Half a mile south of Highway 13 and midway between Sidi bou Zid and Sbeïtla, Djebel Hamra provided a fine grandstand from which to watch the enemy get his comeuppance, and by midmorning on Monday, February 15, a covey of officers and correspondents had scaled the 2,000-foot crest. McQuillin arrived along with the CCC commander, Colonel Robert I. Stack. So did Hains and Hightower and the ubiquitous Ernie Pyle, with his “signature belch, inventive profanity, [and] wondrous hypochondria.” At Ward’s headquarters in Sbeïtla that morning, an officer had assured Pyle, “We are going to kick hell out of them today and we’ve got the stuff to do it with.”
The day was dry and sunny. A mirage shimmered like spilled mercury around Sidi bou Zid, a dark green smear thirteen miles distant. Beyond the town, the hazy lavender trapezoid of Djebel Ksaira sat on the horizon. Djebel Lessouda loomed to the left, tethered to the long ribbon of Highway 13. A landscape that from a distance seemed flat as a billiard table was in fact corrugated with subtle folds and dips. Even from Hamra’s Olympian summit the plain teemed with Arab farmers plowing their fields behind plodding black bullocks. Birdsong and the smell of dung rose on the morning thermals.
Just before one P.M., Alger’s battalion appeared on a camel track from the north. The column wheeled with parade-ground precision around a lone gum tree and headed southeast for Sidi bou Zid at eight miles per hour. Dust plumed behind each Sherman. Tank destroyers flared to the flanks, and an infantry battalion followed in trucks and half-tracks, trailed in turn by a dozen artillery tubes. From a radio truck blared “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” clearly audible on the hillcrest, where a lieutenant who was immune to the prevailing confidence of his seniors murmured, “‘Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.’”
Alger had been told to push beyond Lessouda and Ksaira “and then hold until friendly infantry could withdraw” from the hills where they were trapped. Ward’s staff drew his route with blue pencil and a straight edge on the only map available, a 1-to-100,000 scale sheet on which each mile of terrain was represented by less than an inch of paper. Drivers were to use Ksaira’s north nose as a homing beacon. No reconnaissance was conducted, and Allied intelligence put enemy strength at only sixty tanks. This was less than half their actual number.
At 1:40 P.M., twenty Stukas materialized like swallows in the brilliant air; they caused little damage but deranged Alger’s formation and confirmed that German commanders knew of the counterattack. Alger again paused after hearing a radioed warning that American planes planned a counterstrike on Sidi bou Zid. When no friendly planes appeared, he pressed on, neatly overrunning a half-dozen enemy antitank guns hidden along a wadi near the hamlet of Sadaguia.
Ward sat in his command post listening to radio traffic and eating lunch from a wooden tray. At 2:45 he heard CCC report: “Tanks now approaching Sidi bou Zid…. Enemy’s lack of reaction suspicious but, on present indications, enemy force must be small or sucking us in.” On a sheet of lined paper he scribbled a message for Drake to be dropped by airplane: “Daisy Mae join Lil Abner in the moonlight. He will give you a lift. Ward.” Howze also sent a radio message alerting the men on Djebel Ksaira to their imminent salvation: “Keep your eye peeled and be ready to jump on the bandwagon.”
No sooner did these optimistic messages go forth than a flare arced over Sidi bou Zid, “like a bright diamond in the afternoon sun,” A. D. Divine reported from Djebel Hamra. Muzzle flashes winked near the town; twenty seconds later, enemy artillery airbursts spattered the American gun batteries. Alger reported the telltale dust feathers of approaching enemy tanks on his left and, ten minutes later, his right.
Into the trap they had ridden, into the valley. “Brown geysers of earth and smoke began to spout,” wrote Pyle. He was astonished to see Arabs go on plowing, as if declining to acknowledge disfigurement of the day’s tranquility. An ammunition carrier detonated, “with flames leaping and swaying. Every few seconds one of its shells would go off, and the projectile would tear into the sky with a weird swhang-zing sort of noise.” Divine, standing at McQuillin’s elbow, reported that “within a matter of minutes the golden dust that trailed [Alger’s tanks] like banners had turned black. Blue smoke and red smoke from the German signals mingled with it…. We saw the counterattack falter and break and shatter.”
The killing was confined mostly to an onion field a thousand yards square and two miles west of Sidi bou Zid. Tank rounds by the hundreds skipped across the furrows, many of them striking armor plates with electric blue flashes. By 4:30, American tanks were brewing up from Company D in the north, Company E in the center, and Company F in the south. Subsequent tests would show that the Sherman’s main gun could not penetrate a Tiger’s frontal armor even at point-blank range, while a Tiger could puncture a Sherman a mile away. Less scientific but no less relevant was the calculation by an American soldier that medium tanks once holed took twenty minutes to burn up and that “it takes ten minutes for a hearty man within to perish.” Battle din muffled the sounds of those hearty men within, as if they were screaming underwater.
At 4:50 P.M., Colonel Stack radioed Alger. What was happening? What did the battalion need? “Still pretty busy,” Alger answered laconically. “Situation is hard. No answer to second question. Further details later.” Moments later a German round severed his radio antenna. Another struck the gun barrel and jammed the turret; four more in quick succession blew through the engine and turret, killing the radio operator and triggering dreamy clouds of fire retardant. Leaping from the hatch with two crewmen, Alger sprinted north across the desert. Within half an hour he was a prisoner, soon to join John Waters in a German camp.
Stack warned Ward that getting to Lessouda and Ksaira looked doubtful: “May not be able to reach position indicated to you by sundown.” Five minutes later he ordered his infantry battalion to hold in place rather than risk encirclement. At six P.M., the attack was canceled outright, and all survivors began pulling back. Four Sherman tanks kept in reserve rallied below Djebel Hamra to await their fifty-two sisters. But, as the battalion war diary recorded, “None returned.”
“As dusk began to settle, the sunset showed red on the dust of the Sidi bou Zid area,” McQuillin later reported. “There was no wind, and the frequent black smoke pillars scattered over the terrain marked locations of burning tanks.” He counted twenty-seven tanks aflame, but “the heavier dust cloud near Sidi bou Zid no doubt obscured more that were afire. It was easy to recognize a burning tank due to the vertical shaft of smoke.” Throughout the evening the desert leaked beaten, smoke-stained tankers. “I found myself all alone wandering amongst the dead and wreckage,” recounted one soldier. “The night had a dead silence except for a few howling dogs.” German salvage teams fanned across the shell-plowed field, scavenging weapons by the light of flaming tanks and hosing brains and gore from the few Shermans that had failed to burn.
By morning, CCA would estimate casualties from the past two days at 1,600 men. Nearly a hundred tanks had been sacrificed, along with fifty-seven half-tracks and twenty-nine artillery pieces. Also lost, after such obviously inept generalship, was whatever confidence the ranks still held in the high command.
Listening to the bray of voices from the radio, Ward refused to give up hope. At 10:30 Monday night, he told Fredendall, “We might have walloped them or they might have walloped us.”
Anderson had no illusions. “We are dangerously dispersed,” he warned Eisenhower in a message. “It is wise to consider in good time whether we should not voluntarily withdraw to the main ridge of the Grand Dorsal.” The “awful nights of fleeing, crawling, and hiding from death,” in Ernie Pyle’s words, had begun.
“Sometimes That Is Not Good Enough”
THE immolation of Alger’s battalion had also been visible from Djebel Lessouda, which provided bleacher seats for Robert Moore and his trapped infantrymen. Except for mortar barrages every two hours, the enemy seemed content to starve the Americans on Lessouda into surrender. At dusk on Monday evening, a lone P-40 flew
over the hill and dropped a U.S. mail sack tied to a small parachute. Inside, Moore found a message to John Waters, whose fate was still unknown: “You are to withdraw to road west of Blid Chegas where guides will meet you. Bring everything you can. Ward.” Suspecting a trick, Moore radioed McQuillin’s command post for authentication. What was the division commander’s nickname? “Message okay,” came the reply, then added: “Pinky.”
At 10:30 P.M. Moore gathered his men on Lessouda’s southwestern slope. Hundreds of faces, blued by starlight, turned to hear his instructions. Heavy weapons would be spiked and abandoned. Moore himself was taking only his cherished English sleeping bag and his helmet, with its crease from the French machine-gun bullet in Algiers. They would march in two columns, thirty yards apart, parallel to and a mile north of Highway 13. The rendezvous point lay nine miles west, near the crossroads below Djebel Hamra on the road to Sbeïtla. Wounded men would be carried on litters. If any German prisoner uttered a sound, he was to be bayoneted.
Off they went beneath a full, ascending moon, two snaking lines led by Company F, which Moore had commanded so long ago in Villisca. At the base of the hill the men passed an 88mm gun, “so close that we could have easily reached out and touched it,” one officer later reported. A German gunner called out. Moore shushed his men and pressed on. The gunner shrugged and lay back down.
Half an hour later, Moore heard voices in bushes to his left. Perhaps Ward’s guides were searching for them. He veered from the column toward the trees, and a dark figure thirty yards away hailed him auf deutsch. Moore circled back to the column. “He didn’t speak our language,” he whispered to a young captain. The voice called out again, insistent this time, and then machine-gun fire ripped across the desert.
“Scatter!” Moore yelled. “Run like hell.” Like hell they ran, to all directions of the compass. The first German rounds flew high but within twenty seconds men began to fall. Moore ordered them to flatten out and crawl. In a frenzy they crawled. Artillery from the western edge of Lessouda boomed, followed by the crump of German mortars blindly gouging the desert. The battalion chaplain, Lieutenant Eugene L. Daniels, told the litter bearers and medics to flee while he remained with the wounded to await capture.
At five o’clock on Tuesday morning, February 16, Moore and a small band from Company F reached the crossroads where Ward had posted sentries. Haggard and red-eyed, lacerated by cactus thorns and desperately thirsty, they found nearly three dozen men from the company already there. Fifteen minutes later, part of Company H staggered in with a dozen German prisoners, followed by Company G. By sunrise, Moore counted 231 men. Others arrived throughout the day in Sbeïtla, where a quartermaster passed out blankets and overcoats. After another head count, Moore reported that of the 904 men he had commanded two days before, 432 remained.
Drake’s ordeal was even more hideous. Nearly twice as far from friendly lines, he and his 1,900 men had been squeezed into an ever shrinking perimeter on the crests of Djebel Ksaira and Garet Hadid. “Besieged, good strength, good morale,” Drake radioed Ward. Only the first was true. Hunger gnawed at troops whose tongues were swollen with thirst and who repeatedly wandered back from fighting positions on various pretexts. Drake authorized the regimental bandleader to form firing squads if necessary to keep the lines intact.
German intelligence mistakenly believed that only a company occupied each hill—the American force equaled roughly two battalions—and efforts to winkle out the defenders grew increasingly bold. By sunset on February 15, an estimated 300 grenadiers backed by panzers had infiltrated the lower slopes of Ksaira. German machine-gunners and snipers fired at any movement; the band’s bass drummer fell dead while carrying extra ammunition to the perimeter, and a clarinetist was killed trying to avenge him. Wounded men died for want of medical aid; dead men lay unburied for want of grave diggers. American counterattacks temporarily repulsed the enemy with showers of hand grenades, but minutes later the coal-scuttle helmets could again be seen darting up the wadis.
At 2:30 P.M. on February 16, Drake on Garet Hadid radioed the 3rd Battalion commander on Ksaira, proposing that “you cut your way out and join me.” Lieutenant Colonel John H. Van Vliet, Jr., replied promptly: “There are eight 88s between you and me.” As if in confirmation, the enemy pulled onto the flat between the two hills, “unlimbered his guns and shelled our men at will,” a lieutenant recalled. “We had no artillery to reply to him and he was out of range of our smaller weapons.”
A few minutes later, a message from McQuillin confirmed that no cavalry would ride to the rescue: “Fight your way out. Time and place yours. Air cover will be provided. Instructions will be dropped by plane this afternoon.” Two typed sheets followed in a parachute sack which landed on Ksaira rather than Garet Hadid; Van Vliet spent more than an hour decoding the prolix message and then encoding an abridged version for radio transmission to Drake. Soldiers slashed their tires with bayonets and battered surplus equipment with hammers until the hilltops echoed like a forge. A sergeant walked through the small motor pool, firing pistol bullets into every engine block. Men too gravely wounded to walk—there were sixty on Ksaira alone—were draped with canvas and left to German clemency. An officer later described how the regimental chaplain, “standing in full view of enemy snipers with his hands raised in benediction, asked the blessing of God upon the decision.” Drake broadcast the code phrase to decamp—“Bust the balloon”—and hundreds of soldiers crept down the rocky slopes beneath a full moon sheathed in clouds. With one delay and another, the last troops did not leave Ksaira until nearly midnight, precluding any chance of reaching safety before daybreak.
“We marched all that night across the sand, in gulleys or dry washes, wherever we could find a path other than being silhouetted on a skyline,” wrote one soldier. “Whenever the moon would come out, or a real or imagined sound was heard, we would halt and crouch down.” Weak from hunger and tormented by thirst, GIs soon tossed away machine guns and mortar tubes, then ammunition, blankets, and even rifles. Columns disintegrated into noisy bands of stragglers who offered comrades with full canteens up to a thousand francs for a sip of water. Troops stumbled through the ghostly battlefields where Hightower and Alger had fought, now strewn with dead men. Rooting through incinerated tanks, scavengers pulled out C-ration cans to lick the charred hash and beef stew inside.
Corporal Dave Berlovich, once a Des Moines bookstore clerk, found himself in a thicket with two comrades who insisted he travel alone. “You’re marked as a Jew, aren’t you?” one man asked. Berlovich recoiled. “Fuck no, I’m a Catholic.” His father was Jewish, but Berlovich had been raised in Iowa by his Christian mother. By the glare of a struck match they examined his dog tag: stamped below the corporal’s name and serial number was a tiny “H”—for Hebrew—he had never noticed before. Yanking the chain and tag from his neck, Berlovich flung them into a thorn thicket and hurried west at a redoubled pace.
Dawn caught them all in the open, scattered across five miles of desert west of Sidi bou Zid. Their objective, Djebel Hamra, loomed on the horizon, shrouded in mist. A column of trucks appeared on a dirt road, and for a few sweet moments Drake’s men believed that rescue was at hand. Then troops in gray poured from beneath the canvas awnings. “Those,” a lieutenant informed Colonel Van Vliet, “are not our vehicles.” Machine-gun fire from the left flank sent the men fleeing before a maelstrom of bullets and mortar bursts. Drake tried to rally the 400 men still within earshot by dispatching a dozen volunteers to fight a delaying action. The squad “gained the desired ground, a little knoll in the desert,” a witness reported, “and there they were able to hold the enemy off for about an hour.” Flanked and overrun by panzer grenadiers, the rear guard was wiped out.
At ten A.M., Drake ordered Lieutenant William W. Luttrell to assume command of another squad. “He took one look at me and screamed, ‘Lieutenant, take those men and charge!’” Luttrell later recounted. Lacking only a saber to complete the Civil War tableau, Luttrell formed a hasty
skirmish line of frightened riflemen. “Move out!” he barked, then watched as his little command was cut to ribbons. “They just went down in front of me—some slow and some quick, some forward and some backward.” Luttrell survived to be taken prisoner by a Wehrmacht sergeant with a machine pistol—“Everything is better in Germany,” his captor advised—but the scorched smell of passing machine-gun bullets lingered in memory for the rest of his life.
Panzers finished the encirclement, herding the Americans into small groups. “I saw that it was hopeless and put my white handkerchef on a stick and waved it. That was that,” Van Vliet reported. From the open turret of a Tiger tank, an officer yelled at Drake, “Colonel, you surrender.” Drake replied, “You go to hell,” and turned his back until a Wehrmacht major appeared and, in perfect English, offered a seat in his scout car. He had once practiced law in Chicago, the major claimed, and would be honored by Drake’s company.
The debacle was complete. Of Van Vliet’s men from Djebel Ksaira, some 800 were captured, along with another 600 from Garet Hadid. A burial detail stacked the dead in a mass grave, then joined the column of American prisoners stretching east as far as the eye could see. A few hundred GIs—including the tagless, ecumenical Berlovich—reached Allied lines, many having survived a week or more on stolen eggs and fried cactus leaves. Drake’s second-in-command and the only officer to escape, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald C. Line, staggered into the American camp and later wrote his wife, “I haven’t found out for sure whether I am sane or insane.”
For all military intents and purposes, the 168th Infantry Regiment—Iowa’s finest—had been obliterated. “It is pardonable to be defeated,” observed Lieutenant Luttrell, who would spend the rest of the war in a German prison, “but unpardonable to be surprised.”
An Army at Dawn Page 47