An Army at Dawn (63 page)

A few minutes later Drake dictated a ninety-three-word message directly to Ward. Scribbled on three sheets of British toilet paper, the note ended: “Talked to McQuillan [
sic
] once by radio, said had requested help. Germans have absolute superiority ground and air…. Unless help fromair and armor comes immediately, infantry will lose immeasurably.”

A young lieutenant folded the message and slid it into the breast pocket of his fatigue shirt. He scrambled down the back slope of Garet Hadid and headed west in a jeep, a dispatch rider in search of the cavalry.

Eisenhower and Truscott had returned to Speedy Valley from Sidi bou Zid at dawn on Sunday morning, the fourteenth. In his goop suit, with a wool hat pulled over his eyes, the commander-in-chief “looked pinched with cold,” Kay Summersby reported. “He was very tired and very depressed.” He crawled into a tent near Fredendall’s command post and slept for two hours in a sleeping bag spread across a cot, snoring loudly.

Rising at midmorning, Eisenhower conferred with Fredendall and Anderson. Both affected a bluff élan. Information was sketchy, they admitted, but the enemy attack appeared to be a local affair. “There was no reason to think that McQuillin would not be able to hold his own,” Truscott later wrote. No other enemy activity was reported along the front, but Anderson wanted to evacuate exposed Gafsa in the far south as a precaution, retracting the Allied right flank to the more defensible foothills of the Grand Dorsal. Eisenhower agreed. He told Marshall in a subsequent message, “I really believe that the fighting of today will show that our troops are giving a very fine account of themselves even though we must give up part of our extended line.”

The truth would soon out. Some troops indeed were fighting with uncommon valor; many were not fighting at all. Most were befuddled and frightened. Hightower’s gallantry, coupled with resistance around Djebel Ksaira, had allowed hundreds of McQuillin’s men to escape, but several thousand others were trapped, captured, or dead. Of the five battalions controlled by CCA, two were surrounded and three were on the way to obliteration. Nine Axis battalions had slammed into the Americans, and although the depleted German units barely added up to a full-strength armored division, they included two of the Wehrmacht’s most celebrated formations: the 10th Panzer Division, spearhead of General Heinz Guderian’s breakthrough at Sedan in May 1940, and the 21st Panzer, the first German division in Africa and perhaps the most experienced desert fighters on earth. Moreover, the second phase of the offensive,
MORGENLUFT
—Rommel’s attack in the south—had yet to begin.

No sense of urgency gripped Speedy Valley. There was concern, yes, and vexation at an annoying foe who refused to relinquish the initiative. But no commander seemed to have an inkling that life-and-death consequences derived from decisions made
right now
. Anderson’s eyes remained fixed on the north, peering for enemy columns that did not exist. CCA had yet to identify 10th Panzer as the agent of its destruction; consequently, Anderson surmised that the division remained poised to strike the French near Kairouan. Not only was Ward’s 1st Armored Division too dispersed to throw an effective counterpunch, but the division artillery chief’s diversion to command the improvised CCD two weeks earlier had deprived the most lethal American defensive arm—massed howitzers—of its leader and his staff.

Eisenhower summoned reinforcements from Morocco and Algeria, but not many; the Americans remained as fixated on the fantasy of an Axis strike through Spain as the British did on a prospective blow in northern Tunisia. Those who heard the trumpet came slowly: the U.S. 9th Infantry Division, for example, was missing half its vehicles, which had been left at home in
TORCH
or sent as replacements to the Tunisian front. Other troops, unaccountably, were left on the sidelines, including more than 4,000 gunners in the 13th Field Artillery Brigade, who had landed with tubes and full transport in Algeria in December and would remain there until mid-March.

With Summersby again behind the wheel, Eisenhower left Speedy Valley at 11:30
A.M.
Sunday for the return to Algiers. Fifty-five miles northeast of Tébessa, while Hightower fought for his life and Waters hid under a rock, Eisenhower ordered the motorcade to stop at the ancient city of Timgad. Built by Rome’s Third Legion in
A.D.
100 the town had been consigned to oblivion for centuries until French archaeologists excavated the site in the 1880s.

For more than an hour, the Allied commander-in-chief and his band wandered through streets paved in blue limestone and lined with Doric colonnades. The white bones of Timgad ribbed a hillside dominated by the Emperor Trajan’s forty-foot triumphal arch. Commode seats were still graced with marble arms in the shape of frolicking dolphins. Little imagination was needed to hear the clatter of chariot wheels, or to smell cedar burning on the altars of Jupiter Capitolinus. A guidebook invited visitors to conjure “barbarians from the outer desert in paint and feathers flitting along the narrow byways,” and the scuffing cadence of Roman soldiers helmed in bronze. Eisenhower and Truscott studied an inscription chiseled between two columns in the great forum:
“Venari lavari ludere ridere hoc est vivere”:
To hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh—that is to live.

“When you remember me in your prayers, that’s the special thing I want—always to do my duty to the extreme limit of my ability,” Eisenhower wrote his wife a few hours later, during a stop in Constantine. Finally returning to Villa dar el Ouard after the long last leg to Algiers, he sat at the grand piano in the room where a few nights before he had belted out “One Dozen Roses.” Sometimes Eisenhower amused himself at the keyboard by plunking “Chopsticks” with two fingers. This night, weary and morose at the increasingly bad news from Tunisia, he instead, very slowly, picked out “Taps,” then stood without a word and went to bed. To err, to fret, to grieve, to learn—that, too, was to live.

None Returned

W
ITH
Anderson’s decision to shorten his southern flank and evacuate Gafsa, GIs took a last quick wash in the hot-spring Roman baths and headed northwest. It was Sunday night, February 14. Soon Highway 15 was jammed with overloaded refugee carts, bleating livestock, and 180 Army trucks. A tearful bordello owner who introduced herself as Madame LaZonga pleaded with American officers for deliverance. Deliverance came. At midnight Madame rode out of town on the back of a General Stuart with six young women she identified as her daughters, all waving like beauty queens on a Columbus Day parade float. Combat engineers blew up the power station, “plunging us into total and rather sinister darkness,” one British officer noted. Then they wedged six tons of ammonal, plastic explosives, bangalore torpedoes, guncotton, and “great quantities of cortex” into a subterranean gallery beneath Gafsa’s sixteenth-century citadel. The blast, at six on Monday morning, was audible for thirty miles. “Rocks three feet in diameter flew more than a hundred feet into the air,” an engineer captain reported proudly. The explosion also demolished nearly three dozen houses; the bodies of thirty residents were recovered immediately, and eighty people remained missing when Axis troops arrived a day later.

The sprawling air bases at Fériana and Thélepte, forty-five miles up Highway 15, were next to be abandoned on Anderson’s order. Evacuation of the 3,500 troops had begun at eleven on Sunday night. For the benefit of future German occupants, a departing officer tacked up a large wall map showing the latest battle lines around Stalingrad, where Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus of the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army had just surrendered.

Thirty-four Allied airplanes grounded for repairs were scuttled with thermite grenades. An engineer who had been detailed to destroy 50,000 gallons of gasoline recounted, “Before I finished the Germans were attacking the field. I was the last one out…. They were shooting at me, but there was an awful lot of smoke and they couldn’t see me very well.” The enemy nevertheless captured fifty tons of aviation gas and oil, and the engineer was not, it so happened, the last one out. The evacuation order failed to reach Company C of the 805th Tank Destroyer Battalion, which instead heeded a previous command to attack the approaching enemy. Repulsed, utterly, the company suffered seventy-five casualties and lost all twelve tank destroyers along with sixteen other vehicles.

A battlefield bromide cautions: “Never believe a straggler and rarely believe a casualty.” Both breeds had begun trickling in to 1st Armored Division headquarters, and their collective tale of prodigious German strength fell on deaf ears. Colonel Hightower arrived at Ward’s command post in the Sbeïtla cactus patch on Sunday night. He was, a witness reported, “badly used up and declared that his battalion had been wiped out.” Hightower confirmed that Tigers were involved in the attack along with scores of other panzers. Messages from Djebel Lessouda and Djebel Ksaira provided detailed if fragmentary intelligence about enemy tanks, guns, and troop concentrations.

Yet a mood of benighted denial had settled over the Allied high command, which no eyewitness testimony could dislodge. Anderson visited Robinett at Maktar and proposed borrowing a single tank battalion to drive the enemy from Sidi bou Zid. A French proposal to fling
all
of CCB into the counterattack was rejected by the British as imprudent given the suspected German legions waiting to pounce in the north. Shortly after eight
P.M.
on Sunday night, Anderson sent Fredendall a message:

As regards action in Sidi bou Zid: concentrate tomorrow on clearing up situation there and destroying enemy…. Army Commander deeply regrets losses suffered by CCA, but he congratulates them on their fine fight, is confident they will decisively defeat the enemy tomorrow, and is sure that the enemy must have suffered losses at least as heavy as their own.

This hallucination whisked through Speedy Valley without challenge and on to Ward. He and his operations officer, Hamilton Howze, then wrote the order to counterattack with a force weaker than the one already routed: a tank battalion, a tank destroyer company, an infantry battalion from CCC, and a few artillery tubes. “I didn’t like it much,” Ward told his diary, but he neither protested the order nor tried to enlarge the contingent. Howze, who admitted to knowing little about armor tactics, later acknowledged an enduring shame “for not contesting the order more strongly, even at the cost of my commission.”

The tank battalion chosen to lead the counterblow had never seen combat. Fitted with new Shermans and commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James D. Alger, a twenty-nine-year-old West Pointer from Massachusetts, the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Armored Regiment held battle honors dating to the Black Hawk War. But in this war the unit was green as grass. Ward told his diary: “Alger was more or less on his own.”

Robinett stood by the road in Maktar as the tanks rolled south, stripped for battle. “Off we went across the desert,” a lieutenant later recalled. “We knew not what we were getting into.” As for young Alger, Robinett reported that he “saluted and smiled as he passed.”

Half a mile south of Highway 13 and midway between Sidi bou Zid and Sbeïtla, Djebel Hamra provided a fine grandstand from which to watch the enemy get his comeuppance, and by midmorning on Monday, February 15, a covey of officers and correspondents had scaled the 2,000-foot crest. McQuillin arrived along with the CCC commander, Colonel Robert I. Stack. So did Hains and Hightower and the ubiquitous Ernie Pyle, with his “signature belch, inventive profanity, [and] wondrous hypochondria.” At Ward’s headquarters in Sbeïtla that morning, an officer had assured Pyle, “We are going to kick hell out of them today and we’ve got the stuff to do it with.”

The day was dry and sunny. A mirage shimmered like spilled mercury around Sidi bou Zid, a dark green smear thirteen miles distant. Beyond the town, the hazy lavender trapezoid of Djebel Ksaira sat on the horizon. Djebel Lessouda loomed to the left, tethered to the long ribbon of Highway 13. A landscape that from a distance seemed flat as a billiard table was in fact corrugated with subtle folds and dips. Even from Hamra’s Olympian summit the plain teemed with Arab farmers plowing their fields behind plodding black bullocks. Birdsong and the smell of dung rose on the morning thermals.

Just before one
P.M.
, Alger’s battalion appeared on a camel track from the north. The column wheeled with parade-ground precision around a lone gum tree and headed southeast for Sidi bou Zid at eight miles per hour. Dust plumed behind each Sherman. Tank destroyers flared to the flanks, and an infantry battalion followed in trucks and half-tracks, trailed in turn by a dozen artillery tubes. From a radio truck blared “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” clearly audible on the hillcrest, where a lieutenant who was immune to the prevailing confidence of his seniors murmured, “‘Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.’”

Alger had been told to push beyond Lessouda and Ksaira “and then hold until friendly infantry could withdraw” from the hills where they were trapped. Ward’s staff drew his route with blue pencil and a straight edge on the only map available, a 1-to-100,000 scale sheet on which each mile of terrain was represented by less than an inch of paper. Drivers were to use Ksaira’s north nose as a homing beacon. No reconnaissance was conducted, and Allied intelligence put enemy strength at only sixty tanks. This was less than half their actual number.

At 1:40
P.M.
, twenty Stukas materialized like swallows in the brilliant air; they caused little damage but deranged Alger’s formation and confirmed that German commanders knew of the counterattack. Alger again paused after hearing a radioed warning that American planes planned a counterstrike on Sidi bou Zid. When no friendly planes appeared, he pressed on, neatly overrunning a half-dozen enemy antitank guns hidden along a wadi near the hamlet of Sadaguia.

Ward sat in his command post listening to radio traffic and eating lunch from a wooden tray. At 2:45 he heard CCC report: “Tanks now approaching Sidi bou Zid…. Enemy’s lack of reaction suspicious but, on present indications, enemy force must be small or sucking us in.” On a sheet of lined paper he scribbled a message for Drake to be dropped by airplane: “Daisy Mae join Lil Abner in the moonlight. He will give you a lift. Ward.” Howze also sent a radio message alerting the men on Djebel Ksaira to their imminent salvation: “Keep your eye peeled and be ready to jump on the bandwagon.”