Blood and Essentials

To 5,372 U.S. doorsteps, since March 16, when the Allied drive in Tunisia began, came the unwanted telegrams, with the feared news: killed, wounded, missing in faraway Africa.

The people whose hands opened the messages, and whose eyes read them, a few days later read a statement made by War Secretary Henry L. Stimson. On the performance of U.S. troops in the Tunisian campaign, the Secretary said: "Inferences which have been made from the facts by commentators and others in the press have not been quite fair to the American troops."

There had not been many such inferences. The Secretary's defensive statement helped arouse concern: Had the Americans done their share? Were the British doing the whole job? What were the facts?

The facts, said Mr. Stimson, were that U.S. troops had made an "important contribution" to a British victory. General Patton, said the Secretary, had been ordered not to try to cut between Rommel and Von Arnim.

General Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander, commander of land forces in Tunisia, denned the order carefully. "The main task I gave to the Second U.S. Corps," he said, "was 1) to capture and secure Gafsa as an administrative base for the Eighth Army; 2) to threaten Rommel's rear from Gafsa and Maknassy so as to draw off reserves from the Eighth Army." Both these jobs had been "most successfully done."

Correspondents at the front said categorically that British troops fought better than U.S. troops. But they made it clear that this was nothing shameful. British troops, who had fought badly in their time, and might again, were veterans; U.S. troops were still green.

Phil Ault, of United Press, wrote: "[The American Army has] long ago dropped the attitude that any five Americans could lick any five Germans automatically just because they were Americans and had fine equipment."

Secretary Stimson need not have been alarmed. The next of kin of those 5,372 men could be proud. In bleak North Africa those men had given, with their blood, fierce determination to their comrades in arms and humility to their people at home.

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