An Army at Dawn (76 page)

Although Hitler had vacillated before ordering Mareth held, Kesselring—ignoring Rommel’s skepticism—considered the position a suitable place to begin converting Tunisia into “one vast fortress.” A retreat farther up the Tunisian coast, toward Gabès or Sfax, might allow the merger of Alexander’s two armies; it would also shorten Allied bombing runs to Tunis and Bizerte. Under orders issued by Comando Supremo on March 17, Mareth was “to be defended to the last.” With Rommel gone to Europe, Arnim would command the Axis army group that comprised his own Fifth Panzer Army in the north and Panzer Army Africa, renamed First Italian Army, in the south. The latter included remnants of the Afrika Korps among its 50,000 Germans and 35,000 Italians, and was commanded by General Giovanni Messe, who for the past two years had led the Italian expeditionary corps in Russia.

Built by the French in the 1930s to thwart Italian aggression from the east, the Mareth Line by an odd turn was now garrisoned by twenty-two Italian battalions backed and flanked—“corseted”—by ten German infantry battalions and the 15th Panzer Division with thirty-two functioning tanks. Wadis were scarped into antitank ditches—more than a hundred feet wide and twenty feet deep in places. Thick plaits of barbed wire screened the front, which was four miles deep and seeded with 170,000 mines. Twenty-five decrepit French blockhouses marked the line, some with concrete walls ten feet thick. The Axis flank to the west beyond the hills was protected by
chotts
—desert salt lakes—and was marked on French maps as
terrain chaotique.

These engineering nuances were known to the Allies, of course. Anglo-American intelligence possessed not only the Mareth blueprints but also the former French commander, who, Beetle Smith reported, was indulged in Algiers with six aides—“one for himself and five for his wife. The five were always borrowing ham and bacon and sugar for Madame.” On March 12, Alexander offered his assessment of enemy intentions at Mareth in a lilting if ambiguous message drawn from the twelfth chapter of Revelation: “The devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

Montgomery knew his Bible and he believed he also knew his enemy. Eighth Army outnumbered the 85,000-man First Italian Army by more than two to one. The disparity in heavy weapons was even more lopsided, including a five-to-one tank advantage, 743 to 142. With a sense of infallibility stoked by the rout at Médenine, Montgomery considered the Italians simply too weak to withstand his horde, corseting be damned. He dispatched his New Zealand Corps, with roughly one-quarter of his combat force, on a looping expedition to the west, where by a series of secret night marches they were to negotiate the
terrain chaotique
before falling on the enemy’s rear with 26,000 men and 150 tanks, wreaking havoc and despair. But the main blow, code-named
PUGILIST GALLOP
, would be a frontal attack by his XXX Corps just a few miles from the coast on a pinched front of 1,200 yards; once a hole was torn in the enemy line, the X Corps would plunge through in an ecstasy of exploitation. “When I give a party, it is a good party,” Montgomery assured his men on attack eve. “And this is going to be a good party.”

The party had begun badly. In preliminary jostling intended to improve British positions four nights before the main attack, two Guards battalions on the night of March 16 struck an enemy salient ten miles from the coast, on the road from Médenine to Mareth. The attackers included the 6th Grenadier Guards and the 3rd Coldstreams, newly arrived from Syria with heavy Hebron coats and tasseled fly switches. Their objective, a curvy cluster of hills rising 600 feet above the plain and known as the Horseshoe, was said to be “lightly held” by “one or two isolated machine gun posts.”

In fact, it was defended by 6,500 stone-cold killers from the German 90th Light Division and was part of a four-mile front bristling with more than fifty guns. Two grenadier battalions infested the Horseshoe proper, and Axis engineers had made good use of the three months allowed them to improve the Mareth defenses. After a British artillery barrage of 24,000 shells that did little but irk the defenders, the moonlit Guardsmen surged forward with much hoarse whispering and nervous nibbling of cookies stuffed in their pockets. Within minutes they were mired in unsuspected minefields of unprecedented density. German parachute flares floated over the line like tiny suns, exposing the men to a hellish crossfire. After some nasty bayonet work in the bottom of a wadi, the Guardsmen fell back, leaving the Horseshoe littered with bloody Hebron coats and fly switches that would switch no more. “It was my first contact with sudden death, and I couldn’t credit my senses,” one survivor reported. A German officer cadged cigarettes from British prisoners in exchange for cold coffee and black bread. “For you the war is over,” he told them, “but I must go on.”

The Coldstreams suffered 159 casualties, the Grenadiers 363, including twenty-seven of thirty-four officers. “Well I am still alive and that is more than I dared hope twelve hours ago,” the Coldstream padre wrote. “Our attack was a complete failure.” It was, one of Montgomery’s lieutenants admitted, “the most damnable thing.” Enemy casualties were fewer than 200. Burial squads trying to retrieve sixty-nine British bodies from one especially morbid acre found that they first had to remove more than 700 mines.

A lesser man might have reconsidered his scheme for a frontal attack against such formidable defenses. Not Montgomery. Unfazed, he proclaimed that these preliminary operations “as a whole were a great success.” Distracted with planning for Sicily, he seemed so disengaged from
PUGILIST GALLOP
that Major General J. S. “Crasher” Nichols, commander of the division ordered to spearhead the attack, was “left largely to his own devices,” according to an official British account of the battle. The result was a valorous attack of regrettable ineptitude using a solitary infantry brigade reinforced by a solitary regiment of Valentine tanks, most armed with the impotent 2-pounder popgun.

Of such battles are myths made and empires lost. As Montgomery and his officers watched their movie on March 20, 300 guns from the Royal Artillery unleashed 36,000 rounds. Most fell on the Young Fascist Division investing the point of attack, eight miles north of the earlier Guards foray and within smell of the briny Mediterranean. Infantrymen capered forward in the bright moonlight “as if they were going to a picnic,” one witness reported. An officer holding a hurricane lamp led minesweeping Scorpion tanks through choking dust toward the Wadi Zigzaou. They found a steep-banked freshet with water eight feet deep in places and protected by a parallel antitank ditch fanged with concrete dragons’ teeth.

The medieval flavor of this battlefield was reinforced by the appearance of “thug patrols,” British squads carrying scaling ladders, which they laid over the antitank ditch for riflemen to scoot across into the labyrinth of trenches and breastworks on the far side. Valentine crews at midnight dumped into the wadi dozens of fascines, dense bundles of sticks intended to give purchase to the tank tracks. Other Tommies trotted forward with tape to mark paths through the mine belts, or formed human ladders for their comrades to surmount the wadi banks.

So far, so good. Then the lead Valentine foundered in the mucky Zigzaou, blocking the only vehicle crossing. The tanks’ hot exhaust ignited the fascines; soon roaring bonfires added their illumination to the Very lights and dusty moonbeams. Four tanks managed to negotiate the wadi on a hastily built bypass, but a fifth stalled, blocking the gap cut in a minefield.

By first light on March 21, portions of four infantry battalions had gained a shallow bridgehead: a mile wide and half a mile deep. But with aircraft hampered by foul weather, even 300 guns could not, as one general had advised, “pound the objectives to powder and render the defenders imbecile.” Italian gunnery intensified in daylight, enfilading the wadi with sheets of fire. German grenadiers and artillery soon reinforced the Young Fascists. Casualties soared. Tommies spent the day trying to winkle defenders out of their pillboxes and waiting for darkness so the Valentines could again force a passage across the wadi. British engineers managed to build only one of three planned crossings over the Zigzaou. “Soon a vague feeling spread from soldier to soldier that something is wrong,” one witness reported, “that someone is making a hash of things.”

In the small hours of March 22, forty-two Valentines were able to cross the wadi, but their tracks chewed up the delicate causeway and no antitank guns or other vehicles could follow. Thick overcast limited air support, and a cloudburst swelled the Zigzaou, further undoing the engineers’ handiwork. Ammo carriers plodded forward with their heavy green boxes, and litter bearers shuttled to and from the rear without ever bothering to fold their stretchers. “My operations progressing well,” Montgomery cabled Alexander at 11:45
A.M.
on the twenty-second. “Suggest you announce that my operations are proceeding satisfactorily and according to plan.”

One hour and fifty-five minutes after this inanity went out, the 7,000-man 15th Panzer Division counterattacked in three columns from an assembly area seven miles northwest of Wadi Zigzaou. Thirty tanks and two infantry battalions slammed into the bridgehead, gripping the British in such an intimate embrace that despite fairing weather Allied pilots hesitated to fire for fear of killing their own. Panzers methodically obliterated one strong point after another, grinding in the slit trenches. Soon thirty-five Valentines were reduced to smoking hulks. The Zigzaou’s seething ravine became an abattoir, with bodies beached on the mud or floating heavily in the stream. As shrapnel frothed the water around them, bare-chested Sikh sappers toiled to repair the causeway with steel mesh and duckboards amid the improbable battle cry of “More fascines!”

“Crowds of men wounded and unwounded flitted like wraiths through the haze,” the correspondent Jack Belden wrote. “Some crawled. Some stumbled. Some marched erect.”
Most
, in fact, crawled, often toward the rear on hands and knees in single file across fifty yards of steel-swept no-man’s-land. Snatches of incongruous conversation drifted above the shell fire. “Organization,” a voice called in the gloaming. “That’s the trouble.”

By nightfall the bridgehead was all but gone. The 50th Division’s 151st Brigade alone had 600 casualties. A drift to the rear continued. Someone
had
made a hash of things.

Montgomery disliked being awakened even for good news and not since Alamein had aides dared disturb his repose. But there was no sugaring this pill. At two
A.M.
on Tuesday, March 23, he was roused with word that his XXX Corps commander, General Oliver W. H. Leese, needed to see him. The huge, toothy Leese met Montgomery in the latter’s cramped map lorry, ten miles southeast of the battlefield. The 50th Division had pulled nearly all surviving troops back across the Zigzaou, Leese reported. A follow-on British thrust had been canceled. Casualties were heavy. The attack had failed.

Montgomery kept his composure until Leese left with orders to return in the morning. The Eighth Army chief of staff, Brigadier Francis “Freddie” de Guingand, found his commander tousled and stunned amid the tacked-up maps, his normally impassive countenance now dissolved with worry. For the first time in ten months, Eighth Army was withdrawing. The infernal rumble of artillery rattled the lorry—“a whole night being shelled like hell,” De Guingand later recalled. In a small voice Montgomery asked, “What am I to do, Freddie?”

The answer lay on the map, and within two hours Montgomery had found it, along with his composure. The Matmata Hills—a “jagged purple coxcomb” drenched with the scent of wildflowers, as one soldier wrote—extended at a right angle from the Mareth Line, roughly paralleling the Mediterranean coast for a hundred miles. Only the narrow Tebaga Gap pierced the range, fifty crow-flying miles west of Mareth, and only through this pass could the Axis defenses be outflanked. It was in that direction that Montgomery had dispatched his New Zealand Corps more than a week earlier with orders to turn the enemy line. The circuitous 200-mile expedition took the Kiwis past the arid land of the Troglodytes, an ancient people who lived like moles in subterranean hovels and whose strange language Herodotus had likened to the cry of a bat. The cavalcade also drove through a locust plague of biblical intensity: millions of insects borne on a hot, southwesterly wind pelted windshields and tank turrets. But by midafternoon on March 21, the corps vanguard had pressed into Tebaga Gap.

Alerted by Luftwaffe reconnaissance, General Messe and his lieutenants knew of this flanking peril; alerted by Ultra, the British knew they knew. Wehrmacht legions sidled westward, first the 164th Division, then eventually the 21st and 15th Panzer Divisions. A promising Kiwi attack on the night of the twenty-first took 850 prisoners at a cost of only sixty-five casualties. But then lethargy and caution, those handmaidens of battlefield stalemate, prevented quick exploitation before Axis reinforcements arrived in force. A golden chance to fall on the enemy rear was lost.