An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  In Fériana later that day, Patton read the latest dispatches from the fighting front before sitting down to scribble another letter home. In his jagged, canted hand he told Bea, “I think I have made a man of Ward.”

  Two days later, on the twenty-seventh, Patton appeared at the division command post to pin a Silver Star on Ward’s chest. The corps commander was “calm, pleasant, and logical,” Ward noted in his diary. But in a scathing private meeting before the ceremony, Patton accused Ward of indolence and excessive dependence on his staff. “I have little confidence in Ward or in the 1st Armored Division,” Patton wrote in his diary the next day. “Ward lacks force. The division has lost its nerve and is jumpy. I fear that all our troops want to fight without getting killed.”

  The stalemate east of Maknassy showed no sign of breaking, particularly after Patton shifted some tanks from Old Ironsides to Terry Allen’s force in the south. In a message to the division, Ward decried “skulking and straggling…. Search your soul,” he urged, “and make the enemy pay with his life for threatening the life of our country.”

  Yet his own days in Tunisia were numbered. By early April, the division’s losses since the recapture of Sened Station would reach 304 killed in action, 1,265 wounded, 116 missing, and forty tanks destroyed—with little to show for them but Patton’s ingratitude. Although the division would claim 2,000 enemy killed or wounded, and another 960 captured—plus another 2,000 captured by the 1st Armored troops attached to Allen—those figures were certainly inflated. Eisenhower wrote Marshall that Ward “has not been fully able to recover from initial shocks and exhibit the necessary sturdiness of purpose.” He lacked “the necessary veneer of callousness.”

  There was truth in that. Ward had a delicacy ill-suited to a job requiring iron resolve and lead-from-the-front vigor. Even Colonel Lang, watching the Americans from the other side of Djebel Naemia, had been surprised by their timid initial approach to the Maknassy heights; a more forceful attack, he concluded, could have shortened the Tunisian campaign by weeks. In his view, the Americans appeared reluctant to risk heavy casualties in a decisive battle, preferring to crush their foes with material superiority even if that meant extending the fight. There was truth in that assessment too.

  A letter from Alexander to Patton on April 1 sealed Ward’s fate. “With some diffidence,” the army group commander had concluded that “Ward is not the best man to command the American 1st Armored Division.” (Alexander was less diffident in a private note to Brooke, pronouncing Ward “quite useless.”) Patton immediately asked Eisenhower to recall Ernie Harmon, who had returned to Morocco after his brief duty with II Corps at Kasserine. Averse to direct confrontations with his peers, Patton delegated the hatchet work to Omar Bradley. “Look, Brad, you’re a friend of Pink Ward’s,” he said over breakfast. “Go up there and tell him why I’ve got to let him go.”

  A few hours later Bradley arrived at Ward’s command post in the Maknassy orchard. He had been a year junior to Ward at West Point and in the same cadet company; he believed the firing unjust. In concocting a plan designed mainly to accommodate Montgomery, then changing it repeatedly, Alexander had hardly demonstrated brilliance. As for Patton, he had provided more snarling criticism than useful tactical advice or infantry reinforcements. Ward had been unlucky, Bradley believed. But luck in war was a general’s one indispensable virtue.

  In his tent, Ward greeted Bradley with a serene smile, as if expecting the news. Patton had decided to make a change, Bradley said without mentioning Alexander’s letter. There would surely be important work for Ward at home or in another theater. Harmon would arrive within a day to take over. Nearly in tears, Bradley shook hands and hurried back to Fériana. Ward said little.

  “Bradley gave me order for my relief,” he wrote in his diary. “He much upset, more than I.” In a handwritten note to the division he announced: “The undersigned hereby relinquishes command of this splendid division to Major General Harmon. I beg you to render unto him the splendid support and loyalty that you have given me.”

  Harmon would arrive on April 5, strafed en route by Messerschmitts and then by Patton, who, upon being asked whether he wanted Harmon to attack or defend, roared in reply, “What have you come here for, asking me a lot of goddamned stupid questions? Get the hell out of here and get on with what I told you to do, or I’ll send you back to Morocco!” Ward waited in Maknassy with his bag and his bedroll. He saluted his successor and said, “The party is all yours, Harmon.”

  If outwardly gracious, Ward churned inside. He resented the British, Fredendall, Eisenhower, and Patton, whom he considered overrated as a tank commander. Had things gone better in Tunisia, he believed he might have been chief of staff someday. Other indignities would nettle him in coming days. Robinett sent a generous if hypocritical farewell message offering “my deepest gratitude to you for your many tolerances” and admitting, “Frankly, I am tired and need a change of pasture.” Eisenhower in Algiers was pleasant even while telling Ward he was “not mean enough.” Mark Clark privately tried to prevent Ward from receiving the Distinguished Service Cross for his valor on Djebel Naemia. A board reviewing the case concluded that “the facts do not warrant the award of the DSC”—beyond the less exalted Silver Star already awarded—and, Clark wrote Eisenhower, “I concur in that recommendation.” Ward received the DSC anyway.

  Ward was a good soldier—his conscience, as he so often said, was clear—and he accepted all slights with equanimity. “My record, I am afraid, has dubbed me stupid and brave,” he confided to a friend. “It probably takes a stupid man to get himself into such fixes.” By mid-April he would be home in Denver. There was indeed important work for him, first as commander of the Army’s tank destroyer and field artillery schools, and then as commander of another armored division, which would seize Munich in April 1945. In the American Army few relieved commanders got a second chance to lead men in combat; Ward was an exception because he was exceptional. But first he had to do penance for his virtues as well as his sins.

  “Ward was too sensitive, both to criticism from his immediate superior and to the loss of his friends and subordinates on the battlefield,” Eisenhower wrote Marshall. “In all else he seems tops.”

  Night Closes Down

  WITH the Americans unable to reach the enemy’s rear through the Maknassy heights, Alexander revised his orders to Patton for a third time. At noon on March 25—as Ward was having his bloody eye doctored and Montgomery prepared to launch his left hook at Mareth—II Corps was told to shift the weight of its attack to the south. The 9th Infantry Division would join Allen’s 1st Division in cutting a hole through enemy defenses southeast of El Guettar so that tanks drawn from Ward’s 1st Armored could lunge down Highway 15 toward Gabès. The offensive was designed to harass German forces facing Montgomery by again threatening to split the Axis armies and trap the Mareth defenders from behind.

  As ordered by Patton, Allen shortly before midnight on the twenty-fifth pulled Darby’s Rangers and two battalions of the 18th Infantry Regiment off Djebel Berda on the extreme southern flank of the American line. They were happy to leave: a frenzied German counterattack the previous evening had driven them back 2,000 yards. The Rangers returned to Gafsa to loll in the hot springs and play volleyball; the 18th Infantry looped north to Gumtree Road and now anchored the left flank of Allen’s division, which occupied a nine-mile front north of Highway 15. The 9th Division shuffled forward to take the positions south of the highway vacated by Darby and the 18th.

  If any gods were watching from their djebel eyries and saw disaster brewing, they declined to intervene on behalf of the mortals in olive drab. Patton’s plan, concocted in response to Alexander’s hasty change of orders, was badly flawed. German infiltrators now occupied the highest ground on Djebel Berda, including a key promontory designated Hill 772; they could see virtually every American movement. Instead of first securing this pinnacle and the connecting ridges, the Americans chose to skirt them in a hell-for-leather attack b
y the two infantry divisions on either side of Highway 15.

  Moreover, the 9th Division was short-handed, ill-informed, and poorly equipped for the battle ahead. Of the division’s three infantry regiments, one—the 60th—had been diverted to Ward’s quixotic fight at Maknassy and another—the 39th—had spent most of the past five months on guard duty in Algeria. Delays in moving forward postponed the attack a day, until Sunday, March 28; as always, the Germans used the extra time wisely. The 9th Division’s bespectacled commander, Major General Manton S. Eddy, whose domed forehead and chin wattles gave him the mien of a “big galoot who looks like a country school teacher,” was in fact energetic and imaginative; to encourage military discipline, he had once issued a three-day pass to a private for saluting an empty staff car. But his troops had neither heavy artillery, nor armored bulldozers, nor sufficient compasses, nor experience in attacking fortified ramparts.

  An intelligence estimate based on reports from departing 1st Division officers posited that the ground was “but lightly held by the Germans,” or by Italians who would quail at the sight of American bayonets. That was wrong. Poor maps, based on 1903 French survey sheets, implied that the topography ahead was mostly flat. That, too, was wrong. Though badly reduced in the failed March 23 attack, the 10th Panzer and Italian Centauro Divisions had regrouped, and now had the benefit of fighting defensively in a badlands terrain of box canyons and knife-blade ridges. Particular care was lavished on fortifying Hill 369. A steep massif two miles south of the highway; it rose 500 feet above the desert, with a greater presence than its modest height suggested. For a command post, German engineers excavated five dugouts from the solid rock; each was ten feet square and roofed with tile and dirt. Machine guns occupied three forty-foot knolls north of the hill facing the road, while infantrymen infested trenches carved from the talus. Ten 75mm antitank guns were sited around the hill, backed by three even deadlier 100mm guns spaced 100 yards apart. After dark, Wehrmacht trucks drove forward with cans of muscatel for the defenders.

  Hill 369 prevented all travel down Highway 15, and it was the 9th Division’s objective. Uncoiling from wadis at the base of Djebel Berda, a column of four U.S. battalions marched east at 3:30 A.M. on March 28. A medical officer described dawn “lighting up the opposite mountain range in gold and purple and black, with a brilliant blue sky.” That was the last pretty thing many of those men saw. At 5:35 A.M. Germans firing pistol flares and machine guns ambushed the 2nd Battalion of the 47th Infantry, which had unwittingly veered south into a hilly labyrinth. Within fifteen minutes Company E alone, on the point, lost 179 men. Surrendering officers tied handkerchefs to their carbine muzzles. Those who continued to fight, died. “The last I saw of him,” a lieutenant later reported of one rifleman, “he was laying on the ground holding his intestines in both hands.” Troops in field gray rounded up 242 prisoners, including the battalion commander, eight other officers, and Eisenhower’s junior aide, who had been sent to the front for seasoning. An American patrol later found only stiffened bodies and a sweet stench rising from the crepuscular wadis. Shaking his fist and pulling on his pipe, the 47th Infantry commander stalked through his command post, muttering, “You sons of bitches. You sons of bitches.”

  Worse yet, another battalion had also wandered off course and was so thoroughly lost that not a word was heard from it for thirty-six hours. The two remaining battalions in the assault attacked what they presumed was Hill 369 but was in fact Hill 290, a lesser eminence a mile closer to the highway and not shown on the map. The hill held, and German artillery, guided to the centimeter by observers on Djebel Berda, combed the wadis with fire. Men burrowed into any depression they could find, urinating in canteen cups and defecating in helmets. The wounded pleaded for help, mimicked by English-speaking Germans trying to lure medics into the open. One soldier later wrote in his diary: “Just lay in my hole and beat the dirt with my fists.”

  Alexander visited II Corps and professed satisfaction despite all this. Patton’s fury, however, knew no bounds. He gave Eddy a tongue-lashing that stunned the division commander. “In all my career I’ve never been talked to as Patton talked to me this morning,” he told one of his colonels. “I may be relieved of command.” Eddy kept his job but was shaken enough to throw good money after bad. He ordered a single battalion, the 2nd of the 39th Infantry, to advance down Highway 15 and take Hill 369 in a dawn assault.

  Off they went again, this time in trucks, somehow persuaded that the Germans were weary from a long day of winning and that only Italian stragglers waited to be routed. With a slamming of tailgates and rattling of equipment, the men clambered from the trucks at first light on March 30, only to again mistake unmapped Hill 290 for Hill 369. A single star shell inaugurated the enemy ambuscade, followed by the usual machine-gun hellfire. The battalion broke. Most fled back down the asphalt highway; others not dead or captured hid until darkness let them slip away the next night.

  North of Highway 15, things had hardly gone better for Allen’s 1st Division. The 18th Infantry advanced several miles down Gumtree Road on the left flank, but otherwise all progress was measured in yards or inches. The wedge of land between Gumtree and the highway was soon stained white with artillery splashes and trussed in endless skeins of Signal Corps wire. The 26th Infantry surgeon’s diary for March 29 reported: “Snipers and machine gunners had every wadi covered and our casualties were terrific until everybody decided to hole up until dark…. We baked in the hot sun from 11:30 A.M. until dark.” Daylight evacuations were fatal, and the wounded bled to death or died of shock waiting for nightfall.

  Darkness brought its own misery. “You fight all day here in the desert and what’s the end of it?” one GI wrote. “Night just closes down over you and chokes you.” A dispatch from the 26th Infantry reduced the battle to four words: “This place is hell.” A two-battalion attack by the 16th Infantry, abutting the 9th Division, went nowhere and cost 105 casualties in ten minutes. One officer reported that Allen “fussed and fumed, lit one cigarette after another, [and] was beside himself.” Some even said his stutter returned.

  Late on March 29, Alexander revised the American attack plan a fourth time: an armored spearhead drawn from the 1st Armored Division was to bull through the enemy defenses down Highway 15. Given Axis fortifications, this scheme had little chance of success, and it is uncertain how much time Alexander had taken to study the ground. His order included precise instructions on how to deploy the American battalions. Patton replied with a huffy message to army group headquarters:

  I feel that I must respectfully call General Alexander’s attention to the fact that in the United States Army we tell officers what to do, not how to do it, that to do otherwise suggests lack of confidence in the officer…. I feel that for the honor and prestige of the U.S. Army I must protest.

  With Patton’s protest delivered and his honor redeemed, the attack went forward at noon on March 30 with seven battalions under Colonel Clarence C. Benson, who until that morning had never met several of his subordinate commanders. “From a hundred wadis and ditches tanks began to debouch onto the center of the valley,” the correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote, “…as though one was looking at a battle fleet steaming into action over a green, flat sea—a wonderful sight.” Whip antennae swayed to the rhythm of the pitching tanks. Dark ranks of infantrymen rose from their holes to trail the Shermans. After a 5,000-yard running start on a half-mile front, Benson’s juggernaut ran into a minefield and then blistering fire from German guns in a feral patch the Americans now called the Hot Corner. Puffing on his corncob pipe 300 yards back, Benson soon realized that the enemy had been reinforced, first with Afrika Korps grenadiers and then with the 21st Panzer Division.

  “I saw tanks hit by shells burst into flames,” correspondent John D’Arcy-Dawson reported. “The turret was thrown back and small figures leaped to the ground, running between falling shells toward jeeps which bounded forward to pick them up.” Moorehead added: “Ambulances began to stream back from the ot
her direction. Over everything sounded the same quick staccato coughing of the guns.” With five tanks in flames, Benson retreated. Trying to chivvy the enemy from their works, he warned, was “like digging potatoes.”

  At 12:30 the next afternoon, Benson Force tried again, but made just modest headway before the fuming guns drove them back minus another eight tanks. Grim councils of war followed. “We seem to be stuck everywhere,” Patton told his diary on March 31.

  The Axis line drew back two miles in the north and a mile in the south, then held fast. A two-battalion attack on Hill 772—belatedly recognized as the battlefield linchpin—failed, with grievous losses. “Nasty grim mountain fighting,” Patton told Eisenhower. On April Fool’s Day, Alexander ordered another change—his fifth—reinstating the original plan for two infantry divisions to pry open a gap for the tanks. Weary dogfaces continued to gnaw at the djebels but to little profit. The 9th Division log for April 2 acknowledged: “No movement of any importance during the day.”

  Tens of thousands of mortar and artillery rounds fell on both sides. The 9th Division would expend more than a million rounds of rifle and machine-gun ammunition at El Guettar. The 47th Infantry added another seventy-five stretcher bearers to the regiment’s original sixteen; the 39th Infantry added sixty. Even the squeal of ambulance brakes at night drew fire. The dead were stacked like sawed logs in a truckbed and hauled to Gafsa for burial.

  In little more than a week of fighting, the 9th Division suffered 1,812 casualties—more than 10 percent of the division. Five of six battalion commanders were lost. Casualties in the 47th Infantry alone totaled 868, more than a quarter of the regiment. Eddy later considered El Guettar the division’s toughest battle of World War II, not to be eclipsed by combat in Sicily and Normandy. The 1st Division’s losses approached 1,300. Stanhope Mason, the Big Red One’s operations officer and eventual chief of staff, also deemed El Guettar the “most severe battle of the three years of warfare,” a remarkable assessment for a division whose destiny led to such killing fields as Sicily, Normandy, and Aachen.