An Army at Dawn (90 page)

“One more hill!” the American officers told their men each morning, always with the ironic inflection required when comrades lie to one another. Every captured pinnacle brought better artillery observation and thus a better opportunity to pulverize the next ridge with well-aimed fire. The infantry—having learned the hard lessons of El Guettar and Maknassy—maneuvered around the flanks to force the enemy back yet again.

“One more hill!” It was not true, not yet, but every man could sense truth beneath the fiction.

No hill loomed larger than the flattop called Djebel Tahent locally but better known to the Americans as Hill 609. Arnim’s troops had retreated half a dozen miles across the II Corps front only to dig in deeper than ever, and by Monday, April 26, Bradley recognized that 609 was the linchpin of Axis defenses. Three miles northeast of Sidi Nsir on the American right, 609 dominated the countryside by virtue of its height and location: almost two thousand feet above sea level, it frowned down on all direct approaches from Béja to Mateur. A desolate mesa 800 yards long and 500 yards wide crowned the hill, which was dramatically faced with fifty-foot limestone cliffs on the south and east. From the summit, a man with a telescope could pick out individual house windows in Mateur twelve miles away and the hazy smudge of Bizerte another twenty miles beyond.

Except for a small olive grove 500 yards from the southern slope, the terrain offered little cover to attackers, while the limestone palisades provided countless knobs and crevices to hide defenders. Storks nested in fissures that formed natural chimneys up the cliff walls; machine guns now nested in scree at the base. Wind tossed the yellowing wheat on the lower slopes, making the hill undulate like a great breathing thing. Neighboring heights—461, 490, 531, 455—provided intertwined fields of fire manned largely by Barenthin Regiment soldiers drawn from the Wehrmacht’s parachute and glider schools, who, in Alexander’s assessment, were “perhaps the best German troops in Africa.”

Anderson proposed simply ignoring the hill. In a phone call to Bradley’s Béja command post on Tuesday morning, the British commander advised: “Never mind the enemy opposing you at Sidi Nsir. When you have him on a hilltop, try always to get around him. I don’t want you only to push the enemy back, but to get behind him and capture him before he can establish a bridgehead around Bizerte.” Almost as an afterthought, Anderson requested the transfer of an American infantry regiment to reinforce the stalled First Army farther south.

Bradley was appalled, and privately concluded that Anderson was “in far over his head as an army commander.” In a hastily arranged rendezvous that afternoon at Allen’s battered farmhouse, Bradley clipped his map to an easel and explained to Anderson why 609 could not be wished away. The Big Red One had made enough progress to have an exposed left flank just a couple of miles southwest of the hill, from where German gunners had now begun to flay Allen’s troops with fire. The 1st Division was more than two thousand men understrength, including a shortfall of sixty officers; new lieutenants received a fifteen-minute orientation lecture, then were shoved straight into the line. Allen lacked the muscle to bull ahead against the five enemy battalions on his front without risking a catastrophic counterattack from Hill 609 that would roll up his left wing. Furthermore, bypassing the hill meant returning to the vulnerable valleys and again drawing fire from every hilltop
Gefreiter
with a mortar tube. “All this depends upon our taking Hill 609,” Bradley concluded.

Allen nodded vigorously, head swiveling to keep the cigarette smoke from his eyes. Anderson squinted at the map for a long minute, then also nodded. As for the loan of an infantry regiment, Bradley refused. “We’d like to help you, but you’re asking me to do something I will not agree to without direct orders from Ike.” To his staff he added, “This campaign is too important to the prestige of the American Army to take such risks.” Eisenhower soon concurred, telling his corps commander, “Stand your ground, Brad.”

To seize the hill, Bradley turned to troops whose self-esteem and reputation may have been the lowest in the U.S. Army. Since the fiasco at Fondouk three weeks earlier, the 34th Division had spent every day in intense remedial training, practicing night attacks, tank-infantry tactics, and—led by the division commander, Charles Ryder—marching fifty yards behind rolling artillery barrages. Now Bradley told Ryder: “Get me that hill and you’ll break up the enemy’s defenses clear across our front. Take it and no one will ever again doubt the toughness of your division.”

Nine battalions from the 34th swept toward Sidi Nsir along a 6,000-yard front on April 27. A mendacious German deserter had claimed that Hill 609 was held by only a war-worn rear guard, which could be overrun by a determined platoon of fifty men. “There was excitement in the air and the tone was for an immediate attack,” one captain later recalled. But Ryder recognized that what he called the “checkerboard of interlocking defenses” required that his men reduce the adjacent hills before attacking 609 itself.

Troops picked at their C rations, filled their canteens, and smoked last cigarettes. At dusk, each soldier tied a white cloth to the back of his helmet so the man behind could follow him in the dark. Engineers marked paths through enemy minefields with white tape or rocks wrapped in toilet paper. Every few minutes, platoon leaders huddled under their blankets with red-lensed flashlights to check their compasses. “For the love of heaven and hell,” a company commander’s voice called in the darkness, “get going.” As they edged into the killing zone, the ripping-canvas sound of a German machine gun split the night, joined by a second and a third. “Our men were crouched gray shapes, running, falling flat, firing, running again,” one witness reported. Mortar rounds burst in the saddles between the hills, and yellow flares blossomed overhead. The men again fell flat, still as death except for the writhing wounded. Mines and booby traps detonated with a short, flat pop; more men writhed. “We lay there awaiting dawn, listening to the cries of a wounded man about a hundred yards down the side slope,” a soldier later recalled. “[He] weakened and finally became silent.”

Two attacks failed with heavy casualties, but by midday on Wednesday, April 28, Hills 435 and 490 had fallen between Sidi Nsir and 609. Four German counterattacks were repulsed. All day the valleys rumbled with artillery fire; the crack of shells splitting rock carried from the hilltops. Hundreds of men fell sick in apparent reaction to Atabrine, a synthetic antimalaria drug dubbed “yellow magic” and recently distributed in lieu of quinine, the world supply of which Japan controlled almost exclusively. Many would have preferred malaria. Weak and nauseated, they vomited down the front of their uniforms and fouled their trousers with uncontrollable diarrhea before rising on command in Thursday’s wee hours to stumble forward again.

Fog muffled every footstep as the 3rd Battalion of the 135th Infantry advanced 2,000 yards from Hill 490 to El Kradra, an Arab hamlet beneath the south wall of 609. Watching at first light, Drew Middleton reported that he could trace “the path of these soldiers through the wheat just as you would follow the path of Pickett’s charge through the summer wheat at Gettysburg.” But an attack against Hill 531 on the right was thrown back—the defenders wired together bundles of “potato masher” grenades and dropped them on GIs scaling the escarpment—and delays on the other flank left the battalion at El Kradra vulnerable to a German counterattack. Muzzle flashes erupted across the face of 609 like “tiny sparks, and the wind brought us the angry chatter of a machine gun,” Middleton noted. In disarray, the battalion retreated 400 yards from the village to shelter in the olives. Fleas from the village huts so tormented some men that they stripped to their shoes, helmets, and ammunition belts, then dunked their infested uniforms in gasoline. Hundreds of shells crashed across the crest of Hill 609—“it resembles an erupting volcano,” one soldier said—but the Germans held fast and the American momentum ebbed.

Ryder’s troubles at 609 had increasingly discomfited Terry Allen, who complained that his 16th Infantry was catching “unshirted hell” in artillery and mortar salvoes fired from the hill. At two
P.M.
on April 28, he had ordered all three 1st Division regiments to halt until the 34th Division could better protect his left flank. In a querulous phone call to Ryder, Allen asked how much longer the 34th needed to capture Hill 606.

“Don’t you mean Hill 609?” Ryder replied.

“No, I mean Hill 606. My division artillery has put enough fire on that hill to knock it down three meters.”

Another morning of inactivity on Thursday was more than Allen could bear. The corps’ casualties in the offensive now exceeded 2,400 men, and nearly half of those came in the Big Red One; while enemy losses were uncertain, only 400 prisoners had been captured since Good Friday. The 34th Division had been reduced to firing white phosphorus shells into the bunchgrass around 609 so that sharpshooters could pick off Germans flushed by the flames. Convinced that his own division’s fortunes were being dragged down by Ryder’s failure, Allen on Thursday stopped pacing long enough to order the 16th Infantry forward again. The unit was to seize Hill 523, another fortified butte a mile due east of 609. Allen proceeded despite trenchant protests from the regimental commander, Colonel George A. Taylor, who considered the attack rash.

Impatience cost Allen dearly. In a moonless drizzle shortly after midnight on Friday, April 30, the 1st Battalion of the 16th Infantry crossed a wheat field from the south, climbed Hill 523, and by 4:45
A.M.
had captured eleven Germans while killing or routing several dozen more. But dawn brought a quick reversal: in the gray light, figures in coal-scuttle helmets darted through a nearby earthquake fissure to surround the hill. The subsequent mêlée with Barenthin Regiment troops was “more like a street fight than a battle at any distance,” one survivor reported. “We couldn’t call for artillery because the forces were so close.” The brawl, he added, disintegrated into “fist fights, coupled with grenades.”

When the crack of artillery finally carried to Colonel Taylor’s command post, a clerk noted in his log that “the sound is sweet to our ears”—then realized that those were German guns. Ted Roosevelt ordered a tank company up the hill, but mines and 47mm fire destroyed three Shermans in a narrow draw—the lead tank took more than two dozen hits—and others were repulsed short of the crest. Through breaks in the smoke, the bitter end could be seen from a nearby observation post, which at noon reported to Taylor: “The Heinies are all over that hill.” By 12:30 the Germans had marched away more than 150 prisoners, including the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles J. Denholm; another hundred dead and wounded Americans were left behind. In the next twenty-four hours, Hill 523 was to change hands three more times.

Hill 609 would change hands only once, finally. Despite skepticism from his armor commanders—“No one in his right mind would consider putting tanks in mountains,” one colonel warned—Bradley persuaded Ryder to order seventeen Shermans up the west slope at dawn on April 30. Clouds of infantrymen trailed behind, often grabbing the skirt of a tank with one hand while firing their rifles with the other. “God bless all of you,” a company commander from the 133rd Infantry told his men. “We must succeed or die trying.” Some did die: Private First Class Edward S. Kopsa of Grundy Center, Iowa, fell with a shell wound so gaping that his heart could be seen beating. “Tell my mother,” Kopsa said, and the beating stopped. But within two hours, the tanks had covered almost a mile, machine guns rattling and main guns roaring. The reek of gunpowder saturated air that was already full of primitive shrieks and cries for help. By midafternoon, American soldiers had scrambled up a goat trail to gain the summit, where they winkled the defenders from their breastworks. Additional battalions enveloped the hill from both flanks, and among the first reinforcements to top the crest were Iowans from the 2nd Battalion of the 168th Infantry, including Company F of Villisca and Company E of Shenandoah. Feeble German counterattacks on May Day were shattered with artillery and automatic-weapons fire, and all along the line scouts reported enemy forces retreating or surrendering.

“Jerries approach our troops, some run, some fall on their faces, most of them are weary, haggard, wild-eyed, terrified men who swing arms above heads,” the 16th Infantry reported. “A panorama of defeat, as vehicles, mules, and men walk toward the [GIs] with white flags fluttering.” Others feigned surrender with white-flag ruses—Staff Sergeant Clarence T. Storm, whose wife worked in the Villisca five-and-dime, was among those killed by such treachery—and the GIs’ disdain for the enemy grew murderous. “For twenty-four hours,” Bradley noted, “few prisoners came in from the 34th Division’s front.”

The summit of 609 resembled hell’s half-acre, a fire-scoured wasteland of spent brass, bloody bandages, and, oddly, family photos, as if those about to die had pulled them from their wallets for a last farewell. The dead Germans in their rock redoubts reminded one soldier of Civil War photos showing bloated corpses along the rail fences at Antietam. The tabletop “was literally covered with bodies,” another wrote. “The stench was terrible.” Although the hill was “pitted with shell craters, thick as currants in cake,” few holes were deeper than six inches: solid rock underlay the thin soil. After futilely trying to bury the dead in these shallow craters, GIs tossed them into earthquake rifts and a bulldozer plowed them over. “Those who went through it,” wrote Ernie Pyle, “would seriously doubt that war could be any worse than those two weeks of mountain fighting.”