by Oliver North
Though he had no doubt about the eventual outcome, Eisenhower was far less certain than his leaders about the timing of a victory in North Africa. In briefing the president, prime minister, and the Joint Staff, he noted that German reinforcements were now flooding into Tunis and that preparations for an Axis counteroffensive appeared to be under way.
He didn’t have to wait long. On 14 February, in weather so bad that it grounded the air forces of both sides, Rommel sent the 10th and 21st Panzer Divisions smashing into II Corps lines guarding the Faid Pass in Tunisia. General Fredendall’s II Corps, consisting of the U.S. 1st Armored Division, and the 1st and 34th Infantry Divisions, was inadequately prepared for the Panzer assault and the poorly trained Americans fell back in disorder, more than fifty miles through the Kasserine Pass.
The German advance was finally halted on 20 February by the British 6th Armored Division, supported by the U.S. 9th Division’s artillery—but not before 5,275 American GIs were dead, wounded, prisoners of the Reich, or missing in action. Corporal Duane Stone, a Browning Automatic Rifleman in the 34th Infantry Division, was one of them.
CORPORAL DUANE STONE, US ARMY
34th Infantry Division
Faid Pass, Tunisia
18 February 1943
I started my training in March 1941, but we didn’t even get rifles until May. Later I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for some real training and from there, I was sent overseas on a British passenger liner that had been converted into a troop ship—along with about 1,700 other troops that were just as green as I was. We landed in Liverpool and started doing amphibious training, getting ready for an invasion—though nobody told us where. We assumed it would be some place in Europe. By July we were training for landings on beaches that were laid out exactly like the ones we’d see in North Africa on Operation Torch—but we didn’t find that out until later.
In October the word came down, “We are going to take a boat trip.” Everyone in my BAR squad—all three Browning Automatic Rifle teams—knew then that we were headed for war. I think they told us we were going to North Africa three or four days before we actually landed. Our objective was to take the western part of the city of Algiers.
After we landed on 8 November, we marched twenty-plus miles before we were under fire by a Vichy French battalion. The actual battle, as far as we were concerned, was over in about two and a half hours.
Things were quiet for a few days but then, about the third night, while we were in Algiers, the Luftwaffe started bombing us. Every night thereafter the Germans would spend three, maybe four hours, bombing the ships and piers at the harbor and our camps around the city. They had plenty of aircraft—but we had almost none. Almost every night German Stukas would attack 17th Field Artillery. It was like that until we headed east from Algiers in December to attack the German lines near the Faid pass, up in the Atlas Mountains of Tunisia.
For most of December, January, and the first half of February of ’43, we were in a series of back and forth fights with Rommel’s forces up in the mountains. Our regiment was spread between the Faid Pass and Kasserine Pass—a distance of about fifty miles. Then, on the night of 13–14 of February, the Luftwaffe carpet-bombed our whole sector. Afterwards we could hear armor moving and we very quickly realized this was no probe—it was a major attack.
One of our officers passed the word that we were surrounded and had to try to break out—and would have to make a forced march to get to the Kasserine Pass. But, of course, you don’t move at night, on foot, as fast as you do in the daytime.
By the night of the seventeenth we had been battling the Germans nonstop for three days as we retreated. We had no food, very little water, and were running low on ammunition. Our biggest holdup was trying to move an entire unit of 1,800 troops through enemy lines. So we were told to break up into small groups and start walking northwest toward Kasserine as soon as it was dark.
Just before dark, a column of American tanks headed toward us. They were probably four miles away and I watched ’em, through my field glasses. Even though they were outnumbered, they engaged the Germans—but there just wasn’t anything they could do. The Panzers just devastated them. There were also some armored personnel carriers with 105s mounted on ’em that fired on the German tanks but the shells just bounced off—they couldn’t penetrate the Panzer’s armor plate.
There were probably twenty men in the group I was with and we started out after dark. There was no moon that night and we had to move very slowly because there were minefields all over the place.
During the night we passed through some German tank platoons that were held up on the road—but I estimated that we were still twenty miles behind the German front line. Before dawn, the dozen of us who were still together stumbled into an irrigation ditch and we decided to hole up there during the daylight hours and hope that we wouldn’t be spotted.
But shortly after the sun came up, a German half-track with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on it came rumbling up through the ditch. A German officer, probably twenty-four or twenty-five years old, said in perfect English, “Gentlemen, for you, the war is over. You can go and see our homeland now.”
Fifteen German soldiers circled around us, took our weapons, and made us understand that we were to start marching east. After five or six hours we arrived at a barbed-wire fenced compound, and the English-speaking officer said, “You’ll stay here, for a couple of days.”
Eventually they sent us to a prisoner of war camp, in Germany, that held POWs of every nationality—including about 1,500 American soldiers. They were brutal to the Americans, but for the Russians it was worse. Once, they brought in a whole trainload of Russian POWs, but never let ’em off that train—for forty-two days! By the time they opened the doors of the boxcars, half of them were already dead, and the other half probably wished they had died.
A couple of American POWs hung themselves—committed suicide. But a lot more died from what the Nazi guards said were “heart attacks.” I was confined in that POW camp until we were liberated—on May 6, 1945—just two days before the war ended.
The disaster that had befallen Duane Stone and his comrades began at Faid Pass and ended just a few miles to the northwest of the Kasserine Pass—the gateway through the Atlas Mountains between Tunisia and Algeria. But by 22 February, the German counter-offensive had stalled. The Panzers were running out of fuel, and the weather had cleared enough for Allied airpower to attack the German armored columns in the open countryside. Rommel knew he was about to be assaulted by Montgomery on the Mareth Line.
On 26 February, Eisenhower launched an attack on a three-division front, driving the Germans back through the Kasserine Pass and restoring Allied positions to those held prior to Rommel’s offensive. The following week he relieved Fredendall, the II Corps commander, and replaced him with Patton. From then on, it was simply a matter of time and attrition until the Allied armies could finish off the Desert Fox.
On 3 March Rommel’s attempt to push Montgomery’s 1st Army back from the Mareth defenses failed. Three days later Rommel was evacuated to Germany for unspecified medical treatment—leaving his deputy, Jürgen von Arnim, in command of Army Group Africa.
Von Arnim’s tenure in command would be brief but violent. Between 20 March and the first week of May, with Patton pressing in from the west, 1st Army from the north, and Montgomery from the south, German and Italian troops were forced into an ever tightening noose. By then the Americans had learned the hard lessons of combat. In a pitched armor battle at El Guettar on 29 and 30 March, Patton’s 2nd Armored Corps mauled the numerically superior 10th Panzer Division and sent it in retreat back across the desert with half its tanks destroyed.
By April, British motor torpedo boats were regularly interdicting German resupply craft from Sicily. American and British fighters now roamed the skies at will, shooting down German transports attempting to deliver critically needed materiel to the cornered Axis troops.
Eisenhower’s strangulation strategy
worked. Bizerta fell to the Americans of II Corps on 7 May and the British 1st Army seized Tunis that afternoon. By the end of the following week, the Germans and Italians, their backs to the sea and no way to escape, were through. Messe surrendered the remnants of his Italian legions to Montgomery on 12 May. The next day, von Arnim conceded defeat. More than 125,000 Wehrmacht soldiers and 115,000 Italians passed into Allied captivity.
The Allied victory in North Africa came with a terrible price: 70,000 Allied casualties. But the American army was transformed—its units were bloodied, but had proven their worth in battle. The soldiers—and their leaders—had learned valuable lessons that would soon be put to the test again on Sicily. And though they could not know it then, those who fought in North Africa had ended the expansion of the Third Reich. After 13 May 1943, Hitler would always be on the defensive.
CHAPTER 6
SICILIAN HELL 1943
Planning for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, began even before the Allies had secured Tunisia. Neither Marshall nor Eisenhower wanted to tie up forces that would ultimately be needed for a cross-channel offensive. But once Roosevelt and Churchill agreed at Casablanca that there would be no invasion of Europe until 1944, the two American generals relented and Eisenhower’s staff commenced work on the Husky operations plan in February 1943.
As he had with Torch, Eisenhower insisted that the objectives of the Sicily operation be clearly delineated to avoid an “open-ended” commitment of his forces. After a series of acrimonious debates with the British, who were still pressing for an invasion of the continent through the Balkans—what Churchill called “Europe’s soft underbelly”—the Joint Staff finally responded to his entreaties.
The issues of what was to be accomplished in Sicily—and what forces would do it—were finally resolved by Roosevelt and Churchill during their 11–27 May “Trident Conference” in Washington. Churchill himself, with Marshall accompanying, flew directly from Washington to Algiers to tell Eisenhower the goals of the Sicilian invasion. They were to secure Mediterranean sea lines of communication; relieve pressure on the Red Army by diverting German troops and materiel from the Eastern Front; seize air bases closer to Germany for the growing bombing campaign against the Reich; and, hopefully, force Italy out of the war.
To carry out this complex and ambitious mission, Eisenhower, the overall commander in chief, would have General Sir Harold Alexander as Allied ground commander and two field armies—the U.S. 7th, commanded by George Patton, and the British 8th, led by Bernard Montgomery. Patton’s forces would include the U.S. 1st and 3rd Infantry Divisions, the 2nd Armored Division, and the 82nd Airborne—all from North Africa—and the new 45th Division, sent from the United States.
Montgomery’s principal 8th Army troops were the same combat hardened but weary soldiers—plus freshly joined replacements—that he had led all the way from El Alamein. He was also given the entire British 1st Airborne Division and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, dispatched from Great Britain.
The invasion force—nearly a half-million American, Canadian, and British soldiers, sailors, and airmen—were going up against more than 325,000 well-prepared Italian and German troops occupying terrain that gave the advantage to the defenders. Getting so many troops quickly and safely ashore over landing beaches that stretched over eighty miles along Sicily’s eastern and southern shoreline required ships and landing craft that were already committed for operations in the Pacific or that had been earmarked for Overlord—the invasion of France.
Eisenhower got most of what he asked for—including brand-new LSTs, “Higgins boats,” and the new DUKW—“Ducks”—wheeled amphibious vehicles that could quickly shuttle troops and supplies from ship to shore and then inland. By 10 July 1943—D-Day for Husky—the naval armada numbered more than 2,500 ships and small craft. It divided into three task forces and converged on Sicily from the east, south, and west.
To confuse Hitler about where this force was heading, the British concocted a deception plan they dubbed Operation Mincemeat. The corpse of a British airman killed in a plane crash was attired as a Royal Marine major and a briefcase full of bogus maps and documents, detailing secret plans for the invasion of the Balkans, was handcuffed to his wrist. The “major’s” body was planted by a Royal Navy submarine on the coast of Spain.
The ruse may well have worked. Allied air and naval bombardment of the tiny island of Pantelleria—just off Sicily’s southern coast—forced the surrender of the island’s Italian garrison on 11 June. But even after that furious five-day assault Hitler refused to believe that his American and British enemies were headed for Sicily.
To ensure that the Allies maintained air superiority over the landing beaches and supported the 82nd Airborne paratroop drops, more than 1,500 U.S. and British aircraft were assembled on Malta and at fields in Algeria and Tunisia. For the airborne operations during Husky, the Joint Staff allocated a flotilla of C-47 transports—some for towing 144 of the new CG-4 Waco gliders to Sicily—which carried British troops.
Eisenhower’s ground maneuver plan for Husky had actually been drafted by Montgomery—some said, in an Algerian latrine. It called for night parachute assaults by the U.S. 82nd and British 1st Airborne Divisions to seize the high ground overlooking the landing beaches. Then, at dawn, after a naval bombardment, the amphibious forces would come ashore.
The balance of the British 8th Army would land north of Cape Passero, on Sicily’s east coast, seize the port of Syracuse, and then dash for Messina—where the “toe” of the Italian boot is just over six miles distant. The U.S. 7th Army was supposed to seize a beachhead at Gela, and then push north and west, protecting the British left flank as Montgomery drove north for Messina—cutting off any Axis retreat.
That was the plan. But as so often happens in war, things rarely go according to plan and Husky was no exception. By the time Eisenhower moved his forward headquarters to Malta on 7 July, things had already started to go wrong.
First, Eisenhower’s intelligence staff inexplicably failed to note and report to those going ashore that Hitler had reinforced the Axis garrison on Sicily with two first-rate armored units—the 15th Panzergrenadier Division and the Hermann Goering Panzer Division. Second, the weather in the central Mediterranean—normally calm in mid-summer—began to deteriorate as clouds and high winds swept in from the west.
Both the unexpected enemy armor and the adverse weather would have a profound effect on the American and British airborne troops strapping into their parachutes and boarding the Waco gliders on the night of 9–10 July 1943. One of the 3,400 paratroopers in Colonel Jim Gavin’s 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division was Captain Edwin Sayre from Breckenridge, Texas. He would be among the first to see action on Sicily.
CAPTAIN EDWIN SAYRE
505th Parachute Infantry Regiment
3 Kilometers Northeast of Gela, Sicily
10 July 1943
I was assigned to the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment on 19 April ’42, and was initially a company executive officer. Less than a year later I was promoted to captain and made a company commander. We all knew we were going someplace overseas in Europe, but didn’t know where. We went by train to New York, and then boarded the Monterrey—a converted luxury liner for four hundred passengers. But it wasn’t quite so luxurious for six thousand soldiers. We crossed the Atlantic and landed in North Africa as part of a large convoy with plenty of destroyer escorts.
A week before D-Day, we got maps of Sicily and aerial photos of our proposed objectives. We built sand tables, and duplicated exactly what the drop zone was supposed to look like, and knew where all our checkpoints were on the approach. We all memorized the map features and rehearsed at those sand tables with our troops, again and again.
We took off from Tunisia in a large flight of C-47s, just at dark on the night of July 9. The wind was blowing hard—in training we don’t jump in wind over fifteen miles per hour because high winds will blow paratroopers off their drop
zone or drag them across the ground. As we got closer to Sicily the overcast and turbulence increased, but we were all in high spirits—it was our first combat jump and we were ready.
We were supposed to jump shortly after midnight but we were late because of the winds. The whole timing of H-Hour had been based on the moon and the tides. The airborne needed a little bit of moonlight and the amphibious force needed an incoming high tide.
Theoretically, we were to have moonlight as we jumped and then the moon would be setting and we’d be in complete darkness. But instead of moonlight we got pitch-black darkness; instead of low winds we got strong ones. But at this point we had to take what we could get.
I looked out the door of my plane, with my map in hand, and I saw that we were in the wrong place. So, I went up to the cockpit and showed the pilot on the map where we were compared to where we needed to be. Fortunately I was in the lead aircraft with the most experienced pilot in the formation. Not every pilot would have let a young paratroop captain tell him he needs to turn a nine-plane formation around, and go to some other place. But this pilot listened to me—even though anti-aircraft gunners on the ground were firing at us. He asked, “Do you want to circle around and try another shot at it?” I said “yes,” and we circled around, found the checkpoints, and he let us out about a mile from our intended drop zone.
The wind had to be blowing 40 to 45 miles per hour. I was blown over my DZ and landed right in the middle of a grape vineyard, and couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. By dawn—as the amphibious forces were landing on the beach—right on time below us, I had collected up a handful of men from my company.