The Stalingrad of Africa: the story of the battle for Tunis

Early on 8 November 1942, Adolf Hitler’s special train was en route from Berlin to Munich when it was stopped at a small station in the Thuringian Forest to receive an urgent message from the Foreign Office. A day earlier, Hitler’s HQ staff had received a “very disturbing signal” from German agents in Gibraltar, informing them that a large Allied troop convoy had passed heading in an easterly direction. Most on the train assumed the convoy was bound for Libya, a colony of Germany’s ally Italy since 1912. But its true destination was revealed by the Foreign Office communiqué: “A US expeditionary corps is disembarking in Algiers and Oran,” ports in French-controlled Algeria.

Hitler was aghast. Aware that French North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy regime) was an area of the “greatest political and strategic importance”, he asked his advisors what resources were available to meet the threat. The answer was: none.

Farther down the line, Joachim von Ribbentrop boarded the train. So concerned was the German foreign minister about the news coming from the Mediterranean that he urged Hitler to put out peace feelers to Stalin, hoping to free up German men and materials to be rushed to north Africa. The Führer refused: “a moment of weakness is not the proper time to negotiate with an enemy.”

Instead, Hitler ordered General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations staff of his high command, to “organise the Wehrmacht for the defence of Tunis”, the capital of French Tunisia, which was a short flight or sea journey from Sicily. By securing Tunisia, Hitler hoped to stymie Allied plans to trap Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel’s Italo-German Panzer Army in Libya between General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army, advancing from Egypt in the east, and the forces just landed in Algeria and Morocco to the west. Such was indeed the Allies’ plan – and the subsequent ‘Race for Tunis’ would set the scene for one of the decisive campaigns of the war.

The principal objective

In December 1941, when the US entered the conflict, the strategy agreed with Britain was ‘Germany First’: win the war in Europe, then deal with Japan. On the question of how to defeat Germany, however, there was less consensus. Prime minister Winston Churchill preferred a ‘peripheral’ strategy, containing Germany by blockade, bombing, small raids and an attack on north Africa until it was sufficiently weakened by its efforts in Russia for a knockout blow on the continent. US president Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) broadly agreed, but his Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that only the earliest full-frontal assault on Germany via France would keep the Soviet Union in the war.

The dispute came to a head in July 1942 when the Joint Chiefs told FDR that, if the British insisted on “scatterization” in north Africa, “America should turn to the Pacific for decisive action against Japan”. FDR was not convinced and in late July, after more inconclusive talks in Britain, he told his Joint Chiefs that north Africa was now the principal objective, and that an attack would occur “at the earliest possible date”.

The fighting in North Africa had begun almost two years earlier in September 1940 when the Italian 10th Army, hoping to seize the Suez Canal and create for Mussolini a new ‘Roman empire’, invaded British-occupied Egypt from Libya. Defeated by a much smaller British and Commonwealth force, the Italians were saved by the arrival in Libya of the dashing German commander Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps in February 1941. The contest had then ebbed and flowed as first the Germans and then the British took the initiative. But Rommel’s defeat by Montgomery’s 8th Army at El Alamein in Egypt on 4 November 1942, after a 12-day attritional battle, was a key turning point.

Four days later, three Allied task forces landed in French North Africa as part of Operation Torch, the largest amphibious operation of the war to date. Commanding the Western Task Force was 56-year-old Major-General George S Patton Jr, a hard-charging tank expert who felt he was destined for greatness. Patton’s objectives were three ports on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Despite a number of setbacks – troops dropped late and in the wrong place, and fierce French opposition – Patton kept his cool and, having landed by small boat, took personal charge of the operation. “God was very good to me today,” he noted in his diary.

Vichy French forces put up a stern fight at Oran and Algiers, and Allied attempts to capture the two ports in surprise attacks from the sea were repulsed bloodily. But on 10 November, with defeat inevitable, the French authorities – led by Admiral François Darlan, head of all Vichy armed forces – agreed to a ceasefire. That was too late to prevent German and Italian planes and troops from making the short hop across the Mediterranean from Sicily to forestall an Allied takeover of Tunisia.

The subsequent ‘Race for Tunis’ was contested by the vanguard of Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson’s First Army and a 15,000-strong Axis force under Generalleutnant Walther Nehring. Anderson, a dogged Scotsman with thin lips and unkempt grey hair, hoped to advance eastwards on two main roads from Algeria to northern Tunisia and capture the ports of Bizerte and Tunis. But Anderson’s British and American armoured columns were harassed by German planes, which had local air superiority, and held up by bad weather and strong German resistance to the west. Attempts were made to outflank the German defences using airborne troops and Commandos, but these were launched too late, and failed.

The experience of the 600-strong British Second Parachute Battalion, led by 29-year-old Lieutenant-
Colonel John Frost (who later won renown for his exploits at the battle of Arnhem), was typical. Dropped behind enemy lines on a poorly planned mission to destroy German planes before linking up with an Allied armoured thrust towards Tunis, Frost and his men were left without support and suffered heavy casualties as they battled their way to safety. Anderson praised their “epic adventure and great physical endeavour”, but that was little consolation for Frost, whose battalion had been “cut to pieces” on a pointless venture.

Dropped behind enemy lines on a poorly planned mission, Frost and his men suffered heavy casualties

On 14 December, Anderson informed General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, that his American troops were “green” and “unwilling to listen to advice”, and that prospects of getting to Tunis “before the heavy rains and before the Hun gets stronger than I am” were tiny. He made no mention of his own weaknesses, which included a tangled, inadequate command structure, headquarters too far from the scene of battle and a failure to intervene decisively when disaster beckoned.

Setback at Longstop

Prodded by his American superior – Lieutenant General Dwight D ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, a brilliant organiser with a “sharp, orderly mind” – Anderson made one last attempt to capture Tunis before Christmas, launched on 22 December. Despite rain and insufficient air cover, it made good progress up the lower ridges of the 275-metre-tall Longstop Hill guarding the river corridor from Medjez to Tebourba and on to Tunis. But poor intelligence failed to identify a second area of high ground and, after three days of bitter hand-to-hand fighting by British and US troops, and with ammunition running low, the Allies withdrew to Medjez. “We took Longstop three times,” noted a bitter American casualty, “but the Germans took it four.”

By now, the opposing forces had swelled to 134,000 Allies – 54,000 British, 73,800 Americans and 7,000 French – and 195,000 Axis troops (though 70,000 were service rather than combat) renamed the Fifth Panzer Army and commanded by Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, who had replaced Nehring. The Allies used substantial air and sea forces to try to throttle Axis reinforcements. Because Tunis and Bizerte were less than 150 miles from ports and airfields in western Sicily, though, it was difficult to intercept Axis transports, and by late January 1943 a total of 243,000 men and 870,000 tonnes of supplies had reached Tunisia.

As the battle raged, Allied leaders met at Casablanca to discuss strategy. Again, Churchill persuaded FDR to delay the cross-Channel invasion – this time because of a slower than expected build-up of forces and a shortage of landing craft. Instead, the next target would be Sicily: to safeguard Mediterranean shipping, tie down German troops, threaten mainland Italy and perhaps drive that Axis partner out of the war.

Also at Casablanca, Ike was warned that his “neck was in a noose” if he did not conquer north Africa quickly. To assist him, General Sir Harold Alexander (‘Alex’) was given command of land operations, leaving Ike to solve “political and inter-Allied problems”. Alex’s strategy was to link up Anderson’s First Army with Montgomery’s Eighth Army which, since its victory at El Alamein in Egypt in early November 1942, had pursued the remnants of Rommel’s Panzer Army more than 1,000 miles to Tunisia’s southern border.

Before the junction could take place, however, the German theatre commander, Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, ordered Rommel and von Arnim to attack and defeat the two converging Allied armies one after the other, beginning in the mountains of central Tunisia where Anderson’s defensive line was at its thinnest. “After Stalingrad, our nation is badly in need of a triumph,” said Kesselring.

At this point, Axis troops were holding Tunisia’s coastal plain, while the Allies were strung out along the Eastern and Western Dorsals – two mountain ranges that join in the north but diverge farther south to form an inverted ‘V’. The only way of breaking into the Allied position was round its southern tip, at Gafsa, or through a double defence line of mountain passes. The first, Faïd in the Eastern Dorsal, was captured from the (non-Vichy) French on 30 January. Two weeks later, in Operation Spring Wind, four battle groups from von Arnim’s 10th and 21st Panzer Divisions surged out of the Faïd and Mazila passes and, in a double pincer attack, defeated elements of the US First Armored and 34th Infantry Divisions near Sidi Bou Zid.

Rommel denied

Rommel tried to exploit this success further south with Operation Morning Air, an advance through the Kasserine and Sbiba passes in the Western Dorsal via Gafsa, and on towards the rail and road hub of Tebessa in Algeria, HQ of the US II Corps. Rommel captured Gafsa and 200,000 tonnes of abandoned Allied supplies on 15 February. But his request to use all three panzer divisions in Tunisia – the 10th, 15th and 21st – for the second phase of his plan was rejected by Kesselring, who also altered the axis of advance: it would now be north towards Le Kef in northern Tunisia via Thala, not east toward Tebessa in Algeria. It was, wrote Rommel, “an appalling and unbelievable piece of shortsightedness” because it meant that, instead of executing a sickle-stroke deep into the enemy’s rear, the thrust would be “far too close to the front and was bound to bring us up against the strong enemy reserves”.

On 19 February, Rommel’s armoured spearheads failed to capture Allied positions in the Kasserine and Sbiba passes. The following day, Rommel renewed the assault at Kasserine with panzers, rocket launchers and five battalions of Panzergrenadiers. They were up against 2,000 inexperienced US troops defending a 3-mile front. Surprised by Germans infiltrating along the heights, the flank company of the US 19th Engineer Regiment was the first to crack, and by 5pm the whole line had disintegrated. Hundreds surrendered, the rest fled, and some 20 tanks and 30 armoured troop carriers were captured, with Rommel marvelling at how “fantastically well equipped” the Americans were.

On 21 February, Rommel sent battle groups north to Thala and west to Tebessa, but both were stopped short of their objectives by stout Allied resistance. Believing the enemy had grown “too strong for the attack to be maintained”, Rommel ordered a withdrawal through the Kasserine Pass. He was convinced that, but for Kesselring’s caution, they might have been able to “thrust far beyond” Tebessa to the north before meeting any serious opposition. In just eight days, the Axis forces had advanced up to 80 miles, taken more than 4,000 prisoners and destroyed nearly 200 tanks. But they had failed to win a decisive victory – and the tide in Tunisia now turned against them.

In just eight days, the Axis forces had advanced up to 80 miles and destroyed nearly 200 tanks

Promoted to command the newly formed Army Group Afrika, Rommel fought his final battle at Medenine in southern Tunisia on 6 March. He attacked Montgomery’s veteran Eighth Army from three directions with all his remaining armour – 160 panzers – but was stopped in his tracks by well-sited anti-tank guns, artillery and tanks. “Rommel absolutely bought it yesterday,” Monty crowed to Alex on 7 March. “He lost over 30 tanks knocked out, many more hit and damaged.”

On 9 March, convinced that the campaign was lost, Rommel flew to Hitler’s southern Werwolf HQ, at Vinnitsa (now Vinnytsia) in Ukraine, to persuade the Führer to withdraw all Axis forces from Tunisia before it was too late. Hitler, basking in the glow of Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein’s successful counter-offensive against the Soviets at Kharkiv (which put a temporary halt to the retreat after Stalingrad), said no. Tunis, he declared, “is a strategic position of the first order. It is of decisive importance for the outcome of the war, and all available resources must be used to hold it.” Rommel was sent to a sanatorium to recover his health, never to return to north Africa.

Axis fate sealed

There were more tough battles ahead, but the fate of the Axis garrison – now commanded by von Arnim – was sealed. Tunis finally fell on 7 May, following a brilliantly planned two-day Allied offensive known as Operation Strike. This assault deployed armour, infantry, artillery and tactical air support in overwhelming force to punch a hole through the Axis defences in the Medjerda valley and reach the French Tunisian capital in just two days.

The end came on 13 May: Maresciallo d’Italia Giovanni Messe surrendered the remnants of his First Italian Army to Bernard Freyberg, commander of the British X Corps, north of Enfidaville (now Enfidha). Von Arnim and his staff had been captured a day earlier. “Sir, we are masters of the north African shores,” Alex reported to Churchill, who was ecstatic: “We have struck a blow equal to Stalingrad,” he told the US Congress on 19 May.

For the Western Allies, the scale of the Tunisian victory was unprecedented. At a cost of just over 70,000 casualties – including 10,000 dead – they had captured more than a quarter of a million Axis troops. The victory “signified to friend and foe alike”, wrote Ike, “that the Allies were at last upon the march”. It also welded together a team of Allied commanders – including Ike himself, Patton, Omar N Bradley, Alex, Monty and Arthur Coningham – that would go on to direct all major Allied operations in the Mediterranean and Europe for the rest of the war.

The battle for Tunisia was one of three Axis defeats in early 1943 that changed the course of the war

With Stalingrad in Russia and Guadalcanal in the Pacific, the battle for Tunisia was one of three Axis defeats in 1943 that changed the course of the war. Historians have recognised the significance of the others, but Tunisia is often either ignored or characterised as a sideshow. Yet it ended Axis seapower in the Mediterranean and destroyed more than 2,400 Axis aircraft, 40 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s strength. More German and Italian troops were captured in Tunisia than at Stalingrad. Such was the scale of the defeat that the German public dubbed it ‘Tunisgrad’.

Ultimately, the catastrophe led to the dissolution of the German-Italian Axis in Europe. For Hitler, it was the beginning of the end.