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previous: Chapter 9 This webpage reproduces part of Giraud and the African Scene by G. Ward Price The Macmillan Company, 1944 The text is in the public domain. This text has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 11

 p222  Chapter X

American Battles
and the Final Victory

The end of the first month of 1943 saw the start of the enemy offensive which General Giraud foretold.

On January 30th the Germans launched an attack on the French position at the Faid Pass, the most easterly gap in the Allied front on the road running west from Sfax towards Tebessa. Eighty tanks of the Tenth Panzer Division and part of the Afrika Korps were suddenly flung upon the Moroccan Division holding this pass. Lacking anti‑tank guns, without enough air support, and short even of ammunition for their rifles, the French troops held on with remarkable tenacity for thirty‑six hours. The French officer commanding on this sector afterwards reported to General Giraud as follows:

"The help that was expected from the American Air Force, tanks and anti‑tank units did not arrive, or came too late. Had it been present in sufficient strength, at an early stage of the engagement, the attack could have been stopped. To these deficiencies was due the loss of Faid, and of a large number of good soldiers."

At last, when two battalions had been completely surrounded, and the rest had suffered heavy casualties the French troops were forced to retire •about ten miles, from Faid to Sidi-Bou‑Zid.

This withdrawal was made more difficult by shortage of motor-transport. One French officer with thirteen trucks ran to and fro all night, evacuating three battalions. He lost only one truck in the process, but it contained the entire supply of the automatic weapons of one battalion.

The enemy's seizure of the Faid Pass caused much anxiety to General Anderson, the British general in command of the whole front. He felt he was not strong enough to hold so extended a line as the Allied troops occupied. He consequently decided to shorten it in the south.

 p223  Overruling the protests of General Koeltz, the commander of the French 19th Army Corps, he evacuated Gafsa on February 6th and drew his right flank back to Feriana, a town in the plain just below the pass through the hills in general to Tebessa, which was the main supply-base of the American sector.

On February 14th, the Germans renewed their attack on Sidi-Bou‑Zid. This time the American tanks at Sbeitla advanced to meet them, supporting two of their battalions which were entrenched on a couple of isolated hills, one called Djebel Lessouda, •five miles north of Sidi-Bou‑Zid, and the other Djebel Ksaira, about the same distance to the east.

As the German armoured column began to debouch from the mouth of the Faid Pass, twenty American Shermans of the First Armoured Division charged forward, in close order, to attack it. Inexperience of the enemy's tactics sealed their doom. Instead of accepting battle, the leading German light tanks fanned out right and left, revealing in their rear several batteries of 88‑millimetre guns, deadly as tank-killers. The Shermans at once found themselves under fire from ahead and from both flanks.

Every one of them was knocked out, and the attacking German armoured division swept on through the little town of Sidi-Bou‑Zid, where General Eisenhower himself had been only two hours before on a visit to the forward positions.

This advance cut off the two American battalions on the hills facing the outlet from the Faid Pass. The one on Djebel Lessouda was well hidden away among rocks and in slit-trenches. It had seen the slaughter of its own tanks on the plain below, and the German motorised infantry pouring out of the Faid Pass onto the ground which had thus been cleared of resistance. But, though this was their first real battle, it never occurred to these American soldiers to budge. They stayed where they were while the Germans pushed on and surrounded their hill. Occasionally they would open fire on enemy detachments that offered good targets. They sniped the gun crews of one of the batteries that had knocked out the Sherman tanks and had then advanced to the foot of the hill whose crest the United States battalion occupied.

 p224  Oddly enough, the Germans paid little attention to them. Possibly they could not believe that six hundred men had remained behind on that isolated hilltop. The German General was too busy pushing on after the retreating remainder of the American force to pay much attention to what he probably thought were just a few stragglers well behind his own front.

So for two days this battalion from the Midwest hung on in the midst of the German force. On the third night they took a desperate chance. Led by their commander, Major Robert R. Moore, of Iowa, they crept stealthily down the hill in the darkness, passing so close to some German guns that one of their officers​a afterwards claimed he could have touched them.

When they reached the foot of the slope, they had •ten miles of enemy-occupied territory to cross before getting back to their own lines. Major Moore knew that they could not hope to sneak through unnoticed. So he gave the bold order to march in formation along the crown of the road; after all, no German sentry would be likely to suspect a column of troops approaching his post from the rear in the dark as being anything but friendly.

This bluff succeeded. At one or two points, the Americans did draw fire from distant outposts because they gave no reply to shouted challenges. Nor did they retaliate by shooting back, so the puzzled German sentries, probably dismayed by the idea that they might have been firing at their own men, took no further action. Well before daylight the "lost battalion" had joined up with the rest of the American First Infantry Division to the west of Sbeitla.​b

The other American battalion was even more completely cut off. It held out for three days, after which General Fredendall told me that he had sent an aeroplane to drop an order to surrender, so as to avoid useless casualties. Close on a hundred American tanks were lost during the three‑day battle.

Next day Sbeitla too had to be evacuated, and the American forces took up position in the Kasserine Gap, which led into the heart of the Allied position.

This Allied reverse had brought the enemy right up against the  p225 Grande Dorsale, the chain of heights held by the French, and General Anderson ordered a withdrawal to the western spurs of these mountains.

Rommel could not resist the temptation to follow up his success. He thrust forward in two directions, one to the north through Sbiba, which was defended by the British Guards Brigade and detachments of the French 19th Corps, together with the 345th American Division and part of the British 6th Armoured Division. This advance soon stopped. The other German push was made directly to the west through the Kasserine Gap, out of which the American troops stationed there were driven by gunfire.

The gap leads into a broad empty plain, surrounded by mountains, out of which run two roads, one to the west, towards the American base of Tebessa, and the other due north to the ridge of Thala, held by the British.

The road to Tebessa was barred by Major‑General Terry Allen's U. S. First Infantry Division, reinforced by some French troops under Colonel Morlière. Here the Germans were confronted by a strong position, and they did not deliver a heavy attack, though the threat was serious enough to cause all American stores at Tebessa to be evacuated •some sixty miles back up the road towards Constantine.

As already related, the advance northwards to Thala was also repulsed on February 22nd by the British Rifle Brigade and the tanks of the Lothian and Border Horse and 17th/21st Lancers.

Thus ended the most dangerous enemy thrust of the whole campaign. In mid‑February, as Giraud predicted, the Germans had nearly broken through into the centre of our position, which might have entailed the retirement of the whole Allied line for many miles.

The fighting was sharp while it lasted, and some units had severe casualties, though these were not on the heavy scale that prevailed in the last war.

What kept the operations from being more deadly was the comparatively small numbers of troops engaged in proportion to the size of the wide-open country in which the action was going on.

As a matter of fact, this warfare was on the colonial, not the continental,  p226 scale. And, despite the increasing complication of weapons, the mechanisation of war leads to economy of casualties.

If such terms as "battle" and "barrage" were used too freely to describe any exchange of fire or burst of shelling, it was due to the natural enthusiasm of some of the younger war correspondents who had no experience of the concentrated fighting that characterised the trench warfare of 1914‑18.

Attacks on isolated "djebels" which the enemy had had time to fortify with concrete gun emplacements and deep dugouts were the sternest encounters of the Tunisian campaign. Most of these occurred in its final stages, when such natural fortresses as Longstop Hill and "the Bou feature," barring the direct road to Tunis, had to be taken by assault.

These hills were so small — only a few miles round at the base — that the troops which undertook to storm them came at once under short-range and machine‑gun fire. If they were not wiped out or thrown back, they soon found themselves fighting at close quarters with hand-grenade or bayonet. It was in such desperate struggles that British regiments like the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the Royal West Kents and the East Surreys on Longstop, and the Irish Guards on "the Bou feature," had their heavy losses.

But even while these fierce engagements were going on, you could drive by day in all but complete safety to within •a mile or two of the hills on which the fighting was taking place. There was no systematic enemy shelling of the roads leading to the front as in the last war, and the substitute for it — bombing or machine‑gunning from planes — was stopped by the complete mastery of the air established by the Allied squadrons during the last two months of the fighting in Tunisia.

Rommel's armoured thrust against the British in the centre and the Americans on the right flank of the Tunisian front failed because he had not time to press it home.

General Montgomery's 8th Army was following hard upon the heels of his rearguard as it retreated into the south of Tunisia from Libya, and the German commander had to call off his daring tank-raid for the purpose of bringing his armour back to strengthen the  p227 defences of the Mareth Line, which the 8th Army was preparing to attack. He accordingly withdrew the troops that he had sent against the First Army's front and these fell back, blowing up bridges and scattering minefields behind them.

This enabled the French, with Allied support, to reoccupy Sidi-Bou‑Zid in front of the Faid Pass, which the Germans had now fortified, and also to reach Pichon, at the gateway of the next pass to the north.

In the next phase of the Tunisian campaign, the enemy attacked the Allied forces on their northern sector, stretching from the sea to the Medjerda River. His object in doing this was to prevent any of General Anderson's command from being used to threaten the rear of the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia.

French troops were heavily involved in defending Medjez and Beja from this attack. In engagements round Toukabour, Chaouach, and the Djebel Ang, all in the mountains to the north of the Beja-Medjez road, they lost 30 per cent of their strength.

Another enemy onslaught still nearer to the sea was launched down the Sedjenane road parallel to the coast on March 26th. The Corps Franc d'Afrique, stationed there, resisted stoutly for three days, taking three hundred and fifty German prisoners on March 28th by a sudden charge. More German guns and tanks arrived, however, and drove them out of Sedjenane back to Tabarka. Very tough were these French North African irregulars, and one could only pity any Arab villager who fell into their hands under suspicion of having helped the Germans.

Despite the enemy diversion in the north, the Allied forces on the southern flank of the 8th Army made a move westwards towards the rear of the Mareth Line. On March 17th, the American 2nd Corps reoccupied Gafsa, after the Germans had evacuated it, and they followed up the retreating enemy along the Gabès road as far as El Guettar.

This advance was the prelude to a combined push by the British, French and American forces in the first week of April against Kairouan, which fell on April 11th, the day before the British 8th Army entered Soussa, on the coast •forty miles further east. Thus a  p228 full junction between that army advancing from Libya and the Allied forces based on Algiers was effected. Already, on April 7th, British reconnaissance cars coming out of Gabès had established contact with the American 2nd Corps on the road between that town and Gafsa.

The two Allied armies which had come from Algiers and Alexandria respectively had been by this time combined into the 18th Army group, under the operational command of General Sir Harold Alexander.

The thrust to Kairouan involved several days of fighting, and cost the life of one of the French Divisional Commanders, General Welvert, who, with two or three of his staff-officers, drove onto a minefield near Pichon.

After this junction between the two Allied forces in North Africa, the stage was set for the last act of the campaign. At this time, the Allied line ran from Enfidaville on the eastern coast of Tunisia in a northwesterly direction through Takrouna, Djebibina, Djebel Fkirine, Djebel Mansour, Bou Arada, Djebel Rihima, Grich-el‑Oued, Djebel Ang, and Sidi N'sir, to Cape Serrat.

For the final assault on Tunis and Bizerta, General Alexander, in charge of strategical operations under the Commander-in‑Chief, General Eisenhower, ordered a considerable regrouping of the Allied forces. This was carried out by great columns of motor-transport which, owing to the command of the air which the Allies had by now obtained, were able, for the first time in this campaign, to move with headlights on by night.

The American 2nd Army Corps, hitherto on the southern extremity of the front, made the biggest shift of all, for it was brought up to the north, and took over the line from Cape Serrat down to Beja. This corps was now under the command of General Patton, who also had under his orders the French Corps Franc, some Goumiers, and a French marine battalion.

Next in the line came the 5th British Army Corps under General Allfrey, whose front stretched southward as far as Goubellat. On their right was another British Army Corps, the 9th.

 p229  Its front extended from Goubellat to somewhat south of Bou Arada.

Next came the welter of mountains at the northern end of the Grande Dorsale, where the French 19th Corps, under General Koeltz, were stationed on the lower slopes of the great Djebel Zaghouan. To their right was General Montgomery's 8th Army, advancing from Libya.

Facing this united 18th Army group were some 200,000 men, representing the combined forces of General Arnim and General Rommel.

The Allied action began on the most northerly sector on April 16th, when the Corps Franc and the Goumiers made rapid progress in the mountainous country between Cape Serrat and the Beja-Medjez road. The American 2nd Corps also advanced in this area, pressing resolutely forward over the steep and stony hills.

On the night of April 20th, the Germans counterattacked south of Medjez. They got into our lines, but were stopped, with the loss of thirty-three tanks. Then followed desperate fighting by British troops to win the isolated heights known as Longstop Hill and "the Bou feature," both to the north of Medjez. This lasted for a full week with varying fortunes, until at last the British infantry, at the cost of heavy casualties, stormed and carried these commanding positions.

Meanwhile, the French, on April 25th, supported their Allies by capturing the hills known as Mansour, Chirich, and Fkirine. They were now better supplied with tanks, having taken over the Valentines and Crusaders which the British armoured regiments had given up when they were equipped with the heavier American Shermans.

Next, it was the turn of the American 2nd Corps to have a success. The Germans facing them began to fall back rapidly, with the result that the American troops entered Mateur, the last town before Bizerta, on May 3rd. The British 9th Corps captured Massicault and St. Cyprien on May 6th, and on the following day its advance-guard entered Tunis at 3:40 in the afternoon, while almost simultaneously  p230 at 4 P.M. the Corps Franc and the Americans penetrated into Bizerta.

The fall of Tunis came so quickly that until one found oneself actually entering its widespread suburbs, where the white villas of the richer inhabitants stand in walled gardens of palm-trees, olives, and mimosa, it was difficult to believe that we were going to get into the enemy stronghold that day at all.

Even now I have never heard a satisfactory explanation of why the long straight road that runs there from Medjez was left by the enemy almost totally unmined.

The last time I saw General Eisenhower before the swift joy‑ride into Tunis which virtually ended the North African campaign, he emphasised the importance of putting sandbags on the floor of the cars which we war correspondents used. "One of my best colonels has just had his legs blown off through neglecting that simple precaution," said the Commander-in‑Chief.

It was a lovely morning of early summer as, with two colleagues and an army officer, I set out from the headquarters of the British 5th Army Corps, on a hillside just outside Medjez-el‑Bab, to see how far we could progress towards the battle. We knew that the Germans were falling back, but a strong enemy stand was expected on the Tunis perimeter, where a fortified position was believed to exist. It had been photographed from the air by our reconnaissance planes, but, when it was reached by ground troops, the entrenchments turned out to be incomplete.

The British 5th Corps had been enlarged, for the purpose of this final thrust to Tunis.

The additional elements consisted of one British and one Indian Division, together with the 7th Armoured Division, brought over from the Eighth Army, which was held up by the enemy's mountain-positions at Enfidaville.

The British, with their two corps, the 5th and 9th, had great superiority of strength for their final attack on Tunis. They disposed of about 400 guns and 550 tanks, with seven divisions in line against seven enemy battalions.

The Germans were believed to have no more than 50 guns and 85 tanks. Our command of the air was also overwhelming.

 p231  Despite this preponderance of material resources, the generals did not expect to overcome the enemy resistance so easily. "There will be a good dog‑fight before we make our break-through," they were saying up to a day or two before the actual attack.

This began on May 6th, and though on the following day one knew that it had made good progress, there was nothing in the reports from the front line to suggest that the enemy was on the point of collapse.

Early that morning, Friday, May 7th, I should have been prepared to lay odds that Tunis would not fall for several days. I can remember no one who would have been likely to take the bet, except Colonel Solidovnik, the military correspondent of the Soviet Tass Agency. He had come over from the Eighth Army on a short visit to the First, and at the end of April suddenly decided to leave the Tunisian front. At that time the generals in charge of operations were foretelling six weeks' hard fighting before Tunis could be taken.

The little Colonel bluntly stated a contrary opinion. "It is finished here. In a week you will be in Tunis," he said on April 30th — and we were.

Since, even if one managed to get near to the city, it seemed unlikely that it would be possible to return the same day for the purpose of filing a message, I called at the headquarters of the British Army carrier-pigeon service at Medjez, and borrowed three of their birds to take along with me for the purpose of sending back short flashes of news to Army Headquarters. These did their job well — yet, as it turned out, I was not only able to reach the heart of Tunis but also to get out again and transmit my story by air‑mail to the base.

"How far along the main road is it safe to go by car?" I asked at Corps Headquarters.

"So far as we know, it's all right for •about five miles," was the reply. "There's the risk of running onto minefields, so you'd better leave the road when you've gone that distance and take to a rough track lying parallel to it through the cornfields."

This turned out good advice. The car ahead of us, containing two  p232 British officers, did not take it. Just beyond the five-mile point, they arrived abreast of a place called "Cactus Farm," which stands a few hundred yards off the road and was surrounded by a litter of smashed‑up tanks, British and German, that had become casualties during the previous two or three days' fighting.

There this car came suddenly under close-range machine‑gun fire from a rearguard outpost of Germans, hidden among the corn. Its occupiers jumped out to take refuge in the ditch, but one of them, a young major who had just arrived from England on a tour of inspection, was crippled by bullets through both of his thighs.

The Germans rushed across to take prisoner the car‑driver and the unwounded officer. They bandaged the injured major, lifted him out of the ditch, and dumped him ten yards off the road, out of sight amid the standing barley.

One of the Germans, whispering that he wanted to surrender as soon as he got the chance, left a flask of brandy with the wounded man, which undoubtedly saved his life, for he lay there all day and through the drenching rain of the following night, too weak to move, or even give any sign of his presence to the British motor-transport which soon began to pour along the road close by. Only next morning, by a superhuman effort, did he manage to raise his hand for a few moments above the corn. It was fortunately seen by the driver of a passing truck, who picked him up and carried him to a field-hospital.

We, who had followed the advice to leave the road, bumped our way across country through almond groves pitted with shell-holes and littered with trees felled by the German artillery-fire. The guns were thundering in the direction of Tunis, and a great conflagration could be seen there, which was encouraging, for it suggested that the enemy might be destroying his supply dumps.

Towards midday, the rough track led us back onto the highway, not far from the village of Massicault, exactly halfway from Medjez to Tunis.

By this time, the road had become wide open for British transport. Thundering along it was a continual stream of Churchill tanks, tank-transporters, lorries, ambulance wagons and staff-cars, all heading  p233 the same way — towards the city which for six months had been their goal.

In Massicault stood three British generals, who had just arrived by jeep, holding a conference by the roadside. They were General Alexander, in command of all these operations under General Eisenhower, together with General Anderson, Commander of the British 1st Army, and General Allfrey, Commander of the British 5th Corps.

We drove on a little further, and overtook General Keightley, the commander of the British 6th Armoured Division, telephoning by radio from his armoured car.

He was covered with dust, but his face was radiant. He said that the German resistance was collapsing everywhere, but he had one great disappointment — he had just received orders that his armoured division was not to go into Tunis, but was to be diverted to the south. The 78th Infantry Division, he said, was being "embussed" in trucks to be hurried forward to occupy the city.

A small tank battle was going on, he told us, a few miles further along the road.

Just outside Massicault was an odd sight, characteristic of the British soldier's cheerful way of making war. The crews of some tanks parked on the fields by the roadside had got out of their vehicles and were playing a game of football. A few hours before they had been in battle, and were still within shell-range of the enemy.

The next place we came to was Mornaghia, only •ten miles from the Tunis seafront. There I found General Horrocks, commanding the British 9th Corps.

"This is a complete blitz carried out by our guns and aircraft," he said cheerfully. "When this action started we had one gun to every seven yards of front.

"I am sending the 1st and 6th Armoured Divisions and the 4th Indian Division to block the entrance to the Cape Bon peninsula, into which the enemy troops from Tunis will try to retreat. The 78th British Division will enter Tunis tomorrow. The armoured reconnaissance cars of the 11th Hussars are already in the outskirts of the city. The Boche is simply running, abandoning lots of guns.

 p234  "I have fixed Tunis railway station as today's objective for the 7th Armoured Division."

That morning the British army code-names for their four successive objectives on the way to Tunis had been "shoe," "pants," "collar," and "tie." In surprisingly work time a strangle­hold had been secured on the "tie."

The early summer day had turned grey and chilly. I could see six big fires burning in the city itself, while away to the right the high, jagged, black peak of Djebel Zaghouan rose above the smoke. New fires were starting up all the time, and the black pall that overhung Tunis made it look like a city of the Apocalypse.

At 3:30 P.M. we came to the last ridge before our destination. Tunis lay widespread like a chessboard of white villas before our eyes, but between us and it ten British tanks were fighting a last engagement against some German artillery batteries on a hillside.

As we watched, British guns joined in and turned the encounter to our advantage, smothering the enemy position with their shell-bursts. By the side of the road where we stood, a smashed and still smoking Mark III enemy tank, with its driver dead inside it, lay in the midst of a German military graveyard.

As soon as the shells had ceased to whine across the road ahead, we continued on our way. A "soft-skinned vehicle" was not an ideal conveyance for entering a city where German troops were still holding out, but the chance of being among the first to reach the target of the Tunisian campaign was too tempting to be missed.

By this time we were passing through the garden-suburb known as the Bardo, where is one of the palaces of the Bey. It is a charming residential section, made up of white villas embowered in bougainvillea.

Men, women and children were almost dancing with delight on either side of the road. We passed a small group of Sikhs, their brown faces broad with smiles. They were evidently prisoners-of‑war from the 4th Indian Division who had just escaped.

At last we reached the city itself, with the sign-boards of the German Army indicating the directions to which the various avenues  p235 led. By this time the streets were packed with hysterically cheering — or sometimes weeping — French people. Flowers were flung continually into the car.

I have entered cities liberated from an enemy before, in this war and others. The excitement of the inhabitants seems at the time almost comical. Yet it should fill one with corresponding thankfulness that no British or American soil, with the exception of the Channel Isles, has felt the heavy tread of a conqueror.

Mixed up with these civilians were German and Italian soldiers. One ran up to our car. "Ich möchte mich ergeben!" (I want to surrender) he was shouting. We had no room for prisoners. I called to a British officer whose head was sticking out of a tank which had just overtaken us to ask if he wanted him. The offer was declined, and I advised this candidate for captivity to proceed in the direction from which we had come until he saw a British soldier in a red cap, who would be a military policeman, and would doubtless be ready to oblige him. "Ich danke," he said submissively, and set out on a walk which would be the first stage of a long journey to some prison-camp in the United States or Canada.

Soon, a whole procession of German soldiers, headed by one carrying a white flag, was besieging our car with a similar request. They were shepherded by a civilian holding an Italian automatic pistol. Three Italian officers had clambered onto one of our Bren gun‑carriers. I talked to one of them, a colonel, whose uniform was immaculate. He said that most of the Germans had left the town a couple of hours before.

As we got near the centre, however, shots could be heard coming from buildings standing back from the road. A Frenchman ran up, shouting that there were twenty Germans in his house with a machine‑gun, firing at anything that passed. A tank immediately ahead swung round and began shooting down a side-street. The civilians had a moment of panic, and there was a wild stampede.

A grey German automobile suddenly darted out of a turning onto the main road. Its escape was blocked by the almost solid line of British armoured cars crawling into the town. Out of the halted  p236 vehicle jumped a German soldier, a hand-grenade grasped in his fist. Before he could throw it, someone shot him, and the machine‑gun of the nearest British armoured car riddled with bullets both his automobile and his companions.

It looked as though the taking of Tunis was not going to be all cheers and carnival. Moreover, it had begun to pour with rain, and as one had to drive back at least •seventy miles to dispatch an account of this stirring day's events, we turned round and made our way out against the unbroken stream of military traffic now entering the captured city.

The main body of Giraud's troops, the 19th Corps, was still faced by the formidable German mountain-position of Zaghouan, a few miles to the south. They attacked it with a vigour increased by the news of the capture of Tunis, and, on May 11th, 30,000 German and Italian troops with all their war‑material surrendered to General Mathenet, commanding one of the French divisions.

The British were by that time pursuing the broken Germans into the Cape Bon peninsula, where, on the morning of May 13th, General von Arnim, with his whole staff, surrendered, bringing the Allied Tunisian campaign to a triumphant close.

The impossibility of being in two places at once had prevented me from seeing the entry of the American troops and the French Corps Franc into Bizerta, which took place on the same afternoon as the fall of Tunis. But I went there twenty-four hours later.

The most striking spectacle on the way was the large quantities of German prisoners being brought down to "P. O. W. cages" by American escorts of about one per cent of their numbers. They came thundering along in big motor-trucks, each carrying at least thirty smiling, robust, healthy young Germans, guarded only by a doughboy with his tommy‑gun on the driving-seat, and, at intervals in the long procession, by a jeep mounting a machine‑gun.

There were airmen and sailors among these prisoners as well as soldiers, and after meeting a hundred trucks I gave up counting them.

At places one saw large groups of Germans squatting in the fields by the roadside without any guards at all. They were disarmed, certainly —  p237 but there was nothing to prevent them from taking to the open country if they had wanted to get away.

It was a romantic sort of terrain over which the 9th U. S. Division and the Corps Franc advanced on Bizerta.

Mateur, a town at the foot of the mountains •twenty miles inland, had been occupied by the American troops on May 3rd. Immediately to the north of Mateur are two great lagoons called Achkel and Bizerta, of which the latter is the largest inland naval harbour in the world.

Achkel is an •eight-mile-long expanse of dirty brown water, while Bizerta, on the seaward side, and separated from its neighbour only by a narrow neck of low‑lying land, is as blue as the sky. Between the lakes lies the modern white town of Ferryville, where the French naval arsenal is.

The country in this coastal plain is of a broad, open, moorland character, stretching away to distant brown and grey mountains. But straight up from the shore of Lake Achkel rises a steep black height of the same name, so forbidding in appearance that it looks like one of those sinister mountains described in the "Arabian Nights" as the lurking-places of Djinns, Afreets, and other malevolent supernatural beings.

While the American 2nd Army Corps — consisting of the 1st division, part of the 34th division, and the 1st armoured division — kept to the south of the lakes, the 9th division, with its French comrades-in‑arms, thrust forward from Mateur across the narrow isthmus, past the big aerodrome of Sidi Ahmed on the shore of the lake of Bizerta — badly knocked about by Allied bombs — until, on May 7th, they reached the gates of Bizerta.

They literally are gates — heavy steel ones, flanked by a loopholed wall. They look as if they had been put up towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the French garrison of North Africa was always reckoning with a possible native uprising.

Through the gates, one entered a town that had simply ceased to exist. Straight ahead stretched a fine boulevard, lined on either side with three rows of stumpy date-palms, but not a single house among the villas bordering it had escaped almost total wreckage.

 p238  The channel from the lake to the sea, along whose shore this naval base of Bizerta stretches, was staked with the masts of ships sunk by bombing. The civilian population had entirely disappeared. The American troops were all outside the ruined town.

I met a French admiral who had been interned at Ferryville by the Germans during the whole of the campaign. He told me he had watched every air‑raid made on Bizerta.

It was the daylight attacks by Flying Fortresses and Liberators that had done the most damage. They simply massacred the German supply-ships discharging in the harbour. The night-bombing had been less accurate, and was responsible for the destruction of the residential sections of the town. It had, however, been sufficiently formidable to make the Germans send all their store-ships out to sea as soon as darkness fell, and as the nights were at their longest during part of the campaign, this considerably reduced the working-hours of the port.

The rapidity with which the end came was surprising to all who had seen the stiff resistance maintained by the Germans until the last few days of fighting. It may be attributed in great part to the fact that von Arnim knew his retreat by sea to have been completely cut off by the British Navy. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham had sent fifteen destroyers to cruise well in view off the coastline of the Tunis and Bizerta peninsulas, for the purpose of bringing home to the Germans the fact that they were surrounded by sea and land alike.

It may also be that Arnim himself had no desire to return to Germany and there be exposed to unflattering comparisons between himself and Marshal Rommel, whom he had succeeded in the chief African command.

Thus, in one week, the enemy front in Tunisia disappeared, with the surrender of 26 generals, 224,000 men, over 1,000 guns, 250 tanks, and many undamaged aeroplanes. It was particularly gratifying to the French North African Army that the Tenth Panzer Division, which, on May 13, 1940, had been the first to cross the Meuse in triumph at Sedan, and so begin the invasion of France, should have hoisted the white flag exactly three years later on May 13, 1943, in  p239 surrender to an Allied force of which French troops formed an important part.

During this six months' campaign, French troops in the line of battle had expanded from 20,000, spread about over a front of •250 miles, in November, 1942, to 40,000 by January 1, 1943, and to 75,000 by the end, when their front was reduced to only •40 miles in length. In the whole campaign they had had 15,000 casualties, of whom 6,000 were killed in action.

They had fought on the most difficult sectors of the Tunisian theatre of war — in dense scrub, on steep mountains and in the marshy plain. Despite inferiority of armament, the French North African Army had met and beaten the best troops that Germany could produce.

The victory carnival in Tunis lasted all through the weekend.

Little files of stolid, sunburnt British soldiers moving about its streets on patrol could only push their way slowly through masses of excited and enthusiastic civilians. Prisoners were everywhere, Germans and Italians, sailors and soldiers — some of them even driving themselves in their own trucks.

At seven o'clock on Sunday morning, May 19th — which was the festival of Joan of Arc — the shrill notes of French bugles awakened me in my bedroom at the Hotel Majestic — which was without light, owing to German destruction of the power station, and almost without food.

I went onto the balcony, and there, below, was the head of a long column of French troops who had been marching all night from their sector of Bou Arada on the south side of Tunis. Rifle­men, light anti‑tank guns, and armoured cars were all covered with dust. They looked utterly weary, but they marched magnificently, stimulated by being the first French formations to get home to the recovered capital of the Tunisian Protectorate. They would not know it, but Tunis is the place where "Home, Sweet Home" was written — by John Howard Payne, the United States Consul there, a hundred years ago.

Most of the population having, like myself, stayed up until the small hours, there were few of them about when those first infectious  p240 bugle-notes rang out, but soon they came pouring from their houses and apartments, the men hurriedly buttoning raincoats over pajama -suits, the women in gaily coloured dressing-gowns.

They cheered and clapped, and flung the flowers that are always at hand in the North African springtime. Sometimes an onlooker would recognise a friend in the ranks as they strode by, and, disregarding military discipline, break into the column to kiss and cuddle a battle-stained, unshaven soldier.

What gave pungency to this gay spectacle was that, looking up from the festival-scene in the street below, one saw the vivid flashes and heavy white oily smoke of British shells falling on the Germans who had retreated into the Cape Bon peninsula. But the cheering drowned the guns.

Later that morning I beheld the rare spectacle of Army, Navy and Air Force all in action at once against that same peninsula. I was in the terraced gardens of the lovely Villa Nejma ez-Zohra, the home of Baroness d'Erlanger, on the coast above the site of ancient Carthage.

Beyond the smooth, translucent waters of the Gulf of Tunis, broken only by the masts of two sunken ships, heavy artillery-fire was smothering in smoke the little seaside bathing-resort of Hammamlif. Above, British and American aircraft were dropping bombs on a mountain behind it, called the Bouc Cornu, and, while I watched, there came round the headland into the empty bay two British destroyers, the Laforey and Bicester. They swung their little turrets round and joined in the fight by firing salvoes at the German positions on the Cape Bon peninsula. Seldom has all the mechanism of human destruction — terrestrial, maritime, and aerial — been seen in operation from an observation-post of such beauty.

Tunis never before knew a Sunday like that of May 9, 1943. All the people who till then had been afraid to leave their houses, because they could not believe that the Allied victory was final, were now out on the streets to celebrate.

The cathedral was packed to suffocation with worshippers, sobbing out their relief and joy. British troops had bivouacked the previous night in the central palm-avenue of the city, lined with  p241 deep, zigzagging shelter-trenches, and were washing and changing their clothes beneath the gaze of ten thousand curious eyes.

Every Allied truck or jeep was covered with a pyramid of shrill-voiced small boys clinging on like bunches of bananas. The local newspapers, suppressed by the Germans, had rushed out triumphant single-sheet editions, containing a proclamation by General Giraud which threatened reprisals against collaborators with the Axis.

The report spread that the General himself would soon be arriving, and the streets down which he was likely to pass were soon packed with eager spectators, who waited in vain, for he did not come until several days later.

From President Roosevelt next morning, the French Commander-in‑Chief received the following telegram:

To this General Giraud replied:

---

Thayer's Notes:

a The officer was in fact Maj. Moore himself, in an interview given to an Associated Press correspondent. Details are given in The Buttry Diary, "The Homecoming", which tells the story of Moore's career, including of course the battle at Djebel Lessouda, with a focus on Moore's hometown of Villisca, Iowa.

b The "lost battalion" was not quite as fortunate as our author makes it seem. Though Maj. Moore's bold tactic was fairly successful, the battalion did suffer losses, not only before taking Djebel Lessouda, but also in its escape from the hill: a more detailed account is given by Rick Atkinson in his Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942‑1943 (excerpted at Depothill.Net, an Iowa history website).

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