On February 23, 1943, Erwin Rommel stood before his staff and delivered a verdict that took exactly forty-two words. The Desert Fox, the panzer commander who had driven the British Empire across two thousand miles of North African sand, had just watched his armored columns shred the American II Corps at Kasserine Pass. Now he told his officers that the Americans were not soldiers yet. They were well-equipped tourists who did not know what they were doing.
Give him forty-eight hours, he said, and he would destroy what remained of their army in Africa. The confidence was not unearned. In six days of fighting through the mountain passes of western Tunisia, the II Corps had lost 6,500 men killed, wounded, or captured. Nearly two hundred tanks had been destroyed.
A hundred and eighty-three artillery pieces sat abandoned in the sand. The First Armored Division had been functionally wrecked. Supply depots had been overrun, headquarters staff caught fleeing in open trucks as German armor rolled through. But the numbers were not the worst part.
The worst part was what came after them. When Rommel’s panzers finally halted, stopped not by American resistance but by overextended supply lines and a British defense to the north, the men of the II Corps were not regrouping. They were drifting through the Algerian mountains in small packs, uncertain of their unit boundaries, uncertain of their officers, uncertain whether the whole theater had collapsed while they were not looking. A sergeant in the First Infantry Division, a twenty-three-year-old named Thomas Breedlove from Macon, Georgia, wrote in his diary on February 27: “Don’t know where the rest of the company is.
Don’t know where battalion is. Heard the Germans hit our artillery and got everything. We’re walking west. Nobody’s talking much.
Can’t shake the feeling we just got beat. Not lost. Beat. ”
That specific bone-deep recognition of failure was exactly what Dwight Eisenhower and the Allied command feared most.
An army that believes it has been beaten sometimes becomes an army that cannot stop believing it. On March 6, 1943, George S. Patton arrived at II Corps headquarters near Tebessa. He came not in a staff car but in a cavalcade, motorcycles and armored scout cars and flags snapping in the wind, sirens clearing traffic.
He wore his lacquered helmet liner and twin ivory-handled revolvers. He was sixty years old. Within ninety minutes he had relieved two officers, issued an order mandating that every man wear his helmet and necktie at all times, and delivered a briefing that one witness described as the most frightening speech a general ever gave. The essence was simple.
They hit us hard. They will hit us again. And we are going to hit them first, faster, and from a direction they are not expecting. The specific target was a valley and road junction southwest of a small Tunisian market town called El Guettar.
The town sat at the mouth of a mountain pass opening directly onto the coastal plain of eastern Tunisia. Through that pass ran the supply route connecting the German-Italian Panzer Army Africa to its rear depots. Capture El Guettar, hold the pass, and the Axis forces would be split in two. Rommel would lose the ability to shift armor laterally between the northern and southern fronts.
That was why the Germans had fortified it. The job of taking El Guettar fell to the First Infantry Division, the Big Red One, and the First Ranger Battalion operating on its flank. The operation was planned for March 17. The man Patton chose to carry the assault forward at its critical point was Captain James R.
Forsyth, twenty-seven years old, commander of Company G, 18th Infantry Regiment, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was not a West Pointer. He had not written tactical papers. What he had, by every account of the men who served under him, was an ability to read ground.
He could look at a ridge line, a dry creek bed, the angle of a shadow, and tell you where the enemy would be before you could see them. Company G numbered 187 men on March 14. By the time the assault launched, the number was 171. Sixteen men had been evacuated with dysentery in the two days before the operation.
In Tunisia in the spring of 1943, dysentery was not a medical footnote. It was a tactical variable. The plan as headquarters designed it was straightforward. The Rangers would move at night to seize the high ground commanding the pass.
The 18th Infantry would follow at first light, push through the pass, and establish a blocking position on the far side. The flaw in the plan, the one no Allied patrol had yet discovered, was the wadi. A dry riverbed roughly forty meters wide and three meters deep ran across the valley floor at an angle that the pre-war French survey maps showed as negligible, passable, almost flat. It was not flat.
It was not passable by wheeled vehicles without engineering support. And the 18th Infantry had no engineering support assigned. Forty miles to the east, in the German 10th Panzer Division’s command post near Maknassy, General Friedrich von Broich received intelligence that American forces were moving toward El Guettar. “They are coming after their embarrassment at Kasserine,” he responded.
“Let them come. They will find the same result they always find when they try to fight Germans. ” He ordered the forward screen reinforced but did not move his main body. The fuel would be needed later.
It was a rational decision based on accurate prior experience. The prior experience was about to become obsolete. March 17, 1943. 0300 hours.
The First Ranger Battalion moved in darkness through the foothills south of El Guettar, boots wrapped in rags to muffle sound against the stone. Colonel William Darby moved at the head of the column without looking at his map. Company G moved behind them in support, 171 men stretched into a single file disappearing into the dark. They reached the wadi at 0417.
It was not where the maps said it would be, not the shape the maps said it would be. A ditch built to stop exactly this kind of movement, except no one had built it. Ten thousand years of flash flooding had. Forsyth walked the lip for two hundred meters in each direction.
No crossing point. No ford. A man could climb down. A jeep could not.
He called for the radio operator, Private First Class Augustine Delgado, twenty years old from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Static. Partial contact. The high ridges were eating the signal.
At 0443 he got through to battalion. He reported the obstacle. He asked for engineering support or a new route. The response from Lieutenant Colonel Ben Sternberg took eleven minutes.
New orders from division. The Rangers had secured the ridgeline. The mission timeline could not slip. Move the company through the obstacle by foot and establish the blocking position.
Vehicles would find an alternate route. Forsyth read the order twice. Then he obeyed it. The Rangers were already on the high ground.
Every minute without infantry below them was a minute in which the Germans could counterattack the ridge. He ordered Company G into the wadi. It took forty minutes to get 171 men across, slipping on shale, lifting equipment hand to hand over crumbling walls. Three men twisted ankles.
One broke a wrist. They came out the other side at 0541, four minutes before first light. And ran immediately into what no one in Allied headquarters had prepared for. The forward screen von Broich had reinforced was not a platoon and not a company.
It was two full companies of Panzergrenadiers, veterans of the Eastern Front, plus four Pak 40 anti-tank guns positioned to cover every obvious approach to the pass. They had been there since midnight. They were awake. They had been waiting.
The ambush opened at 0547 from three directions. Machine gun fire from the left, rifle fire from the front, the hammer crack of an anti-tank gun from the right. The gun was not firing at tanks. It was firing at his men.
The Germans had been told there were tanks with this column. Their intelligence about the American axis of advance had been accurate about everything except the wadi. The ambush had been designed for armor. When armor did not appear, the Pak 40 crews fired at what they could see.
In the first ninety seconds, Company G lost eleven men. Forsyth hit the ground and started moving sideways, looking for the shape of the fire, where it concentrated, where it thinned. A man who plans an ambush always has a kill zone. The edge of the kill zone, if you can reach it fast enough, is survivable.
He got twelve men into a shallow depression at the base of the ridge. Behind him, his platoon leaders were making local decisions with fragmentary information. The radio reached battalion at 0601. He reported the ambush and requested artillery.
The response was that the 32nd Field Artillery Battalion was engaged on the northern flank. Air support was unavailable. Weather was closing in. Hold position.
Reinforce your left. Hold position meant die slower. Forsyth had perhaps thirty minutes before the Germans pressed forward and turned a suppressed ambush into an encirclement. He had forty-six men in or near the depression.
The Germans in front, based on the volume of fire, numbered somewhere between two hundred and two hundred eighty. The math was not good. Patton had a name for what happened to officers who accepted that math. He called it the paralysis of the obvious.
In field notes distributed to every officer in the II Corps after he assumed command, Patton had written that the enemy’s plan has a shape, the shape has a weakness, and the weakness is always in the one direction the enemy is most certain you will not go, because the enemy is a human being, and human beings protect what they fear losing, not what they have already assumed they have won. Forsyth looked at the ground. The ridge to his left was covered by German observation. The valley floor to his right was open, covered by the Pak 40s and a machine gun that had already proven its range.
Directly ahead was the main German blocking position. Behind him was the wadi, forty minutes of exposure to cross. None of these directions were the answer. The answer was something he had noticed while crossing the wadi.
On the eastern wall, roughly three hundred meters south of the crossing point, a section where the shale had collapsed inward. A natural ramp partially concealed from above by an overhang of harder rock. He had noted it unconsciously as an alternate extraction route. It was not an extraction route.
It was a flanking route. The German ambush had been designed for an attack from west to east. Every gun was oriented west. Every observer was watching west.
The three hundred meters of valley floor between his position and that ramp would be visible to one machine gun position for perhaps forty seconds before a fold in the ground cut the sight line. There was one more problem. The farmhouse. The same farmhouse the German commander was using as his command post was occupied by a Tunisian family that had not left.
If the flanking movement succeeded, if Forsyth came up behind the farmhouse and hit the command post from a direction nobody was watching, the farmhouse became the flash point. An assault on a command post with a family inside. Forsyth made the decision in under sixty seconds. He sent Sergeant First Class Luis Montoya, the oldest man in the company, thirty-four, a career soldier from El Paso who spoke enough Arabic to ask basic questions, forward with one other soldier.
Their job was to move along the wadi bank, reach the farmhouse’s south wall, find the civilians, and get them moving away before the assault hit. At 0641 Forsyth divided his forty-six men into four elements. Eight men would stay in the depression and keep firing, keep the German observers watching west. Their job was noise.
Twenty men would move south along the wadi toward the ramp. Ten would follow Forsyth directly. Eight would hold the far right flank as a blocking force. He gave Sergeant First Class Albert Drummond, twenty-nine, father of three, command of the suppression element with six words: “Make it sound like forty men.
” Drummond looked at him. “Yes, sir. ”
The flankers entered the wadi at 0644. Moving through a wadi under fire is not like moving through a trench.
A trench is linear. A wadi bends, narrows, widens unexpectedly into pools of dried mud that slow your feet like wet concrete. The men moved bent double, rifles held horizontally to keep barrels from scraping stone. No talking.
Only the flat crack of Drummond’s men maintaining fire above and ahead. The ramp. Forsyth reached it first. The sight line to the ridge machine gun was blocked, not fully, but enough.
The forty-second window he had calculated would be thirty-five seconds here, because the ramp came up at an angle and they would be moving uphill, slower. He turned to the man behind him, Private First Class Raymond Kowalczyk, twenty-one, from Detroit, and said, “When we clear the top, you go left. Don’t stop. ”
They went up.
Forty seconds is enough time for a machine gun to fire approximately three hundred rounds. None of that happened. Not because they were invisible. Drummond was cycling fire from the depression, burst from left, burst from right, one grenade thrown at maximum range, the cycle repeated.
The German machine gun on the ridge rotated slightly west. Not much. Five degrees. But five degrees was a corridor.
Company G made it up the ramp. And then everything went wrong. The German position was not where the map showed it. Between the ramp and the farmhouse, thirty meters of open ground that should have been a field was a secondary fighting position.
Four men. An MG 42 crew dug into a scrape that had been invisible from every angle except the one Forsythe was now occupying. They saw Company G at the same moment Company G saw them. Three seconds of mutual recognition, the pause where both sides understand what is about to happen.
Kowalczyk decided first. He went left and forward simultaneously, not toward cover, toward the gun crew. The rounds the MG 42 fired went above and left of the position he had just left. The crew was silent at 0658.
The farmhouse was thirty meters ahead. Montoya was not visible anywhere. For twelve seconds Forsyth did not know if Montoya had reached the civilians or if Montoya was dead. Then the door on the south wall opened and a woman walked out with two children and a goat, moving south with the practiced calm of someone who has been told exactly where to go and is going there.
Behind her came Montoya, walking backward, rifle up, watching the door. The civilians were out. The command post was occupied. The German commander was inside.
Forsyth hit the farmhouse from two directions at 0702. Hauptmann Werner Kessler had received no warning. The direction of the attack was, in the precise language of tactical analysis, impossible. The American unit pinned in the depression west of the pass was attacking from the south, from behind the German left flank, from the one direction the entire engagement had been designed to make unreachable.
His first radio call went to von Broich at 0711. “Americans have flanked position seven. South approach. Unclear how.
Request immediate reinforcement. Request artillery on our own former position. Fire on the farmhouse. Americans are there.
”
Von Broich’s response took four minutes. By then it was academic. Forsyth had not stopped at the farmhouse. At 0716 his men cut the field telephone lines running to every gun position in the forward screen.
The screen went deaf. The Pak 40s stopped receiving directions. The machine gun on the ridge lost its forward observers. Drummond’s eight men in the depression noticed the change in fire almost immediately.
They did not wait for orders. They stood up and walked forward. Not charged. Walked.
They had been holding without advancing for thirty-seven minutes. They were done with it. Company G was through the pass. At von Broich’s headquarters, the reports arriving between 0711 and 0730 were, in the words of a German staff officer who survived the campaign, each message more confusing than the last.
The Americans were north of their position. The Americans were south. Position seven had fallen. Position eight was not answering.
The artillery was firing on coordinates that had changed three times. Von Broich said nothing for several minutes. Then he said, “They did not do what we thought they would do. ” His staff later reported they had never heard him say that about any enemy.
The pass fell completely by 0800 on March 17. Company G had done what eleven killed, twenty-three wounded, no artillery, no air support, and an unmapped wadi had made categorically impossible. The company went into the pass with 171 men. A hundred thirty-seven came out the far side.
The pass was held. On March 23, the German 10th Panzer Division launched a full-scale counterattack on the El Guettar position with fifty tanks, expecting the Americans to break again as they had at Kasserine. They did not break. The First Infantry Division and the First Ranger Battalion held.
The 10th Panzer lost thirty tanks and retreated. It was recorded as the first American ground victory against the German military in the Second World War. German documentation of what happened at El Guettar did not emerge in full until Allied forces captured Axis headquarters files in May 1943. What the documents showed was not tactical information.
It was a fundamental revision in German operational thinking about the American military. General von Broich, interrogated after his capture on May 12, said: “At El Guettar I received my first true understanding of what General Patton had done with the American Second Corps. They did not fight as we expected. They fought as we would have fought.
Reading the ground. Ignoring what should have been impossible. And moving when everything said to stop. That is not something you train in six months.
That is something a commander either creates in his men or does not. Patton had created it. ”
Rommel himself, removed from African command in March 1943, broken by illness and supply failures, wrote in his personal diary after the Tunisian campaign ended in Allied victory on May 13: “The Americans I met at Kasserine were not the Americans who held El Guettar. Either they learned very fast or Patton found a way to release what was already in them.
I made the mistake of assuming they were what I saw first. I should have known. All armies are what their commanders make them. ”
Forty-two words to sentence an American army to death.
Rather more words to acknowledge having been wrong. Patton received the report of the March 17 action that same afternoon. By several accounts, including that of his aide-de-camp, his response was not celebratory. He read the after-action summary.
He looked at the casualty list. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “That’s what I wanted them to know how to do. ”
Not what I wanted them to do.
What I wanted them to know how to do. The distinction mattered. Patton’s entire tactical philosophy, the one he had drilled into the II Corps in the ten days between assuming command and the assault, was not about courage. Every army has courage.
It was about cognition. The ability to think under fire. To read an obstacle not as a stop sign but as information about where the enemy was most vulnerable. Company G’s dead were buried at the Allied Military Cemetery at Gafsa, forty miles west of El Guettar.
The cemetery still exists. Thirty-four American graves from the El Guettar campaign, marked with white marble stones in the precise geometric order the American military uses to suggest that chaos and sacrifice can be made orderly in retrospect. Private Henry Abramowitz, Bronx, New York, age twenty-two, first marble stone in the third row. His family received his personal effects in June 1943.
A wallet, a letter he had written but not mailed, and a deck of cards held together with a rubber band. The letter was addressed to his mother. Among other things, it said: “I think we’re figuring it out over here. Don’t worry.
”
There is a ridge above El Guettar that still has no name on most maps. The locals have a name for it. The name translates roughly as the place where the Americans did not leave. They mean it as a fact, not a compliment.
But it is both.