The Cost and the Memory of Kasserine

When the Germans and Italians pulled back through the Kasserine Pass on 23 February 1943, they left behind burned-out tanks, unburied dead and an American army that had lost about a fifth of the men it had put into the fight. The bill for February came to some 6,000 to 7,000 American casualties, most of them missing, and about 4,000 Allied prisoners on their way to camps in Italy, Germany and occupied Poland. By the end of the campaign in May, about 18,000 Americans had been killed, wounded or captured in Tunisia, and a quarter of a million Axis soldiers were behind wire. This last chapter counts the cost as carefully as the sources allow, follows the prisoners, the wounded and the dead, and asks how Kasserine came to be remembered: by the soldiers and the reporter who wrote about them, by the U.S. Army, by the Germans and Italians, and by the Jews of Tunisia, for whom the campaign meant six months under the SS.

Why it mattered

Kasserine was not the largest battle the U.S. Army fought in the Second World War, nor the bloodiest. Its American losses, a little over 6,000 men in nine days, were smaller than those of a hard week in the Hürtgen Forest or on Okinawa. What gave it weight was that it was the first time a large American force met the German army in open battle, and that the result was a defeat. The earlier chapters of this collection followed it from the Torch landings (Chapter 1) through the destruction of Combat Command A at Sidi Bou Zid (Chapter 3), the fight in the pass (Chapter 5), the stand at Thala and Djebel el Hamra (Chapter 6) and the recovery under Patton and Bradley that ended with the Axis surrender in May (Chapter 8).

This chapter is about what came after the shooting. Numbers come first, because the numbers of Kasserine are more uncertain than most readers expect, and because they are often quoted wrongly. Then come the people behind the numbers: the men who went into German and Italian cages and spent two years there; the wounded and the medical chain that carried them back to Algeria; the dead, and the improvised system that buried them and the permanent cemetery at Carthage that now holds many of them. The second half of the chapter is about memory. It follows Ernie Pyle, whose columns from Tunisia shaped how Americans at home understood the defeat; the U.S. Army, which turned Kasserine into a standing lesson about the price of being unready; Rommel and the German and Italian memory of the campaign; and the Jews of Tunisia, who lived for six months under an SS commando led by a man who was never brought to trial. It ends on the ground itself, with what survives at Kasserine, Thala and Sbeitla and how, and whether, a visitor can see it today.

Throughout, the rule is the one followed in the earlier chapters. Where sources disagree, the range is given with the names of those who give it. Contemporary records, later recollections and historians’ reconstructions are kept apart. And where a story has grown in the telling, the record is set beside it.

Counting the American cost of February

The figure most often quoted for American losses in the Kasserine battles is about 6,300: some 300 killed, 3,000 wounded and 3,000 missing, nearly all of the missing in fact prisoners. It comes from Martin Blumenson’s essay on Kasserine in America’s First Battles (1986), which also gives the materiel lost by II Corps: 183 tanks, 104 half-tracks, 208 guns and 512 trucks and other motor vehicles, some of them captured and put to use by the Germans. Blumenson adds that about 7,000 replacements were needed to bring the units back to strength (Blumenson, 1986, p. 261, as cited in Wikipedia, “Battle of the Kasserine Pass”). Other careful writers round differently. Encyclopaedia Britannica gives about 6,500 American casualties in a total of about 10,000 Allied casualties among some 30,000 Allied troops engaged; Stephen Budiansky, writing for HistoryNet, puts the American loss at “nearly 7,000 men.” A fair statement is that the U.S. Army lost between about 6,000 and 7,000 men in the February battles, with the dead numbering in the low hundreds and the prisoners in the low thousands.

The reason for the uncertainty is the shape of the battle. Most American losses came not in the pass on 19 and 20 February but in the first four days, at Sidi Bou Zid, Djebel Lessouda and Djebel Ksaira, where whole battalions of the 1st Armored Division and the 168th Infantry were surrounded and taken. The U.S. Army’s own brochure on the campaign puts the loss in those first days at 2,546 missing, 103 tanks, 280 vehicles, 18 field guns, three antitank guns and an entire antiaircraft battery (Anderson, Tunisia, CMH, 1993, p. 16). Missing men are hard to count. Some walked back to the American lines days later; some were dead on the battlefield and were not found until the ground was retaken in late February and March; most had been marched east as prisoners. Unit morning reports, written in retreat, were often incomplete. The figures therefore firmed up only over weeks, as men turned up, bodies were identified and the Red Cross lists of prisoners arrived through Geneva.

The materiel losses were heavier in proportion than the losses in men. Of the materiel, a good deal was not destroyed but abandoned, much of it in working order: the gasoline dumps and supply depots at Sbeitla, Fériana and Thelepte were burned or left behind, and when the Axis took Kasserine they captured more than 215 cubic meters (57,000 U.S. gallons) of gasoline and lubricants and about 45 tons of ammunition (Howe, Northwest Africa, ch. XXIV).

The Allies’ partners suffered too. The French troops in the sector, poorly equipped and already worn by the fighting of January, lost about 500 men (Blumenson, 1986, p. 261, as cited in Wikipedia: 50 killed, 200 wounded and 250 missing). The British losses at Thala and Sbiba are harder to pin down in men, but Howe records that the 26th Armoured Brigade lost fifteen tanks on the ridge south of Thala on 21 February and five or more in the counterattack that followed, and that the Germans withdrew from Thala with about 700 prisoners. The German count of what they took at Thala alone was 571 prisoners, 38 tanks, 12 antitank guns and 16 heavy mortars (Howe, ch. XXIV, footnotes 11 and 17).

By the numbers

The Kasserine battles, 14–22 February 1943: losses by nation

Killed, wounded and missing (including prisoners). Ranges show where the sources differ. British personnel losses at Thala and Sbiba are not given in the sources used here and are not charted.

United Statesabout 6,000–7,000

Franceabout 500

Germany989

Italyat least 535 captured; casualties not fully recorded

What the Axis paid

German losses were much lighter. The German records cited by Howe give 201 killed, 536 wounded and 252 missing for the whole offensive, a total of 989, with 20 tanks, 67 vehicles and 14 guns lost; Britannica, drawing on other counts, gives about 2,000 Axis casualties among some 22,000 Axis troops engaged, plus 34 tanks. The Italian losses, chiefly in the Centauro armored division and the Bersaglieri who fought around the pass and at Djebel el Hamra, were never fully recorded in the sources available in English. The Allies took 73 German and 535 Italian prisoners (Blumenson, 1986, p. 260), most of them on 22 and 23 February, when the Axis broke off the attack and the Italian rear guards were caught in the pass. The Signal Corps photograph of Italian prisoners from the pass being loaded for Tébessa on 24 February, in Chapter 6, shows some of them.

On the other side of the ledger were the Allied prisoners. The German claims, compiled by Group Ziegler for 14 to 18 February and by Group Rommel for 19 to 22 February, came to 3,721 captured; a consolidated report of 24 February counted 4,026 Allied prisoners (Howe, ch. XXIV). Howe himself calls the claims incomplete. They fit well with the American figure of about 3,000 missing once French and British prisoners are added.

Measured that way, Kasserine was a clear German victory: six or seven Allied casualties for every German one, and a large haul of prisoners and equipment. Measured against what the offensive was meant to do, it was not. Howe’s “balance sheet” of the February battles concludes that the Axis had two aims, to wreck the Allied capacity to attack by destroying men and materiel, and to force the British First Army back by breaking through its southern flank. The second aim failed entirely. The first succeeded only for a few weeks: by the end of February the Allies were back on the ground they had lost, their ability to attack, in Howe’s words, “not significantly impaired.” The Americans could replace 183 tanks from the depots in Algeria and the factories at home. The Germans could not replace the fuel, the time and the reputation they had spent.

The whole campaign: November 1942 to May 1943

Kasserine was one battle in a six-month campaign. The British official history, by Maj. Gen. I. S. O. Playfair and his colleagues, gives the standard Allied figures for the Tunisian campaign: 76,020 casualties in all, counting First Army from 8 November 1942 and Eighth Army from 9 February 1943. Of these, 38,360 were British and Commonwealth (6,233 killed, 21,528 wounded, 10,599 missing); 19,439 were French (2,156 killed, 10,276 wounded, 7,007 missing); and 18,221 were American (2,715 killed, 8,978 wounded, 6,528 missing) (Playfair, vol. IV, p. 460; Atkinson, An Army at Dawn, p. 536). The U.S. Army’s own campaign brochure gives the same American figures within “70,000 Allied casualties” (Anderson, CMH). The French figure is easy to overlook. The French XIX Corps, most of whose men were Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian soldiers of the Armée d’Afrique, held the mountain center of the line all winter with old rifles and almost no armor, and its losses were larger than those of the Americans.

Axis figures are much less certain, because the records of an army that surrenders in the field are often lost with it. Rick Atkinson estimates about 8,500 German and 3,700 Italian dead and 40,000 to 50,000 wounded (Atkinson, p. 537). The great number is the prisoners. Playfair counts 238,243 unwounded prisoners: 101,784 German, 89,442 Italian and 47,017 not classified by nationality. Howe, the American official historian, gives more than 275,000; the 18th Army Group counted 244,500, including 157,000 Germans; Atkinson judges about a quarter of a million a reasonable estimate. Even the losing commanders disagreed: Rommel’s figure was 130,000 Germans captured, while Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim spoke of 100,000 Germans and 200,000 Italians (as reported by Playfair, cited in Wikipedia, “Tunisian campaign”). Most of the prisoners were taken in the last week, between the fall of Tunis and Bizerte on 7 May and the surrender of the last Italian and German forces on Cap Bon and at Enfidaville on 13 May.

In American memory the two numbers that matter most are the 18,221 casualties of the campaign and the roughly 250,000 prisoners who ended it. Tunisia was the U.S. Army’s first long campaign against the Germans, and it was paid for at a rate the Army had not known since 1918; it also ended with the surrender of an entire Axis army group and the end of the war in Africa. The campaign is best remembered with both facts in mind.

Into the cages: the American prisoners

For most of the Americans listed as missing in February 1943, the war ended on a hill east of Sidi Bou Zid. The garrisons of Djebel Lessouda and Djebel Ksaira, cut off on 14 February, held out for two or three days, and some men slipped away through the German lines at night; most were captured. Among them were Col. Thomas D. Drake, commanding the 168th Infantry, and Lt. Col. John K. Waters, commanding the 1st Battalion, 1st Armored Regiment, whose stand is told in Chapter 3. Medical men were taken with the troops they served: on 14 February an entire collecting company of the 34th Division’s 109th Medical Battalion was captured, together with most of the 168th Infantry’s medical detachment, ten medical officers and more than 100 enlisted men in all, and an officer of the 47th Armored Medical Battalion was taken with four ambulances full of wounded (Wiltse, Medical Service in the Mediterranean and Minor Theaters, ch. III).

The prisoners’ journey followed a pattern that later memoirs describe again and again, although details varied from man to man. Men were collected at German command posts, often without water or food for a day or more, then trucked to Tunis or Bizerte. From there most were flown or shipped across the Sicilian narrows to Italy, the only way out of a bridgehead the Allies were steadily closing. Italian transit and prison camps held many of them through the summer of 1943. Officers were separated from enlisted men. When Italy surrendered in September 1943, the Germans moved most Allied prisoners in Italy north into Germany, although some escaped in the confusion.

The officers captured in Tunisia became the first inmates of what would be the main German camp for American ground-force officers. On 6 June 1943 the camp at Szubin (German Schubin, earlier Oflag XXI-B) in German-occupied Poland was redesignated Oflag 64 and set aside for American officers, the first of whom had been captured in Tunisia (Wikipedia, “Oflag 64”; dzieje.pl). Its population grew with every campaign, and a roll call on 21 January 1945 counted 1,471 prisoners. That day, with the Red Army approaching, the Germans marched every man who could walk out of the camp. The column covered about 340 miles, mostly on foot, in seven weeks of winter, and reached Oflag XIII-B at Hammelburg in Bavaria about 9 or 10 March; some 400 men dropped out, escaped or were shot on the way. The roughly 100 left behind at Szubin, mostly the sick and their medical staff, were liberated by the Soviet 61st Army on 23 January 1945 (Wikipedia, “Oflag 64” and “Task Force Baum”).

Enlisted prisoners went to the Stalags, the large camps for other ranks, and most were put to work on farms, in factories and on railways, as the Geneva Convention of 1929 allowed for privates (though not for NCOs, who could only volunteer). They received Red Cross parcels irregularly and, in the last winter of the war, almost none. A prisoner captured at Sidi Bou Zid in February 1943 who survived spent more than two years in captivity, among the longest-held American soldiers in Europe. For their families, the War Department’s “missing in action” telegram was often followed by weeks or months of silence before confirmation of capture came through the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The Hammelburg raid remains controversial. Patton denied that his son-in-law was the reason for it; Bradley and others believed he was. What is certain is that the men who had been captured at Sidi Bou Zid were, by March 1945, among the longest-held American prisoners in Europe, and that the attempt to free them cost the lives of some of the soldiers sent to do it. Waters’s story is told here not because it was typical but because it is well documented, and because it shows how long the consequences of a single February afternoon in Tunisia could last.

From aid station to Algiers: the wounded

An American wounded at Kasserine passed through a chain of medical units laid out in the doctrine of the day. A company aid man gave first aid on the spot. Litter bearers carried the man to the battalion aid station, where a battalion surgeon could stop bleeding, splint a fracture and give plasma. From there ambulances of a collecting company took him to a division clearing station, and then to a surgical or evacuation hospital for operations. Patients who would need weeks to recover went farther back, by road, rail or air, to the general and station hospitals at Constantine, Algiers and Oran.

In February 1943 that chain was stretched over enormous distances and then pulled backward. The Army’s official medical history, by Charles M. Wiltse, describes it in detail. On 14 February the forward hospital nearest the front was the 48th Surgical Hospital, with 200-bed units at Thala and Fériana, each more than 50 miles behind the line. The 9th and 77th Evacuation Hospitals stood about ten miles southeast of Tébessa, and the 77th was not yet in operation. As the Axis advanced, aid stations in the Faïd and Gafsa sectors were “hastily leapfrogged to the rear,” one section caring for patients while the other moved. Evacuation ran over long roads, mostly at night, in ambulances that were never available in sufficient numbers, helped out by trucks and jeeps rigged to carry litters (Wiltse, ch. III).

The Fériana section of the 48th Surgical moved back to Bou Chebka on the night of 14 to 15 February and to Youks-les-Bains, west of Tébessa in Algeria, by 17 February, where it was taking in patients again within six hours. Bad weather grounded the transport planes, so a British unit, the 6th Motor Ambulance Convoy, with 25 ambulances and two buses able to move 180 patients at a time, was placed at the hospital’s disposal on 18 February and cleared the casualties from the Tébessa area before the Germans broke through the pass. By 20 February the 9th and 77th Evacuation Hospitals were working again in the Aïn Beïda and La Meskiana area, farther back in Algeria (Wiltse, ch. III; med-dept.com, 48th Surgical Hospital).

Air evacuation, new to the U.S. Army, was the great innovation of the campaign. C-47 transports, each carrying 18 litter patients and attendants, flew wounded men from forward airstrips back to Algeria; the practice was organized after a meeting on 14 January 1943, and nurses and technicians of the 802d Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron took over the work after 10 March. During the Kasserine battles patients were flown out from Youks-les-Bains, with the British 12th Casualty Clearing Station as the holding unit. The II Corps surgeon reported 3,313 patients evacuated by air from January to 15 May (Wiltse, ch. III).

Wiltse gives the scale of the load in hospital admissions for II Corps: 4,689 from 1 January to 16 March, the period that includes Kasserine; 6,370 from 17 March to 9 April, the period of El Guettar and Maknassy; and 8,629 from 10 April to 15 May, the drive on Bizerte. These figures include sickness and injury as well as wounds. Two lessons from the campaign shaped American military medicine for the rest of the war. The first was that plasma was “not a complete substitute for blood in combat surgery.” With no whole blood available from the rear, the 48th Surgical Hospital at Gafsa ran an informal blood bank with 25 to 50 soldiers detailed as donors each day, the seed of the theater blood bank that followed. The second concerned what was then called exhaustion. At El Guettar and Maknassy, psychiatric reactions accounted for 20 percent of all battlefield evacuations, and on some days for 34 percent. Of the men sent back to hospitals in the rear early in the campaign, fewer than 3 percent returned to combat. Capt. Frederick R. Hanson, a psychiatrist, found that about 30 percent could return to full duty within thirty hours if treated close to the front, and by the last phase of the campaign 58 to 63 percent of such cases were returning to duty without leaving the combat zone (Wiltse, ch. III). Forward psychiatric treatment, later standard in the U.S. Army, was learned in Tunisia.

Burying the dead

The U.S. Army entered North Africa with almost no organization for its dead. Graves registration was a Quartermaster Corps function, and the 1942 mobilization plan had provided for only four graves registration companies; thirteen were activated between March and December 1942, but the two meant to go with the Western Task Force stayed behind in the United States for lack of shipping. In the words of the Army’s own later summary, the fighting forces of 1942 and early 1943 “were obliged to improvise their own Graves Registration Service” (med-dept.com, “Quartermaster Graves Registration Service”). In practice, through most of the Kasserine period, combat units collected and buried their own dead, with chaplains, unit burial details and, where they could be found, local laborers.

The procedure, set out in Army manuals and taught by improvisation in Tunisia, was simple. Each soldier carried two identification tags. At burial, one tag was left with the body and the other fixed to the grave marker; where a marker could not be set up, a tag was sealed in a bottle and buried about six inches down, with a stake driven at least 18 inches into the ground to mark the spot. Bodies were wrapped in a blanket or a mattress cover and buried in temporary cemeteries whose locations were mapped and reported (med-dept.com). Personal effects were collected and sent back for the families. When the Allies reoccupied the pass on 25 and 26 February, and the Sbeitla valley and the Sidi Bou Zid battlefield in the weeks that followed, burial parties went over the ground of the February fighting, recovering Americans who had lain where they fell for days or weeks, and burying German and Italian dead as well. The photograph below, taken in the pass on 26 February, shows the result.

Organized graves registration arrived as the campaign went on. The 46th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company reached North Africa in early 1943 and supported the 1st Infantry Division from mid-March; the 47th followed and took over from it when the 46th left for Sicily in July. The first official theater Graves Registration Service was announced on 1 April 1943 (med-dept.com, unit histories). A company of the 1943 pattern had 130 men, including a small medical detachment. Their work went on long after the fighting: searching battlefields and minefields for isolated graves, identifying remains from tags, dental records and personal effects, and consolidating scattered burials into a smaller number of temporary military cemeteries in Tunisia and Algeria.

After the war, Congress offered every family a choice: the dead could be brought home for burial in a national or private cemetery at government expense, or they could rest permanently overseas in a cemetery maintained by the United States. Under the Return of the Dead program, which ran until 1951, more than 60 percent of families chose repatriation, and nearly 172,000 sets of remains were returned to the United States (National WWII Museum). For North Africa the result was that most of the American dead of Kasserine went home, to churchyards and family plots across the country, and a minority stayed in Africa, gathered from the temporary cemeteries into one permanent cemetery at Carthage.

Carthage: the North Africa American Cemetery

The North Africa American Cemetery and Memorial lies on 27 acres between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Tunis, on part of the site of Roman Carthage, about ten miles northeast of the center of Tunis. It was established in 1948 to consolidate the temporary American cemeteries of North Africa; the government of Tunisia granted the land for use as a permanent burial ground, free of charge and of taxation. It was dedicated on 21 July 1960 and is maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC brochure, 2024). It is the only American military cemetery in Africa.

The ABMC gives the number buried there as 2,841. Its visitor brochure counts 2,833 headstones, 2,777 Latin crosses and 56 Stars of David, of which 240 mark the graves of unknowns; the brochure does not explain the small difference between the two figures. Four pairs of brothers are buried there. The names of 3,724 missing are carved on the Tablets of the Missing, a wall 364 feet long on the south side of the mall: soldiers, sailors and airmen lost on land, at sea and in the air across the region, many of whose bodies were never found. Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified. At the west end of the mall stands the memorial, with a chapel and an open-air map room whose mosaic maps trace Allied operations from the November 1942 landings to the Axis surrender in May 1943. The Court of Honor holds a figure called “Honor” bestowing a laurel wreath (ABMC; Wikipedia, “North Africa American Cemetery and Memorial”).

The graves at Carthage hold men from every phase of the campaign, from the Torch landings to the last days around Bizerte, and men of the air forces and the navy as well as the Army. Among them is Capt. Foy Draper of Georgetown, Texas, who ran the third leg for the American 4 x 100 meter relay team that won the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, alongside Jesse Owens. As a pilot of an A-20 Havoc light bomber based at Thelepte, he took off on 4 January 1943 and did not return with his two crewmen; his death is often dated 1 February 1943, but his headstone gives 4 January (Wikipedia, “Foy Draper”). The names on the Tablets of the Missing include men who never reached Tunisia at all. Among them is Pvt. Horace J. Gibbs of the Gerton community in Henderson County, North Carolina, of the 853rd Engineer Aviation Battalion, one of 1,015 American soldiers lost when the troopship HMT Rohna was sunk by a German glide bomb off the Algerian coast on 26 November 1943, the largest loss of American troops at sea in a single incident (Henderson County, N.C., veterans memorial record).

Medal of Honor · Carthage

Pvt. Nicholas Minue, Company A, 6th Armored Infantry, 1st Armored Division

Born on 13 March 1905 in Sedden, in Austrian Galicia (his citation says Poland), Minue served with the 1st Armored Division through the Tunisian campaign. On 28 April 1943, near Medjez el Bab, when flanking machine-gun fire stopped his company’s assault, he charged an entrenched enemy position alone with a fixed bayonet, killed about ten machine gunners and riflemen, and pressed on, clearing riflemen from dugouts until he was mortally wounded. His company credited his attack with carrying it forward. He is the one Medal of Honor recipient buried at the North Africa American Cemetery, in Plot E, Row 8, Grave 4 (Wikipedia, “Nicholas Minue”; ABMC).

American Battle Monuments Commission →

In their words

Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God

The cemetery is the main place where official American memory of Kasserine is kept. A Memorial Day ceremony is held there each year; in May 2010, for example, soldiers of U.S. Army Africa ended a four-day staff ride over the Tunisian battlefields with the Memorial Day ceremony at Carthage (army.mil, 2010). Its visitors are few in most years, because few Americans travel to Tunisia. Its staff, many of them Tunisian, keep it as carefully as the cemeteries in Normandy that millions see.

Ernie Pyle and the GI’s war

Most Americans in 1943 learned about Tunisia from the newspapers, and many of them learned it from one man. Ernie Pyle had been a roving columnist for the Scripps-Howard newspapers before the war, writing about ordinary people in small towns. He arrived in North Africa with the troops in November 1942, and in the winter of 1943 he went to the Tunisian front, where he stayed with American units through Kasserine, El Guettar and the final battles in the north. His columns, filed several times a week and carried by hundreds of papers, were about the soldiers rather than the generals: what they ate, how they slept, how they talked, how they died.

Pyle did not hide the February defeat from his readers, though censorship delayed his account of it. A dispatch filed on 4 March 1943 and printed the next day in the Pittsburgh Press, with an editor’s note that it had been written before the tide turned, described the withdrawal of the American forces from the Sbeitla valley back through the Kasserine Pass. “It started before dawn one morning,” Pyle wrote, “and continued without a break for 24 hours” (Pyle, Scripps-Howard column, Pittsburgh Press, 5 March 1943). He wrote as a witness who had shared the retreat rather than as a critic of the generals. Read together, his Tunisian columns carry a theme he returned to for the rest of the war: that the men at the front bore the cost of every mistake made above them, and that they learned quickly.

Pyle’s Tunisia reached a larger audience still through the film The Story of G.I. Joe, released on 18 June 1945, two months after his death. Directed by William A. Wellman, with Burgess Meredith as Pyle and Robert Mitchum as an infantry lieutenant, it drew its dialogue and narration from the columns in Here Is Your War and Brave Men and followed C Company of the 18th Infantry from its baptism of fire at Kasserine to Italy. It received four Academy Award nominations (Wikipedia, “The Story of G.I. Joe”). A quarter century later the opening of the film Patton (1970) used the aftermath of Kasserine to set up its subject’s arrival in command of II Corps, and for many Americans born after the war it is probably the only picture of Kasserine they have.

The GI’s own memory of Kasserine was more private. Veterans’ memoirs and oral histories from the 1st Armored, 1st Infantry, 9th and 34th Infantry Divisions return to the same few things: the cold of a Tunisian winter few had expected in Africa, the speed and skill of the German tank attacks, the terror of the Stukas before the Allied air forces learned to cover the front, and the sense of having been badly led. They also return to the recovery: the first time a unit stood and stopped the Germans, at Djebel el Hamra or El Guettar, and the parade through Tunis on 20 May 1943. The men of February were the cadre of the divisions that went on to Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and Normandy; by 1944 the lieutenants of Kasserine were company and battalion commanders, and the lessons they had paid for were the ones they taught.

Kasserine in the Army’s memory

The U.S. Army began learning from Kasserine before the battle was over. Eisenhower’s staff and the observers sent from Washington drew up lists of failures within weeks, and the changes described in Chapter 8 followed quickly. Maj. Gen. Lloyd R. Fredendall was relieved of II Corps, and Patton took command on 6 March 1943 with Bradley as his deputy; Maj. Gen. Orlando Ward of the 1st Armored Division was replaced by Maj. Gen. Ernest Harmon in April. Eisenhower created the 18th Army Group under General Sir Harold Alexander to give the Allied front a single field commander. The training establishment at home was told what had gone wrong, and the next divisions to go overseas trained against it.

The lessons, as the analysts of 1943 and 1944 set them down, were concrete. Units had been spread too far apart to support each other, on hilltops that could be surrounded one by one. Infantry had dug shallow slit trenches rather than deep foxholes, and had sited them on crests where they were easy targets (Westrate, 1944, as cited in Wikipedia). Armor had been parceled out in small packets instead of being kept together; the Army’s campaign brochure puts it simply: “The greater lesson… was to maintain concentration of tanks” (Anderson, CMH). Artillery, by contrast, had been the American arm the Germans respected most, and the massed fire of the 9th Division’s guns at Thala and the 1st Division’s at El Guettar showed what American fire control could do. Coordination with the air forces, poor in February, improved through the spring, though historians judge that it reached maturity only in 1944 (Hamilton, 2005, as cited in Wikipedia). Above all, Kasserine showed that men who had trained in the United States for a year or more were not ready for the German army until they had fought it.

After the war, Kasserine became one of the Army’s standard teaching cases. The official history, George F. Howe’s Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West, appeared in 1957 and treated the February battles in great detail. Martin Blumenson, himself a historian with the Army in Europe during the war, published Kasserine Pass in 1967, the first full popular account. In 1986 the University Press of Kansas published America’s First Battles, 1776–1965, edited by Charles E. Heller and William A. Stofft, a collection of essays by Army historians on the first major engagement of each of the nation’s wars. Its premise was that the Army had almost always gone into its first battles unprepared, and that the results could be studied. Blumenson’s essay on Kasserine, “Kasserine Pass, 30 January–22 February 1943,” stood beside Roy K. Flint’s on Task Force Smith in Korea.

The parallel with Task Force Smith is the one Army officers have drawn most often. On 5 July 1950, near Osan in South Korea, a force of about 540 men from the 24th Infantry Division, two rifle companies of the 21st Infantry and a battery of 105 mm howitzers under Lt. Col. Charles B. Smith, were sent from occupation duty in Japan to delay the North Korean advance. They had few antitank weapons that worked against the T-34, little ammunition and no time to prepare. They were overrun in a day. Like the men of Sidi Bou Zid, they had been trained and equipped for a war that the Army’s leaders did not expect them to fight, and like them they paid for the unreadiness of the institution rather than for any lack of courage. In the early 1990s Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, the Army’s chief of staff, made “No more Task Force Smiths” the slogan of his effort to keep the post-Cold War Army ready (Sullivan, interview, Army, January 1992, as cited in Wiersema, SAMS monograph, 1997). Kasserine is the older case of the same lesson.

Kasserine also became a staff ride. The staff ride, in which officers study a campaign and then walk the ground where it was fought, is an old Prussian and American teaching method, and the Tunisian battlefields have been walked by officers of the U.S. Army, the Marine Corps and allied armies many times. The U.S. Army Africa staff ride of 27 to 31 May 2010 began at Sidi Bou Zid and went on to Gafsa, the Kasserine Pass, El Guettar, Enfidaville, Takrouna, the Fondouk Pass, Longstop Hill and Tunis, before ending at Carthage on Memorial Day; its commander, Maj. Gen. William B. Garrett III, described its purpose as “talking about the past, in the present” (army.mil, 2010). One of the colonels on that ride walked ground his grandfather had fought over.

Rommel’s verdict and the Axis memory

Rommel wrote about Kasserine in the notes that were published after his death as The Rommel Papers (edited by B. H. Liddell Hart, 1953). His judgment of the Americans was mixed and, for a commander who had just beaten them, fair. In Ronald Lewin’s summary, he felt that most American units and commanders had shown their inexperience and had lost sight of the larger picture, but he later remarked how quickly American commanders learned the business of mobile warfare, and he praised American equipment, observing that British experience had been put to good use in it (Lewin, 2004, pp. 202–205, as cited in Wikipedia). He described the Allied air attacks of 23 February, when the weather cleared and the Twelfth Air Force caught his columns pulling back through the pass, as “hammer-blow air attacks” (Rommel, quoted in Playfair, vol. IV, p. 302). These words are given here only as the published sources quote and summarize them; readers who want his full text should go to the Papers themselves.

Rommel had his own reasons to explain the failure. He had wanted a deep thrust through Tébessa toward the Allied supply base at Bône and the rear of the British First Army. The Italian high command, the Comando Supremo, ordered him on 19 February to strike instead toward Thala and Le Kef, a shallower move closer to the Allied reserves; and Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, commanding the Fifth Panzer Army in the north, kept back part of the 10th Panzer Division, including its company of Tiger tanks, for his own plans. When Kesselring flew to Rommel’s headquarters on 22 February, the two agreed that the attack had run its course. Rommel was given command of the new Army Group Africa on 23 February, fought one more battle at Medenine on 6 March, and left Africa on 9 March 1943, never to return.

In German memory, Kasserine has a small place. It was Rommel’s last victory in Africa, and it figures in the many biographies that made him the best-known German general of the war, but for most Germans the African war ended not in February but in May, with the surrender in Tunisia of an army group and the loss of veteran divisions that had been flown and shipped across the Mediterranean in a doomed effort to hold the bridgehead. Arnim was captured on 12 May 1943; his departure for captivity in England, photographed by the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, became one of the images of that defeat (see Chapter 8 for the end of the campaign). The German dead of the campaign were gathered after the war by the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge) from provisional cemeteries at Bizerte, Mateur, Sfax and elsewhere and from field graves across the country into a single war cemetery at Bordj Cédria, about 25 km southeast of Tunis. Built between 1973 and 1975 and opened to the public on 28 September 1977, it holds 8,562 German dead in ossuaries set in six courtyards cut into a hillside, and commemorates 104 more whose graves were never found (Volksbund).

Italian memory of Tunisia, so far as it reaches English-language sources, centers less on Kasserine than on the end. The Italian First Army under General Giovanni Messe, the old Panzerarmee Afrika that had retreated from El Alamein, fought its last battles in the hills around Enfidaville and Takrouna and was the last Axis force to surrender, on 13 May 1943; Mussolini promoted Messe to marshal of Italy the day before. The Centauro armored division, which had fought at Kasserine and at El Guettar, was destroyed in the spring. For Italy the loss of Tunisia meant the loss of the empire in Africa and opened the way to the invasion of Sicily two months later and the fall of Mussolini in July.

The Commonwealth dead of Tunisia lie in the cemeteries of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The largest is Medjez-el-Bab War Cemetery, about 60 km west of Tunis on the road to Le Kef, which holds or commemorates 2,903 servicemen, 385 of them unidentified; the Medjez-el-Bab Memorial within it bears the names of almost 2,000 men of First and Eighth Armies who have no known grave (ww2cemeteries.com, after CWGC). The British dead of Thala and Sbiba are among them.

Walther Rauff and the Jews of Tunisia

The Tunisian campaign is usually told as a soldiers’ story, but for one group of Tunisians it was something else. When German forces flew into Tunis in November 1942, they brought with them an SS Einsatzkommando of the Security Police and SD under SS-Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff, a man who had already helped develop the gas vans used to murder Jews and others in occupied Eastern Europe. Rauff’s unit had been formed in the summer of 1942 to follow Rommel’s army into Egypt and Palestine; it went to Tunisia instead (Wikipedia, “Walter Rauff”).

Within about two weeks of the German arrival, the persecution began with the arrest of leaders of the Jewish community (Montreal Holocaust Museum). On 8 December 1942 Rauff’s command demanded 3,000 Jewish men with digging tools for the next day; when only about a hundred appeared, the Germans made a round-up on 9 December (Jewish Refugees Association, after historian Claude Nataf). Over the following months about 5,000 Jewish men were sent to forced labor in some 30 to 40 camps across the country, near the front lines and in the cities, digging fortifications, loading supplies and clearing bomb damage (USHMM; Wikipedia). The Jewish community was made to pay for the labor itself through levies of millions of francs, and to supply the German army; hostages were taken, property was seized, and on the island of Djerba the Germans took 43 kg of gold from the Jewish community. Jews were ordered to wear the yellow star (Wikipedia, “Walter Rauff”; Jewish Refugees Association).

Conditions in the camps varied, but hunger, cold, beatings and Allied bombing of the sites near ports and airfields killed workers, and some men were shot, among them 19-year-old Gilbert-Mardochée Mazouz, killed by a German soldier on his way to the Cheylus camp near Tunis (Montreal Holocaust Museum). A full count of the dead has not been established in the sources used here. Tunisian Jews living in France were caught in the deportations there; the most famous was the boxer Victor “Young” Perez, born in Tunis, a former world flyweight champion, who was deported from Drancy to Auschwitz and died on a death march on 21 January 1945. The Montreal Holocaust Museum notes that the Nazis’ plans for Tunisia’s Jews were limited by “time constraints, lack of resources, and the evolution of the war.” In plain terms, the Allied armies, including the American divisions that fought at Kasserine, ended the occupation before the SS could go further. Tunis was liberated on 7 May 1943.

The memory of these six months was long kept mainly within the Tunisian Jewish community, most of whose members emigrated to France and Israel in the decades after independence in 1956. Since the 2000s historians in France, Israel and Tunisia, and institutions such as Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, have collected testimony and documents, and the Holocaust in North Africa now has a place in the general histories it long lacked. For an American reader, it is a reminder that the soldiers who fought their way back through the Kasserine Pass in late February 1943 were, whether they knew it or not, also ending a persecution.

Timeline

After the battle: the cost and the memory, 1943–2024

1. 14–17 Feb 1943Sidi Bou Zid and Sbeitla: most American prisoners of the campaign are taken; a collecting company of the 109th Medical Battalion is captured.
2. 24 Feb 1943A German consolidated report counts 4,026 Allied prisoners from the February offensive.
3. 26 Feb 1943Burial parties work in the reoccupied Kasserine Pass.
4. 6 Mar 1943Patton takes command of II Corps; Fredendall is relieved.
5. 9 Mar 1943Rommel leaves Africa for the last time.
6. 1 Apr 1943The first theater Graves Registration Service in North Africa is announced.
7. 7 and 13 May 1943Tunis and Bizerte fall; the last Axis forces surrender. About 250,000 prisoners are taken.
8. 6 Jun 1943The camp at Szubin becomes Oflag 64, for American officers, its first inmates taken in Tunisia.
9. 1943Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War is published.
10. 21 Jan 1945The Oflag 64 column, 1,471 men at roll call, is marched west toward Hammelburg.
11. 27 Mar 1945Task Force Baum reaches Hammelburg; Lt. Col. John K. Waters is shot; the camp is liberated on 6 April.
12. 18 Apr 1945Ernie Pyle is killed on Ie Shima.
13. 1948The North Africa American Cemetery is established at Carthage.
14. 5 Jul 1950Task Force Smith is overrun near Osan, Korea.
15. 21 Jul 1960The North Africa American Cemetery is dedicated.
16. 1963The Chilean Supreme Court frees Walther Rauff.
17. 28 Sep 1977The German war cemetery at Bordj Cédria opens.
18. 14 May 1984Rauff dies in Santiago, never tried.
19. 1986America’s First Battles sets Kasserine beside Task Force Smith.
20. 2006The Kasserine Pass and Sbiba Gap Monument is erected west of Kasserine.
21. 27–31 May 2010U.S. Army Africa staff ride over the Tunisian battlefields ends at Carthage.

The battlefield today

The ground of February 1943 has changed less than most European battlefields. Kasserine, little more than a village in 1943, is now a provincial capital of about 116,000 people (2022 figure, Wikipedia) with Roman remains of its own, the ruins of ancient Cillium and the Mausoleum of the Flavii, whose 110-line verse inscription is the longest surviving Latin funerary epitaph. The pass lies a few miles west of the town, where the Oued el Hatab cuts the gap between Djebel Chambi to the south and Djebel Semmama to the north. In 1943 the gap was barely 800 yards wide at its narrowest. Today Route 13 from Sbeitla meets Route 17 at a roundabout on Kasserine’s western outskirts, and beyond the gap, as in 1943, the roads to Thala and Tébessa divide near the fork the 26th Infantry and the 19th Engineers defended (Armchair General, 2010).

Djebel Chambi, at 1,544 meters (5,066 feet) the highest mountain in Tunisia, is the core of Chambi National Park, created in 1980 and covering 6,723 hectares; it was named a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1977 and is one of the last refuges of the Cuvier’s gazelle and the Barbary sheep (Wikipedia, “Chaambi National Park”). It is also, since 2012, the main hiding place of armed jihadist groups in Tunisia, and the Tunisian army has fought a long counterinsurgency campaign in the mountains around Kasserine. The U.S. State Department’s travel advisory for Tunisia, dated 23 October 2024 and current when this chapter was written, rates the country as a whole at Level 2, “Exercise Increased Caution,” but lists as Level 4, “Do Not Travel,” “the Mount Chaambi National Park, Mount Salloum, Mount Sammamma, and Mount Mghila in Kasserine governorate due to terrorism,” along with the zone within 16 km of the Algerian border. The two mountains that form the Kasserine Pass are both on that list.

There are few markers on the ground. The one battle monument is a modest stone west of Kasserine, reached by a dirt track off Route 17 about half a mile before the roundabout, with a clear view of the pass. Its inscription reads “Kasserine Pass and Sbiba Gap Monument, 19-22 February 1943. In Honor Of all Those Who Fought for Freedom.” It was put up in 2006; a visitor who wrote about it in 2010 could not find out who had erected it (Armchair General, 2010). The ground itself is the real monument. Visitors with a copy of Howe’s maps can still pick out the shoulders of the two mountains where the engineers dug in, the bed of the Hatab, and, farther north on the Thala road, the ridges where the British armor and the American guns stopped 10th Panzer. At El Guettar, staff-ride parties have found foxholes from March 1943 still visible in the hillsides.

Sbeitla, about 24 miles east of Kasserine on Route 13, is the easiest place in the region to visit and the most rewarding. The town was the 1st Armored Division’s base until 17 February 1943, and the scene of the confused night withdrawal told in Chapter 4. Beside it lie the ruins of Roman Sufetula, with three temples of its forum that are the best preserved in Tunisia and a small museum of mosaics and sculpture. In 647 it was the site of a battle in which the Byzantine and Berber army of the exarch Gregory was defeated by the Arab army of Abdullah ibn Saad, the opening of the Muslim conquest of North Africa (Wikipedia, “Sbeitla”).

Thala, the hill town about 35 miles north of the pass where Rommel’s last push was stopped, has no memorial to the battle that the sources used here record; the ridge south of the town where the 26th Armoured Brigade and the Leicesters fought on the night of 21 February is open country. Sidi Bou Zid, now the provincial capital Sidi Bouzid, is best known today as the town where the Tunisian revolution began in December 2010; the hills of Lessouda and Ksaira still stand over the plain to the east. Tébessa is in Algeria; Fériana and the Thelepte airfields lie close to the border, and parts of that region fall inside the State Department’s 16 km Level 4 zone.

For an American visitor, the practical course is to base in Tunis and to begin at Carthage. The North Africa American Cemetery, at 553 Rue Roosevelt in Carthage, is open to the public, admission is free, and its staff will give guided tours on request when they can (ABMC brochure). From Tunis, day trips reach the German cemetery at Bordj Cédria to the southeast, the Commonwealth cemetery at Medjez-el-Bab to the west, the battlefields of Longstop Hill and the Medjez valley, and, farther south, Enfidaville and Takrouna. Kasserine and Sbeitla are about four hours by road from Tunis and are best visited with a reputable local guide and after checking the current State Department and British Foreign Office advice; the mountains on either side of the pass should not be entered. In the far south, the Mareth Museum, on a hill above the Wadi Zigzaou between Gabès and Médenine, shows the Mareth Line and the Eighth Army’s battle of March 1943, with guns and command posts outside and the casemates of the line nearby (Wikipedia, “Mareth Museum”).

A closing reflection

It is easy to make too much of Kasserine and easy to make too little of it. Too much, if it is told as a national humiliation from which the Army was rescued by one general; the record shows a defeat that was real but limited, an enemy who failed to reach any of his objectives, and an army that had largely corrected its worst faults within six weeks. Too little, if it is reduced to a few paragraphs in the story of the road to Normandy; for about 6,000 Americans and their families, February 1943 was the whole war, and for the 3,000 or so taken prisoner it was the beginning of two years in camps in Italy, Germany and Poland.

The best lesson of Kasserine is the plain one that the Army drew from it and that Ernie Pyle told his readers in his own way: that courage does not make up for unreadiness, and that the price of unreadiness is paid by the youngest men at the front. The men of the 168th Infantry on Djebel Ksaira, the tank crews of Combat Command A, the engineers in the pass and the nurses who packed up a hospital in four and a half hours did their duty in a battle they had not been prepared for. The proper memory of them is not shame, and it is not legend. It is the accurate record of what they did and what it cost, which is what this collection has tried to set down.

The questions readers most often ask about the battle, from how many Americans died to whether Rommel could have reached the sea, are answered briefly in the collection’s questions and answers.

Sources

• George F. Howe, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West, United States Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1957), especially ch. XXIV, “Thala and Sbiba” and “Balance Sheet of the February Battles,” via HyperWar.
• Martin Blumenson, “Kasserine Pass, 30 January–22 February 1943,” in Charles E. Heller and William A. Stofft, eds., America’s First Battles, 1776–1965 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986); and Kasserine Pass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). Roy K. Flint, “Task Force Smith and the 24th Division: Delay and Withdrawal, 5–19 July 1950,” in the same volume.
• Charles R. Anderson, Tunisia, 17 November 1942–13 May 1943, The U.S. Army Campaigns of World War II (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1993).
• Charles M. Wiltse, The Medical Department: Medical Service in the Mediterranean and Minor Theaters, United States Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1965), ch. III, “Conquest of North Africa,” via the Army Medical Department Center of History and Heritage.
• I. S. O. Playfair et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. IV, The Destruction of the Axis Forces in Africa, History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Military Series (London: HMSO, 1966; reprint Naval & Military Press, 2004).
• Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).
• B. H. Liddell Hart, ed., The Rommel Papers (London: Collins, 1953); Ronald Lewin, Rommel as Military Commander (reprint, 2004), as cited in Wikipedia, “Battle of the Kasserine Pass.”
• Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War (New York: Henry Holt, 1943); Scripps-Howard column of 4 March 1943, Pittsburgh Press, 5 March 1943, as transcribed on the TimeGhost “Roving Reporter” archive thread; Theresa Archard, G.I. Nightingale: The Story of an American Army Nurse (New York: Norton, 1945).
• American Battle Monuments Commission, North Africa American Cemetery and Memorial visitor brochure (2024) and earlier brochure (archived 2013).
• WW2 US Medical Research Centre (med-dept.com): “Quartermaster Graves Registration Service”; unit histories of the 48th Surgical / 128th Evacuation Hospital and the 46th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company.
• National WWII Museum, “The Graves Registration Service in World War II” and “Ernie Pyle: The Voice of the American Soldier in World War II.”
• Jonathan F. Keiler, on John K. Waters and the Hammelburg raid, Warfare History Network; Wikipedia, “John K. Waters,” “Task Force Baum,” “Oflag 64”; dzieje.pl, on Oflag 64 in Szubin (in Polish).
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Labor and Internment Camps in North Africa”; Montreal Holocaust Museum, on the Jews of Tunisia under German occupation; Jewish Refugees Association (Harif), articles of 2019 and 2022 drawing on Claude Nataf and the diaries of Clement Hori; Wikipedia, “Walter Rauff,” “Jews outside Europe under Axis occupation,” “Kasserine.”
• Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, Bordj Cédria; Commonwealth War Graves Commission records for Medjez-el-Bab, via ww2cemeteries.com.
• U.S. Army, “U.S. Army Africa Soldiers apply lessons of WWII to current mission” (2010); Armchair General, “A Journey to World War II Battlefields, Part 2: Kasserine Pass” (2010).
• U.S. Department of State, Tunisia Travel Advisory (23 October 2024).
• Richard E. Wiersema, No More Bad Force Myths: A Tactical Study of Regimental Combat in Korea, July 1950 (School of Advanced Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, 1997), for Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan’s “No More Task Force Smiths” (Army, January 1992).
• Henderson County, North Carolina, veterans memorial record for Pvt. Horace J. Gibbs, 853rd Engineer Aviation Battalion.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Battle of the Kasserine Pass”; Stephen Budiansky, “Triumph at Kasserine Pass,” HistoryNet; Wikipedia, “Battle of the Kasserine Pass,” “Tunisian campaign,” “North Africa American Cemetery and Memorial,” “Nicholas Minue,” “Foy Draper,” “Ernie Pyle,” “The Story of G.I. Joe,” “Chaambi National Park,” “Sbeitla,” “Mareth Museum” (for the works they cite).

Photographs: U.S. Army Signal Corps (U.S. National Archives, digitized by the Signal Corps Archive), the Office of War Information (Library of Congress), the Bundesarchiv, the American Battle Monuments Commission, the U.S. Army, U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Army Africa, Fort George G. Meade Public Affairs, and the photographers Nabucodonosor and Carole Raddato; public domain, CC0, CC BY 2.0, CC BY-SA 2.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 and CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons. The Bundesarchiv photographs were taken by German propaganda-company photographers and their period captions reflect that purpose. Badges are original illustrations in the period style, not official insignia.