How It was Done

A German staff officer, wearing the Iron Cross around his neck, stepped to the tent of a U.S. general at 9:50 a.m. on Sunday, May 9, 1943 near Bizerte and said: "What are your terms for surrender?"

"Tell him," the general said to his interpreter, "my terms are unconditional surrender, no sabotage of German equipment and no attempt at evacuation by sea. We will kill all who try to get out."

The emissary and the general's chief of staff, a colonel, carried the terms to the headquarters of Major General Fritz Krause, commander of the sector. General Krause accepted the terms, got in the colonel's jeep. On the way back to U.S. headquarters, the colonel saw Germans setting fire to their trucks. He told General Krause to order them to stop. The general did. One of the Germans snapped: "Why should we give the damn Americans all this equipment?" General Krause pointed at the U.S. colonel in the back seat. The German grew confused, ordered his men to stop firing the trucks.

Back at headquarters another German major general named Willibald Borowietz appeared and broke into tears. "I am a general without a command in truth," he said. "I have seen my division split in two and my Panzers wiped out. I have no Panzers, no artillery, not even a grenadier." The general's cheek twitched. . . .

Thus, suddenly, breathtakingly, sooner than anyone had expected, the battle of Tunisia was decided. These surrenders were the beginning of a roundup in the Tunis-Bizerte area of 64,000 German prisoners, 330 tanks, 500 guns, 4,000 trucks. Other Axis troops fled toward Cap

Bon, where their last stand was to be made. Some managed to flee across the water in barges and cockleshells.

How had the collapse come about so quickly?

Hill 609. In the first place, U.S. infantry did a job which would have done credit to any infantry anywhere -- even Russian infantry. It was U.S. infantry, supported by superb artillery fire, which unbuttoned the first button along the front -- a tough position known as Hill 609. They hit this hill with courage and craft, and took it. And when they took it, the surprised Germans found themselves forced to pull out, not just a hill or two away, but for several miles, sacrificing Mateur and eventually Bizerte.

Executor of this break-through and temporary commander of the U.S. II Corps (as Lieut. General George Patton had been at Gafsa and El Guettar, where it had been expected that tanks would be supreme) was Major General Omar N. Bradley, a top-notch infantry soldier. Tall, wiry and grey, General Bradley is as tough as his hardest topkick. He was an outstanding athlete at West Point. When a new 550-yard obstacle course was opened under his supervision at Camp Claiborne in Louisiana, he personally tested its 14 hazards at top speed.

Again the Eighth. The second factor in the victory was a sneak by important armored and infantry units of the Eighth Army. They hustled from their dormant sector on the southeastern end of the line up to the First Army's toughest sector, the Medjerda Valley approach to Tunis.

For several days, armored units made a great show of preparing a break-through to the south of that sector, until the enemy placed his best armor, the remnants of his loth and 21st Panzers, oppo site the diversion.

Then, in the darkness before dawn, men of the First and some of the incomparable Eighth swept forward under a roof of shells. Gurkhas swarmed up hills, British troops plunged into dugouts. The first objective was captured in three hours.

By 9:45 a.m. all infantry objectives as signed for the day had been captured.

Tanks swept through to the plain of Tunis -- and eventually to the capital -- in force never before shown by the Allies in that theater of war. The Germans were caught flat-footed by masterful diversion and overwhelming concentration.

Break-Through by Air. The third ingredient of success was an air assault more devastating than any the Allies had ever tried in cooperation with ground troops, and perhaps more severe than any in the history of war. In two days Allied bombers and fighters flew 3,700 sorties (a sortie is one mission by one plane). An Allied communique claimed that planes "blasted a path in advance of our ground units," and there was no rhetoric in the claim. It was literally and dreadfully true.

The path to Massicault in the Medjerda Valley was only four miles wide and 1,000 yards deep. Into that confine four planes a minute dropped their loads for hours.

Aircraft also had the job of interdicting Axis withdrawals by sea. This was peculiarly an air job, because the Germans were using Siebel motor barges -- too shallow in draft to be torpedoed, too well armed to be attacked efficiently by motor torpedo boats' machine guns, too small to be worth risking large naval units for, and fast enough (twelve knots) to cross the Sicilian Channel under cover of dark ness. Aircraft caught some by day, for the Germans were unquestionably trying to get away as much valuable personnel as possible. Late in the week the Axis was estimated to have withdrawn between 4,000 and 5,000 men. In two days Allied planes sank 45 vessels, including many of these ferry barges.

Two-to-One. Allied superiority in numbers and equipment undoubtedly helped swing the balance. The Axis radios, busy rationalizing, said the Allies outnumbered the Axis 10-to-1. Actually, not counting the admittedly large Allied reserves which never entered Tunisian action, the pre ponderance on the front lines last week was nearer 2-to-1.

At its peak strength the Axis troops in Tunisia never numbered more than 250,000, were perhaps nearer 150,000. About 50,000 had been killed or captured since the Mareth battle. There were probably something more than 100,000 left when the final assault began last week.

Eisenhower. Probably the greatest fac tor of all in the victory, and certainly the most encouraging for the future of the United Nations, was the unity of all arms, of all nations, of all commanders, of all units participating on the Allied side. This unity had to be achieved after some initial difficulties, and it was largely the handiwork of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. As commander of the whole Allied effort, he has kept himself rigidly out of the limelight, has exercised the greatest possible tact, and has contributed many ideas (the forced march of U.S. troops from El Guettar to the extreme north was an Eisenhower conception).

General Eisenhower praised this unity last week as if he had nothing to do with its forging: "What has impressed me more than anything else during my visits to the forward areas has been the perfection of the coordination developed among the Allies. Many of the early prejudices or little differences that you would expect among the Allied forces have disappeared; everybody is 100% for everybody else."

A successfully interwoven chain of command was partly responsible for the unity. Last week, for instance, the New York Herald Tribune's Russell Hill visited a "truly Anglo-American" air unit: "Here is an American group. The next higher formation is ... another group, a British one commanded by a British air commodore. This commander in turn is under another British officer, Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, head of the Tactical Air Force in Northwest Africa. Marshal Coningham is under American Lieut. General Carl Spaatz, who is under British Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur W. Tedder, who in turn is responsible to American General Dwight D. Eisenhower."

Cooperation between air and land had never been so smooth for the Allies. Said Marshal Coningham to his flyers after the victory: "The capture of Tunis and Bizerte sets the seal on your past mastery and present dominance of African air. But of deeper significance and more lasting value is the record of intimate collaboration with land forces in their battle. You have been true comrades in arms."

Just as failure and defeat had in the past done much to aggravate inter-Allied and interservice frictions, now success was furthering cooperation. Bigger challenges and greater victories than Tunisia will both depend on and confirm this new amity.

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