Americans in Battle

TIME's Foreign News and Battlefronts Editor Charles Wertenbaker returned last week from a three months' assignment as war correspondent in North Africa. This is his report on how the U.S. Army fought:

The Battle of Africa became history last week. To the U.S. soldiers who fought their way across Tunisia's dust-whipped plains and along the bald ridges of Djebel Berda and Djebel Tahent it was history of a peculiarly intimate kind, for in battle each soldier is alone. To Private Alvan Mendelsohn it was a foxhole on a hilltop beyond El Guettar, reading a magazine when the shelling got heavy by day and at night lying there waiting to know if his number was coming up. To Corporal Isaac Lorenzo Moroni Parker it was the sonofabitching Kasserine Pass. To Private First Class Michael Scotto di Clementi it was digging a slit trench beside the colonel's tent in an oasis and wondering if anybody remembered Micky Scott of Our Gang comedies. To Major General Terry Allen it was a satisfying pride in his 1st Division and an occasional chance to talk polo with a British major over a cup of tea. To many another soldier it was a grave in a clearing at Beja, in the Valley of the Medjerda.

To all the men of the four divisions that fought through those last three months it meant a great deal for the people at home to know how they had fought. It was important that the people understand the nature of their accomplishments, and the reasons for their failures. Between March 18 and the end of the campaign last week, our U.S. divisions were almost continuously on the offensive, from Gafsa in the south to the tip of Tunisia at Bizerte. They were the 1st, the 9th and the 34th Infantry and the 1st Armored Division. Now that most restrictions of censorship have been lifted, it is possible to tell something of how each fought.

Gafsa & El Guettar. On the night of March 17-18 General Terry Allen's 1st Division traveled 45 miles by truck to launch a surprise attack on Gafsa at daybreak. Purpose: to establish Gafsa as a supply base for the Eighth Army. The first shell that pitched toward Gafsa that morning opened the campaign that ended at Bizerte and Tunis. It was the 1st Division's first action as a complete division since it landed in Oran in November. So successful was it that the enemy got out of Gafsa without a fight, and three days later the ist pushed 18 miles to El Guettar and into the hills beyond.

In these steep, rocky, treacherous hills, broken by gullies and chasms, the 1st Division fought for four days and nights without rest or relief. Three times the 10th Panzers counterattacked, first with tanks followed by infantry, next with infantry followed by tanks, the third time by infantry infiltration supported by tanks. All three attacks were beaten off. On the day of the heaviest attacks the Germans sent in nearly 100 tanks, in two waves, and the first wave penetrated the 1st Division's positions. Cut off from its base, the infantry stood its ground, as only the best-trained, best-disciplined troops will do, until artillery and antitank guns drove the tanks back.

The Germans had 31 tanks put out of action that day; they lost heavily in both men and materiel during those four days of fighting. When the 1st Division retired from the southern ridge called Djebel Berda at the end of the fourth day, it was to prepare for a fresh offensive. By that time the men were so tired that, as one battalion commander, Lieut. Colonel Ben Sternberg, put it, "if you'd told a man a German was on the other side of a rock he wouldn't have given a damn." But, the Colonel added, "we could have held that stinking ground."

Meanwhile the 1st Armored Division had taken Maknassy, north of Gafsa, but was unable to push through the hills beyond. Reason: insufficient infantry. So about half the division was shifted to El Guettar for the new offensive. A dozen miles east of El Guettar the hills come close together in a narrow pass, and after that there is flat going to the sea. The plan was for the 1st Division to seize the hills to the north, for the 9th to take Djebel Berda and the other hills to the south, then for the ist Armored to push through the pass and see what it could do. This would keep the enemy engaged while Montgomery was attacking toward Gabes, and with luck the armor might get through to Rommel's rear.

It never got through, and to this extent El Guettar was a failure. The fault was not with the 1st Division, which took all its objectives on schedule. It was partly the fault of the 9th, which took ridge after ridge only to leave pockets of the enemy in its rear. The Germans had mortars sunk in gullies which could be captured only by hand-to-hand combat. They had heavy artillery which covered the hills on both sides of the pass and the valley between. And they had observation posts on the highest peaks which could direct their fire anywhere. The 9th Division, in its first offensive action, could not keep pace with the ist. Its officers, particularly the battalion and company commanders, were not so well trained or experienced. But the 9th's performance, though ragged, was no disgrace: it was up against a terrain that was ideally suited to defense and had been prepared for months.

Correspondents who saw the British 6th Armored Division break through at Fondouk two weeks later felt that the U.S. armor might have shown more daring at El Guettar. True, the hills to the south of the pass had not been cleared, but a determined thrust might have forced the pass and flanked the enemy in those hills. True, there were minefields in the pass, but so there were at Fondouk, and there the British sacrificed some 40 tanks to plough through. But whatever shortcomings were revealed at El Guettar, they taught some valuable lessons. If U.S. troops learn best by experience, they seldom have to learn more than once.

Fondouk was a lesson to the 34th Division. The task at Fondouk, 90 miles north of El Guettar, was much the same as it had been in the south: to clear the mountains guarding a pass, force the pass and spread out on the plain to Kairouan. Those who watched a brigade of Guards take the dominant hill north of Fondouk in half an hour, who later saw the British armor plunge through a 450-yard-deep minefield covered by twelve anti-tank guns and speed for Kairouan, felt that there was something essentially wrong with the 34th, which had been unable to take the hills on the south side of the pass. The four U.S. correspondents who saw that battle went to Major General Charles W. Ryder's headquarters to get his side of the story.

"The British," said he, "were damn good."

But there was more to it than that, as this correspondent learned later--not from able General Ryder, who knew his men too well to make excuses for them. The tactical plan, as devised by the British IX Corps, called for a frontal assault by the 34th on its objective while the hill to the north of the pass, which dominated the 34th's objective, was still in enemy hands. U.S. infantry works better in enveloping tactics. If the hill to the north had been taken first, and then the southern hills attacked from either flank, the story of Fondouk might have been written differently.

609, Mateur, Bizerte. One criticism made of U.S. troops is that they do not begin to fight their best until they get mad. If that is true, what happened to the 9th Division at El Guettar and to the 34th at Fondouk (or perhaps what was said about them) made them first-class divisions. The history of the last three weeks of the Tunisian campaign, of Hill 609 and Mateur and Bizerte, is too fresh to need repeating, but these facts should not be forgotten:

>It was the capture of Djebel Tahent, Hill 609, which rises like a flat-topped fortress above the lower hills near by, that cracked the German positions south of Bizerte and started the withdrawal that became a collapse. The 34th Division took 609 in a bloody battle and held it against savage counterattacks.

>The 9th Division stormed Green Hill and Bald Hill, on either side of Jefna, after veteran British troops had tried for six months to capture them.

>These two actions, and the work of the incomparable 1st farther south, opened the way to Mateur; and with the fall of Mateur began the collapse which spread across the entire German line. If the 9th and 34th had not learned their lessons so well, the Battle of Tunisia might not yet be over.

>Casualties were high. In those mountains a wounded man often died before help could reach him. Many a U.S. soldier paid with his life for the experience gained by the next man.

Because of those who learned and those who died, the U.S. has gained the nucleus of an army to fight the Germans. It is not yet an entire army: only four full divisions fought through the campaign, and those are now depleted. But they are no longer new to war. They have fought as well as any U.S. troops ever fought. They deserve well of the Republic.

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