Worse yet, the War Department had assumed that airpower would so lighten the infantry’s burden that losses would be less than they had been in World War I. Remarkably, no one foresaw that riflemen would be chewed up much faster than, say, cooks or typists. Moreover, combat simply wore down units. Senior generals came to realize that divisions should not be left in the line longer than thirty to forty days without rest; to fill the ranks with inexperienced replacement soldiers who lacked emotional ties to their new comrades did nothing for combat efficiency.
These defects, and more, began to appear in Tunisia. Because of the urgent demand for combat replacements, many of the men shoved forward had not finished basic training, and many were physical or disciplinary derelicts. They were handled, Eisenhower’s personnel chief admitted, like “sacks of wheat.” One study estimated that 80 percent had not qualified in their basic weapons. Of 2,400 men sent to the 34th Division, an extraordinary number were overage and in poor physical shape. One batch of 250 men included 119 who were thirty-nine or older. Nineteen thousand trained U.S. armor force replacements would arrive in Africa, but the crying need for rear-echelon service units meant most became drivers, stevedores, and ammo handlers. Rather than trust the vagaries of Army personnel officers, savvy commanders began sending their agents to replacement depots to pick out new soldiers, one officer wrote, “somewhat as one would buy a horse.”
No less worrisome was a surge in mental breakdowns. Every man exposed to extended combat had become “a bit windy of shellfire,” in a British reporter’s phrase. Before Kasserine, “psychiatric reactions” accounted for a fifth, and sometimes more than a third, of all battlefield evacuations. Now, in the spring of 1943, more than 1,700 men would be admitted to the psychiatric ward of a single hospital, the 95th General, and many thousands of others were showing symptoms of instability. Eisenhower worried in a memo to Patton that “an increasing number of these cases are now being reported.”
First known as shell shock because of the Great War misapprehension that neuropsychiatric disorders derived mainly from concussions suffered in artillery barrages, the syndrome in Tunisia was renamed combat exhaustion, a term borrowed from the British. Soldiers also called it war fatigue or old sergeant syndrome. The Army’s chief psychiatrist described a typical patient: “He appeared as a dejected, dirty, weary man. His facial expression was one of depression, sometimes of tearfulness. Frequently his hands were trembling or jerky.” By the end of the war more than 500,000 men from the Army ground forces alone would be discharged for psychiatric reasons—this despite ruthless culling during induction physicals, when 12 percent of the 15 million draftees examined were rejected as mentally unfit. For every six men wounded, another became a neuropsychiatric casualty.
Individual cases in North Africa were often poignant, sometimes horrifying. A 1st Division soldier “beat his head against our foxhole ’til his skin on his forehead was just hanging in strands. He was foaming at the mouth like a madman.” A twenty-year-old infantryman, the only survivor in a truck hit by a mortar shell, loped into the night with a pair of suspenders in search of a tree from which to hang himself. Another unhinged twenty-year-old agitatedly recounted how he had positioned the bodies of two dead soldiers, one German and the other American, as shields during an artillery barrage. Men by the hundreds, then by the thousands, had tremors or paralysis in their limbs, dysfunctional bowels, vacant stares. Some tried to scoop foxholes in their hospital cots with hands and feet, tearfully whimpering that “Herman the German” was stalking through the ward.
At first, serious cases were evacuated far from the front, often to the United States or England, where they lost touch with their units, suffered a sharp loss of self-esteem, and often exaggerated their problems. An Army study concluded that commanders fostered “an attitude closely akin to the old Puritan approach toward the venereal problem—the ostrich attitude, the ‘we don’t discuss it’ idea, or ‘it just isn’t so.’ Unfortunately it is very much so…. The front-line soldier wears out in combat.”
Doctors soon learned to treat patients as far forward as possible. Treatments in North Africa included electroshock; large doses of barbiturates, to induce deep sleep for two to seven days; and sodium pentothal, intended to bring repressed demons to the surface. Nearly three-quarters of treated soldiers resumed military duties in some form, but less than 2 percent returned to combat.
The lessons emerging from Tunisia were clear to Army psychiatrists: “the average soldier reached his peak effectiveness in the first ninety days of combat and was so worn out after 180 days that he was rendered useless and unable to return to military service.” Another study noted that “no man is removed from combat duty until he [has] become worthless. The infantryman considers this a bitter injustice…. He can look forward only to death, mutilation, or psychiatric breakdown.” After months of stress, of close calls, of witnessing the unspeakable, even the bravest men wondered, as one fighter squadron commander did, “Am I becoming uncourageous?” Modern combat could break any soldier.
That was not a conclusion acceptable to the U.S. Army, and it was certainly anathema to the new II Corps commander. Patton had little tolerance for human limits. In his cosmology, combat exhaustion was an illegitimate diagnosis for cowards to hide behind.
Visiting a field hospital near Fériana shortly after his arrival in Tunisia, Patton displayed the choler that would cost him his command a few months later, in Sicily, when he brutally slapped two hospitalized soldiers. Strolling from bed to bed, murmuring comfort, he asked one wounded soldier how he had been hurt. The man replied that he had been shot while trying to surrender.
Patton whirled away, his face contorted with disgust. “Serves him right,” he said bitterly. “That’s what he gets for giving up.”
“One Needs Luck in War”
DAWN was just a gray rumor in the east on February 26 when the creak of panzer tracks carried across the sage grass and limestone hills to the farming village of Sidi Nsir. Midway between Mateur and Béja on Highway 11, City Sneer—as Allied troops inevitably called it—anchored the center of the British line, which extended seventy miles from Cap Serrat, on the north coast, to Bou Arada, below the Medjerda River valley.
The usual sunrise sounds of singing larks and lowing cows abruptly ceased at 6:30 A.M., when four German battalions slammed into the British defenders. Stucco walls disintegrated beneath an artillery barrage and the urgent staccato of machine-gun fire merged into a single prolonged burst. By late morning, thirty tanks, including fourteen Tigers—all commanded by Colonel Rudolph Lang, conqueror of Longstop Hill on Christmas Day—had flanked the British gunners and closed to within 600 yards. “Self and three men left,” one lieutenant radioed. “It can’t be much longer. Good-bye and cheerio.”
Eight similar attacks had occurred across the British front in an offensive code-named OCHSENKOPF, or Ox Head. Local successes at Sidi Nsir and elsewhere notwithstanding, the assault was ill-conceived and would only hasten the Axis destiny in Tunisia. Originally designed by Arnim as a modest attack on Medjez-el-Bab, the plan blossomed under the fertilizing influence of Kesselring’s optimism to become a major offensive intended to seize Béja and once again widen the Axis bridgehead around Tunis.
As commander of the new Army Group Africa, Rommel had just been given authority over both his own army and Arnim’s, but he was informed of OCHSENKOPF almost as an afterthought. Foremost among its deficiencies, the offensive was uncoupled from the attack at Thala several days earlier, allowing the Allies time to regroup. Rommel was flabbergasted, and he railed against “the nincompoops at Comando Supremo.” As one officer observed of both sides in the Tunisian campaign, “It was a small war with too many generals.”
It was not the nincompoops who would die, of course, but Wehrmacht teenagers and fuzz-cheeked Tommies. For more than two weeks the fighting flared up and down the line in bursts of fine savagery. General Allfrey rushed reinforcements here and there across the V Corps front. By March 1, Lang had on
ly five battleworthy panzers left, and his own soldiers were calling him Tank Killer.
The Germans fared somewhat better in the far north. Arnim personally surpervised a westward lunge by eight battalions, which swarmed out of their Jefna revetments past the curing bones of the dead left on Green and Bald Hills the previous November. Italian soldiers and German parachute engineers led by Rudolf Witzig, the hero of Green and Bald, deftly flanked the British and French at a mining hamlet named Sedjenane, which fell on March 3. After driving the unfledged 46th Division troops back ten miles, Arnim pushed them another ten by closing to within a few thousand yards of Djebel Abiod, the northern gateway to Béja. Anderson considered abandoning Medjez-el-Bab, on the assumption that the town’s fall was “almost inevitable” if the enemy attack enveloped the British left. Alexander not only refused to give up Medjez but forbade further retreat.
Cruel mountain fighting in bitter weather followed. Sniper fire so devastated the ranks of British junior officers that platoon and company commanders—disdaining Patton’s new rules for the Americans—removed their brass rank insignia, exchanged revolvers for rifles, tucked binoculars into their tunics, and tried to avoid any visible gesture that implied leadership acumen.
In the end Arnim was too weak and scattered to exploit his gains. The British line fell back twenty miles in the north, ten miles in the center, and very little in the south. That lost yardage would have to be won back, hill by bloody hill, before any drive on Tunis could resume. British casualties were heavy, including 2,500 men taken prisoner and sixteen tanks destroyed. But Arnim’s losses were more grievous, because he could afford them less. Although he claimed his casualties numbered only about a thousand, the British counted 2,200 German prisoners, with perhaps as many more killed and wounded.
Moreover, nearly 90 percent of the panzers used in OCHSENKOPF were destroyed or disabled. The bridgehead had been extended, slightly, but the Axis line was thin and brittle. The offensive accomplished little other than to infuriate Rommel and discomfit Anderson.
“It was not a happy period,” Anderson later acknowledged. “Things went wrong too often.”
Rommel was still seething at the nincompoops as his scout car labored in a nimbus of golden dust up a corkscrew mountain road at two P.M. on March 5. The beautiful failure at Thala—how close they had come to real victory!—lay ten days and two hundred miles behind. Now he was back where he felt most comfortable, in the desert, with his Afrika Korps, scanning the eastern horizon for the dusty spoor of Montgomery’s army. This was splendid country, a dominion of refracted light and arid space, far different from the fatherland, different even from Kasserine. He had stopped brooding long enough to admire the irrigated orchards and greening wheat fields and exclaim: “What a colony this would make for us Germans!”
From the crest of this nameless ridge, marked on the map as Hill 715, the turquoise Mediterranean shimmered twenty miles due north. Libya lay seventy miles to the east, but the British were much closer, perhaps fifteen miles, in a sinewy line that stretched north to south before Médenine, a verdant market town fed by a dozen roads from every compass point including the Saharan south. “The world could be so beautiful for all men,” Rommel had written to Lu two days before. “There is so much that could be done—especially here in Africa with its wide-open spaces.”
Yes, this would have made a fine colony; but the field marshal knew it was not fated, not for the Germans and certainly not for the Italians, though they coveted the land even more. He had again urged abandoning this corner of Tunisia and the Mareth defensive line behind him, shortening the perimeter he and Arnim held from 400 miles to 100. But the nincompoops would not agree, and while they stroked their chins in Berlin and Rome, he intended to strike.
Operation CAPRI was a spoiling attack, designed to wreck Eighth Army’s assembly areas and forestall the British offensive everyone knew would soon come. If CAPRI failed—and already OCHSENKOPF in the north had forced a two-day delay—“the end of the army in Africa would be close,” Rommel warned. There was “no point in harboring any illusions.” On the plain below, 31,000 men with 215 guns and 135 tanks—including the 10th, 15th, and 21st Panzer Divisions—jostled forward for the attack set to begin at dawn. Tank crews kicked a soccer ball around within sight of British pickets in a show of unconcern.
Concern was warranted. If “things went wrong too often” for Anderson in the north, now they went spectacularly right for Montgomery in the south. Since the capture of Tripoli on January 23, little fighting had occurred on Eighth Army’s front, other than halfhearted skirmishes intended to distract Rommel during Kasserine. Deliberate at best, Montgomery had intended to take another month before forcing his way into central Tunisia with a set-piece assault on the Mareth Line.
But Ultra decrypts in late February revealed Rommel’s intended attack at Médenine. In a redemption for British intelligence after the sour disappointment of Kasserine, Allied eavesdroppers soon knew the precise size, location, and timing of CAPRI. Montgomery stopped plodding and rushed his army forward to reinforce the single division exposed as his Médenine vanguard. Forewarned, he was now forearmed, with 300 British tanks, 817 artillery and antitank guns, twice Rommel’s air strength, and three seasoned divisions entrenched along a twenty-five-mile front.
Thick mist lingering after a rainy night masked the panzers as they spilled from their wadis at six A.M. on March 6. British troops were just tucking into their sausages and tea when a canopy of Nebelwerfer shells screamed overhead. The German attack went badly from the beginning. Commanders in the 21st Panzer fell for the ruse of bully beef tins laid out to simulate a minefield five miles west of Médenine. Swerving left, they veered beneath the frowning British guns and offered their flanks to stabbing volleys that left a dozen tanks in flames—all within view of Rommel on his height. 15th Panzer two miles north and 10th Panzer two miles south fared no better against the bristle of antitank guns. “It is an absolute gift,” Montgomery wrote, “and the man must be mad.” By ten A.M. the armored attack had stalled. Surviving panzers “wandered rather vaguely,” the British 201st Guards Brigade reported, looking for defilade from the steel sleeting through their ranks.
Gunfire faded to a mutter. Then a second assault at 2:30 P.M. offered 10,000 Axis infantrymen the dubious honor of a more prominent role in the attack. A Coldstream Guardsman reported:
A great many little figures appeared over the distant crest, all in formation. With a shriek and a thud the entire corps artillery came down…. When the smoke cleared, other little figures appeared with stretchers.
One Highlanders history called it a “wonderful shoot,” with field-gray troops “dropping like ninepins.” Montgomery, who kept a photo of Rommel above his desk, saw little to impress him in this attack. “The Marshal has made a balls of it. I shall write letters,” he sniffed, and retired to his trailer to do precisely that.
Médenine was “the first perfect battle,” a British major exulted. Thirty thousand artillery and antitank shells had gutted the Afrika Korps without British tanks ever leaving the sideline. Montgomery’s losses were a trifling 130. Rommel suffered 635 casualties, mostly German, and the destruction of fifty-two tanks, more than a third of his armored force. Scots Guard patrols that night slipped across the battlefield to blow up crippled panzers before they could be recovered, leaving behind fragments “none of which was larger than a card table.”
Rommel had ventured forward during the day before returning to his bivouac on Hill 715. The slaughter had been so lopsided, the battle so plainly anticipated by the British, that the field marshal suspected treachery, perhaps from the Italians, a suspicion Kesselring came to share. Neither ever imagined that the Allies were decoding his mail. “This operation was pointless from the moment it turned out that we had not taken the enemy by surprise,” Rommel said. “A great gloom settled over us all.”
Now came another slap, this one from the Berlin high command, which that night again rejected the field marshal’s plea to
radically contract the Axis line. “To withdraw both armies into one cramped bridgehead around Tunis and Bizerte would spell the beginning of the end,” Hitler decreed.
If hardly unexpected, the decision was devastating. For the army group to remain in Africa was “now plain suicide,” Rommel declared. By the time he worked his way down Hill 715 on March 7, he had decided the moment had come to take his long-deferred sick leave in the Austrian Alps. No one wanted him in Tunisia, certainly not those running the war at Comando Supremo. “During the drive back to headquarters,” his command diary recorded, “C in C [commander-in-chief] decides to begin his health cure right now—at once.” He spent a day saying goodbye to his Africans: a pale, thin figure yellowed by jaundice, his face and neck splotched with angry boils. “C in C makes emotional farewell,” his aide wrote. “The whole thing stinks.”
“I hadn’t seen him for some weeks and was shocked at how unwell he looked,” his reconnaissance commander, Hans von Luck, later recounted. “He was visibly weak…and completely worn out.” Campaign maps were strewn around his trailer, memento mori of his lost cause. Rommel stood and shook hands. Tears flooded his eyes. “The tears of a great man now cast down,” Luck added, “moved me as much as anything I saw in the war.”
At 7:50 A.M. on March 9, he boarded a plane at Sfax for the flight to Rome. For over a month, his departure remained secret from the Allies, and they kept swatting at his ghost; but he never set foot in Africa again. “He was gradually consumed by the fire which glowed within him,” wrote his chief of staff. Even Kesselring’s optimism dimmed. Médenine was “the last trump in our Tunisian hand,” he subsequently concluded. “We could no longer hope to keep the war out of Europe and away from Germany for another year. One needs luck in war. Rommel without doubt had been deserted by his lucky star for quite some time.”
An Army at Dawn Page 54