Germans in Defeat

TIME Correspondent Jack Belden, a veteran of campaigns in China, Burma, Egypt and Libya, last week cabled this on-the-spot analysis of the Axis collapse in Tunisia:

The enemy had neither the courage nor the skill for a Dunkirk. He couldn't take it. He wilted. He collapsed swiftly, miserably and ingloriously.

After the fall of Tunis, only the justly famous 90th Light Infantry Division and the 164th Panzer Grenadiers continued to fight in the manner we expected from an army. The 90th, which had been the backbone of the Afrika Korps, finally agreed to surrender--but only to their old enemy, the Eighth Army. The First Army, then pressing the 90th, turned this proposal down, and fighting continued as the 90th fought southward toward the Eighth. In the end, the 90th's commander, General Count von Sponeck, surrendered to Lieut. General Sir Bernard C. Freyberg, commander of the Eighth Army's New Zealanders.

The Germans, the authors of blitzes, could not understand a blitz in reverse. The quick push on Tunis, though it was the obvious move, gave the enemy a shock greater than that of all our shells and bombs.

From that shock the Germans and Italians never recovered. Their commanders undoubtedly had foreseen the fall of Tunis. Nevertheless they failed to appreciate what a little blitz of 40 miles would do to their own armies. Psychologically, they broke down.

The war at the end got into the German guts. With their units cut apart, their ranks infiltrated, they became utterly bewildered and could think of no plan of action but surrender. The Germans convinced themselves that they were beaten before they really were.

"Catch Them Here." One reason for the enemy's miserable debacle was the fact that his Intelligence was unbelievably bad. Many German and Italian officers did not know that Tunis had fallen. As late as May 11, four days after the fall of Tunis, German officers from rest camps near the sea started driving toward the city, planning an evening's entertainment. German ground crews found on airfields by war correspondents thought that they were being raided by Commandos; they did not know that whole British divisions had bypassed them.

Another reason was that the First Army never relaxed pressure against the Germans for a minute. As a British officer remarked: "We've got to catch them here so we won't have to fight them in Europe." Now there are about 175,000 whom we won't have to fight in Europe.

After the capture of Tunis, Anderson's army paused to fight very few engagements with the enemy but instead pushed out toward Cap Bon in many divergent columns. In principle they infiltrated the enemy much as the Japs infiltrated the British in Malaya and Burma. German and Italian units were badly split and their communications were cut. Liaison was impossible. Some corps and division headquarters surrendered before their soldiers had the order to cease fire.

Bloody Embarrassment. A British major who was at Dunkirk remarked: "Their discipline is far worse than ours was at Dunkirk. They had anti-tank guns and artillery and could have held us off and put up a better show than this. They have had no refugees to contend with either. I think this rather more than makes up for Dunkirk."

It looks as if the enemy High Command never contemplated a Dunkirk. But it is evident that the enemy generals kept their soldiers fighting by promising them that there would be an evacuation by sea. Along the coast are signs in Italian and German that say: "Concentration Point." These are like the signs that the British put up at Dunkirk to concentrate the soldiers and prevent them from overcrowding the embarkation jetties. Everything was perfectly organized to make the Italian and German soldiers think that they were going to be evacuated--except that there was no organization to evacuate them.

"They've been led up the garden path by Arnim," a British general remarked.

"It's bloody embarrassing," a British major growled. "You lose your men guarding these prisoners. How can you get on with a battle this way?"

But there was never any need to guard the prisoners. There was no fight left in any of them.

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