swinging onto the British rear around Tebourba. The Germans, in two converging columns, overran British forces guarding the flank and pushed on toward Tebourba, but were checked by artillery fire and bombing before they could get astride their objective, the Tebourba–Medjez el Bab road. But the threat caused Anderson to pull back his spearhead to Tebourba. Next day Nehring increased pressure, cutting off the road and forcing the Allies to evacuate Tebourba by a dirt track along the Medjerda River, leaving more than a thousand prisoners.
The Germans erected a new defensive line eight miles east of Medjez el Bab, running north to the sea and south to Libya. Nehring had built a solid line of resistance, but Hitler replaced him with Colonel General Hans- Jurgen von Arnim and renamed the forces in Tunisia 5th Panzer Army, though Arnim had fewer than 25,000 fighting men. The Allies deployed 40,000 in the line, and held many more in the rear.
By now the winter rainy season had begun, and General Eisenhower decided to give up the offensive till the weather improved. This gave Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini time to make a stupendous military error. They commenced shipping in more and more troops, altogether about 150,000 men. Yet the Allies had assembled overwhelming sea and air forces—many times more than had ever threatened Rommel—and could throttle the German-Italian army by cutting off its supplies. Sooner or later its fuel, ammunition, and food would be exhausted and it would have to surrender, leaving few Axis troops to defend Sicily and Italy.
Erwin Rommel noted dryly afterward that, if Hitler had sent him in the spring of 1942 only a fraction of the troops he poured into Tunisia, he could have conquered Egypt, the Suez, and the Middle East, and virtually ruled out an Allied invasion of northwest Africa.
After Rommel’s last offensive failed at El Alamein around the first of September 1942, it was obvious from Ultra intercepts of German messages that supplies and men were not getting to Rommel in any quantity. Therefore, the British 8th Army possessed overwhelming superiority and could push the Axis out of Egypt and Libya at any time.
But Bernard Law Montgomery, the new commander of 8th Army, was not only a difficult, eccentric man concerned with his own glory, he was also excessively methodical. For the next seven weeks Montgomery worked out details of a set-piece counteroffensive, assembling even more tanks, artillery, and men.
The attack was supposed to commence well before the Operation Torch landings, but Montgomery would not be hurried, and finally set the date at October 23.
By this time 8th Army’s fighting strength totaled 230,000 men, while Rommel had fewer than 80,000, of whom only 27,000 were German. The British committed 1,440 tanks, while Rommel had 210 German tanks and 280 obsolete Italian tanks. The RAF could send in 1,200 combat aircraft; the Luftwaffe and Italians could send in only 350.
Because of poor food, many Axis troops had become sick. Rommel was one of the casualties, and in September he went back to Europe for treatment and rest. He was replaced by General Georg Stumme, while General Wilhelm von Thoma took over Africa Corps. Both were from the Russian front and were unused to desert conditions. On the first day of the attack, Stumme drove to the front, ran into heavy fire, and died from a heart attack. Rommel, convalescing in Austria, flew back on October 25 and resumed command of a front already heaving from British attacks.
Montgomery took no advantage of his overwhelming strength by sweeping around the Axis positions. Instead, he launched a frontal attack near the coast, which led to a bloody, protracted struggle. British armor pushed a narrow six-mile wedge into the Axis line. The 15th Panzer Division lost three-fourths of its tanks resisting the advance, but also inflicted huge losses on the British. By October 26 the British armored wedge was stuck in a deep German antitank field. Stymied, Montgomery brought another armored division, the 7th, north to launch a secondary attack toward the coast from within the wedge on October 28. But this attack also hung up in a minefield. Rommel moved his 21st Panzer and Ariete Divisions to meet the new attack, and though his tanks achieved a knockout ratio of four to one, the British still ended up with eleven times as many tanks—800 to 90 German.
Montgomery reverted to his original line of thrust, but it took till November 2 to shift the armor. Minefields again caused delay. While the tanks were immobilized, Rommel launched a counterstrike with the last of his armor. He destroyed 200 British tanks, but lost three-quarters of his own. Rommel was now at the end of his resources. Africa Corps, which started with 9,000 men, was down to 2,000 and thirty tanks. The British still had 600.
Rommel decided to fall back to Fuka, 55 miles west, but Hitler issued his familiar call to hold existing positions at all costs. Rommel recalled the columns already on the way—a decision he regretted bitterly, writing that if he had evaded Hitler’s “victory or death” order he could have saved the army.
Two British infantry divisions opened a breach on the southwest, and on the morning of November 4 three armored divisions passed through it with orders to swing north and block retreat along the coast road.
It was now possible to cut off Rommel’s entire army, especially as General Thoma was captured during the morning and an order to retreat that Rommel now issued—in defiance of Hitler—was not sent out till the afternoon.
But as soon as they heard the order, Rommel’s men moved fast, piled into any vehicles remaining, and escaped to the west, since the British were advancing slowly and hesitantly. Nevertheless, the delay imposed by Hitler caused Rommel to lose most of his remaining armor and a large number of the nonmotorized Italian infantry (about 20,000), who could not escape the British mobile columns.
Over the next few days, British attempts to cut off the retreating Axis troops failed because the turning movements were too narrow and too slow. The final blow to British hopes came on November 6, when heavy rain stopped pursuit. From this point on, 8th Army could not catch Rommel, and he slowly withdrew toward Tripolitania.
The British lost 13,500 men, but captured 7,900 Germans and 20,000 Italians, and killed about 2,000. Most of the remainder got away, though only 5,000 Germans and fewer Italians were able to keep their weapons.
Rommel proposed the correct strategic solution to his superiors—withdraw at once all the way to Wadi Akarit, 225 miles west of Tripoli near Gabes, Tunisia, and 45 miles beyond the Mareth line, a fortified barrier built by the French in 1939–1940. Wadi Akarit was much more defensible than the Mareth line, having only a fourteen-mile frontage between the sea and a salt marsh inland. But Mussolini and Hitler rejected the recommendation and insisted on holding one defensive line after another— Mersa el Brega, Buerat, and Tarhuna- Homs. Yet the work of fortifying these lines was useless, because the British could swing around the flank of all of them.
“If only the Italian infantry had gone straight back to the Gabes line and begun immediately with its construction, if only all those useless mines we laid in Libya had been put down at Gabes, all this work and material could ultimately have been of very great value,” Rommel wrote.
In hopes of getting the Fuehrer to face reality, Rommel flew to his headquarters at Rastenburg on November 28, 1942. He got a chilly reception, and when he suggested that the wisest course would be to evacuate North Africa, in order to save the soldiers to fight again, “the mere broaching of this strategic question had the effect of a spark in a powder keg.” Hitler flew into a rage, accusing members of the panzer army of throwing away their weapons.
“I protested strongly, and said in straight terms that it was impossible to judge the weight of the battle from here in Europe,” Rommel wrote afterward. “Our weapons had simply been battered to pieces by the British bombers, tanks, and artillery, and it was nothing short of a miracle that we had been able to escape with all the German motorized forces, especially in view of the desperate fuel shortage.”
But Hitler would listen to no further argument.
“I began to realize that Adolf Hitler simply did not want to see the situation as it was,” Rommel wrote in his journal.
Hitler finally said he would do everything possible to get supplies to Rommel, and Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring would accompany him to Italy to work things out. Rommel rode with Goring in his private train to Rome.
“The situation did not seem to trouble him in the slightest,” Rommel wrote. “He plumed himself, beaming broadly at the primitive flattery heaped on him by imbeciles from his own court, and talked of nothing but jewelry and pictures.” Goring had stolen hundreds of masterpieces from art museums all over occupied Europe.
As Rommel suspected, Goring did nothing to induce the Italians to make greater efforts to supply the army
