Thala and Djebel el Hamra: Where Rommel Was Stopped

By the evening of 20 February 1943 Rommel’s columns were through the Kasserine Pass, and two roads lay open in front of them: north to Thala and Le Kef, and west to the great American depot at Tébessa. Over the next two days they were stopped on both. On the Thala road a British armored brigade gave ground ridge by ridge, a raw Territorial battalion was overrun in the dark, and an American division artillery that had driven most of the way across Algeria went into action behind the town. On the Tébessa road, American tanks, infantry and guns stopped the Afrika Korps at Djebel el Hamra and Bou Chebka. On the afternoon of 22 February Rommel and Kesselring agreed to call the offensive off, and on 23 February the Axis forces went back through the pass. This chapter follows those three days and asks why the offensive failed.

Why it mattered

The Battle of Kasserine Pass is remembered in the United States as a defeat, and for the first week of the German offensive it was one. From Sidi Bou Zid on 14 February to the collapse of Stark Force in the pass on 20 February, the story told in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 is one of American units overrun, cut off or driven back. What is less often remembered is how the offensive ended. Rommel had broken into the open country beyond the pass, but he got no farther than about nine miles up either road. Within two days of the break-through he had decided to go back, and he went back on his own initiative, not because he had been beaten in a single decisive battle.

The fighting of 21 and 22 February is therefore the hinge of the campaign. It was an Allied battle in the full sense. On the Thala road the defense on 21 February was almost entirely British, and the U.S. official historian, George F. Howe, says so plainly: American units played no significant part that day (Howe, ch. XXIV). From the night of 21–22 February the weight of the defense at Thala was American artillery. On the Tébessa road, at the same time, the defense was American, by units that had been badly hurt the week before and were now dug in on good ground. The way these battles were fought, with guns massed under central control, tanks hull-down on ridges, and infantry holding the high ground, pointed toward the army the Americans would become later in the war.

The end of the offensive has also produced its own legends: that the Germans simply ran out of fuel, that a single American artillery barrage saved Thala, or that Rommel was close to a strategic victory and was robbed of it by his superiors. The record is more complicated than any of these, and this chapter tries to set it out, relying chiefly on Howe’s official history, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West (1957), the British official history by I. S. O. Playfair and his colleagues, and the more recent work of Martin Blumenson, Rick Atkinson, Steven Zaloga and others.

The fork in the road

Beyond the Kasserine Pass the road from Kasserine town comes out into a broad, rolling basin called the Bahiret Foussana, ringed by mountains. A short way northwest of the pass it divides. One branch, the road the Americans called Highway 17, runs north through Thala to Le Kef (El Kef), the British First Army’s main base and road center in the Tunisian highlands. The other, Highway 13, runs west across the basin, past the long ridge of Djebel el Hamra, to Tébessa in Algeria, where II Corps had its headquarters, supply dumps and airfields. Smaller tracks led southwest toward the Bou Chebka passes and Tébessa from the south (Howe, ch. XXIII–XXIV).

Which road to take had been argued over before the offensive began. Rommel wanted a deep thrust west through Tébessa, aiming at the Allied rear and, in his more ambitious moments, at Bône on the coast. The Italian high command, Comando Supremo, issued a directive on 19 February that made Le Kef the first objective, a shorter hook that Rommel thought would run straight into Allied reserves. Howe writes that Rommel regarded the change as “appallingly shortsighted” (Howe, ch. XXIII). When the 21st Panzer Division was checked at Sbiba on 19 February, Rommel shifted his main effort to Kasserine. The 10th Panzer Division, which had to come forward from Sbeitla, was to pass through the Afrika Korps troops in the pass and drive on Thala; Kampfgruppe DAK, the Afrika Korps assault group under Gen. Karl Bülowius, was to push northwest toward Djebel el Hamra and Tébessa. The 10th Panzer arrived at half strength, because Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, commanding the Fifth Panzer Army in the north, had kept back part of it, including its battalion of Tiger tanks (Howe, ch. XXIII).

By the evening of 20 February the pass was in Axis hands. Stark Force had broken in the early afternoon, the remnants of the 19th Engineers and the 26th Infantry had fallen back toward Djebel el Hamra and Tébessa, and an Italian Centauro battalion had pushed several miles along the Tébessa road before halting for the night (Howe, ch. XXIII; Phifer). Rommel now had his choice. The record of what he did on the morning of 21 February is one of the points on which historians are agreed. He did not drive hard down either road. Expecting an Allied counterattack after the loss of the pass, he held his main forces back, sent reconnaissance down each road, and waited. Howe describes him as hesitant after two days of fighting in the pass (Howe, ch. XXIV). Only when no counterattack came, late in the morning, did he order Bülowius to take the passes at Djebel el Hamra and von Broich to advance, cautiously at first, on Thala (Howe, ch. XXIV; Phifer).

Those hours mattered. The Allies spent the night of 20–21 February and the morning of the 21st bringing up whatever they could. At Thala, Brig. Cameron Nicholson, second-in-command of the British 6th Armoured Division, opened the headquarters of a mixed command, “Nickforce,” at 06:00 on 21 February (Howe, ch. XXIV). On the Tébessa road, Brig. Gen. Paul Robinett’s Combat Command B of the 1st Armored Division was reorganizing along the eastern face of Djebel el Hamra, and battalions of the 16th Infantry were on the way. And far to the west, a long column of American trucks and guns was climbing through the Algerian mountains toward Tébessa.

Gore Force, 20 February

The British had been drawn into the defense of the pass before it fell. The 26th Armoured Brigade, part of Maj. Gen. Charles Keightley’s 6th Armoured Division, had been moved south to Thala as a reserve behind the American front. Its commander, Brig. Charles Dunphie, wanted to commit the whole brigade to the fight in the pass on 19–20 February. First Army would not let him; Brig. C. V. McNabb, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Anderson’s chief of staff, released only a small detachment (Howe, ch. XXIII).

That detachment was Gore Force, named for its commander, Lt. Col. Adrian C. Gore of the 10th Battalion, The Rifle Brigade (the Tower Hamlets Rifles), the brigade’s motor battalion. It consisted of C Company of the 10th Rifle Brigade; C Squadron of the 2nd Lothians and Border Horse with seven Valentine and four Crusader tanks; F Battery, Royal Horse Artillery (the Honourable Artillery Company), with 25-pounders; and a troop of anti-tank guns of the 93rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery (Playfair, vol. IV, pp. 289–291, as cited in Wikipedia, “2nd Battalion, Tower Hamlets Rifles”; Howe, ch. XXIII). Howe describes it as eleven tanks, one motorized infantry company, one battery and some anti-tank guns. It was sent toward the northwestern end of the pass at about 04:00 on 20 February, and at first light it moved forward from a ridge about six miles northwest of the road fork (Howe, ch. XXIII). By 10:00, Dunphie had concluded that Stark Force was about to break and that Gore’s men should cover the Thala side of the pass (Walker, 2006, as cited in Wikipedia).

When the American defense gave way in the early afternoon, Gore Force fell back toward Thala by leapfrogging, one element covering the next, and fought German tanks along the way. The Valentines and Crusaders were outgunned by the German Panzer IVs with their long 75 mm guns, and by evening Gore Force had lost all its tanks. What was left of it rejoined the 26th Armoured Brigade about ten miles farther back (Playfair, vol. IV, p. 297, as cited in Wikipedia). A handful of American tank destroyers that had been in the pass came out with it (Phifer). The detachment had bought time at the cost of its armor, and it had shown the brigade what it would face the next day.

Thala and its defenders

Thala is a hill town on the road north from Kasserine, at 1,017 m (3,337 ft) the highest and reputedly the coldest town in Tunisia. In antiquity it was a Numidian royal stronghold; the Roman general Quintus Caecilius Metellus besieged it in 108 BC during the war against Jugurtha (Wikipedia, “Thala, Tunisia,” citing Sallust). In February 1943 it mattered as a road junction: from Thala roads ran north to Le Kef and east toward Sbiba and Rohia, and a German force that took it would be behind the Allied front at Sbiba and well on the way to First Army’s base. The approach from the south crosses open, rolling heathland broken by a series of low ridges running across the road, good ground for a delaying action by tanks firing from hull-down positions, and poor ground for infantry caught in the open.

Nickforce was an improvised command. Nicholson had the 26th Armoured Brigade, with the 17th/21st Lancers and the 2nd Lothians and Border Horse, both equipped with a mix of Valentine and Crusader tanks, and the 10th Rifle Brigade; British field artillery, including F Battery of the Honourable Artillery Company and the 450th Battery of the 71st (West Riding) Field Regiment; and, as his main infantry, the 2/5th Battalion of the Leicestershire Regiment, a Territorial battalion of the 46th Infantry Division that had only recently arrived in Tunisia and had not been in battle (Wikipedia, “Nickforce,” citing Zaloga and Welply, 2006; Wikipedia, “2nd Battalion, Tower Hamlets Rifles”). The Leicesters were dug in on the last ridge south of the town, which the British afterward called Leicester Ridge. Other units, among them a battery of the 23rd Field Regiment, a battery of the 58th Anti-Tank Regiment and a company of 4.2-inch mortars, joined during the battle.

Dunphie’s tanks were the weak point of the defense, and everyone knew it. The Valentine carried a 2-pounder (40 mm) gun and the Crusader III a 6-pounder (57 mm); both were outranged by the German Panzer IV with its long 75 mm gun, and the Valentine was slow (Wikipedia, “17th/21st Lancers”). Dunphie’s orders, as he understood them, were to hold Thala “at all costs” long enough for the Leicesters to be ready on their ridge (Howe, ch. XXIV). The way to do that with weaker tanks was to give ground slowly, ridge by ridge, firing at each crest and pulling back before the German tanks and anti-tank guns could destroy the British tanks in place.

21 February: ridge by ridge

The German advance on Thala began at about 09:30 on 21 February. Its spearhead was the 7th Panzer Regiment of the 10th Panzer Division under von Broich: by Howe’s count, about thirty tanks, twenty self-propelled guns and thirty-five half-tracked carriers, some of them captured American vehicles (Howe, ch. XXIV; Zaloga, as summarized by mikesresearch.com). Probing attacks against the British outposts came first; the main attack developed in the afternoon.

Dunphie’s tanks fought as he had planned. They held a ridge, fired at the advancing German armor, and fell back to the next crest. On a ridge about nine miles south of Thala they held the Germans until about 16:00, at the cost of fifteen tanks (Howe, ch. XXIV). Rommel came forward himself during the afternoon and took personal charge of the spearhead, ordering the German infantry to follow close behind the tanks (Howe, ch. XXIV). Late in the afternoon Dunphie broke contact under a smoke screen and withdrew to the last ridge, where the Leicesters were dug in, and his tanks passed through a gap in their line into their night harbor, the open area behind the line where tanks were refueled and repaired (Howe, ch. XXIV; Zaloga, as summarized by mikesresearch.com).

The Germans followed them in. At about 19:00, as the light failed, a German column came up the road behind the last British tanks, led by a captured British Valentine. In the dusk the defenders took it for one of their own stragglers. By the time they realized their mistake the German tanks were among the Leicesters’ trenches and at the edge of the 17th/21st Lancers’ harbor (Phifer; Zaloga, as summarized by mikesresearch.com). The fight that followed was fought at point-blank range in the dark: tanks firing at tanks a few yards away, infantry overrun in their slit trenches, British anti-tank guns and tanks engaging targets by the light of burning vehicles. The Tower Hamlets Rifles’ history records that one German tank was set on fire and the others were picked off by its light (Hastings, as cited in Wikipedia, “2nd Battalion, Tower Hamlets Rifles”).

After about three hours the German attack was stopped. The Germans pulled back to the ridge they had taken, which by midnight was in their hands, and took with them about 700 prisoners, by Howe’s figure (Howe, ch. XXIV; Phifer). Most of them appear to have come from the overrun Leicester positions. The 10th Panzer Division’s own tally of Allied losses in the Thala action was 571 prisoners, 38 tanks, 12 anti-tank guns, one anti-aircraft gun, 16 heavy mortars, three self-propelled guns, nine motor vehicles and three aircraft (Howe, ch. XXIV, n. 17). The difference between the two prisoner counts is not unusual for a night action: Howe’s figure is an Allied estimate of the missing, the German one a count of men actually brought in. British claims of German tanks destroyed that night are given as about seven (Zaloga, as summarized by mikesresearch.com); German tank losses in the Thala battle are not reliably recorded in the sources available.

The British had lost the last ridge before Thala, most of a battalion and much of an armored brigade. But the German spearhead had been stopped two or three miles short of the town, its tanks had been fighting since morning, and von Broich’s men did not know how little stood between them and Thala. Von Broich had intended to press on; Rommel instead ordered him onto the defensive for the night (Howe, ch. XXIV, n. 14). What the Germans did not know was that, behind the town, American guns were already going into position.

Irwin’s march: Tlemcen to Thala

The American guns had come from the far end of Algeria. In mid-February the 9th Infantry Division, which had landed in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, was still mostly in the west, guarding the line of communications and the border with Spanish Morocco. Its artillery was near Tlemcen, close to the Moroccan frontier. On the morning of 17 February, with the front in central Tunisia collapsing, its commander, Brig. Gen. Stafford LeRoy Irwin, received orders to move to Tébessa at once. By the division association’s account, his orders came down to one word: go (9thinfantrydivision.net, “The Battle at Thala”). The column was on the road by late afternoon the same day.

It was a large column for a forced march: 2,170 officers and men in 411 trucks and jeeps, stretching about eleven miles, led by the 34th Field Artillery Battalion under Lt. Col. William C. Westmoreland with its twelve 155 mm howitzers, followed by the 60th Field Artillery Battalion under Lt. Col. Clinton Adams; the 84th Field Artillery Battalion under Lt. Col. Justin W. Stoll joined near L’Arba, and the cannon companies of the 47th and 60th Infantry came too, each with six 75 mm howitzers (9thinfantrydivision.net; Howe, ch. XXIV). The route ran east across northern Algeria by way of Algiers and Constantine, much of it over mountain roads, in bitter weather. Veterans later recalled troops coming back from the front calling out that they were going the wrong way (9thinfantrydivision.net). This is a recollection handed down in the division’s own history, not a contemporary record, but it captures the position.

The distance is given differently in different sources. Howe writes of an uninterrupted march of “over 800 miles” in four days (Howe, ch. XXIV); the division association’s histories give 800 miles to Tébessa and on to Thala in under 100 hours in one account, and 735 miles in 100 hours in another (9thinfantrydivision.net, “The Battle at Thala” and “Tunisia”). The lower figure probably measures the march to Tébessa and the higher one the whole route to the guns’ positions at Thala, though the sources do not say so. Either way it was among the longest forced marches by an American artillery unit in the war, made by a division artillery that had not yet fired a shot in battle in Tunisia.

The column reached Tébessa on the morning of 21 February, expecting to support II Corps on the Tébessa road. There Irwin was told to go north instead, to Thala, where the British needed artillery most. The guns arrived behind Thala in the afternoon and at dusk of 21 February, Howe and the division history differing by a few hours, while the fight on the last ridge was going on a few miles to the south (Howe, ch. XXIV; 9thinfantrydivision.net). A British artillery officer, Brig. H. J. Parham, had already chosen and surveyed gun positions for them (Howe, ch. XXIV). Through the night the gunners dug in, laid their guns and laid telephone wire. The 34th Field Artillery’s twelve 155 mm howitzers went into position west of Thala, covered by the 47th Infantry’s cannon company; the twenty-four 105 mm howitzers of the 60th and 84th Field Artillery Battalions went in about 3,000 yards farther south, with the 60th Infantry’s cannon company (Howe, ch. XXIV). The German-held ridge was about 1,200 yards beyond the new British front line (Howe, ch. XXIV).

Irwin brought 48 howitzers: twelve 155 mm, twenty-four 105 mm and twelve 75 mm, with two platoons of 37 mm anti-tank guns (Howe, ch. XXIV; 9thinfantrydivision.net). Howe writes that “General Irwin’s arrival with the American artillery at Thala was highly encouraging” to defenders who were short of infantry and armor and whose remaining tanks were in poor mechanical condition (Howe, ch. XXIV). Irwin himself set up his forward command post at a British observation post on the forward ridge (9thinfantrydivision.net).

22 February at Thala: the guns

The British struck first on 22 February. Before dawn Nicholson sent what remained of his tanks against the German-held ridge. The attack failed: of about ten tanks of the 2nd Lothians, only about half reached the German line, and at least five were lost (Howe, ch. XXIV; Zaloga, as summarized by mikesresearch.com). It had an effect out of proportion to its size. The British survivors reported far more German tanks than were actually there (Nicholson spoke of about seventy), and on the German side the attack convinced von Broich that the Allies were preparing a major counterattack (Howe, ch. XXIV). Rommel, after looking at the ground, approved von Broich’s decision to postpone his own drive on Thala until the expected Allied attack had been beaten off, and then to push on at once (Howe, ch. XXIV, n. 14).

The Allied counterattack never came, and neither did the German assault. Instead, from first light, the Americans and British fired. With the morning cloud over the valley, Irwin’s battalions and the British field regiments fired on the German positions on the ridge, on the vehicles and guns behind it and on the roads leading back toward the pass, while German artillery replied and German infantry probed the line (Howe, ch. XXIV; 9thinfantrydivision.net). The front did not move. In one well-documented episode, Battery C of the 84th Field Artillery Battalion brought four of its 105 mm howitzers forward to fire directly at German tanks over open sights. By the division association’s account the battery destroyed two Panzer IVs and some lighter vehicles and infantry and lost two of its guns (9thinfantrydivision.net). German Stukas attacked through the day, though most of the Axis air effort went against the Allied columns moving up north and northwest of Thala rather than in support of the ground attack (Howe, ch. XXIV).

The guns fired so steadily that ammunition became the main worry. By the afternoon, according to the division history, the howitzers were within about fifteen minutes of running out before resupply came forward (9thinfantrydivision.net). The same account gives 1,904 rounds fired by the 9th Division Artillery in the action and 45 casualties, eight of them killed; its wording does not make clear whether these totals cover 22 February alone or 21–23 February. Other British units came in from Sbiba and Le Kef during the day, among them tanks of the 16th/5th Lancers and a company of the 2nd Hampshires, though most arrived late (Howe, ch. XXIV; Zaloga, as summarized by mikesresearch.com).

The Allied air forces also returned to the battle on 22 February after days of rain and low cloud. Most fields were waterlogged, and aircraft could take off only from the steel-planked strip at Youks-les-Bains near Tébessa. Even so, the XII Air Support Command flew 114 sorties over the Thala area that day, and fighter-bombers attacked German infantry, guns and tanks south of the town at about 16:30 (Howe, ch. XXIV). Not all the fire was well aimed: American anti-aircraft gunners, who had been bombed by Axis aircraft for a week, shot up five P-38 Lightnings on 22 February despite orders, and Robinett forbade his men to fire on any aircraft that had not attacked them (Howe, ch. XXIV, n. 18). The air war is the subject of Chapter 7.

Did the American guns save Thala? They were an essential part of the defense on 22 February, and every account gives them a large share of the credit. But the German attack on Thala had already been stopped on the evening of 21 February by the British, and on the 22nd it was von Broich’s belief that a large Allied counterattack was coming, a belief created by the British tank attack before dawn, that kept him on the defensive in the morning. What the artillery did was to make that belief look correct. A German commander who sees a quiet front and a few British tanks may attack; one who comes under the fire of more than eighty guns on a front of a few miles, with his supply roads under fire and his radio communications disrupted, draws the conclusion that the defenders have been heavily reinforced (Murphy, 2006, and Watson, 2007, as cited in Wikipedia). That conclusion, as it happened, was right.

By the numbers

The guns behind Thala, 22 February 1943

Howitzers and field guns supporting the Thala defense, by type. American figures from Howe; the British figure is the 36 guns given by Watson and Playfair.

U.S. 9th Div. Artillery, all howitzers48

U.S. 105 mm howitzers (60th, 84th FA Bns)24

U.S. 155 mm howitzers (34th FA Bn)12

U.S. 75 mm howitzers (cannon companies, 47th and 60th Inf.)12

British guns at Thala (25-pounders and others)36

Total, about84

The Tébessa road: Djebel el Hamra, 21 February

While the British fought for Thala, the Americans fought for the road to Tébessa. Here the defense rested on Robinett’s Combat Command B, which had been sent south from the northern front and had fought at Sbeitla (see Chapter 4), and on the 1st Infantry Division under Maj. Gen. Terry de la Mesa Allen, whose regiments had been scattered across the front since January. Robinett’s tanks and tank destroyers took up positions along the eastern face of Djebel el Hamra, a ridge across the Tébessa road a few miles west of the fork. Stragglers from the pass were collected and formed into provisional companies (Howe, ch. XXIV). Lt. Col. Henry Gardiner’s 2nd Battalion, 13th Armored Regiment, dug its tanks in along the ridge and in the dry streambeds in front of it.

The 16th Infantry, one of the 1st Division’s three regiments, came up in pieces. Its 2nd Battalion, under Lt. Col. Joseph B. Crawford, was sent south to block three secondary passes at Bou Chebka, where tracks from the Bahiret Foussana led toward Tébessa from the southeast. Its 1st Battalion reached Djebel el Hamra by a roundabout truck march and found Robinett’s command already holding it (Howe, ch. XXIV). The 3rd Battalion followed. Behind them were the 1st Division’s artillery battalions under Brig. Gen. Clift Andrus, including the 33rd Field Artillery Battalion near Bou Chebka.

The German probe began before dawn. At 02:00 on 21 February the 33rd Reconnaissance Battalion struck northwest from the Kasserine area and was stopped by Robinett’s reconnaissance company (Howe, ch. XXIV). Bülowius’s Kampfgruppe DAK, made up of Panzer Grenadier Regiment Afrika, the 1st Battalion of the 8th Panzer Regiment and Italian troops and assault guns of the Centauro Division, left Kasserine at 14:00, after Rommel’s late-morning order to take the passes. In the late afternoon it ran into Gardiner’s tanks and Robinett’s tank destroyers and artillery. After about an hour of long-range fire it broke off, still about four miles short of the passes, and at about 18:00 it pulled back (Howe, ch. XXIV; Phifer). Rommel then authorized a different plan: a night march by Panzer Grenadier Regiment Afrika around the American left, to the south, to come at the Bou Chebka passes and Djebel el Hamra from the flank in the morning (Howe, ch. XXIV).

Bou Chebka and Hill 812, 22 February

The night march went wrong. In darkness, rain and fog, over broken ground, the panzer grenadiers were delayed and lost their way, and at daylight on 22 February they came out not on the flank of Djebel el Hamra but in the southwest corner of the Bahiret Foussana, about seven miles southeast of it, against the positions of Crawford’s 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, and the 2nd Battalion, 6th Armored Infantry (Howe, ch. XXIV). Even so, they did damage. Panzer Grenadier Regiment Afrika cut off Battery C of the 33rd Field Artillery Battalion and captured its five 105 mm howitzers, three 40 mm anti-aircraft guns and about thirty vehicles, and took Hill 812, a height overlooking the Bou Chebka area (Howe, ch. XXIV).

There they stuck. When the fog lifted the Germans on Hill 812 found that they could not go forward against the American line and could not go back across the open plain behind them, which was under American artillery fire (Howe, ch. XXIV; Calhoun). Bülowius tried to reach them. At about 09:30, wrongly believing that his right flank was threatened, he committed his armor; between 10:30 and noon the 1st Battalion, 8th Panzer Regiment and Italian assault guns attacked Robinett’s line at Djebel el Hamra and were stopped by anti-tank fire and artillery (Howe, ch. XXIV). Andrus’s guns of the 1st Division Artillery broke up the attempts to relieve the hill. By noon it was clear to the German command on the spot that the Djebel el Hamra passes could not be taken, and plans were made to fall back to the Kasserine Pass after dark (Howe, ch. XXIV).

The American counterattack was slow to get started. Allen tried all morning to organize an attack on the left of Crawford’s battalion and could not; only after coordination through Robinett and the command post of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Armored Infantry, was it set for 16:00 (Howe, ch. XXIV). Then the 3rd Battalion, 16th Infantry, with artillery support and a sortie by Company G, 13th Armored Regiment, attacked Hill 812 and retook it. The Germans abandoned the eight American guns and the vehicles they had captured that morning, and some of the panzer grenadiers were taken prisoner. Late in the day Robinett’s tanks caught the 5th Bersaglieri Battalion near Hill 732 as it tried to get away, and captured many of its vehicles and supplies intact (Howe, ch. XXIV). The total of prisoners taken in the counterattack is given as more than 400 (Kelly, Meeting the Fox, 2002, p. 244, as cited in Wikipedia).

It was a small action by later standards, but it was the clearest American success of the Kasserine battles. The Afrika Korps, the most experienced Axis formation in Africa, had attacked prepared American positions held by tanks, infantry and massed artillery on good ground, and it had been stopped and then driven back with loss. The Germans had come within about two miles of Djebel el Hamra and about 23 miles of Tébessa, and no closer (Phifer).

Sbiba: the third road

The third Axis thrust had been stopped before the other two began. On 19 February the 21st Panzer Division, under Col. Hans-Georg Hildebrandt, moved north from Sbeitla at 09:00 toward Sbiba and the road junction at Ksour, on the road to Le Kef. Shortly before noon it ran into a belt of mines about six miles southeast of Sbiba, covered by British artillery. Behind the mines was a mixed Allied line: the British 1st Guards Brigade, the U.S. 18th Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division, and the 133rd and 135th Infantry of the U.S. 34th Infantry Division, supported by three American artillery battalions, the 16th/5th Lancers and British anti-tank guns (Howe, ch. XXIII). An armored battalion of the 5th Panzer Regiment with 25 tanks tried to swing around the American flank and was stopped; the 151st Field Artillery Battalion and other American artillery fired more than 100 concentrations on the German tanks. Hildebrandt lost ten to twelve tanks that day, and British engineers destroyed seven more vehicles after dark (Howe, ch. XXIII).

The division attacked again on 20 February with 33 Panzer IIIs and six Panzer IVs and was again stopped, by artillery fire and anti-tank guns; four tanks that got into the 34th Division’s line were destroyed there (Howe, ch. XXIV). On 21 February it went over to an active defense with about thirty serviceable tanks, while the Allies brought up a British Churchill tank unit of about twenty-five tanks (Howe, ch. XXIV). Sbiba was the battle that sent Rommel’s main effort to Kasserine, and it was also the first of the three fronts on which American artillery, here working with British infantry, armor and engineers, showed what it could do. The Sbiba gap is today marked, with the Kasserine Pass, by a battle monument photographed by U.S. Army staff riders in 2010 (see Chapter 9).

The decision of 22 February

By the afternoon of 22 February, then, the offensive was stopped on all three roads. Rommel had seen the Thala front himself on the 21st; on the 22nd he had reports of the repulse at Djebel el Hamra and the loss of Hill 812, of fresh Allied units arriving, and of the Allied air forces back over the battlefield. That afternoon Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German Commander-in-Chief South, came to Rommel’s command post northwest of the Kasserine Pass, accompanied by Gen. Hans Seidemann, the Luftwaffe commander in Tunisia, and others (Howe, ch. XXIV).

The two field marshals agreed that the time had come to withdraw the attacking forces from west central Tunisia, and that Comando Supremo should be told so. They proposed instead a rapid shift of the mobile forces south to the Mareth Line, to strike the British Eighth Army before Gen. Bernard Montgomery could complete his preparations to attack it (Howe, ch. XXIV, n. 22). Rommel’s reasons, as Howe records them, were the ground and the weather: mud and mountainous terrain that were poor going for tanks, rain and fog that hampered air support, and Axis units that had been worn down. He recognized that the offensive could not succeed (Howe, ch. XXIV). Rommel ordered a retirement into the Kasserine Pass while he waited for a new directive, and Comando Supremo issued the order to call off the offensive shortly before midnight (Howe, ch. XXIV, n. 23).

The sources differ on the details of this conference. Howe dates the decisive meeting to the afternoon of 22 February and presents it as an agreement between the two men. Stephen Budiansky, writing for Military History, also places the meeting on the afternoon of the 22nd and quotes Kesselring’s later judgment, in his memoirs, that Rommel’s heart “was not in his task” (Budiansky, 2011). Paul Watson’s 2007 account, as summarized in Wikipedia, describes a meeting at which Kesselring and his chief of staff, Gen. Siegfried Westphal, tried and failed to persuade Rommel to continue, and dates it to 23 February. The safest reading is that Kesselring arrived hoping the attack could go on, found Rommel convinced that it could not, and accepted his view; the formal orders followed that night.

Rommel’s own account, published after his death as The Rommel Papers (ed. B. H. Liddell Hart, 1953), places much of the blame elsewhere: on Comando Supremo’s insistence on Le Kef instead of Tébessa, and on von Arnim’s failure to release the forces, including the Tigers, that Rommel had asked for. It also gives the Americans more credit than their own army did at the time. Rommel noted that “British experience has been put to good use in American equipment” (as quoted by Ronald Lewin, cited in Wikipedia), and he wrote of the American defense with respect. His account was written after the event and with an eye on the record, and it should be read alongside the operational records Howe used; but on the central point it agrees with them. By the evening of 22 February Rommel no longer believed the offensive could succeed.

Withdrawal and a slow pursuit, 23–25 February

The Axis withdrawal began on the night of 22–23 February and was carried out well. On the Thala road, the 10th Panzer Division’s battle group waited until dark on the 22nd and then slipped away; northwest of the pass the withdrawal was complete by the forenoon of 23 February (Howe, ch. XXIV; Watson, as cited in Wikipedia). The Germans and Italians left mines and demolitions behind them on the roads and tracks, blew culverts and bridges, and took most of their equipment with them. The 10th Panzer Division took up defensive positions to cover the pass, and Kampfgruppe DAK went south to relieve the Centauro Division at Fériana and Thelepte (Howe, ch. XXIV). On 23 February Comando Supremo also named Rommel commander of the new Army Group Africa, with authority over von Arnim’s Fifth Panzer Army as well as his own forces, a reward that came too late to affect the battle.

The Allies did not realize at once that the Germans were going. On 23 February the weather cleared, and Allied aircraft flew in strength over the pass; observers counted 104 Allied planes over the Kasserine area in a single fifteen-minute period, while four to eight Axis fighters flew sweeps from 08:40 to 17:28 (Howe, ch. XXIV, nn. 25–26). That night the RAF bombed the pass without coordinating with the American ground troops (Howe, ch. XXIV, n. 32). On the ground the pressure, in Howe’s words, “lacked punch.” Maj. Gen. Ernest Harmon, sent by Eisenhower to help Fredendall, reached II Corps headquarters on the night of 22–23 February and took charge of the counterattack in the Kasserine sector, taking over Maj. Gen. Orlando Ward’s mission with the 1st Armored Division without relieving him (Howe, ch. XXIV). Nickforce was dissolved at 20:00 on 23 February.

The official history

Allied pressure lacked punch and the withdrawal continued in good order.

The Allied attack to retake the pass was planned for 06:30 on 25 February, “Plan Howze,” under an order from Fredendall directing Ward to drive the enemy from the valley and recapture the pass (Howe, ch. XXIV). On 24 February the British 1st Guards Brigade advanced over the heights, and British tanks and sappers moved down the road from Thala toward Kasserine. Opposition was light; mines and demolitions slowed them more than the enemy did (Howe, ch. XXIV). By 10:00 on 25 February Ward’s troops had reached the defile on the Tébessa–Kasserine road, and the pass was free of the enemy (Howe, ch. XXIV). Fériana was also reoccupied, and Sbeitla and Sidi Bou Zid followed in the next days (Rutherford, 1971, as cited in Wikipedia).

The slowness of the follow-up was criticized then and later. Allied commanders had been badly shaken by the week of defeats, and they were not sure on 23 and 24 February that the withdrawal was not a trick or a regrouping for another blow. Their units were mixed up and short of tanks, and the British armored brigade that had fought at Thala had few left. The weather, which had turned the valley floor to mud, worked against the pursuers as it had against the attackers. And the Axis rear guards and mines made any rapid advance costly. The result was that Rommel got his mobile forces away almost intact, to attack the Eighth Army at Medenine on 6 March, a battle he lost heavily (see Chapter 8).

On 26 February the 2nd Battalion of the 16th Infantry walked back through the Kasserine Pass toward Kasserine and Fériana behind a reconnaissance unit clearing mines, and Signal Corps photographers recorded the march (Signal Corps photos SC 170123 and SC 167571). They found the wreckage of the week’s fighting: burned-out tanks of both sides, abandoned guns and trucks, and the graves of soldiers buried where they fell. The battle described in this collection was over. The men walking east through the pass that day had been on the losing side for most of it and on the winning side at the end.

Timeline

Thala, Djebel el Hamra and the withdrawal

1. 17 Feb 1943, afternoonBrig. Gen. S. LeRoy Irwin’s 9th Division Artillery leaves the Tlemcen area for Tébessa.
2. 19 Feb 1943Comando Supremo directive makes Le Kef the objective; 21st Panzer Division is stopped at Sbiba and Rommel shifts his main effort to Kasserine.
3. 20 Feb 1943, about 04:00Gore Force (Lt. Col. A. C. Gore) is sent toward the northwest end of the pass.
4. 20 Feb 1943, afternoonStark Force collapses; the Axis are through the pass; Gore Force loses all its tanks falling back toward Thala.
5. 21 Feb 1943, 02:00German 33rd Reconnaissance Battalion is stopped by Combat Command B’s reconnaissance company on the Tébessa road.
6. 21 Feb 1943, 06:00“Nickforce” headquarters opens at Thala under Brig. Cameron Nicholson.
7. 21 Feb 1943, about 09:3010th Panzer Division’s battle group starts up the Thala road; Rommel later joins the spearhead.
8. 21 Feb 1943, 14:00–18:00Kampfgruppe DAK attacks toward Djebel el Hamra, is stopped by Robinett’s tanks and guns, and pulls back.
9. 21 Feb 1943, about 16:00–19:0026th Armoured Brigade falls back to the Leicesters’ ridge; German column led by a captured Valentine breaks in at dusk; about three hours of close fighting.
10. 21 Feb 1943, afternoon and night9th Division Artillery arrives behind Thala and goes into position with 48 howitzers.
11. 22 Feb 1943, before dawnBritish tank counterattack at Thala fails, but convinces von Broich an Allied attack is coming.
12. 22 Feb 1943, daylightPanzer Grenadier Regiment Afrika takes Hill 812 and Battery C, 33rd Field Artillery, near Bou Chebka; Allied and Axis artillery duel at Thala.
13. 22 Feb 1943, 16:003rd Battalion, 16th Infantry, and Company G, 13th Armored, retake Hill 812; more than 400 prisoners taken.
14. 22 Feb 1943, afternoonKesselring and Rommel agree to withdraw; Comando Supremo issues the order shortly before midnight.
15. 23 Feb 1943Axis withdrawal northwest of the pass completed by the forenoon; Rommel named commander of Army Group Africa; Nickforce dissolved at 20:00.
16. 24 Feb 1943British 1st Guards Brigade and tanks advance against light opposition, slowed by mines.
17. 25 Feb 1943, about 10:00The Kasserine Pass is free of the enemy.

Why the offensive failed

Explanations for the failure of Rommel’s offensive fall into four groups, and most historians now combine them.

A divided command and a confused objective. The offensive was planned and fought by two army commanders who distrusted each other, under a German theater commander, Kesselring, who shared authority over them with the Italian high command that issued the formal directives. Von Arnim’s Operation Frühlingswind at Sidi Bou Zid and Rommel’s Operation Morgenluft at Gafsa were separate operations, joined only after the first had succeeded (see Chapter 3). Von Arnim kept back part of the 10th Panzer Division and the Tiger battalion. Comando Supremo’s directive of 19 February sent the main effort toward Le Kef rather than Tébessa, and Rommel then split his strength three ways, at Sbiba, Thala and Djebel el Hamra, none of them strong enough to break through (Howe, ch. XXIII; Budiansky, 2011). Rommel’s own hesitation on the morning of 21 February cost him further hours.

Allied reinforcement, and above all artillery. In the week after Sidi Bou Zid the Allies moved large forces into the threatened sector: the 26th Armoured Brigade and the 1st Guards Brigade from the British side, the 9th Division’s artillery from western Algeria, and units of the 1st and 34th Infantry Divisions and the 1st Armored Division from other parts of the front. At each of the three points of attack the Germans met prepared positions covered by massed artillery, and at each they were stopped. The 9th Division Artillery’s march to Thala has become the best-known example, but the 1st Division’s artillery at Djebel el Hamra and the 34th Division’s artillery at Sbiba did the same work (Howe, ch. XXIII–XXIV; Calhoun, 2023).

Weather, ground and air power. The rain and fog of mid-February turned the valley floors to mud, hid the Axis attacks from Allied aircraft for several days, and then, when the weather cleared on 22 and 23 February, left the Axis columns exposed to Allied air attack as they withdrew (Howe, ch. XXIV). Rommel himself listed the mud, the mountainous terrain and the weather among his reasons for stopping (Howe, ch. XXIV, n. 22). The air war over the battlefield, which swung in the Allies’ favor in the last days of the battle, is described in Chapter 7.

The real objective lay elsewhere. Rommel had always seen the Kasserine offensive as a spoiling attack to buy time before Montgomery’s Eighth Army attacked the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia. By 22 February the Eighth Army’s leading divisions were approaching Mareth, and every day spent at Thala was a day lost for the blow Rommel wanted to strike at Medenine. Once the offensive had failed to break through quickly, the logic of the campaign told against continuing it (Howe, ch. XXIV; Playfair, vol. IV, p. 301, as cited in Wikipedia).

None of this means that Kasserine was not an American defeat. It was. In the battles of 14–24 February the U.S. II Corps lost, by Blumenson’s figures, about 300 killed, 3,000 wounded and 3,000 missing, most of the missing taken prisoner, and more than 180 tanks; German losses, by incomplete German returns, were fewer than 1,000 men (Blumenson, as cited in Wikipedia; Howe, ch. XXIV, n. 44). The cost of the battle, and the many ways it has been counted, are the subject of Chapter 9. But the battle ended with the Americans and British holding the ground beyond the pass that mattered, and the Germans withdrawing. Howe’s own balance sheet concludes that the Allies returned to the ground they had lost with their capacity for attack not seriously impaired (Howe, ch. XXIV).

Questions readers ask

How close did Rommel come to Thala and Tébessa?

On the Thala road the Germans took the last British ridge, a few miles south of the town, on the evening of 21 February, and got no farther. On the Tébessa road they came within about two miles of Djebel el Hamra and about 23 miles of Tébessa before they were stopped on 21 and 22 February.

How far did the 9th Division artillery really march?

The U.S. official history says more than 800 miles in four days, from near Tlemcen in western Algeria to Thala, between the afternoon of 17 February and the afternoon or evening of 21 February. One of the division’s own histories gives 735 miles in 100 hours. The difference probably reflects where the count stops, at Tébessa or at the gun positions behind Thala.

Why did Rommel withdraw if he was not beaten?

Because he had been stopped on all three roads, could see Allied reinforcements arriving, and believed that further attacks in mud and mountains would fail. He also wanted his mobile forces back in the south to strike the British Eighth Army at Mareth before it could attack him. He and Kesselring agreed on the afternoon of 22 February, and Comando Supremo ordered the withdrawal that night.

How it connects

This chapter picks up where Chapter 5: The Pass ends, with Stark Force broken and the Axis through the Kasserine Pass on 20 February. The defeats that brought the Germans there, at Sidi Bou Zid, Sbeitla, Gafsa, Fériana and Thelepte, are told in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. The air war that turned in the Allies’ favor on 22 and 23 February is in Chapter 7.

What came next is in Chapter 8: Fredendall’s relief and Patton’s arrival at II Corps on 6 March, the same day Rommel’s last offensive failed at Medenine; the 1st Infantry Division’s stand at El Guettar, where the 1st and 9th Infantry Divisions fought side by side; and the end in Tunisia in May. The losses of the Kasserine battles, the American cemetery at Carthage and the long argument over what Kasserine taught the U.S. Army are in Chapter 9.

What happened afterward

The men who fought at Thala and Djebel el Hamra went on to long wars. The 26th Armoured Brigade, re-equipped with Shermans, fought through the rest of the Tunisian campaign and into Italy. Dunphie went to II Corps as an assistant chief of staff, the British liaison at the heart of the American corps that was rebuilt under Patton and Bradley. Gore commanded brigades at Anzio and in Italy. Irwin took the 5th Infantry Division across France in 1944, and at the end of the war he commanded XII Corps in Patton’s Third Army. Westmoreland, who had led the 34th Field Artillery Battalion to Thala, commanded it again in Sicily, was chief of staff of the 9th Division in Normandy and Germany, and in 1964 took command of U.S. forces in Vietnam.

Robinett, whose combat command had held the Tébessa road, was wounded later in the Tunisian campaign; his story is told in Chapter 4. Terry Allen’s 1st Division fought at El Guettar and in Sicily. The 16th Infantry landed on Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944. For the U.S. Army as a whole, the end of the Kasserine battles marked the start of a period of hard learning: about command, about the use of armor and about air-ground cooperation. One lesson it did not need to learn was how to mass artillery. That it already knew.

Walking the ground today

Thala is today a town of about 18,000 people in Kasserine Governorate, on the road from Kasserine north to Le Kef. The ridges south of the town where the 26th Armoured Brigade fought its delaying action and the Leicesters were overrun are still open, rolling country crossed by the main road; there is no large memorial on them, and the positions of 1943 are best traced with Howe’s maps or the U.S. Army’s staff-ride guides. Djebel el Hamra and the Bou Chebka area lie on and south of the road from Kasserine to Tébessa and the Algerian border. A battle monument to the Kasserine Pass and Sbiba gap battles was photographed during a U.S. Army Africa staff ride in May 2010 (see Chapter 9).

Visitors should be careful. The mountains along the Algerian border, including the Djebel Chambi massif on the south side of the Kasserine Pass, have been the scene of fighting between Tunisian security forces and armed groups for more than a decade, and for years the U.S. State Department has advised Americans not to travel to the border areas and the Chambi region. Anyone planning a visit should check the current advisory and local conditions, and should travel with a qualified local guide. The Americans who died in these battles and were not brought home are buried or commemorated at the North Africa American Cemetery at Carthage, near Tunis, maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Sources

• George F. Howe, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West, United States Army in World War II: The Mediterranean Theater of Operations (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1957), especially ch. XXIII, “Rommel’s Thrust Through Kasserine Pass” and ch. XXIV, “The Enemy Is Turned Back” (HyperWar edition).
• I. S. O. Playfair and C. J. C. Molony et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. IV, The Destruction of the Axis Forces in Africa, History of the Second World War, UK Military Series (HMSO, 1966; Naval & Military Press, 2004), pp. 289–302, as cited in Wikipedia.
• Martin Blumenson, Kasserine Pass (Houghton Mifflin, 1967), and “Kasserine Pass, 30 January–22 February 1943,” in Charles E. Heller and William A. Stofft, eds., America’s First Battles, 1776–1965 (University Press of Kansas, 1986).
• Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (Henry Holt, 2002); Orr Kelly, Meeting the Fox: The Allied Invasion of Africa, from Operation Torch to Kasserine Pass to Victory in Tunisia (Wiley, 2002); Bruce Allen Watson, Exit Rommel: The Tunisian Campaign, 1942–43 (Stackpole, 2007); Steven J. Zaloga, Kasserine Pass 1943: Rommel’s Last Victory (Osprey, 2005); Charles Whiting, Kasserine: The Battle that Saved the Allies (1984).
• B. H. Liddell Hart, ed., The Rommel Papers (Collins/Harcourt, 1953); Albert Kesselring, The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Kesselring (William Kimber, 1953); Ronald Lewin, Rommel as Military Commander (1968; 2004 ed.), as cited in Wikipedia.
• 9th Infantry Division Association, “The Battle at Thala” and “Tunisia” (drawing on the division’s wartime history and To Bizerte with the II Corps, CMH).
• Mark T. Calhoun, “Kasserine Pass: German Offensive, American Victory”, The National WWII Museum, 14 February 2023.
• Stephen Budiansky, “Triumph at Kasserine Pass”, HistoryNet / Military History, 2011; Mike Phifer, “Panzer Strike at Kasserine Pass”, Warfare History Network; “Kasserine Pass 1943”, mikesresearch.com (summarizing Zaloga).
• R. H. W. S. Hastings, The Rifle Brigade in the Second World War, 1939–1945 (Gale & Polden, 1950), as cited in Wikipedia; Steven E. Clay, Blood and Sacrifice: The History of the 16th Infantry Regiment (Cantigny First Division Foundation, 2001), as cited in Wikipedia; Boyd L. Dastrup, “History of the US Army Field Artillery School,” Fires (January 2011), as cited in Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia: “Battle of Kasserine Pass” (for the works it cites: Playfair, Walker, Watson, Murphy, Rutherford, Kelly, Blumenson, Lewin), “Nickforce”, “2nd Battalion, Tower Hamlets Rifles”, “17th/21st Lancers”, “26th Armoured Brigade”, “16th Infantry Regiment”, “Thala, Tunisia”, “Carlos Brewer”, “United States Army Field Artillery School”, and the biographies of Stafford LeRoy Irwin, Adrian Gore and Charles Anderson Lane Dunphie.
• Photographs: U.S. Army Signal Corps photos SC 170080, 170083, 170093, 170099, 170119 and 170123 (U.S. National Archives, digitized by the Signal Corps Archive); Imperial War Museums NA 500, NA 847 and NA 853; Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1989-089-00; all via Wikimedia Commons.

Photographs: U.S. Army Signal Corps (U.S. National Archives) and No. 2 Army Film & Photographic Unit (Imperial War Museums), public domain; a Tunisian postcard of about 1925, public domain; and the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv), CC BY-SA 3.0 DE; all via Wikimedia Commons. Many Signal Corps photographs of the Kasserine area were taken on 24–26 February 1943, after the Axis withdrawal, and show the aftermath of the fighting rather than the fighting itself.