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September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every 3 seconds.
In solidarity with their Japanese ally, Hitler and Mussolini quickly declared war on the United States. It was perhaps the Führer’s gravest miscalculation and, as the British historian Martin Gilbert later wrote, “the single most decisive act of the Second World War.”
A conscript had to stand at least five feet tall and weigh 105 pounds; possess twelve or more of his natural thirty-two teeth; and be free of flat feet, venereal disease, and hernias. More than forty of every hundred men were rejected, a grim testament to the toll taken on the nation’s health by the Great Depression. Under the rules of conscription, the Army drafted no fathers, no felons, and no eighteen-year-olds; those standards, too, would fall away. Nearly two million men had been rejected for psychiatric reasons, although screening sessions sometimes went no further than questions such as
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In a message on October 13, General Eisenhower, the TORCH commander, had reduced the mission to twenty-six words: “The object of the operations as a whole is to occupy French Morocco and Algeria with a view to the earliest possible subsequent occupation of Tunisia.” The Allies’ larger ambition in TORCH had been spelled out by Roosevelt and Churchill: “complete control of North Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea.”
A newly uncrated fifteen-page pamphlet advised, “Never smoke or spit in front of a mosque” and “When you see grown men walking hand in hand, ignore it. They are not queer.” Repeated lectures stressed such respect for Arab dignity that many GIs were said to think of the North Africans as the “First Families of Virginia, in bathrobes.”
And he instructed his officers: “A soldier doesn’t fight to save suffering humanity or any other nonsense. He fights to prove that his unit is the best in the Army and that he has as much guts as anybody else in the unit.”
For neophyte troops, this first combat experience was revealing: war was fought by ignorant armies on a darkling plain.
Almost 37,000 men now occupied a beachhead seventy miles wide and fifteen miles deep. With the surrender of Algiers, the capture of Oran gave the Allies virtual possession of Algeria, although Morocco was still contested and North African politics remained more tangled than ever.
Patrols pushing into Fedala captured ten members of the German Armistice Commission—some still in pajamas—as they trotted across the municipal golf course toward a waiting airplane. Their rooms at the Miramar Hotel yielded stacks of secret documents and an ornate Prussian military helmet. The helmet’s owner, General Erich von Wulisch, the head of the commission, had escaped to Spanish Morocco, although not before a weepy farewell phone call to General Noguès: “This is the greatest setback to German arms since 1918. The Americans will take Rommel in the rear, and we shall be expelled from
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pinks-and-greens
The Wehrmacht’s entrenchment in Tunis set the stage for a confrontation between German and Anglo-American armies that was to scorch two continents over the next two and a half years and cost several million lives. Here began the struggle for possession of the earth itself, or at least the western earth, an unremitting series of titanic land battles that would sweep across Salerno and Anzio, Normandy and the Bulge, broken only by brief interludes to cart away the dead and revivify the living.
“November 8, we fight everybody,” he wrote privately. “November 9, we fight the Germans. November 10, we fight nobody. November 10 (noon), we fight the Germans. November 11 (night), we fight nobody.” Perhaps no passage written during the war better captured the agony of France and the moral gyrations to which her sons were subject.
It was no doubt God’s will, and he very much believed in God, just as he also believed “it is good medicine to one’s self-esteem to meet with serious setbacks at timely intervals.”
Captain Evelyn Waugh of the British Army wrote of the Stuka, “Like all things German, it is very efficient and goes on much too long.”
the half-track mounted with a 75mm gun was already known as a “Purple Heart box.”
Someone with perfect prescience might have seen that failure at the gates of Tunis had cascading consequences: delaying the invasion of the Italian boot by several months, preventing Allied armies from breaching the Gustav Line south of Rome until 1944, and extending the Italian campaign until the end of the war. But all that lay in the future, and was impossible to know.
“If you don’t eat for three days, canned Army grub tastes like chicken,” one resigned soldier wrote home. Another offered an improvised recipe for gruel: cracked wheat and condensed milk boiled together with two rolls of Life Savers. An officer in the 1st Division reported that the battalion cook had been nicknamed Hitler.
“How long it’ll take to finish the job?” Eisenhower hesitated. The president seemed far too sanguine about fighting in the Tunisian winter. “With any kind of break in the weather, sir, we’ll have ’em all either in the bag or in the sea by late spring.” “What’s late spring mean? June?” Eisenhower nodded. “Maybe as early as the middle of May. June at the latest.” He had committed himself. Victory in Africa by mid-May.
The document, Admiral King suggested, “goes a long way toward establishing a policy of how we are to win the war.” The plan indeed affirmed the primacy of the war against Germany. It enshrined a Mediterranean strategy, while confirming the American determination to punish Japan without mercy.
The main strategic consequence of the eighteen meetings held by the combined chiefs at Anfa was a year’s postponement of a cross-Channel invasion, a delay that probably saved the Allies from catastrophe.
Casablanca, like the African campaign as a whole, was part of the American coming of age, a hinge on which world history would swing for the next half century.
Brandishing his cigar at the photographers on the runway, he grumbled, “You simply cannot do this to me.”
For a few francs, Tunisian boys carried messages between American and Italian sentries encouraging each other to surrender; the Italians sometimes did, slipping through the lines with a battered suitcase, a sheaf of pornographic photos, and the address of a cousin in Brooklyn or Detroit.
“The generals of three nations had borrowed, divided, and commanded one another’s troops until the troops were never quite certain who was commanding them,” a 1st Armored officer observed.
Rudyard Kipling wrote of him, “At the worst crises he was both inventive and cordial and…would somehow contrive to dress the affair in high comedy.” When a staff officer at Dunkirk told him, “Our position is catastrophic,” Alexander was said to have replied, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand long words.”
Ha!
Suave, phlegmatic, and immaculate—“the archetypal Edwardian hero”—he was Britain’s most admired soldier and Churchill’s favorite general.
Harold Alexander
Thala would prove the high-water mark of the Axis campaign in northwest Africa.
“The proud and cocky Americans today stand humiliated by one of the greatest defeats in our history,” Harry Butcher scribbled in his diary. “There is a definite hangheadedness.” From Faïd Pass to Thala, the Americans had been driven back eighty-five miles in a week, farther than at the infamous “bulge” in the Belgian Ardennes nearly two years later. At least in terms of yardage lost, Kasserine may fairly be considered the worst American drubbing of the war. Grievous as the past ten days had been, the Allies had suffered a tactical, temporary setback rather than a strategic defeat.
Certainly he had done some things well, even very well. He cannibalized the U.S. 2nd Armored and 3rd Infantry Divisions for reinforcements, and hurried the 9th Division artillery to its gallant rendezvous at Thala. He worked on rearming the French; redesigned American training methods; unleashed Alexander; overhauled his intelligence operation; and parried Churchill, who had sent an annoying message insisting that the Tunisian campaign be finished by March and the Sicily invasion launched in June. “We must be prepared for hard and bitter fighting,” Eisenhower told the prime minister on
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The Axis territorial gain amounted to a fragile salient in lower Tunisia; it bowed as far west as Sbeïtla and Gafsa on flat, indefensible terrain that Rommel knew he could not hold against a determined attack. Commanders on both sides recognized that a final campaign in Africa would be fought on a shrinking battlefield—for now, the eastern third of Tunisia.
Tunisia, as Paul Robinett observed, was fast becoming “a professional graveyard, particularly for those in the upper middle part of the chain of command.”
One captain spoke for many young officers: “Patton sure scares the shit out of me.” Both reactions pleased him, and he wasted no time leaving his bootprints on II Corps. One definition of military morale is a will to fight that is stronger than the will to live; the Americans plainly needed inspiriting. “Bedizened with stars and loaded with guns,” Robinett observed, Patton “came with Marsian speech and a song of hate.” Again and again he vowed, “We will kick the bastards out of Africa.” For this task, he needed officers who “can sweat, get mad, and think at the same time.” And he needed men
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Love this guy
A believer in reincarnation, he might have been an embodiment of William Tecumseh Sherman, as described by Walt Whitman: “a bit of stern open air made up in the image of a man.” Bradley concluded that Patton was simply “the strangest duck I have ever known.”
By the end of the war more than 500,000 men from the Army ground forces alone would be discharged for psychiatric reasons—this despite ruthless culling during induction physicals, when 12 percent of the 15 million draftees examined were rejected as mentally unfit. For every six men wounded, another became a neuropsychiatric casualty.
The lessons emerging from Tunisia were clear to Army psychiatrists: “the average soldier reached his peak effectiveness in the first ninety days of combat and was so worn out after 180 days that he was rendered useless and unable to return to military service.” Another study noted that “no man is removed from combat duty until he [has] become worthless. The infantryman considers this a bitter injustice…. He can look forward only to death, mutilation, or psychiatric breakdown.”
Now came another slap, this one from the Berlin high command, which that night again rejected the field marshal’s plea to radically contract the Axis line. “To withdraw both armies into one cramped bridgehead around Tunis and Bizerte would spell the beginning of the end,” Hitler decreed. If hardly unexpected, the decision was devastating.
At 7:50 A.M. on March 9, he boarded a plane at Sfax for the flight to Rome. For over a month, his departure remained secret from the Allies, and they kept swatting at his ghost; but he never set foot in Africa again. “He was gradually consumed by the fire which glowed within him,” wrote his chief of staff. Even Kesselring’s optimism dimmed. Médenine was “the last trump in our Tunisian hand,” he subsequently concluded. “We could no longer hope to keep the war out of Europe and away from Germany for another year. One needs luck in war. Rommel without doubt had been deserted by his lucky star for
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In Oran, engineers built an assembly plant near the port and taught local workers in English, French, and Spanish how to put together a jeep from a box of parts in nine minutes. That plant turned out more than 20,000 vehicles. Another new factory nearby assembled 1,200 railcars, which were among 4,500 cars and 250 locomotives ultimately added to North African rolling stock.
In World War I, more than half of all supplies for American forces were obtained abroad, including nearly all artillery and airplanes. In this war, almost everything would be shipped from the United States, including immense tonnages sent to the Russians, British, French, and other allies. The demands of modern combat were unprecedented. Although a latter-day infantry division was half the size of its Great War predecessor, it typically used more than twice as much ammunition—111 tons on an average fighting day. In Africa, total supply requirements amounted to thirteen tons per soldier each
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“Hitler wanted to be stronger than mere facts, to bend them to his will,” Kesselring’s chief of staff observed.
Artillery booms and flashes on the screen mingled with the real thing until they were almost indistinguishable: a celluloid depiction of the battle of El Alamein five months earlier was superimposed on tonight’s opening barrage of Eighth Army’s assault against the Mareth Line. But it was the film that held the men rapt. Churchill himself had sent this print of Desert Victory, a sixty-five-minute documentary that had become a worldwide propaganda sensation in the two weeks since its London premiere.
Find?
(Churchill, upon hearing Montgomery boast that abstinence made him “100 percent fit,” replied that he both drank and smoked and was “200 percent fit.”)
Churchill tartly noted: “Indomitable in retreat, invincible in advance, insufferable in victory.”
Madame LaZonga and her “daughters” soon returned from Tébessa to reopen the bordello, contributing to venereal disease rates in Tunisia that had reached 34 cases per 1,000 white soldiers and a staggering 451 per 1,000 black soldiers.
In five days, the Americans had covered seventy-five miles, taking Gafsa, El Guettar, and Sened Station, while reclaiming more than 2,000 square miles of territory—at a cost of fifty-seven battle casualties. “It’s all going like maneuvers,” Terry Allen mused. “It can’t be right.”
Eddy later considered El Guettar the division’s toughest battle of World War II, not to be eclipsed by combat in Sicily and Normandy. The 1st Division’s losses approached 1,300. Stanhope Mason, the Big Red One’s operations officer and eventual chief of staff, also deemed El Guettar the “most severe battle of the three years of warfare,” a remarkable assessment for a division whose destiny led to such killing fields as Sicily, Normandy, and Aachen.
Evacuated to Italy, Stauffenberg was placed on a hospital train bound for Munich. His long recuperation gave him time to concoct the bomb plot that nearly killed Hitler on July 20, 1944.
On average nearly a thousand Axis prisoners were tramping into Anglo-American cages every day. Allied forces were about to secure their fifth great battlefield conquest in a year, with a triumph that would join Midway, El Alamein, Guadalcanal, and Stalingrad as a milepost on the road to victory. More than 200,000 Axis troops were now penned like sheep in a Tunisian fold measuring roughly fifty by eighty miles, just large enough to bury two enemy armies. An entire continent would soon be reclaimed and an entire sea, the Mediterranean, converted into an Anglo-American lake. If American troops
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In less than three weeks, FLAX destroyed 432 Axis aircraft at a cost of thirty-five Allied planes; the losses included more than half the German air transport fleet.
The next day—Friday, the thirtieth—Anderson told Eisenhower that First Army in the past week had suffered 3,500 casualties, including roughly 900 killed. VULCAN had cost one man for every three yards gained. Many companies were reduced to fewer than two dozen soldiers of all ranks. If British losses were heavy, so were German and Italian, and there was always consolation in that. Arnim now had sixty-nine functioning panzers in all of Africa. His reserves consisted of a single depleted tank battalion.
