A World at Arms (88 page)

The third possibility was an Axis offensive which used the armored units of
both
armies first against one of the two Allied forces and thereafter against the other. The obvious sequence would be to defeat the Allies in Tunisia first and then the 8th Army as it came through Libya into Tunisia. It was this which the Germans decided to try to do, striking at the southern end of the Allied Tunisian front. This would require the shortest movement for Rommel’s units, would strike the Allied forces at the point where they were numerically weakest, and open up the possibility of a drive into the rear of the British 1st Army in northern Tunisia, which frontal attacks in the north could keep from intervening. Success for the Germans depended on getting into Africa enough supplies and soldiers to nourish a real offensive, speed to take advantage of the interval between the arrival of Rommel’s army in southern Tunisia and the arrival in force of the British 8th Army, and careful coordination between the two Axis forces.

The last of these conditions was never met at all. The German army in Tunisia was able to push the Allies back into less favorable positions in the early weeks of 1943, in part because they had a temporary numerical superiority over the Allies on the central and southern sections of the front, in part because the French troops on the Allied side were very poorly equipped, and in part because neither the American nor the British units involved were led or fought particularly well.
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But when it came to changing from local attacks on specific objectives to a general offensive, Axis coordination was hopelessly faulty. Directives from the central German and Italian headquarters were confused, the Germans and Italians were repeatedly at odds with each other, and the two senior German commanders were never in agreement on anything, with Rommel not only arguing for plans that differed from those advocated by von Amim but from the directives from the German theater commander, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, as well.
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As for the supplies and reinforcements, the Germans and Italians made really quite enormous efforts to provide these by sea and by air during January and February. In the face of an Allied campaign against their shipping, and the shortage of oil which immobilized most of the Italian navy, they pushed through some tonnage and troops, losing heavily in the process. An airlift involving some two hundred of the standard German transport planes, the three engined JU-52 – and fifteen of the huge six–engine ME-323 –delivered a small but steady stream of supplies and replacements until April when the Allied air force came to be able to inflict prohibitive losses on the German air force.
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Everything then depended on speed. The Germans hoped to break rapidly through either the Sbiba or Kasserine Pass into the rear of the British 1st Army by seizing Le Kef. The assault at Sbiba on February 19 was halted by the primarily American forces defending the pass, so that the next day Rommel concentrated on Kasserine Pass where his forces had done better in the first attack. They took the pass on the 20th, defeating the American defenders, and in the following days pushed north and west on the paths leading out of the pass. On both the route north to Thala and that west to Tebessa American and British forces held the Germans on the 21st and 22nd. The Americans had lost heavily, but there was no breakthrough as the Germans had planned. Rather than engage in a continued frontal assault on the stiffening United States and British lines, Rommel now withdrew in order to collect his forces for a thrust at the advance units of the British 8th Army before that army could bring the bulk of its strength to bear in the south.
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The American tactical defeat at Kasserine Pass and its two thousand casualties had three repercussions, one immediate, the other two more lasting. The immediate effect was a series of personnel changes. The American corps commander was relieved, as was the British officer heading Allied intelligence. The new American commanders who came to the fore as a result, especially General George Patton and General Omar Bradley, would go on to higher postings and greater fame;
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the new chief of intelligence, General Kenneth Strong, once British military attaché in Berlin, would hold the same position in Eisenhower’s staff in the invasion of France. The two more lasting effects were on the American and British thereafter. The American army learned a great many
useful tactical lessons, some applied in battle thereafter and many incorporated into the training of new divisions in the United States and the specifications for American equipment.
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The higher commanders of the British army drew an entirely different and fatefully flawed lesson from this event. Both General Montgomery and Field Marshal Alexander, who in February was appointed to command all the ground forces in North Africa now called 18th Army Group, concluded that the Americans were hopelessly trained and led, made poor soldiers, and were unlikely to improve quickly in either performance or leadership.
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It is difficult to understand why they found it so hard to comprehend that the Americans’ taking several months to learn what it had taken their own army and its leaders three years was a good, not a bad, sign for the Allied cause. On the basis of their assessment, they would make a disastrous error in the Sicilian campaign. Thereafter, Alexander, who kept his opinions on this subject quiet until he revised them, would always get along well with the Americans, while Montgomery, who probably never revised his opinion and at times voiced it, never could develop a harmonious relationship with American–or Canadian–commanders.

The withdrawal of the German assault forces from the Kasserine front was designed to enable Rommel to strike quickly at the advance units of the British 8th Army, slowly following him across Libya, before the full weight of that army could be gathered. The German commander had wanted to go all the way back to the narrow line at the Wadi Akarit where only a slender coastal strip offered an invasion route between the Mediterranean and a vast inland lake, but he had been ordered to hold the Mareth Line, an old set of French defenses which the Germans and Italians now rebuilt and reinforced. To strike at Montgomery’s advance guard, he gathered his armored units for an assault on the Medenine area. The British knew from intelligence that this attack was coming and defeated it handily on March 16.
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Between Rommel’s attacks at Kasserine and Medenine, the Germans under von Arnim had also launched attacks in the north against the British, making substantial gains but suffering losses they could not afford. The stage was now set for the final steps in the campaign.

The Allies had built up their supplies and had even made a beginning of helping the French sort out their internal quarrels. New airfields had been built so that better air support was available. The plan now was for the British, French and American forces to hit at the Axis lines in north and central Tunisia while 8th Army assaulted from the south. The initial 8th Arnl Y attack on the right flank of the Axis position failed to penetrate and had to be withdrawn, but the New Zealanders on the left
had pushed rapidly and successfully around the Mareth position by March 22. Montgomery now shifted his axis of attack and reinforced the push inland behind the New Zealanders. The result was that the Axis army defending the Mareth line had to pull back or risk being cut off. Their blocking forces held long enough to enable what was now called the 1st Italian Army under General (later Field Marshal) Giovanni Messe to escape once again.
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The British assault had been assisted by the American attack to the north, which had drawn one of the German armored divisions away from their front, but the British battered rather than crushed the army in front of them.
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Whatever the defects of the operation at the Mareth line, it had so weakened the Axis forces that when the 8th Army attacked the line at the Wadi Akarit on April 6, the defenders crumbled in one day. By April 13, the 8th Army was before Enfidaville, and the Axis forces had been compressed into a small perimeter defense around Tunis and Bizerta. The Allied plan for the final assault had two features worth noting. In the first place, it appeared to Eisenhower and Alexander to make the most sense to have the major offensive, which was to begin on April 19, launched by the British 1st rather than the 8th Army. The latter had had plenty of experience in the desert, the former in the rugged Tunisian terrain. This judgement was certainly confirmed by the event, as Montgomery on several occasions halted the operations of 8th Army, which had been designed to hold the Axis forces facing it, at times which were very bad for the over–all plan. Because of the need to amass a powerful attack force, however, several of 8th Army’s most experienced divisions were transferred to 1st Army and took part in its offensive .

The second unusual feature of the Allied plan was the transfer of the bulk of the American II Corps from the southern to the northern end of the front across the whole supply and communication routes of the British 1st Army.
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To make certain that the American officers and men received the needed further battle experience, the American contingent was to be allocated a section in the offensive instead of being squeezed out as the front contracted. The huge transfer was made successfully, though the lesson that such a procedure was entirely possible appears to have been lost on the participants, as later developments would show.

The Allies, in preparation for the final assault, also took measures by sea and air to prevent an evacuation of the Axis forces, but in this they misjudged Axis intentions. Almost to the last moment, the
Germans were bringing troops and supplies
into
Tunisia, and no preparations whatever were made for any evacuation. The hope was that the bridgehead could hold and keep the Allies tied down for months; it was assumed that any evacuation preparations would only lower morale.

When the Allies struck in April, the British 1st Army and United States II Corps battled their way forward while 8th Army soon called off its assaults. The 1st Army headed for Tunis, broke the German bridgehead into two portions, and courteously allowed the French units attached to it the honor of clearing the capital. The Americans had learned a great deal, mastered the difficult terrain and the fiercely resisting Germans on their front, and freed Bizerta, also quickly turning it over to French units. Running out of supplies and battered by Allied ground forces and the efficiently managed overwhelming Allied air force,
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the Axis units fell apart after their initial strong resistance had been broken. Instead of trying to hold out in the Cape Bon area or elsewhere, both German and Italian troops after May 3 surrendered in increasing numbers. The numbers, in fact, increased more rapidly than the Allies had expected. Only about 800 Axis soldiers managed to escape, and in about ten days some 275,000 German and Italian soldiers walked, drove, or rode donkeys into prisoner of war enclosures that repeatedly had to be expanded. It was the largest haul of Axis prisoners in the war to date.

The Western Allies had attained their objective in North Africa but not as quickly as they had hoped. In the process, they had learned some hard lessons in the problems of fighting as Allies with all the difficulties of such an arrangement. They now had some experience in this form of warfare at times of both advances and set-backs, disasters and triumphs, daring strikes and grinding positional warfare. It was experience that would be critical to their future success in the invasion of Sicily, already in the final planning stage, and thereafter. The Americans had begun to learn the realities of fighting experienced and determined soldiers in modern war, a learning process better carried out at a distance from the enemy’s main center of resistance than closer to it.

In victory, even the French began to work together, with Giraud and de Gaulle forming the French Committee of National Liberation which the British, United States and Soviet governments then recognized as a de facto government and which pulled together the areas earlier under de Gaulle with those in Northwest Africa. The great issue which underlay the cleavage–whether to overlook or to punish
the earlier identification with the Vichy regime of most of Giraud’s associates–would continue to divide Frenchmen. But they could begin to work together.

The Axis had lost its hold on parts of North Africa, two armies, and vast quantities of supplies, shipping and airplanes. Its cohesion was strained to the limit as Italian morale was hit by the loss of the last portion of the country’s African empire. Time and again Mussolini and other Italian leaders had urged Germany to make peace on the Eastern Front so that all Axis forces could concentrate on fighting Britain and the United States, a subject that is discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this chapter. The Germans had always rejected this concept and were instead planning a new summer offensive in the East in the very days that the Axis forces in North Africa were surrendering by the tens of thousands.

On only one point did the Germans learn something from the disaster. Between October 1942 and June 1943 they lost 1419 transport planes; they now established an air transport command for the first time in the war.
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The great loss of precious transport planes had been caused by two simultaneous heavy demands on their limited fleet of such aircraft: the need to supply the campaign in Tunisia and the effort to supply the army cut off in Stalingrad.

“URANUS”: THE SOVIET STALINGRAD OFFENSIVE

From mid-September to mid-November, while the German army ground its way into Stalingrad, the Soviet high command had worked to build up its forces for the “Uranus” operation designed to cut off the Germans in the area. The internal mechanism of the Red Army was tightened by a dramatic reduction in the power of the commissars and a heavier reliance on the professional officers, symbolized by the decree of October 9, 1942 which at least nominally gave full responsibility to the commanders and Chiefs of Staff.
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The full mobilization of manpower rebuilt the Red Army to a front line strength of 6.5 million at a time when Germany and its allies could field about 4 million. In spite of the fact that the Germans had overrun additional Soviet territory of great economic importance in terms of both industrial plants and mineral resources, Soviet industry was able to increase production of planes, tanks, and guns. What is perhaps more important than the increase in numbers is that a far higher proportion of the tanks and planes was of the more modem models. In all categories, the Soviet Union by itself was out–producing the Germans.
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The Soviet plan for “Uranus” took advantage of the geographic and
military advantages on their side and the disadvantages of their enemies, though these disadvantages might have been ameliorated by the Germans if they had exercised some insight and judgement, the former missing from German army intelligence, the latter from both Hitler and his military advisors. The geographic advantage was that the bulge toward Stalingrad practically invited a pincer attack. It was accentuated by the fact that on the northern flank the Red Army had retained bridgeheads across the Don, especially at Serafimovich, and had actually expanded these during the fighting inside Stalingrad. The northern pincer of the offensive, the new Southwest Front of General Vatutin, could therefore begin massing its assault forces across the river even while Red Army engineers built additional bridges for the supplies and reserve units needed to nourish any move into the rear of the Axis troops.