Worst Defeat

U.S. soldiers clung like goats to the rocky hillside, dug into shallow holes, anxiously watched the German positions on the opposite ridge. In the peaceful valley between, where an ancient Roman column stood against the green olive groves of Arab farms, a shell from a U.S. 105-mm. howitzer exploded, sending a white puff rolling up through Faid Pass.

From the German rear, 88-mm. guns coughed heavily in reply. A lieutenant on the rocky ridge pulled a U.S. infantryman down, saying curtly: "A man lying down looks like a rock. A man standing up looks like a man."

Early Sunday morning, hours before daybreak, General Dwight Eisenhower rode up in a jeep to inspect the Allied positions at Sidi bou Zid, a few miles west of Faid Pass. The U.S. soldiers had just moved in to relieve French troops. The whole situation was precarious. Eisenhower had been maintaining this mountainous front--from Pichon to Faid Pass southwest to Gafsa--largely by bluff.

The French were poorly equipped and had too little support. Even now the fresh, inexperienced U.S. troops under General Lloyd Fredendall were inadequate for any real defense. Fredendall knew that he was holding the bag. Eisenhower rode off to inspect the next point in the U.S. positions.

Three and a half hours later the Germans called his bluff. The tough, desert-hardened 21st Panzer Division and Colonel General Juergin von Arnim's veteran 10th moved forward against Fredendall's lightly held line. According to some reports, Rommel was lying wounded in a German hospital at Tunis; according to others, he had just been called to Russia. In any event, his hand and genius were clearly to be seen in what followed.

Death In the Groves. A canopy of screeching Stukas shook U.S. soldiers, experiencing dive-bombing for the first time. Thirty German tanks poured out of Faid Pass. Artillery, infantry and 50 German tanks moved out of a point north of the pass (see map). South around Maknassy the Germans rolled toward the road that connects Sidi bou Zid with Gafsa. Another column pounded toward Gafsa itself. Mark IVs and some of the new, giant Mark VIs overran the positions of green. U.S. artillerymen, who sometimes scarcely had time to fire one round.

U.S. armor courageously tried to stop the German onrush along the road to Sbeitla. Lieut. Colonel Louis V. Hightower put his General Sherman tank between the advancing Germans and a fleeing motorized column. Hightower's tank held off nine Mark IVs and a Mark VI, destroyed four of them and damaged the Mark VI before a shell exploded in one of his gas tanks. Hightower shouted to his crew: "Git!" They got, jumping out "like peas from a hot pod." The other, thin-skinned vehicles had been saved.

An infantry force on Djebel* Ksaira was not so lucky. The German column from Maknassy hooked around them like a giant finger, plucked them off. As day ended and night closed down, U.S. tanks threw themselves against Panzer units that outnumbered them 2-to-1. Tank fought tank, firing at the livid gun flashes. On the second day U.S. armor counterattacked.

But the weight of Rommel's suddenly concentrated assault was too heavy. The old hands of Rommel's desert army were too smart for freshmen U.S. troops. As the British had done at Knightsbridge, U.S. tanks charged blindly into German ambushes. German 88-mm. cannon blasted them to bits. Swift-moving German columns surrounded and cut them off.

In the end U.S. forces had to abandon Gafsa, Feriana and Sbeitla, swinging their whole line north and westward to escape annihilation. General George S. Patton's soa-in-law, Lieut. Colonel Johnny Waters, led one armored force to Djebel Lessoude, rescued isolated infantrymen from destruction. By midweek thousands of Allied vehicles were rolling west over sand hills and cactus patches--trucks, tanks, jeeps, two-wheeled carts, the jackass baggage trains of tired French Zouaves and Senegalese.

Great columns of smoke rose over abandoned and burning munition dumps. From Thelepte airport near Feriana, flames licked into the air as retreating troops fired 60,000 gallons of aviation gasoline. Three airports were abandoned. In the valleys of olive groves around Sbeitla lay more than 100 wrecked U.S. tanks, numbers of jeeps, motor transports, huge quantities of ammunition. Toward the German rear lines filed long lines of weary Allied prisoners. Valiant Allied air support kept the retreat from turning into a rout.

For five days the battle of pursuit and retreat raged across the waist of Tunisia, until the Allies had been driven to the eastern slope of the "Grand Dorsal" range of mountains east of Tebessa. British artillery moved up to blunt the onslaught at Sbiba. French troops withdrew from their too-forward positions at Pichon, hurried back into the new Allied line. Weary U.S. troops tried to hold Kasserine Pass, but the cocky and persistent Germans kept jabbing at them. Despite a storm of U.S. artillery fire, they seized the pass, swept on through toward Thala. With Tebessa and the whole right flank of the British First Army in danger, Allied armor met Rommel's divisions this week in a climactic melee.

Wounds in the Mountains. In their first major encounter with the Germans, U.S. troops had taken a thorough shellacking. They had admittedly gambled on their ability to hold the line by bluff, but the fact remained: for the first time in this war, on a battlefield of their own choosing, U.S. troops had been thoroughly defeated.

The Axis claimed that 2,876 men were captured, 125 tanks, 50 big guns and more than 40 armored cars seized or destroyed. Measured against the hippodrome theater of Russia, the figures were not large. But considering the difficulty of transporting replacements and reinforcements to the sector, the loss was serious. It knocked out any hope that Eisenhower would soon be able to launch an offensive across central Tunisia. He had lost three airdromes, which will seriously hamper bomber and fighter operations and will give the Germans a valuable advantage. The only consolation for the Allied high command was that green U.S. troops, ruefully licking their wounds in the mountains, had learned some lessons. So, possibly, had the high command.

The Germans, whether they jabbed any further or not, had already swept up some 4,000 sq. mi. of Tunisia, now had room to move around. More important to them, they had removed any threat to their flank when they turned south to face their old enemy, Montgomery. It would be some time before Montgomery's Eighth, slowly advancing around the ends of the Mareth Line, and Eisenhower's central Tunisian forces could join hands.

* Arabic for mountain.

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