest their tracks betray the headquarters of V Corps, formed earlier in the month under Anderson’s subordinate, Lieutenant General Charles W. Allfrey, to coordinate the Allied advance on Tunis.

  Eisenhower and Anderson clumped through mud ankle deep to find the farmhouse parlor crowded with wet, spattered officers. R
obinett and his CCB battalion commanders had been invited for a pep talk, which Anderson now delivered in a grim monotone. (“He seemed greatly depressed,” Robinett commented later.) Eisenhower appeared no happier. Groping for words, he offered neither censure nor praise for CCB’s earlier travails, nor inspiration for battles yet to come. Robinett and his men filed past to shake hands with the generals, then vanished into the rain to wonder why their leaders seemed so gloomy.

  The same melancholy prevailed for the next two hours, as Anderson and Allfrey spread a large map to review the battlefront for the commander-in-chief. Winter rains would worsen in January and February, Anderson said. Interrogated “natives” told him so. He had “ordered trials of moving various sizes of equipment” through the mud, but “nothing could be moved satisfactorily.” No offensive was likely for at least six weeks, until the ground dried.

  Eisenhower nodded. Earlier in the day, he had seen four soldiers futilely try to wrestle a motorcycle from the muck. There was no avoiding the obvious: a winter stalemate was at hand. Sensing the commander-in-chief’s bitter disappointment, Anderson offered to resign. A successor, someone with a brighter outlook, might have more luck with the Germans and the French. Eisenhower dismissed the proposal.

  Perhaps CCB could move south, Eisenhower suggested, where the weather was drier and the ground firmer. Robinett could be reunited with the rest of the 1st Armored Division, which would soon reach Tunisia. Anderson’s earlier plea “to concentrate maximum strength at the chosen point of attack” was ignored, along with his Presbyterian musings about only the deserving earning God’s help.