radio equipment.70
During the night of 29 March, Patton organized a task force under the command of Col Clarence Benson, CO of the 13th Armored Regiment, to cut through German lines in the hills east of El Guettar and link up with Monty’s Eighth Army north of Gabes. The 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion formed part of the task force, which spent six days trying unsuccessfully to overcome stiff German and Italian resistance. Reconnaissance Company had been issued several light tanks for the assault, a field modification of the TO&E that gave the men—always at the bleeding edge—considerably more punch. Finally, at 0930 on 7 April, the entire battalion was ordered forward after a renewed tank attack showed signs of progress. The Americans broke through and, now freed, raced into the flat desert beyond. At 1600 hours, elements of the 899th established contact with the Eighth Army near Sobkret Sidi Mansour.71 There was now only one front in North Africa.
Lieutenant General Omar Bradley replaced Patton at the head of II Corps on 15 April so that the latter could return to overseeing the planning for the invasion of Sicily. Pinched out of the line by the steady shrinkage of the Axis perimeter, II Corps shifted behind the British lines and took on responsibility for the left flank along the coast. The new objective was Bizerte.
The tank-destroying days were basically over for the TD battalions in North Africa. The terrain was broken and poorly suited to the use of armor. Instead, the TD battalions usually occupied antitank defense positions to fend off hypothetical attacks. At times, they performed the roles of assault guns and artillery.72
American forces captured Bizerte on 7 May—Recon Company of the 894th claims to have entered the city first—and pushed onward as British units pounded toward Tunis. Resistance collapsed on 9 May and ended completely three days later. The Allies bagged 270,000 prisoners of war, veterans who would not be waiting for them when they invaded the shores of Europe.
The First Accounting
Some senior American officers judged that the North Africa campaign had tested the tank destroyer and found it wanting. Patton was among the critics; he concluded that the tank destroyer had proved unsuccessful
The tank killers had tripped over at least three obstacles. The first was the field commanders’ lack of training in and experience with the use of the weapon in combat. They tended to order tank destroyers to expose themselves recklessly to enemy fire and assigned to them missions for which they were not suited. After surveying commanders at the close of the campaign, moreover, Allied Forces Headquarters concluded that the tank destroyer battalions had at times been too widely dispersed to be effective. The headquarters issued training notes urging that the battalions be kept intact—at least within one division’s sector—to enable the TDs to repel large armored thrusts.74
A second issue was a certain degree of confusion among the tank killers themselves over how to implement the offense-minded doctrine they had been taught. The Army responded to these challenges by ordering the Tank Destroyer Center to rewrite FM 18-5 to clarify for infantry and armor commanders and tank killers alike the necessity for the force to fight using concealment and surprise.75 As one experienced battalion commander told Camp Hood, the proper way to attack enemy armor was with massed firepower. Charging German tanks was a recipe for disaster.76
The third obstacle was the frequent mismatch between the flat, cover-less terrain and the tall vehicles issued to the battalions. Concealment in the desert was often impossible for a self-propelled tank destroyer, whereas a towed gun could be dug in with little more than its barrel exposed. Bradley, among others, indicated that he would prefer towed tank destroyer battalions. Tankers had told Bradley that dug-in German antitank guns were virtually impossible to spot, and that four hidden 88s could hold off a company of American tanks.77 This was doubtless music to LtGen Lesley McNair’s ears, and as early as January 1943, Army Ground Forces ordered the Tank Destroyer Center to organize an experimental battalion armed with towed 3-inch guns. A failure among senior American officers to ponder the conditions likely in the
The view of the tank destroyer’s utility was more enthusiastic at the fighting level up to the very end of the campaign. A 1st Armored Division report on the action at Mateur between 4 and 9 May, for example, indicated that the use of tank destroyers on the flanks as close support had yielded excellent results. The report credited the men of the 776th Tank Destroyer Battalion with putting the enemy to flight on several occasions merely through reconnaissance by fire. (The report lamented, however, that the recently arrived tank killers had been too interested in looting and had thereby given the enemy time to destroy his equipment!)79
Moreover, teething problems in the tank destroyer force to some degree resembled kinks elsewhere in the U.S. Army. Air-ground coordination had been a mess. Ground commanders accused the high command—almost as inexperienced as they were—of criminal negligence in ordering attacks at dawn, when the sun was invariably in the eyes of American gunners.80 And the evolution in combat of task force-style groupings of armor, infantry, tank destroyers, and artillery revealed other holes in doctrine and training. Task force commanders, for example, were typically armor officers who viewed the infantry through the prism of the doctrine for employing specialized armored infantry, a situation that led to misunderstandings between commanders and infantry officers.81
A fair assessment of the tank destroyer battalions’ performance would acknowledge Omar Bradley’s overall observation on the North African campaign: “On reflection, I came to the conclusion that it was fortunate that the British view [in favor of Torch] prevailed, that the U.S. Army first met the enemy on the periphery, in Africa rather than on the beaches of France. In Africa we learned to crawl, to walk—then run. Had that learning process been launched in France, it would surely have… resulted in an unthinkable disaster.”82
The tank destroyer program had, in any event, reached its high-water mark. In April 1943, McNair recommended that no more than one hundred six battalions be established, rather than the planned two hundred twenty. This was about the number of units that already existed or were in the activation process. In October, the War Department indicated it wanted to inactivate forty-two existing battalions, leaving only sixty-four. AGF thought this excessive but agreed to disband twenty-five tank destroyer battalions in light of the need to provide replacements for divisions suffering high casualties in Italy. Further inactivations would reduce the force to seventy-eight battalions by 1944.83 Fifty-six would serve in the European or Mediterranean theaters and six in the Pacific Theater. Eleven would be converted to armored field artillery, amphibious tractor, chemical mortar, or tank battalions.84
The use of tank destroyers in the artillery support role during the North Africa campaign spurred Allied Forces Headquarters to inform the War Department that field commanders wanted tank destroyer battalions to improve their capability for indirect fire. A TD battalion had the same number of pieces as three battalions of light field artillery, and by the end of the campaign, TD battalions had fired more rounds in artillery missions than in any other role.85 (Army Ground Forces suggested that tanks could make a similar contribution.)
In the spring of 1943, indirect-fire tests had been conducted at the Tank Destroyer Training Center. Thereafter, a demonstration of indirect fire was included in the curriculum of the Tank Destroyer School, and battalions were permitted to practice artillery missions after completing all other requirements.86 In North Africa, the 776th Tank Destroyer Battalion, by June 1943, had begun training with field artillery units to coordinate their fire on specific targets.87 The 701st also conducted artillery training upon receiving its new M10 TDs beginning in August.88
In early September, a board that included Major General Bruce from the Tank Destroyer Center recommended extensive use of the tank destroyers—but not tanks—as artillery. The fall maneuvers demonstrated that tank destroyers were fully capable of operating as reinforcing artillery. In November, the War Department ordered that both tank and tank destroyer battalions receive one month of artillery training.89 This change would have a major impact on the activities of the tank destroyers in their next campaign.
