The Fight Against the Champ

(See Cover)

The General was restless. George Smith Patton Jr., who had long ago boasted that nothing would please him so much as to get in a tank and joust, medievally and to the death, with a single tank commanded by Erwin Rommel, was now confined to a single room behind the lines by his lord and master, battle.

The room was on the second floor of headquarters. The General paced it, went out on the balcony, peered up and down the street, went back in, sat down, crossed his legs, uncrossed them, rubbed his big hands over his face, yawned (he had been up since 5:30), stood up, paced again.

"It's a problem to know what to do," he said. "I want to get in it, but if I go up there, I'll lose touch. Temperamentally, I'd make a damn good corporal."

Here his high-pitched voice was not "the voice you can hear all over North Africa." His bright blue eyes were not now the eyes of "that disciplinary sonofabitch." Here his two pistols were in their holsters to stay, his bloodthirsty boasts lay doggo in his throat.

He was no longer a man approaching battle. Now he was a man running a battle, the very battle he had wanted for years--against Rommel. Now he must forsake his reputation for impetuousness, and be careful; this was a battle that would not tolerate error. And now, to admit the bitter truth, the battle was not going very well.

On the Map. The General suddenly stopped his random pacing and walked over to the topographical map on the wall. There, on the curious, pudgy, hatted, east-facing profile that is Tunisia, he could at a glance see the complexion of his own battle and of the whole campaign.

In Tunisia men of Germany, Italy, the U.S., the British and French Empires were fighting. They were there not for the sake of Tunisia; no one on that terrain was defending his doorstep--not directly. But Tunisia is a threshold of Europe. Every Italian and every German on the battle fields of Tunisia knew that each day he could prolong the defense of Tunisia was postponing by one more day the Allied invasion of Europe. And for the Allies, for men like Lieut. General Patton, there was urgency to destroy this stubborn Tunisian delaying force in time to make 1943 the decisive, if not final, year of the war.

The job was moving on. A great step toward its completion had been made the week before, when Montgomery's Eighth Army had forced its way deep into Tunisia and virtually shut Rommel in. On his map General Patton could see where the Eighth Army, having succeeded again, was resting again. The masterful forced march around Rommel's right flank (see p. 27) had shaken Rommel out of the Mareth Line -- but had not destroyed him.

Rommel had pulled away almost intact, leaving behind a few Italianate droppings (the Eighth Army claimed only 8,000 prisoners, almost all Italian). The Axis armor had moved swiftly northward through the Gabes bottleneck, had settled down for at least a temporary stand at the Wadi el Akarit, a gulch about 16 miles north of Gabes (see map).

To the north, Anderson's First Army was inching forward toward the Bizerte-Tunis area in dreadful weather. Sedjenane was captured and the strategic hills from which Colonel General Jurgin von Arnim had launched his February offensive were almost in British hands.

The British had succeeded in compressing the front somewhat. The Germans claimed that this was just what they wanted. Berlin radio spoke of "the achieve ment of final union between Rommel's forces and those of Arnim," and added: "The original aim of a long prepared plan of operation has thus been achieved." Rommel was reported to have set up new headquarters at El Djem, far north of General Patton's main efforts.

This was a disappointment. People at home had had high hopes for General Patton. They had thought he might crash through to the sea behind Rommel, cut him off and, with the British, drive the Fox to ground in the south once & for all.

General Patton, standing there looking at his map, knew what had actually been planned and what had been done. Very possibly there had never been a plan for him to break through to the sea. Last week his strength was identified as one armored and three infantry divisions, and that would certainly have been a slim spear to throw at the coast. But George Patton must have had passing thoughts of an opportunity missed.

If Patton had not been ordered to try to cut Rommel off, he had certainly been given the task of harassing his flank as he withdrew northward. This Patton had not been able to do; he must have had his doubts as to who was winning the first round of the Rommel-v.-Patton match.

Patton's force was containing some of Rommel's strength, but not effectively harassing it.

On the Ground. The frustrating thing for George Patton was that he could not get at Rommel on the kind of flat terrain where he excels, as Rommel also does.

Between Patton and the flat land, as he launched the second battle of El Guettar last week, lay a final series of ridges which the Axis had organized all too well for defense ever since December.

The first battle of El Guettar took place fortnight ago, when the 10th Panzer Division was driven southeast of the dusty Arab village, and U.S. infantry was in turn driven back from its forward positions on Djebel el Kreroua (TIME, April 5).

In the second battle Patton intended to regain that height and others flanking the road to the plain, then spew his armor out on to the flat places where it could maneuver.

This was not easy. The enemy had chosen his positions well. His artillery and mortars dominated all the natural approaches to the hills, and they were emplaced in gullies where U.S. artillery could not find them. Infantry set out to take the heights and gun positions. Men inched forward and many were killed. For two days and two nights the foot soldiers tried to do their jobs.

"Those hills are the toughest sort of going," said Patton in his room at head quarters. "A few men holding good positions are the hardest to lick. We can't kill many of them. They must have gotten their mortars in there with mules. I'd give anything for one good pack." On the third day the infantry commanders told General Patton they would be able to complete their assignments that day. General Patton ordered his armor forward. The infantry felt their urgency too strongly and pressed on too fast on the hillsides, not taking the very tops.

Axis pockets and Axis artillery were left behind, unsubdued. And when the armor tried to move, that artillery and the ever-present land mines stopped them.

Every move Patton's units made seemed to fall under enemy observation. Fifteen minutes after one battery shifted its position on the fifth day, it was attacked by dive-bombers. The U.S. troops advanced, but slowly. "A man in a track suit could make only half a mile an hour in those hills," grumbled General Patton.

By the sixth day Patton's men had broken through beyond the highest hills.

As soon as they were through, Rommel threw 32 tanks at them. Volleys from "Long Tom" 155-mm. cannon knocked out three and drove off the rest, but forward motion had been stalled another day.

Rommel was moving north, and now the long awaited junction of the U.S. Corps and the Eighth Army was to be a junction embracing emptiness.

The Nearby Deeds. At one moment during the week George Patton, who is said to be a pretty tough fellow, stood in his room at headquarters and told about the death of 27-year-old Captain Richard Jenson, who had been his aide for three years. "Captain Jenson," he said, "had volunteered to go to the front as an additional officer in our tank force on the Gabes road. When Stukas came over this morning he was standing only a few feet from one of our generals. Both dived into slit trenches. A heavy bomb landed almost at the edge of the one in which Jenson lay. He was killed instantly. . . ."

The general's voice broke. His eyes overflowed. He pulled out a handkerchief. "I'm acting like an old fool," he said.

Richard Jenson was just one of Patton's boys, one he happened to know well. Out across the North African landscape with its forbidding foreign names and cold numbers--Djebel Chemsi, Hill 772--thousands of other American men were fighting and doing American things as they fought.

Corporal Robert Pond kept by his side a fuzzy little mongrel named Ziggie, which he had bought for 500 francs. Sergeant Benson Harvey, who used to be a janitor and phone operator in Nashville, worried out loud about the time when he and his three fighting brothers (a doctor in the Atlantic theater, a Navy C.P.O. in the Pacific, a machinist's mate once of the Wasp') all get home. "They'll all want to tell their lies at the same time," said the sergeant. Private Jacob L. ("Jake the Fake") Seiler reminisced about the days when he was a "mixologist"--i.e., bartender. Private Thomas Stewart planned in the greatest detail a two-week catfishing and cougar-hunting trip down the Nueces River in Texas.

A major shared his rations with seven hungry Italians he had just helped to capture. A colonel stood in a Tunisian valley sniffing at a handful of candytuft and Arabis and crimson poppies and yellow marguerites. . . .

The Nearby Lessons. "So much," said General Patton at his headquarters, "depends on the individual." George Patton was a man with his reputation, which had grown gaudy before the battle, at stake. He was a general with thousands of lives in his hands. And yet he was peculiarly at the mercy of his individual men.

The men were fighting bravely, but they could be no better than their training. If all the men under him last week had been as beautifully trained as the armored division, which he had taught, there might have been a different story in the hills by El Guettar.

Here in battle he was still a passionate teacher. On his only visit to the front last week he taught a lesson which may seem small, but which helped make one man a better soldier. One of the first orders General Patton issued when he took his Tunisian command was that all officers must wear helmets and leggings at all times. In the heat of battle, a messenger ran up to a lieutenant at an observation post just forward of a position General Patton had-taken. The lieutenant, looking very pleased and perhaps expecting a compliment, asked: "What is the message?" The runner said: "The General said for you to put your leggings on."

General Patton's infantry were Americans and they were freshmen. It was a safe bet that he and this battle would make them wiser, and that soon perhaps his meticulousness would make them veterans, capable of beating veterans.

The Distant Truths. For all these men, as for George Patton, Tunisia was far from most things they had known. It was bleak, Arab, deadly. General Patton in his headquarters did not have as much time to savor remote memories as most privates did. The last letter he wrote his wife consisted of only two sentences: "We moved from no contact to 89 prisoners. It was a nice fight."

And yet the remote things, which in their sum total are George Patton, may well have been in his mind as he paced headquarters and watched immediate success slipping northward on his map and away from him.

There was West Point, where he had spent five years instead of four, because of certain curricular difficulties which took more than blood and guts to surmount.

There was the disappointment at not becoming the first general officer in his class --an honor that Delos C. Emmons walked away with. There were the epic poems that never got published. The general hopes that they will be published posthumously.

His body had always been magnificent and versatile. In the Olympic Games of 1912, he won third place in the modern pentathlon--the five sports, horseback riding, cross-country running, swimming, fencing, shooting. He had loved polo, squash, tennis, skeet shoots, bird shooting, game fishing, fox hunting. Always he had done these things, if not superbly, at least with a flair. His rule for taking ribbons at horse shows: "If it's a civilian horse show, turn up in dress uniform, decorations and all; if it's a military show, wear civilian habit."

He had always done things the hard way, and the spectacular. When he was ordered to Hawaii, he bought a 40-foot sailboat, boned up on navigation, and sailed out. He still has a sailboat tied up against future leisure--the When and If, it is called.

If You Win. Tunisia was a far cry from his books, from his well-loved and partly memorized Kipling, Service and Burns, from his military volumes, his books on Allenby--but Tunisia was not so far from his assimilation of them all. It was ironically close to some of his published essays--his Why Men Fight, and his Secret of Victory.

Tunisia was strange and far from the American traditions he had absorbed. He had often taken his wife and his namesake son, maps, books, thermos bottle and lunch, to the fields of Manassas and Gettysburg, and he and his army of Pattons had fought the battles out. "George, go down in that field, you're Beauregard's artillery. . . . And Bea, you go over there in those trees and don't move until I tell you." Tunisia was far from wooded Georgia and bloody Chickamauga, far from the tableland beside the Tennessee where Grant won the battle of Shiloh in spite of himself, far even from the foreign forest of Belleau where the living Marines grew so tired they lay down beside their dead friends and slept under shell fire. Tunisia seemed another world, another time almost--it was the place where the Battle of Zama was fought and the arrogant Hannibal was beaten.

Tunisia was far, too, from the training grounds: it would be nice if everything happened as punctually under the Tunisian Patton as it had under old Hurry-Up-and-Wait Patton at Fort Benning, or if Tunisia were as flat and dry just now as the western training reserve, the triangle from Desert Center, Calif., to Yuma, Ariz., to Searchlight, Nev.

This fighting in Tunisia did not sound like the March of the Armored Force, composed by Mrs. George Patton, in spite

The Winter's Net. For the first time, Moscow newspapers last week printed maps showing the "official" battle line in Russia. The net geographic results of Russia's winter campaign, if that line is correct, are shown above. The net strategic effect has been to leave the Germans on something very like the line from which they started a year ago, except that they now hold all Crimea and the Novorossiisk bridgehead. The map also pointed up the smallness of Russian gains in the north. The Rzhev salient was reduced and the Leningrad siege lifted, but nothing like the hoped-for offensive eating into the Baltic states had been realized.

In summaries issued last week, the Red Army claimed that it had, in the winter campaign, killed 850,000 Germans and captured 343,525. Earlier Russian figures had stated that during the battle of Stalingrad the Germans had lost 175,000 dead and 137,650 captured. Using the relatively reliable figures for prisoners, this means that 40% of the total casualties were inflicted at Stalingrad. It appeared that the Germans had sacrificed land in favor of men, and that the Russian winter campaign had done more to destroy Hitler's prestige than to destroy Hitler's force. of the three blasts of a tank siren in the opening measures. It did not smell like Virginia in the spring. It did not feel like that night in Washington when Patton said to some officers of the General Staff: "I want to fight the champ. If you lose, you've lost to the champ, and it's no disgrace. If you win, you're the new champ."

Tunisia was different, distant, and hard. There was only once to do each thing in Tunisia. There was so much to worry about. Supply lines were long. And take the rain. ...

At the headquarters building one day in a sudden downpour a man who looked like General Patton stood on the roof. He had a tin hat on, his slicker was buttoned close up around his neck. He was looking up at a grey heaven and he seemed to be wondering.

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