During the night Rommel moved his armor toward Thala to the north and Tebessa to the northwest. His aim was to confuse the Allies as to the direction of his next thrust and to force them to divide their reserves. The Allies fell for the bait. Fredendall brought Combat Command B of 1st Armored Division to guard the road from Kasserine to Tebessa, while the British 26th Armored Brigade Group moved south from Thala and took up a position ten miles north of Kasserine pass.
On February 21, a battle group of 10th Panzer (30 tanks, 20 self-propelled guns, two panzer grenadier battalions) pressed north against 26th Brigade, repeatedly flanking its positions, and destroying 40 tanks while losing a dozen of its own. The British withdrew to Thala, but a string of German tanks, led by a captured Valentine, a British infantry tank, followed on the 26th’s tail, got into the position, overran some infantry, shot up many vehicles, and captured 700 prisoners.
Next day Rommel learned from aerial reconnaissance that Allied reinforcements were approaching, reducing chances of driving through Thala. Meanwhile, Africa Corps on the Tebessa road had been checked by heavy American artillery fire.
On the afternoon of February 22, Rommel and Kesselring, realizing their weakness, concluded nothing more could be accomplished and ordered withdrawal. Fredendall, not seeing what was happening, did not organize an effective counterstrike, and the Germans retreated with little loss through Kasserine pass.
Rommel’s whole operation killed or wounded 3,000 Americans and netted more than 4,000 prisoners and 200 destroyed Allied tanks, against fewer than a thousand Axis casualties and far lower tank losses. But, if Arnim had cooperated and the
Meanwhile Arnim, using the armor he had withheld from Rommel, launched his operation in the north on February 26. They were largely direct attacks at eight points along a seventy-mile stretch. The main objective was Beja, sixty miles west of Tunis.
Rommel described the plan as “completely unrealistic.” The main attack became trapped in a narrow, marshy defile ten miles short of Beja, and British artillery knocked out all but six tanks. Although the attacks netted 2,500 British prisoners, the Germans lost 71 tanks, the British fewer than 20.
The attack also delayed a strike Rommel was planning against Montgomery’s 8th Army at Medenine, facing the Mareth line, giving Montgomery time to quadruple his strength and to stop Rommel’s attack when it came on March 6. After losing 40 tanks, Rommel called off the effort. This ended any chance of defeating Montgomery before his army linked up with the other Allied army in Tunisia.
Rommel, elevated February 23 to command all forces in Africa, but facing an enemy twice as strong in men and nine times as strong in armor, concluded it was “plain suicide” for the Axis to remain. He took his long- deferred sick leave to Europe on March 9, hoping to convince Mussolini and Hitler to evacuate while there was still time. Mussolini, Rommel wrote, “seemed to lack any sense of reality,” while Hitler, impervious to Rommel’s arguments, concluded he had “become a pessimist,” and barred his return to Africa.
The issue in Africa was no longer in doubt. With command of the sea and growing command of the air, with vastly larger combat forces, the Allies were certain to win. Hitler’s only hope to save the approximately 180,000 Germans and Italians in Tunisia was to abandon guns and tanks, and institute a swift evacuation of the men by air and sea. But this Hitler would not countenance. As he had proclaimed for Stalingrad, the Axis forces in Africa had to stand or die. Mussolini, overwhelmed by the fate bearing down on him, asserted no independent judgment, merely approving everything Hitler ordained.
General Alexander had two strategic choices. He could drive a wedge between Arnim’s forces in the north around Tunis and Bizerte, and General Giovanni Messe’s 1st Italian Army, the new name for Rommel’s old Panzer Army Africa, on the Mareth line, encircling and destroying the two forces separately. Or he could squeeze the Axis armies together into an increasingly small bridgehead around Tunis and Bizerte until they lost their airfields and room to maneuver and were forced to surrender.
Alexander chose the second method, which required Montgomery’s 8th Army to advance northward along the coast, driving the Axis forces into a Tunis-Bizerte pocket, while the remaining Allied forces pressed against the line in Tunisia to hurry the Axis retreat along.
The first choice was the better one, by far, and Alexander knew it. Montgomery would plod forward with maddening slowness, adding to Allied and Axis casualties, and prolonging the Tunisian campaign far into the spring. But Alexander rejected the idea of splitting the two Axis armies because the agent would have to be U.S. 2nd Corps, and, as General Omar Bradley wrote, Alexander had a “complete lack of faith in the American soldier”—the product of the defeat at Kasserine. Instead, 2nd Corps was to “demonstrate” and “make noise” with limited feinting attacks eastward, out of the mountains.
But Eisenhower had replaced Fredendall with an entirely different sort of general, George S. Patton Jr. He was an overwhelmingly aggressive commander and was galled by Alexander’s instructions, especially as Eisenhower had raised 2nd Corps to four divisions and 88,000 men, four times the troops the Axis could find to oppose it.
Patton arrived at 2nd Corps headquarters on March 7, 1943, leading a long procession of armored scout cars, sirens shrieking, his “command car” sporting two metal flags with two huge white stars of a major general on a field of red, and Patton himself standing in the car like a charioteer. Patton immediately instituted his “cure” for the alleged problems of 2nd Corps: every soldier had to wear a tie, even on the battlefront, and everybody, including nurses tending patients in rear hospitals, had to wear a heavy metal combat helmet.
Patton was heir to a California fortune, and had married a rich Boston heiress, yet he never had any doubts about his destiny to be a great soldier. His grandfather, a Virginian, commanded a Confederate regiment and died of battle wounds. Patton graduated from West Point in 1909, won the Distinguished Service Cross in battle in France in 1918, and showed great promise as a tank commander in maneuvers in 1940. Patton was dyslexic, and the difficulty he had reading and writing gave him an enduring sense of insecurity. To cover his insecurity, an innate shyness, and a high, squeaky voice, Patton developed a public demeanor of bravado and bombast. This led him to become a publicity hound and to be extremely hard on his men. Eisenhower summed up Patton as a shrewd soldier who believed in showmanship, talked too much, and was not always a good example to subordinates. But Eisenhower believed he would turn into a superb field commander.
Montgomery proceeded with slow, exasperating preparations for an attack on the Mareth line, planned for March 20, two weeks after the Medenine battle. The attack by 2nd Corps was to be launched three days earlier but was to be limited to drawing off Axis reserves, regaining the forward airfield at Thelepte to assist Montgomery’s advance, and setting up a forward base at Gafsa to help reprovision 8th Army as it moved northward.
On March 17, 1943, the U.S. 1st Infantry Division under Terry Allen occupied Gafsa without a fight, the Italians withdrawing twenty miles down the road to a defile east of El Guettar, blocking the road to Gabes. Meanwhile the U.S. 1st Armored Division under Orlando Ward, with elements of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division, drove eastward from Kasserine, occupied the railway station at Sened, and moved toward Maknassy and the pass there through the Eastern Dorsals.
But Ward’s tanks and trucks got bogged down in mud from heavy rains, and, though Ward launched successive attacks on March 23, he was stymied by an eighty-man German detachment (Rommel’s former bodyguard) under Colonel Rudolf Lang on a dominating hill (322). Ward renewed the attack the next day with three infantry battalions, supported by artillery and tanks—and again failed.
Patton, livid with anger, ordered Ward to lead another attack himself. Ward did so, but it failed as well. Alexander suggested that Ward be relieved. Patton agreed privately but resented Alexander’s proposal as another criticism of Americans. In the end, he sent Omar Bradley, deputy commander of 2nd Corps, to do the deed, replacing Ward with Ernest N. Harmon.
At El Guettar, Terry Allen’s infantry broke into the Italian position on March 21, but on March 23 was hit by a counterattack of the 10th Panzer Division, rushed up from the Mareth line. The panzers overran the American forward positions, but were stopped by a minefield, then hit by American artillery and tank destroyers, which knocked out 40 German tanks. Although the Americans made few gains, their strikes at El Guettar and Maknassy drew off much of the enemy’s scanty tank strength. This helped Montgomery when he launched his attack on the Mareth line.
Montgomery had assembled 160,000 men to Messe’s 80,000, and deployed 610 tanks and 1,400 guns, while
