History of the Second World War (70 page)

Rommel’s thrust was launched early on February 19, within a few hours of receiving the Comando Supremo’s sanction. But the prospects were diminished both by the earlier delays and by Arnim’s action in calling the 10th Panzer Division northward, so that it had to be recalled and could not arrive in time to play a part in the first phase of the new attack. Thus handicapped, Rommel decided to swing his Afrika Korps combat-group round to lead the advance on Le Kef through Thala, while using the 21st Panzer Division for an effort to reach Le Kef by the converging road through Sbiba, so that the two lines of thrust might develop a mutual leverage helpful to both.

The approach to Thala was through the Kasserine Pass, midway between Sbeitla and Feriana, and the position here was held by an American composite force under Colonel Stark. An initial attempt to rush the pass by surprise was checked, and in the afternoon various reinforcements arrived that brought Stark’s force up to a strength considerably exceeding that of the Afrika Korps group (three small battalions — one of tanks and two of infantry) which was carrying out the attack. But the defence was not well co-ordinated, so that the Germans managed to infiltrate at some points in the evening, and still farther after dark. Meanwhile the 21st Panzer Division’s push for Sbiba had been blocked by a minefield and the strong Allied force deployed behind it — eleven infantry battalions against the attacker’s two, as well as a superior number of guns and tanks (for the 21st Panzer Division now had less than forty in operation). So during the night Rommel decided to concentrate on forcing the Kasserine Pass, where the defence seemed more shaky, and to employ there the belatedly arriving 10th Panzer Division. The now shrinking prospect was diminished, however, as it included only one tank battalion, two infantry battalions, and a motor-cycle battalion. Arnim had kept back almost half the division, and its attached battalion of Tiger tanks, on which Rommel had been counting as a trump card in playing his hand.

His concentrated attack on the Kasserine Pass could not be delivered until the afternoon of the 20th, as the elements of the 10th Panzer Division did not arrive until then — a delay which made him ‘extremely angry’. A morning attack had been checked by the defenders’ fire, but at 4.30 p.m., having come close up to the front himself, he threw all the available infantry — five battalions (including one, the 5th Bersaglieri Battalion, of Italians) — into a simultaneous assault, and this quickly broke through. But the attackers then met stubborn resistance from a very small British detachment (an armoured squadron, an infantry company, and a field battery) under Lieutenant-Colonel A. C. Gore which had been sent to support the defence of the pass, and this was only overcome after a panzer battalion had been brought up, and its eleven tanks had been knocked out. The American official history, with an honesty rare in the official histories of any country, not only emphasises the exceptionally tough resistance put up by this detachment, but significantly remarks with reference to the easy breakthrough elsewhere: ‘The enemy was amazed at the quantity and quality of the American equipment captured more or less intact.’*

* Howe:
U.S. Army in World War II. Northwest Africa; Seizing the Initiative in the West,
p. 456.

After capturing the pass, Rommel sent reconnoitring detachments up the road towards Thala and also up the fork road to Tebessa, in order to put the Allies on the horns of a dilemma in moving their reserves, and also to explore the possibility of pursuing his own original aim of capturing the vast American supply dumps at Tebessa. The first aim, and effect, had already been produced by the news of Rommel’s progress. For Fredendall, after ordering Robinett’s Combat Command B in the morning to switch from the extreme right flank to Thala, had later diverted it to cover the fork road from Kasserine to Tebessa. Meanwhile, the British 26th Armoured Brigade Group (under Brigadier Charles Dunphie) — with two armoured regiments and two infantry battalions — had moved south from Thala, and taken up a position about ten miles from the Kasserine Pass, in expectation of Combat Command B’s arrival to support it. Fortunately for the Allies, the attacker’s strength was much weaker than they imagined.

Next morning, February 21, Rommel at first stood fast in expectation of an Allied counterattack, to recapture the Kasserine Pass. That pause seemed surprising to his opponents, who did not realise how slender was his strength compared with what they had now gathered. When he found that they remained static, he pushed on up the road to Thala with such part of the 10th Panzer Division as he had under command — it amounted only to a combat group, comprising thirty tanks, twenty self-propelled guns and two panzer-grenadier (motorised infantry) battalions. Dunphie’s brigade group fell back gradually before the Germans, making a stand on successive ridges until outflanked and enfiladed. But when its tanks withdrew at dusk into the Thala position already prepared, a string of German tanks followed close on their tail — cunningly headed by a captured Valentine, so that they were assumed to be British stragglers. Thus the Germans burst into the position, overrunning part of the infantry, shooting up many vehicles, and spreading confusion. Although checked after a three-hour melee, they carried away 700 prisoners on withdrawing. In this series of fights up the road from Kasserine they had lost a dozen tanks, but had knocked out nearly forty of the opposing tanks, including those of a squadron which lost direction and ran into the midst of their tank leaguer in a dawn counterattack next morning.

Expecting a larger counterattack to follow, Rommel decided to await it, with the idea of following up its repulse. But, during the morning, air reconnaissance showed that large Allied reinforcements had arrived on the scene and that more were approaching. So it became evident that the prospect of further exploitation through Thala had waned, while the Axis left flank was now in growing danger. On the previous afternoon the Afrika Korps combat group had pushed up the Tebessa fork road with the aim of securing the passes there, to cover the flank of the thrust for Thala, but had been checked by a heavy concentration of fire from the American artillery positions on the high ground. A renewal of the effort on the morning of the 22nd brought only slight gain and more serious losses than the attackers could afford — for in this sector they were now greatly outnumbered by the American forces assembled there, Robinett’s Combat Command B and part of Terry Allen’s 1st Infantry Division.

That afternoon Rommel and Kesselring, who had flown to see him, came to the conclusion that no further advantages could be achieved by pursuing the westward counterstroke, and that it should be broken off in order to switch the striking force back for the eastward counterstroke against the British Eighth Army. Following this decision, the Axis troops were ordered to begin withdrawing that evening — to the Kasserine Pass in the first place.

Meanwhile Allen had been trying since early in the morning to organise a counterattack against the Axis flank, but it was delayed by the difficulty of getting into communication with Robinett, and did not develop until late in the afternoon. It then hastened and hustled the Afrika Korps group’s withdrawal to the Kasserine Pass, the Italian elements retreating in disorder. Rommel was impressed by the growing tactical skill here shown by the American troops and the accuracy of their artillery fire, as well as by the abundance of their armament. His relatively weak forces would have been in grave danger if a larger and wider counterattack had developed.

But his weakness and the way that the situation had changed were not realised on the higher level of the Allied Command. As the U.S. official history remarks, Fredendall’s direction of ‘ground operations against the retreating enemy became extraordinarily hesitant at just the time that the enemy was most vulnerable’. Anderson, too, was still thinking defensively. Indeed, the large Allied force at Sbiba was that night withdrawn some ten miles northward in fear that Rommel might break through at Thala and threaten its rear. Under a similar fear the evacuation of Tebessa on the other flank was being contemplated. Even when the enemy’s withdrawal from Thala was discovered, on the morning of the 23rd, nothing was done to press upon it, and not until late that night were orders given for a general counterattack to be mounted — for launching on the 25th. By that time the enemy had safely withdrawn through the Kasserine bottleneck, and the Allied effort to ‘destroy’ the enemy and ‘recapture’ the pass became merely a processional march, meeting only the road demolitions and mines which the vanished enemy had strewn in his wake.

When due account is taken of the balance of the forces, and the hardening resistance, it becomes clear that the termination of the Axis offensive was very well judged. To press it any further would have been folly in face of the vastly superior strength by now assembled on the Allied side. Materially, the profits of the offensive were large in comparison with its cost — over 4,000 prisoners had been taken at the price of little more than a thousand casualties, and some 200 tanks destroyed or disabled at an even smaller ratio of loss. Thus as a ‘limited objective’ stroke it had been a brilliant success. But it had fallen short of, although coming dangerously near to, the strategic object of producing an Allied retreat from Tunisia. Such a result would have been probable if the whole of the 10th Panzer Division had been allotted for the counterstroke and Rommel had been in charge of the operation from the outset with freedom to direct it against Tebessa. A swift seizure of that American main base and airfield centre, with its huge accumulation of supplies, would have made it impossible for the Allied forces to maintain their position in Tunisia.

The irony of fortune was demonstrated by the arrival of an order from Rome, on February 23, placing all the Axis forces in Tunisia under Rommel’s command. While this appointment to command the newly constituted ‘Army Group Afrika’ showed how the dramatic effect of the counterstroke had revived his stock in the minds of Mussolini and Hitler, its timing had a bitter flavour for Rommel, since it came the morning after the withdrawal had begun — and far too late to redeem the lost opportunity.

It also came too late to cancel Arnim’s intended thrust in the north, for which Arnim had kept back reserves that could have been much better employed in Rommel’s. As planned, the capture of Medjez el Bab was to be the limited objective, and the attack was to be launched on the 26th, with two panzer battalions and six others. But at dawn on the 24th Arnim, after sending one of his staff to inform Rommel about this limited plan, flew to see Kesselring in Rome and from their discussion a far more ambitious plan emerged later that day. Under it, attacks were to be launched at eight different points along the seventy-mile stretch of front between the north coast and Pont-du-Fahs, against the British 5th Corps (46th, 78th, and Y Divisions, with a French Regimental Group near the coast). The main thrust, by an armoured group, was to be aimed at the road-centre of Beja (sixty miles west of Tunis), and combined with a shorter-range pincer attack to capture Medjez el Bab. Though all available forces were employed, the increase of strength was nowhere near equal to the extension of the assault. For the Beja thrust the armoured group, of two panzer battalions, was raised to a total strength of seventy-seven tanks (including fourteen Tigers), but even this slender scale was only attained by purloining fifteen that had just arrived at Tunis on their way to the 21st Panzer Division in the south. Rommel was taken aback when informed of the new plan, and described it as ‘completely unrealistic’ — although ascribing it mistakenly to the Italian Comando Supremo, which had been as staggered as he was when informed of it.

Arnim’s operation order was issued on the 25th, and the offensive was launched next day — thus keeping to the intended date of the smaller plan. That was remarkable testimony to the speed and elasticity of German planning, if too hurried for such extensive changes. Even so, the best performance was achieved by the newly added attacks carried out by Manteuffel’s division, on the northernmost sector, which almost reached the Allies’ main lateral road at Djebel Abiod, and took 1,600 prisoners from the French and British troops holding this sector. But the main attack by the German armoured group, after overrunning the British forward position near Sidi Nsir, became trapped in a narrow and marshy defile ten miles short of Beja, where the British field and anti-tank guns took heavy toll. All save six of the German tanks were put out of action, and the push petered out. The secondary attack to pinch off Medjez el Bab ended in failure, after some initial success, and so did the other attacks further south. Altogether Arnim’s offensive took 2,500 prisoners at a cost of just over 1,000 casualties, but that was outweighed by the fact that seventy-one of his tanks were destroyed or disabled, while the British lost less than a score. For the Germans were already suffering from a shortage of tanks and theirs could not be so easily replaced.

Worse still, this abortive offensive caused delay in releasing the divisions needed for Rommel’s intended second stroke — against Montgomery’s position at Medenine, facing the Mareth Line. For Kesselring had asked that the 10th and 21st Panzer Divisions should stay near enough to the Americans’ flank for long enough to deter them from sending reserves northward to help in meeting Arnim’s offensive. This delay made a vital difference to the prospects of Rommel’s eastward counterstroke. Until February 26 Montgomery had only one division up forward at Medenine. He admitted that for once he was worried, and his staff worked feverishly to redress the balance before Rommel could strike. By March 6, when the blow came, Montgomery’s strength was quadrupled — the equivalent of four divisions with nearly 400 tanks, 3 50 guns, and 470 anti-tank guns.

Thus, in the interval, Rommel’s chance of striking with superior force had vanished. His three panzer divisions (the 10th, 15th, and 21st) mustered only 160 tanks — less than one would have had at full strength — and were supported in the attack by no more than 200 guns and 10,000 infantry, apart from the string of weak Italian divisions stationed in the Mareth Line. Moreover, Montgomery now had three fighter wings operating from forward airfields, so was assured of air superiority, while Rommel’s chance of achieving surprise was annulled when the panzer divisions’ approach was spotted and reported on March 4, two days in advance of their attack.