A provisional command called Stark Force. Its core was the 19th Engineer Combat Regiment (reinforced, less one company) under Col. Anderson T. W. Moore, which held the southwestern side of the gap from the Oued Hatab to Djebel Zebbeus across the Tébessa road, and the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, under Lt. Col. Gerald C. Kelleher, astride the Thala road on the northern side. Moore’s first line held about 2,000 men, supported by two batteries of 105 mm howitzers of the 33d Field Artillery Battalion, a French battery of 75s, the 805th Tank Destroyer Battalion and Company I, 13th Armored Regiment. During the battle came the 3d Battalion, 39th Infantry, the 26th Infantry’s regimental band as riflemen, the 3d Battalion, 6th Armored Infantry, the 894th Tank Destroyer Battalion and the British Gore Force. Col. Alexander N. Stark Jr. of the 26th Infantry commanded the whole from early on 19 February (Howe, chs. XXII–XXIII).

Sources: Howe, chs. XXII–XXIII, from the 26th Infantry and 19th Engineer reports

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass

In the sense that matters, yes. The 19th Engineer Combat Regiment was a II Corps engineer regiment that landed in Algeria with Torch and spent the winter keeping the corps’ roads and airfields open, building bridges and clearing mines across the mountains from Tébessa (University of Utah profile; Bedingfield). One of its companies spent about three weeks tunneling shelters at Fredendall’s headquarters. It was not a labor battalion: combat engineers were armed and trained to fight, and the Army’s field manual said that in emergencies they might defend as infantry (FM 100-5, 1941, par. 639). But it had been employed in Tunisia as builders, many of its men had little infantry training, and it laid its mines and took its positions at night, in rain, on ground most of them had never seen by daylight (Howe). That contrast is why it is remembered as the road builders who held Kasserine.

Sources: Howe, chs. XXII–XXIII; FM 100-5 (1941); University of Utah honoree profile; Bedingfield, Baseball’s Greatest Sacrifice

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal

As far as the record shows, yes. At 20:00 on 18 February Fredendall telephoned Col. Alexander N. Stark Jr. of the 26th Infantry at El Ma el Abiod, south of Tébessa. By the regiment’s after-action report, quoted in the official history, he said: “I want you to go to Kasserine right away and pull a Stonewall Jackson. Take over up there” (Howe, ch. XXIII). The allusion was to Thomas J. Jackson’s stand on Henry House Hill at First Manassas in July 1861. Stark drove through the night and took command before morning; it was formally recorded at 07:30 on 19 February. The words are a recollection of a telephone call written down within weeks by the regiment that received it, not a transcript. The order was typical of Fredendall’s style: vivid, and silent on what forces Stark would have or how his command related to Moore’s.

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIII, from the 26th Infantry after-action report, 19–24 February 1943

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal

Rommel hoped to rush the pass at daybreak with the 33d Reconnaissance Battalion, at about 06:30 by one account; it was stopped in the center of the pass. Kampfgruppe DAK under Generalmajor Karl Bülowius then attacked on both sides of the river with Col. Otto Menton’s Panzer Grenadier Regiment Afrika and took Hill 974 on Djebel Semmama; low cloud denied the Germans their usual air support. At 10:15 the Americans saw 35 to 40 truckloads of German infantry unloading, and about noon Rommel and Bülowius were watching from the entrance. At 15:30 German tanks and infantry attacked along the Tébessa road into the engineers’ minefield, where five German tanks were knocked out under machine-gun, antitank and artillery fire (Howe). The Germans broke off at dusk with about 100 prisoners. The pass had held, but after dark a German detachment reached Hill 1191, the height that overlooks the whole floor of the pass.

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIII; mikesresearch.com (06:30 start)

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass

Mainly because the Germans took the high ground. The heights of Djebel Semmama were held by a few companies and patrols and were lost on the night of 19–20 February, when Company A, 26th Infantry, was cut off. At 08:30 on the 20th Bülowius attacked with both battalions of Panzer Grenadier Regiment Afrika, his 88s and a battery of new rocket projectors, with Italian Bersaglieri attacking on the Chambi side. Just before noon a German column broke in between two of Moore’s companies, tanks and infantry got through the minefield on the Tébessa road, and by noon Moore’s command post had been overrun (Howe). Radio contact between the tanks, the tank destroyers and Stark’s headquarters had broken down, there was no reserve, and the river split the position. At 16:30 a coordinated attack under five battalions of artillery cleared the pass. The defense crumbled, Howe concluded, but it “still seemed strong to the enemy.”

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIII; Playfair, vol. IV, p. 297

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass

The plan was right and the execution was not. Moore planned a “triple belt of mines across the roads,” which met the three-row rule of the 1941 field manual (Howe; FM 100-5, par. 688). But the fields were laid at night, partly by infantrymen who had never laid a mine, on ground no one had seen in daylight. One engineer lieutenant, ordered at about 19:30 on 18 February to lay a field in front of the 26th Infantry, was not joined by his infantry detail until about 03:30, and to finish before dawn the men “merely strewed the mines unburied across a gap about 100 yards wide” (Howe, from Lt. Edwin C. Dryden’s memorandum of 20 May 1943). Where the mines on the Tébessa road were covered by fire on 19 February, they stopped the German tanks. On 20 February the troops covering them were driven off, and the Germans got through. The manual’s rule is that an obstacle must be covered by fire.

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIII and n. 21; FM 100-5 (1941), pars. 636 and 688

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

It was the small British detachment that First Army let Brig. Charles Dunphie send from Thala into the pass: eleven tanks (seven Valentines and four Crusaders of C Squadron, 2nd Lothians and Border Horse, by one account), a motor company of the 10th Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, a battery of 25-pounders and some antitank guns, under Lt. Col. Adrian C. Gore. Dunphie had recommended committing his whole 26th Armoured Brigade on the evening of 19 February; Brig. McNabb, Anderson’s chief of staff, refused, wanting the brigade free for Sbiba (Howe). Gore Force left at about 04:00 on 20 February and stood on the Thala side of the pass with the remaining Americans. Its resistance forced the Germans to commit their tank battalion, and, Howe wrote, “the British fought until their last tank was destroyed.” It withdrew at dusk with five American tank destroyers, buying time for the line south of Thala.

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIII; Playfair, vol. IV; Hastings, The Rifle Brigade in the Second World War (1950)

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra

By an Allied defense in two stages. On 21 February, from about 09:30, the 10th Panzer Division’s battle group under von Broich, about 30 tanks, 20 self-propelled guns and 35 half-tracks, advanced up the Thala road. Brig. Charles Dunphie’s 26th Armoured Brigade, outgunned, gave ground ridge by ridge, losing fifteen tanks on one ridge by about 16:00, and fell back through the 2/5th Leicesters on the last ridge before the town. At about 19:00 a German column led by a captured Valentine broke into the Leicesters’ position. After about three hours of fighting in the dark the attack was stopped two or three miles short of Thala, and the Germans took about 700 prisoners (Howe). That night the U.S. 9th Infantry Division Artillery went into position behind the town. On 22 February its fire, with the British guns and a British tank attack before dawn, persuaded von Broich to stay on the defensive (Howe; Zaloga).

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIV; Zaloga, Kasserine Pass 1943 (2005)

Read more: Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra

Brig. Gen. S. LeRoy Irwin’s 9th Infantry Division Artillery was near Tlemcen in western Algeria when it was ordered to Tébessa on the morning of 17 February. It was on the road that afternoon: 2,170 officers and men in 411 vehicles, a column about eleven miles long, led by Lt. Col. William C. Westmoreland’s 34th Field Artillery Battalion, with the 60th and 84th Field Artillery Battalions and the cannon companies of the 47th and 60th Infantry. It reached Tébessa on the morning of 21 February, was sent north to Thala, and went into position that afternoon and night with 48 howitzers: twelve 155 mm, twenty-four 105 mm and twelve 75 mm (Howe; 9th Infantry Division Association). Howe gives “over 800 miles” in four days; one division history gives 735 miles in 100 hours, probably counting only to Tébessa. By the division’s count it fired 1,904 rounds and lost 45 men, eight of them killed.

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIV; 9th Infantry Division Association, “The Battle at Thala” and “Tunisia”

Read more: Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra

No. On 21 February the defense of Thala was British, and Howe says that American units played no significant part that day: the 26th Armoured Brigade and the 2/5th Leicesters stopped the German attack a few miles short of the town at heavy cost. On 22 February the 9th Division Artillery, firing alongside about 36 British guns, more than eighty tubes in all, made the decisive contribution (Howe; Watson; Playfair). It did not destroy many tanks; Battery C of the 84th Field Artillery, firing over open sights, knocked out two Panzer IVs and lost two of its four howitzers. What the massed fire did, together with the British pre-dawn tank attack, was to convince von Broich and Rommel that the defense had been heavily reinforced, which by then was true. Thala was held by an Allied defense, not by either army alone.

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIV; Watson (2007), p. 104; Playfair, vol. IV, p. 300; 9th Infantry Division Association

Read more: Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra

While the British fought for Thala, the Americans held the road to Tébessa. Robinett’s Combat Command B, with Gardiner’s tanks dug in along the ridge of Djebel el Hamra, and the 16th Infantry of Maj. Gen. Terry Allen’s 1st Infantry Division waited on good ground with massed artillery. Kampfgruppe DAK left Kasserine at 14:00 on 21 February, was stopped after about an hour of long-range fire, and pulled back at about 18:00. A night march by Panzer Grenadier Regiment Afrika around the American left lost its way in rain and fog. At daylight on 22 February it overran Battery C, 33rd Field Artillery, and took Hill 812 near Bou Chebka, then stuck there under artillery fire. At 16:00 the 3rd Battalion, 16th Infantry, with tanks of the 13th Armored Regiment, retook the hill and recovered eight American guns; more than 400 prisoners were taken (Howe; Kelly). The Germans got no closer than about 23 miles from Tébessa.

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIV; Kelly, Meeting the Fox (2002), p. 244; Phifer, Warfare History Network

Read more: Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra

Sbiba was the third road, toward Le Kef, and the first to be blocked. On 19 February the 21st Panzer Division moved north from Sbeitla at 09:00 and shortly before noon ran into a belt of mines about six miles southeast of Sbiba, covered by artillery and held by the British 1st Guards Brigade, the U.S. 18th Combat Team and the 133rd and 135th Infantry of the U.S. 34th Division, with three American artillery battalions. American guns, the 151st Field Artillery Battalion among them, fired more than 100 concentrations on the German tanks, and Hildebrandt lost ten to twelve tanks that day. A second attack on 20 February was also stopped (Howe, chs. XXIII–XXIV). The repulse at Sbiba is what made Rommel switch his main effort to the Kasserine Pass on the night of 19–20 February. The one battle monument in the area commemorates the Kasserine Pass and the Sbiba Gap together.

Sources: Howe, chs. XXIII–XXIV; Armchair General (2010)

Read more: Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra · Chapter 5: The Pass

Because he had been stopped on all three roads. On the afternoon of 22 February Kesselring came to Rommel’s command post northwest of the pass, and the two field marshals agreed to withdraw from west-central Tunisia and to shift the mobile forces south against the British Eighth Army at Mareth; the Comando Supremo issued the order shortly before midnight (Howe). Rommel’s recorded reasons were mud and mountains poor for tanks, rain and fog that hampered air support, and worn-out units, while fresh Allied units were arriving. He also wanted to strike Montgomery before the Eighth Army attacked him; he did so at Medenine on 6 March and failed. The sources differ on the conference: Watson describes Kesselring trying and failing to persuade Rommel to go on, and dates it 23 February. The withdrawal went through the pass in good order on 22–23 February, leaving mines and demolitions behind (Howe; Budiansky; Watson).

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIV and nn. 22–23; Budiansky, Military History (2011); Watson (2007)

Read more: Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

Maj. Gen. Lloyd R. Fredendall, born at Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming, in 1883, had commanded the Center Task Force that took Oran in Torch, and he then took II Corps to the Tunisian front. His headquarters lay in a ravine southeast of Tébessa that the troops called “Speedy Valley,” 70 to 100 road miles behind the Eastern Dorsal by different accounts (Howe; Atkinson). He issued detailed orders by radio in a homemade code, fixed battalion positions on ground he had not seen, dispersed his armor, and was barely on speaking terms with his armored division commander or with the British. But Anderson, Eisenhower and the intelligence staff in Algiers shared in the decisions that put the armor where it was on 14 February. He was relieved on 5–6 March 1943 without a formal reprimand, given the Second Army at home, promoted to lieutenant general in June 1943, and died in 1963 (Howe; Blumenson).

Sources: Howe, chs. XX–XXI and XXVIII; Atkinson (2002); Blumenson (1967)

Read more: Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

For part of it. Rommel commanded the German-Italian Panzer Army retreating into southern Tunisia. The first and most damaging blow, Frühlingswind at Sidi Bou Zid on 14–17 February, belonged to von Arnim’s Fifth Panzer Army and was directed by Generalleutnant Heinz Ziegler. Rommel’s own operation, Morgenluft, took an empty Gafsa on 15 February and Fériana and Thelepte on 17 February. On 18 February he proposed a thrust on Tébessa; the Comando Supremo’s order that night gave him the 10th and 21st Panzer Divisions and aimed him at Le Kef. He directed the attacks at Sbiba and the Kasserine Pass from 19 February, watching the pass from its entrance, and took personal charge of the spearhead south of Thala on 21 February (Howe). “Group Rommel” formally took command of the attack forces at 06:00 on 20 February. Rommel left Africa on 9 March 1943 and never returned.

Sources: Howe, chs. XXI–XXIV and XXVIII; The Rommel Papers (1953)

Read more: Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid · Chapter 4: The Long Retreat · Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra

Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim came from the Eastern Front to take command of the new Fifth Panzer Army in Tunisia on 9 December 1942. His EILBOTE attacks broke the French in January, and his Operation Frühlingswind destroyed Combat Command A. He and Rommel commanded separate armies, neither subordinate to the other, under Kesselring and the Italian Comando Supremo, and they disliked and distrusted each other (Howe). Von Arnim wanted limited attacks to secure his own flank; Rommel wanted a deep thrust through Tébessa. When the offensive was turned toward Le Kef, von Arnim kept back part of the 10th Panzer Division, including its Tiger battalion, a decision Kesselring later blamed for the failure and von Arnim defended. He succeeded Rommel in command of Army Group Africa in March and was captured with his headquarters near Sainte-Marie-du-Zit on 12 May 1943 (Howe; Playfair).

Sources: Howe, chs. XVII, XXI–XXIV and XXXIV; Playfair, vol. IV

Read more: Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal · Chapter 4: The Long Retreat · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

Lt. Gen. Kenneth A. N. Anderson commanded the British First Army, which led the race for Tunis in November 1942. On 21 January 1943 Eisenhower gave him responsibility for coordinating the British, French and American sectors, and on 24 January II Corps was attached to First Army, making him responsible for the employment of American troops (Howe). Expecting the next blow in the north, he held Combat Command B near Maktar, far from Sidi Bou Zid. On 15 February he proposed the voluntary withdrawal to the Western Dorsal that Eisenhower approved, and at about 01:30 on 17 February he authorized the evacuation of Sbeitla and Fériana. His chief of staff, Brig. McNabb, released only Gore Force to the pass on 19–20 February, while Anderson fed British reserves to Sbiba and Thala. From 19–20 February Gen. Sir Harold Alexander’s new 18th Army Group stood over him (Howe).

Sources: Howe, chs. XVIII, XXI–XXIV and XXVIII

Read more: Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal · Chapter 4: The Long Retreat · Chapter 5: The Pass

As Allied commander in chief, Eisenhower approved the command arrangements and the dispositions. On 13 February he met Anderson at Fredendall’s headquarters, judged the dispositions “as good as could be made pending the development of an actual attack,” drove forward to Sbeitla and Sidi Bou Zid that night, and returned to Tébessa shortly before the German attack began (Howe). Accounts based on the participants describe him as uneasy at the distance between the hill garrisons and the minefields not yet laid. He had allowed the dispersion of the 1st Armored Division, and he accepted his share of the responsibility. His intelligence chief, Brig. Eric Mockler-Ferryman, who expected the main blow at Fondouk, was replaced by Brig. Kenneth Strong. Afterward Eisenhower acted quickly: he sent Maj. Gen. Ernest Harmon to the front on 20 February, brought in Bradley as his observer, relieved Fredendall and gave II Corps to Patton (Howe; Atkinson).

Sources: Howe, chs. XXI, XXV and XXVIII; Atkinson (2002); Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (1948)

Read more: Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

Patton took command at Djebel Kouif on the morning of 6 March 1943 and held it until 15 April. He imposed discipline at once: steel helmets with chin straps fastened, neckties for officers, leggings, the headquarters mess closed at 07:30, and fines, usually given as $25, for violations (Bradley; D’Este). He toured the divisions constantly, demanded that officers lead from the front, and pressed for patrolling and night attacks. Under him the 1st Infantry Division retook Gafsa on 17 March and won at El Guettar on 23 March. But much of the recovery was already under way when he arrived: replacement tanks and M10 tank destroyers, battle schools, reorganized air forces and reassembled divisions. His attacks at Maknassy and east of El Guettar mostly failed, and on 5 April he relieved Maj. Gen. Orlando Ward of the 1st Armored Division. He then returned to plan the invasion of Sicily (Howe).

Sources: Howe, chs. XXVIII–XXXI; Bradley, A Soldier’s Story (1951); D’Este, Patton (1995)

Read more: Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

Maj. Gen. Omar N. Bradley, Eisenhower’s West Point classmate of 1915, arrived on 24 February 1943 as Eisenhower’s personal representative at the front, his “eyes and ears,” and reported that the division commanders had lost confidence in Fredendall. He became Patton’s deputy at II Corps on 6–7 March while keeping his direct line to Eisenhower, and took over the corps in mid-April (15 April by Howe, the 16th in other accounts). He moved the whole corps, more than 90,000 men, some 140 miles north to the coastal end of the line, and fought the methodical northern offensive of 23 April–9 May that took Hill 609, Mateur and Bizerte and ended with almost 40,000 prisoners in the corps area (Howe). Tunisia made his reputation. He went on to command II Corps in Sicily, the First Army on D-Day and the 12th Army Group in France.

Sources: Howe, chs. XXXI–XXXIV; Bradley, A Soldier’s Story (1951)

Read more: Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

Unevenly. The American M3 light tank, the Stuart, had a 37 mm gun. The M3 medium, the Lee or Grant, carried its 75 mm gun low in a hull sponson with limited traverse and had a high silhouette. The M4 Sherman, just arriving, put the 75 in a fully traversing turret. Against them were Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs, many of the IVs with the long 75 mm gun the Americans called the “Mark IV Special,” and a few Tigers. The Sherman’s 75 with M61 shot was rated to penetrate about 81 mm of plate at 500 yards, enough for the roughly 50 mm front of a Panzer III or IV, but not for the Tiger’s 100 mm. The German long 75s could defeat a Sherman’s front well beyond 1,000 yards (Zaloga; Bird and Livingston). On the open plains range decided the fight, as Hightower’s and Alger’s battalions found at Sidi Bou Zid (Howe).

Sources: Zaloga’s Osprey armor studies; Bird and Livingston, WWII Ballistics; Howe, ch. XXI

Read more: Chapter 1: Torch and the Race for Tunis · Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid

No. The Tiger I of schwere Panzer-Abteilung 501 was the most talked-about German weapon in Tunisia, and Americans had met it as early as 1 December 1942 near Djedeida. At Sidi Bou Zid Howe counts 11 or 12 Tigers; the German unit history says six Tigers and nine Panzer IIIs of the battalion’s 1st Company were attached to the 10th Panzer Division (Schneider). German claims that Tigers knocked out 20 Shermans there cannot be checked against American records. Most American losses came from Panzer IVs, antitank guns, 88s and dive bombers. In the Kasserine Pass itself there were no Tigers: von Arnim kept the 10th Panzer’s heavy tank battalion in the north. The Tiger’s effect was partly psychological, and soldiers began calling almost any German tank a Tiger. Americans got their first close look at one knocked out near Béja in April 1943 (Howe; Zaloga).

Sources: Howe, chs. XXI and XXIII; Schneider, Tigers in Combat (2004); Zaloga

Read more: Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid · Chapter 5: The Pass

Tank destroyers were the Army’s answer, shaped by the 1941 maneuvers, to massed enemy armor: self-propelled antitank guns in separate battalions under the doctrine “seek, strike and destroy.” In Tunisia they were improvisations: the M3 gun motor carriage, an old 75 mm field gun on a half-track, and the M6, a 37 mm gun on a light Dodge truck; the full-tracked M10 with a 3-inch gun arrived in 1943. At Sidi Bou Zid the 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion’s half-tracks had about the punch of a Sherman and far less protection. Their best day came at El Guettar on 23 March 1943, when the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion, with M10s of the 899th, fought the 10th Panzer Division from shallow positions in the open; it lost 21 of its 31 M3s by the ABMC’s count, was credited with 37 tanks and won a Presidential Unit Citation (Howe; Yeide).

Sources: Howe, chs. XXI and XXVIII; Yeide, The Tank Killers (2004); ABMC; Gabel, The U.S. Army GHQ Maneuvers of 1941

Read more: Chapter 1: Torch and the Race for Tunis · Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

It was the American arm the Germans respected most. In the 1930s the Field Artillery School at Fort Sill, under Maj. Carlos Brewer and then Maj. Orlando Ward, later the commander of the 1st Armored Division, developed the fire direction center, which computed firing data for a whole battalion from a forward observer’s call and let several battalions on a surveyed grid mass their fire on one target within minutes (Dastrup). In Tunisia it proved itself at Sbiba, where American guns fired more than 100 concentrations on 19 February; at Thala, with Irwin’s 48 howitzers on 22 February; at Djebel el Hamra and Hill 812; and at El Guettar, where artillery and tank destroyers knocked out nearly thirty German tanks (Howe). The reports from Tunisia recommended that “three battalions of artillery should support one battalion of tanks in an attack” (Howe, ch. XXXV).

Sources: Howe, chs. XXIII–XXIV, XXVIII and XXXV; Dastrup, Fires (January 2011)

Read more: Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

Besides the tanks: the 88 mm gun used against ground targets, more dangerous than any American weapon of its kind; the 7.5 cm Pak 40 antitank gun, hidden in olive groves and wadis, which broke the American tank attacks at Faïd on 31 January and 1 February; and the Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber, which destroyed the 2nd Battalion, 17th Field Artillery, at Sidi Bou Zid on 14 February. At the pass on 20 February the Germans brought up a battery of new rocket projectors, Nebelwerfers, which soldiers came to call “Screaming Meemies.” Howe does not give the model; secondary accounts say the 21 cm Nebelwerfer 42, though the German losses for the operation include four 150 mm launchers, the caliber of the older model. The Italian Centauro Division’s M14/41 tanks were outclassed by 1943, but its Bersaglieri fought hard at the pass (Howe; Craven and Cate).

Sources: Howe, chs. XX–XXIII; Craven and Cate, vol. 2; mikesresearch.com

Read more: Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal · Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid · Chapter 5: The Pass

The record names many. Col. Anderson T. W. Moore organized the defense of the pass with his engineers, and Lt. Col. Gerald C. Kelleher’s 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, held its northern side. Col. Thomas D. Drake held Djebel Ksaira for three days and refused to surrender. Lt. Col. Louis V. Hightower placed his tank between German armor and a withdrawing column and fought on until it burned. Brig. Gen. Paul Robinett fought a model delaying action at Sbeitla and held Djebel el Hamra, and Lt. Col. Henry E. Gardiner, a Chicago lawyer before the war, led his tanks off the field last. Brig. Gen. S. LeRoy Irwin brought his guns to Thala. On the British side Brig. Charles Dunphie and Lt. Col. Adrian Gore fought with outgunned tanks. And Sgt. Frank F. Aiello of the 39th Infantry, badly wounded, stayed behind alone to cover his men’s withdrawal in the pass on 20 February and was killed (Howe; DSC citations).

Sources: Howe, chs. XXI–XXIV; Distinguished Service Cross citations (Home of Heroes; 9th Infantry Division DSC roll)

Read more: Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid · Chapter 4: The Long Retreat · Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra

Drake, born in West Virginia in 1900, enlisted at 16 by misstating his age and won the Distinguished Service Cross as a sergeant in France in 1918. He took command of the 168th Infantry, Iowa National Guard, in January 1943 and led it at Sened Station, winning the Silver Star. At Sidi Bou Zid he held Djebel Ksaira and Garet Hadid for three days under orders to stay, asked in vain to withdraw, and led the attempt to walk out on the night of 16–17 February. When a German officer called on him to surrender on the 17th, he is said to have answered in four words. The exchange, “Colonel, you surrender.” — “You go to hell,” rests on the recollection of Drake and his officers (CMH readings, as quoted by Rogers). He became the first senior American officer at Oflag 64, was repatriated in 1944, received an oak leaf cluster to his DSC, and died in 1970.

Sources: Rogers, “Colonel Thomas Davisson Drake” (Kriegy Research Group), citing the CMH Kasserine Pass Battles readings; Howe, ch. XXII

Read more: Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid

Lt. Col. John K. Waters, a 1931 West Point graduate and Patton’s son-in-law, led the flying column that took Tafaraoui airfield near Oran on 8 November 1942 and the light tanks that fought the first American tank battle against German armor at Chouïgui on 26 November. At Sidi Bou Zid he commanded the Lessouda force and reported the German envelopment by radio until his communications failed. He was captured on the hill; accounts differ on whether that was on 14 February or after the breakout of 15–16 February (Howe; Keiler). He spent two years in German camps, at Oflag 64 in occupied Poland and then Hammelburg in Bavaria, where on 27 March 1945 he was badly wounded by a guard during the raid of Task Force Baum, which Patton had ordered. He later commanded U.S. Army, Pacific, and retired as a four-star general. He died in 1989. His decorations include the Distinguished Service Cross.

Sources: Howe, chs. XI, XVI and XXI; Keiler, Warfare History Network; Wikipedia, “John K. Waters” and “Task Force Baum”

Read more: Chapter 1: Torch and the Race for Tunis · Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

The 1st Ranger Battalion, raised in Northern Ireland in June 1942 on the British commando model under William O. Darby, led the landing at Arzew in Torch and was used in Tunisia for raids and reconnaissance. On the night of 11–12 February 1943 three of its companies marched on foot to the Italian outpost at Sened Station, held by men of the 10th Bersaglieri Regiment, and attacked at 01:00 with rifles, grenades and bayonets. By the Army’s own study they killed or wounded an estimated 75 Italians and took eleven prisoners, for one Ranger killed and twenty wounded (King). Darby won the Silver Star. The battalion was the last unit out of Gafsa on 14–15 February, led the way to El Guettar in March and won a Distinguished Unit Citation. Darby was killed in Italy on 30 April 1945 and promoted posthumously to brigadier general.

Sources: King, Rangers: Selected Combat Operations in World War II (1985); Darby’s Silver Star citation; Howe, chs. XXI and XXVIII

Read more: Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal · Chapter 4: The Long Retreat · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

Ernie Pyle of the Scripps-Howard newspapers was the best-known American reporter in North Africa. He stayed with the troops through Kasserine, El Guettar and the final battles, writing about soldiers rather than generals. His dispatch of 4 March 1943, printed in the Pittsburgh Press the next day and written before the Allies retook the lost ground, described the withdrawal from the Sbeitla valley back through the pass as “a majestic thing in a way”: it started before dawn one morning and went on without a break for 24 hours. He wrote under censorship and from what he saw; the night stampede at Sbeitla is not in it. His North African columns were collected as Here Is Your War (1943). He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 and was killed on Ie Shima, near Okinawa, on 18 April 1945 (Pyle; National WWII Museum).

Sources: Pyle, Scripps-Howard column, Pittsburgh Press, 5 March 1943; Pyle, Here Is Your War (1943); National WWII Museum

Read more: Chapter 4: The Long Retreat · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Not for the February battles, as far as the published award lists show. The highest decorations were Distinguished Service Crosses, among them those of Lt. Col. Louis V. Hightower (14 February), Lt. Col. John K. Waters (14 February, awarded in 1945), Col. Thomas D. Drake (an oak leaf cluster for 14–16 February), Lt. Col. Henry E. Gardiner (Sbeitla) and Sgt. Frank F. Aiello (the pass, 20 February, posthumous, awarded in 1948). Medals of Honor were won elsewhere in the campaign: by Col. Demas T. Craw and Maj. Pierpont M. Hamilton at Port-Lyautey and Col. William H. Wilbur at Fedala in November 1942, and by Pvt. Robert D. Booker at Fondouk on 9 April and Pvt. Nicholas Minue near Medjez el Bab on 28 April 1943, both posthumously. Minue is the one Medal of Honor recipient buried at the North Africa American Cemetery (citations; ABMC).

Sources: Medal of Honor and DSC citations (Home of Heroes; Military Times Hall of Valor; 9th Infantry Division DSC roll); ABMC

Read more: Chapter 1: Torch and the Race for Tunis · Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid · Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

It was the Afrika Korps assault group Rommel formed for Operation Morgenluft: a German-Italian force of about division strength built around the headquarters of the Deutsches Afrikakorps, with Panzer Grenadier Regiment Afrika, two weak Luftwaffe Jäger battalions, a tank battalion of the 15th Panzer Division with 26 tanks, the 33rd Reconnaissance Battalion, artillery, engineers and strong antiaircraft units, plus Italian Centauro infantry, Bersaglieri, artillery and 23 tanks: about 49 tanks in all (Howe, ch. XXII). It entered Gafsa on 15 February and Fériana and Thelepte on 17 February. When its first commander, Oberst Kurt von Liebenstein, was wounded by a mine, Gen. Karl Bülowius, Rommel’s chief engineer, took over and led the assault on the pass. Bülowius was captured in May 1943 and took his own life at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, on 27 March 1945; he is buried in Chattanooga National Cemetery.

Sources: Howe, chs. XXII–XXIII and n. 6; Wikipedia, “Karl Bülowius”

Read more: Chapter 4: The Long Retreat · Chapter 5: The Pass

For the roughly 90,000 Jews of Tunisia the six-month German occupation brought the Holocaust to Africa. An SS Einsatzkommando of the Security Police and SD under Walther Rauff arrived with the troops. On 8 December 1942 it demanded 3,000 Jewish laborers for the next morning; when about a hundred appeared, the SS seized Jews in the streets on 9 December and took hostages (Harif, after Claude Nataf). Yad Vashem counts almost 5,000 Jews held in 32 labor camps; the USHMM estimates about 5,000 men in some forty camps. They dug fortifications for the Axis armies near the front and worked in ports and at airfields, wearing a yellow star on their backs, beaten by guards and bombed by Allied aircraft; dozens died. Communities paid heavy fines, and on Djerba Rauff’s men took about 43 kg of gold. The Germans did not have time to deport Tunisia’s Jews (Yad Vashem; USHMM).

Sources: Yad Vashem, “The Jews of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia”; USHMM, “Labor and Internment Camps in North Africa”; Harif (2022); Montreal Holocaust Museum

Read more: Chapter 1: Torch and the Race for Tunis · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

SS-Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff had overseen, in the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, the development of the gas vans used to murder Jews and others in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. His Einsatzkommando had been formed in the summer of 1942 to follow Rommel toward Egypt and Palestine, a mission ended by the defeat at El Alamein, and it went to Tunis instead (Mallmann and Cüppers). After Tunisia he ran the Security Police and SD in northwestern Italy. Arrested at the end of the war, he escaped from an American internment camp at Rimini in December 1946 and reached Syria, Ecuador and finally Chile. Arrested at West Germany’s request in December 1962, he was freed in 1963 when the Chilean Supreme Court ruled that the crimes were too old to prosecute; later requests, including one in 1983, were refused. He died in Santiago on 14 May 1984, never tried (Wikipedia, citing the New York Times).

Sources: Yad Vashem; Mallmann and Cüppers, Nazi Palestine (2010); Wikipedia, “Walter Rauff”

Read more: Chapter 1: Torch and the Race for Tunis · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Yes, though the record is still being gathered. The American scholar Robert Satloff, in Among the Righteous (2006), documented Arab Tunisians who sheltered Jews during the occupation, among them Khaled Abdul-Wahab, who hid Jewish families on his farm near Mahdia. The German propaganda photograph of Jewish laborers marched through Tunis in December 1942 carries a caption claiming that the Arab population watched “with visible satisfaction,” a line written for the German press, not a record of what the onlookers felt. The memory of the six months was long kept mainly within the Tunisian Jewish community, most of whose members later emigrated to France and Israel. 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 (Satloff; Yad Vashem; USHMM).

Sources: Satloff, Among the Righteous (2006); Yad Vashem; USHMM; Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J20384

Read more: Chapter 1: Torch and the Race for Tunis · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

In the February battles the record is of a hard but conventional fight; the chapters found no specific war crimes recorded against Kampfgruppe DAK in those days. The 10th Panzer Division had an earlier record: its troops and the attached Grossdeutschland Regiment are blamed for the massacre of captured Senegalese and North African riflemen of the French Army at Chasselay, near Lyon, on 19–20 June 1940 (Lengel, National WWII Museum). The great crime of the occupation of Tunisia was the persecution of the Jews by Rauff’s SS unit, carried out behind the front the German army held, with Jewish forced laborers digging fortifications for the Axis armies. This collection shows Axis units only on factual record cards, with original period-style markers labeled as illustrations, and shows no SS insignia (Yad Vashem; USHMM).

Sources: Lengel, National WWII Museum, as cited in Wikipedia, “10th Panzer Division”; Yad Vashem; USHMM

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Over the front through most of the winter, yes. The Luftwaffe flew from all-weather fields at Tunis, Bizerte, Kairouan, Sfax and Gabès, minutes from the battle, while the Allies had only four hard-surfaced fields between Casablanca and the Tunisian border and flew from distant or mired strips such as Youks-les-Bains and Souk el Arba (Craven and Cate). Stukas destroyed an American artillery battalion at Sidi Bou Zid. But during the fight for the pass sirocco dust on 19 February and rain and fog on 20–21 February grounded both sides; Howe notes that the German infantry attacking the pass lacked their usual air support. When the weather cleared on 22 February the XII Air Support Command flew 23 missions and 114 sorties from Youks, and on 23 February it attacked the withdrawing columns, in what Rommel called “hammer-blow air attacks” (Craven and Cate; Playfair).

Sources: Craven and Cate, vol. 2, chs. 3–5; Howe, ch. XXIII; Playfair, vol. IV, p. 302

Read more: Chapter 7: The Air War

Ground commanders who had been bombed wanted fighters patrolling continuously over their troops. Airmen argued that standing patrols wasted aircraft and pilots, could not be kept up from distant fields and left the German airfields untouched; the way to protect the troops was to win control of the air. The Army’s doctrine of the time, FM 31-35 (April 1942), let air units be allotted to ground commanders and was vague about control. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, taking over the Allied tactical air forces, ordered on 18 February 1943 that umbrellas be abandoned unless specifically authorized (Craven and Cate). The quarrel peaked on 1–5 April, when a II Corps report under Patton complained of “total lack of air cover” and Coningham’s widely circulated reply questioned the troops; Tedder made Coningham withdraw it and apologize (Mortensen; Howe).

Sources: Craven and Cate, vol. 2, chs. 5–6; Mortensen, Airpower and Ground Armies (1998); Howe, ch. XXIX

Read more: Chapter 7: The Air War · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

In the middle of the Kasserine battle. On 17–18 February 1943 the Mediterranean Air Command under Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder took charge of all Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, and the Northwest African Air Forces were activated under Maj. Gen. Carl Spaatz, organized by function rather than nationality: the Northwest African Tactical Air Force under Coningham, with Brig. Gen. Laurence Kuter as his deputy; the Strategic Air Force under Doolittle; and coastal, training, service and photographic commands (Craven and Cate). Coningham’s principle was that the army and air commanders were equals who planned together. The lessons were written into War Department Field Manual 100-20, published on 21 July 1943, which declared land power and air power “co-equal and interdependent” and said air power must be controlled centrally through the air force commander (FM 100-20).

Sources: Craven and Cate, vol. 2, ch. 5; FM 100-20, Command and Employment of Air Power (21 July 1943)

Read more: Chapter 7: The Air War · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

Flax was the Allied campaign, launched on 5 April 1943, to destroy the Axis air transport fleet flying supplies across the Sicilian Strait. Its best-known day was Palm Sunday, 18 April, when four P-40 squadrons of the 57th and 324th Fighter Groups, with Spitfires above, caught a large formation of Ju 52s low over the Gulf of Tunis. The pilots’ first claims reached 146; they were later reduced to 58 or 59 Ju 52s and about 16 to 18 escorting fighters, for six P-40s and one Spitfire lost (Craven and Cate; 57th Fighter Group history). German records give lower figures: the AAF history says the Germans admitted 51 Ju 52s, and the figures often cited today are 24 Ju 52s shot down and 35 more damaged and crash-landed (Murawski). On 22 April a formation of Me 323 Gigants carrying fuel was destroyed. By May more than 600 wrecked or abandoned Axis aircraft lay on Tunisian fields (Craven and Cate).

Sources: Craven and Cate, vol. 2, ch. 6; Murawski (2009) and Levine (2008), as cited in Wikipedia, “Operation Flax”

Read more: Chapter 7: The Air War

Not in the campaign itself, which ended on 13 May 1943. The 99th Fighter Squadron, the first Black American flying unit sent overseas, under Lt. Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., arrived at Casablanca on 24 April 1943 and trained near Fez in Morocco. Attached to the 33rd Fighter Group on 29 May, it moved to Fardjouna on Cap Bon in Tunisia and flew its first combat mission on 2 June 1943, in the air campaign against Pantelleria, which surrendered on 11 June. On 2 July, over Sicily, 1st Lt. Charles B. Hall was credited with the first aerial victory of the Tuskegee Airmen (Haulman). In September 1943 senior commanders, drawing partly on a critical report by Col. William Momyer, recommended taking the squadron out of combat; an Army statistical study released in March 1944 found that it had performed about as well as the other P-40 squadrons in the theater (Haulman; Commemorative Air Force archive).

Sources: Haulman, A Tuskegee Airmen Chronology (AFHRA, 2016); Commemorative Air Force Rise Above archive

Read more: Chapter 7: The Air War

The record does not support it. There were real routs: Combat Command A on 14 February, the night stampede of rear-echelon traffic at Sbeitla on 16–17 February, and the break in the pass on 20 February. But most of the failures were of organization and command: dispersed positions chosen by higher headquarters, armor fed in by companies, faulty intelligence, a distant corps commander and no tested drill for working with aircraft. Where units were well placed and well led, they fought hard: the 168th Infantry on its hills, the engineers and the 26th Infantry in the pass, Robinett’s Combat Command B, and the gunners at Thala, Sbiba and Djebel el Hamra (Howe; Blumenson). Rommel wrote that the Americans in the pass had fought superbly, and noted how quickly they learned (Krieg ohne Hass, as quoted by Howe; Lewin). Within a month the 1st Infantry Division beat the 10th Panzer Division at El Guettar.

Sources: Howe, chs. XXII–XXIV and n. 46; Blumenson (1986); Lewin, Rommel as Military Commander

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

No. Fuel was a constant Axis worry in Tunisia, but on 22 February Rommel’s forces had fuel for roughly another 250 to 300 km and about four days’ rations, with reserve stocks behind them, though ammunition was getting low (Calhoun, National WWII Museum, 2023). His recorded reasons for stopping were the ground, the weather and the wear on his units (Howe). The thrusts toward Thala and Tébessa had been stopped by Allied defenders, and the Axis forces withdrew in good order with most of their equipment. The Germans had even taken fuel from the Allies: a German radio message reported 20 tons of aviation gasoline and 30 tons of lubricants salvaged at Thelepte, and Howe records more than 215 cubic meters (about 57,000 U.S. gallons) of gasoline and lubricants captured at Kasserine. Whether a drive on Tébessa could have succeeded cannot be known; it was proposed late and never tried.

Sources: Calhoun, “Kasserine Pass: German Offensive, American Victory” (National WWII Museum, 2023); Howe, chs. XXII and XXIV

Read more: Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra · Chapter 4: The Long Retreat · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Not as the legend has it. A company of the 19th Engineers did spend about three weeks tunneling shelters into a ravine southeast of Tébessa that the troops called “Speedy Valley”: two U-shaped galleries, each reported at about 160 feet. The troops’ nicknames for it said what they thought of it, and the corps command post was far from the front (Atkinson, as summarized; Warfare History Network). But the sources the chapters rely on do not show that the tunnels were ever finished or occupied; during the German advance the headquarters moved back to a schoolhouse at El Kouif, and the tunneling ended. Fredendall did leave the ravine: Howe records him at Sbeitla on 10 February, and on 20 February he drove down the Thala road toward the pass. Bradley later wrote that the tunnels embarrassed every American soldier who saw them. Fredendall’s real failures lay in his orders. The bunker was a symptom, not the cause.

Sources: Howe, chs. XX and XXIII; Atkinson (2002); Warfare History Network; Bradley, A Soldier’s Story

Read more: Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal · Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

No. Patton commanded II Corps for six weeks, from 6 March to 15 April 1943, and restored its discipline and drive. But the corps had already helped stop Rommel at Thala, Sbiba and Djebel el Hamra before he arrived, and new tanks, M10 tank destroyers, battle schools, reassembled divisions and reorganized air forces were in hand. El Guettar, on 23 March, was a defensive victory won by Terry Allen’s 1st Infantry Division, its artillery and the 601st and 899th Tank Destroyer Battalions. Patton’s attacks at Maknassy and east of El Guettar mostly failed, and the final campaign that took Hill 609, Mateur and Bizerte was fought under Bradley (Howe). The film Patton (1970), which opens in the aftermath of Kasserine, did much to fix the legend. Patton gave a shaken corps its nerve back; he did not do it alone.

Sources: Howe, chs. XXVIII–XXXIV; Blumenson, Patton (1985); D’Este (1995)

Read more: Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

The claim is often made, and the record does not support it. Red Oak, a county seat of about 5,800 people in 1940, received more than 100 telegrams reporting its soldiers missing, and 45 of its men were captured or killed in the Kasserine battles, most of them National Guardsmen of the 168th Infantry taken on the hills at Sidi Bou Zid (Atkinson, p. 397). The town has often been said to have suffered more casualties in proportion to its population than any other American community in the war. The final casualty statistics do not bear that out: a 1946 Iowa newspaper report ranked Montgomery County, of which Red Oak is the seat, third among Iowa counties in war dead per head (Council Bluffs Nonpareil, as cited). What is true is that the losses fell heavily on a few small towns whose sons had joined the same Guard companies.

Sources: Atkinson, An Army at Dawn, p. 397; Time (1966) and Council Bluffs Nonpareil (1946), as cited in Wikipedia, “Red Oak, Iowa”

Read more: Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid

Between about 6,000 and 7,000 in the February battles. The figure most often quoted, from Martin Blumenson’s essay in America’s First Battles (1986), is about 300 killed, 3,000 wounded and 3,000 missing, nearly all of the missing prisoners; Britannica gives about 6,500, and Stephen Budiansky “nearly 7,000.” Blumenson adds that about 7,000 replacements were needed. Most of the loss came in the first four days around Sidi Bou Zid, not in the pass. The counts firmed up only over weeks, as men walked back, bodies were found and Red Cross prisoner lists arrived. Beware one figure: the 2,546 sometimes printed as American “killed” at Sidi Bou Zid is the 21st Panzer Division’s claim of prisoners for 14–17 February, not deaths (Howe). In the pass itself three units reported 28 killed, 93 wounded and 344 missing.

Sources: Blumenson (1986), p. 261; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Budiansky, HistoryNet; Howe, chs. XXII and XXIV, n. 45

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid · Chapter 5: The Pass

Much less. German records cited by Howe give 201 killed, 536 wounded and 252 missing for the whole offensive of 14–24 February, 989 in all, with 20 tanks, 67 vehicles and 14 guns lost; Britannica, using other counts, gives about 2,000 Axis casualties and 34 tanks. Italian losses, mostly in the Centauro Division and the Bersaglieri, were never fully recorded in the English-language sources. The Allies took 73 German and 535 Italian prisoners (Blumenson). The Germans claimed 3,721 Allied prisoners from their two operations, and a consolidated report of 24 February counted 4,026 (Howe). Measured in casualties, Kasserine was a clear German victory, six or seven Allied casualties for every German one. Measured against its aims, it failed: the Allies could replace 183 lost tanks, and the Germans could not replace the fuel, time and reputation they had spent (Howe; Blumenson).

Sources: Howe, ch. XXIV and n. 44; Blumenson (1986), p. 260; Encyclopaedia Britannica

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra

By Blumenson’s count, 183 tanks, 104 half-tracks, 208 guns and 512 trucks and other vehicles in the February battles, some of them captured and put to use by the Germans. The heaviest losses came at Sidi Bou Zid: Combat Command A lost 44 tanks on 14 February (Howe), Combat Command C 46 medium tanks on 15 February (Watson), and one participant tallied 98 tanks, 57 half-tracks and 29 guns lost by the 1st Armored Division in those two days (Newton). At Thelepte 18 to 34 aircraft were destroyed on the ground and 60,000 gallons of aviation fuel poured out. Much of the rest was destroyed or abandoned by the Americans themselves during the retreat, at Sbeitla, Fériana and Kasserine. Even so, at 19:00 on 20 February II Corps still counted 99 medium and 47 light tanks operational, with 74 more out of action (Howe).

Sources: Blumenson (1986), p. 261; Howe, chs. XXI–XXIV; Watson (2007); Newton (2002); Craven and Cate, vol. 2

Read more: Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid · Chapter 4: The Long Retreat · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

By the British official history’s figures, 76,020 Allied casualties from November 1942 to 13 May 1943: 38,360 British and Commonwealth (6,233 killed, 21,528 wounded, 10,599 missing), 19,439 French (2,156 killed, 10,276 wounded, 7,007 missing) and 18,221 Americans (2,715 killed, 8,978 wounded, 6,528 missing) (Playfair, vol. IV; Atkinson). The U.S. Army’s campaign brochure gives the same American figures within about 70,000 Allied casualties. The French losses, mostly of North African soldiers of the Armée d’Afrique who held the mountain center of the line all winter with old weapons, exceeded the American. Axis records were largely lost at the surrender; Atkinson estimates about 8,500 German and 3,700 Italian dead and 40,000 to 50,000 wounded. The 6,000 to 7,000 American casualties of February were roughly a third of the American total for the campaign.

Sources: Playfair, vol. IV, p. 460; Atkinson, pp. 536–537; Anderson, Tunisia (CMH, 1993)

Read more: Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

The counts differ: 238,243 unwounded prisoners in the British official history (101,784 German, 89,442 Italian and 47,017 not identified by nationality); 244,500 in 18th Army Group’s count, including 157,000 Germans; more than 275,000 in the U.S. official history; and about a quarter of a million by Rick Atkinson’s estimate (Playfair, vol. IV; Howe; Atkinson). The differences come from double counting in the confusion of the last days and from what each count includes. Almost 40,000 surrendered to the U.S. II Corps in the north on 9–10 May. Von Arnim was captured on 12 May, and Messe surrendered the Italian First Army on 13 May. Far more Axis soldiers surrendered in Tunisia than the roughly 91,000 taken at Stalingrad three months earlier, which is why the campaign was nicknamed “Tunisgrad.”

Sources: Playfair, vol. IV, p. 460; Howe, ch. XXXIV; Atkinson, p. 537

Read more: Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Concrete things, and quickly. Units had been spread too far apart on hilltops that could be surrounded one by one; armor had been parceled out in small packets; commanders had stayed too far back; reconnaissance, map reading, patrolling and night movement had been weak; infantry had dug shallow slit trenches on exposed crests (Howe; Westrate). The Army’s campaign brochure states the greater lesson simply: maintain concentration of tanks (Anderson, CMH). The corrections came within weeks. Divisions fought as divisions, and II Corps fought as a corps on its own front; training at home became harder and more realistic, with live fire; commanders who failed were relieved and those who did well were moved up. The War Department published Lessons from the Tunisian Campaign in 1943. Above all, Kasserine showed that men who had trained for a year or more were not ready for the German army until they had fought it (Howe, ch. XXXV).

Sources: Howe, ch. XXXV; Anderson, Tunisia (CMH, 1993); Westrate (1944); War Department, Lessons from the Tunisian Campaign (1943)

Read more: Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

The main change was to keep them whole. At Sidi Bou Zid the 1st Armored Division fought as scattered combat commands under several headquarters, with its commander bypassed, and the 1st Infantry Division was spread across the front in combat teams. From March the American divisions in Tunisia fought, as far as possible, as divisions, and from late April II Corps fought as a corps of four divisions on its own front under Bradley, the arrangement the inquests had called for. Eisenhower insisted from then on that American forces fight under American command at corps level and above wherever possible, a principle that shaped the Allied armies in Sicily and Normandy (Howe). Armored units were told to attack in depth on narrow fronts and to take time to prepare; the tank destroyers’ half-tracks gave way to M10s and towed guns; and in 1944 the Army reorganized its armored divisions on a lighter pattern (Howe).

Sources: Howe, chs. XXXI and XXXV

Read more: Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

Three lessons that shaped American military medicine for the rest of the war. First, air evacuation: C-47s carrying 18 litter patients each flew wounded men from forward strips such as Youks-les-Bains back to Algeria, and the II Corps surgeon reported 3,313 patients evacuated by air from January to 15 May. Second, plasma was found to be “not a complete substitute for blood in combat surgery”; the 48th Surgical Hospital at Gafsa ran an informal blood bank with 25 to 50 soldier donors a day, the seed of the theater blood bank. Third, forward psychiatric care: at El Guettar and Maknassy psychiatric cases were 20 percent of battlefield evacuations, fewer than 3 percent of those sent far to the rear early in the campaign returned to combat, but by the last phase 58 to 63 percent of cases treated near the front returned to duty (Wiltse).

Sources: Wiltse, Medical Service in the Mediterranean and Minor Theaters (1965), ch. III

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Because both are the Army’s standing examples of the price of unreadiness. On 5 July 1950, near Osan in South Korea, Task Force Smith, about 540 men of the 24th Infantry Division sent from occupation duty in Japan with few antitank weapons that worked against the T-34, was overrun in a day. 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 American war; Martin Blumenson’s chapter on Kasserine stood beside Roy K. Flint’s on Task Force Smith. In the early 1990s the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, made “No more Task Force Smiths” the slogan of his readiness effort (Army, January 1992). Kasserine is the older case of the same lesson: courage does not make up for unreadiness.

Sources: Heller and Stofft, eds., America’s First Battles (1986); Wiersema, SAMS monograph (1997), citing Sullivan

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Directly, through its men. Eisenhower was Supreme Commander. Bradley, who had come to Tunisia as an observer, commanded the U.S. First Army on D-Day. The 1st Infantry Division, whose 16th Infantry had held Djebel el Hamra, led the assault at Omaha Beach, and Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Terry Allen’s assistant division commander in Tunisia, landed with the first wave of the 4th Division at Utah Beach and won the Medal of Honor. The 9th Division, which had sent its artillery to Thala, helped take Cherbourg. Harmon, who had reported on Fredendall, led the 2nd Armored Division in the Ardennes in December 1944, and Patton came to France with the Third Army. The habits learned in Tunisia, massing artillery, fighting divisions as divisions, keeping commanders forward and working with tactical air forces, were not invented in Normandy. They had been paid for in the hills of Tunisia (Howe; ABMC).

Sources: Howe, ch. XXXV; ABMC; Wikipedia biographies cited in Chapter 8

Read more: Chapter 8: Patton, El Guettar and Victory

Only with great care, and not the mountains. The pass lies a few miles west of the modern city of Kasserine, a provincial capital of about 116,000 people (2022), where Route 13 from Sbeitla meets Route 17; the road still runs up the Oued Hatab valley and forks for Thala and Tébessa. Since 2012 the mountains on both sides have been the scene of Tunisian military operations against armed groups. The U.S. State Department’s travel advisory for Tunisia dated 23 October 2024, the one current when the chapters were written, rates the country as a whole at Level 2, “Exercise Increased Caution,” but lists as Level 4, “Do Not Travel,” Mount Chaambi National Park and the Kasserine mountains of Mount Salloum, Mount Sammamma and Mount Mghila, which include both walls of the pass, together with the zone within 16 km of the Algerian border. Check the current advisory before any trip, view the ground from the road, and travel with a reputable local guide.

Sources: U.S. Department of State, Tunisia Travel Advisory (23 October 2024); Armchair General (2010)

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

One, and it is modest. The Kasserine Pass and Sbiba Gap Monument is a small 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, and a visitor who wrote about it in 2010 could not find out who had erected it (Armchair General, 2010). U.S. Army Africa photographed it during its staff ride of May 2010. Thala has no battle memorial recorded in the sources used here, and the ridges south of the town are open country. At El Guettar, staff-ride parties have found foxholes from March 1943 still visible in the hillsides. Read with Howe’s maps, the ground itself is the real monument.

Sources: Armchair General, “A Journey to World War II Battlefields, Part 2: Kasserine Pass” (2010); army.mil (2010)

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 5: The Pass

It is the only American military cemetery in Africa, on 27 acres near the site of Roman Carthage, about ten miles northeast of central Tunis, at 553 Rue Roosevelt. It was established in 1948 to gather the temporary American cemeteries of North Africa, on land granted by Tunisia free of charge and taxation, was dedicated on 21 July 1960, and is maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. The ABMC gives 2,841 burials; its brochure counts 2,833 headstones, 240 of them marking unknowns, and four pairs of brothers. The Tablets of the Missing, a wall 364 feet long, carry 3,724 names, with rosettes for men since recovered and identified. A chapel and an open-air map room trace the campaign in mosaic. Pvt. Nicholas Minue, Medal of Honor, lies in Plot E, Row 8, Grave 4. Admission is free, and staff give guided tours on request when they can (ABMC brochure, 2024).

Sources: American Battle Monuments Commission, North Africa American Cemetery and Memorial brochure (2024)

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Base in Tunis and begin at Carthage. Day trips reach the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s Medjez-el-Bab War Cemetery, about 60 km west of Tunis, with 2,903 burials and commemorations and a memorial to almost 2,000 men of the First and Eighth Armies with no known grave; the German war cemetery at Bordj Cédria, about 25 km southeast of Tunis; the battlefields of Longstop Hill and the Medjez valley; and Enfidaville and Takrouna. In central Tunisia, Sbeitla, with the Roman ruins of Sufetula and its three forum temples, is the easiest and most rewarding stop, about four hours by road from Tunis. El Guettar, east of Gafsa, has been visited by staff rides, and the Mareth Museum, between Gabès and Médenine, shows the Mareth Line. Fériana, the Thelepte airfields and Tébessa lie near or across the Algerian border, partly inside the State Department’s 16 km zone (CWGC; Volksbund; Chapter 9).

Sources: CWGC via ww2cemeteries.com; Volksbund; U.S. Department of State (2024); Wikipedia, “Sbeitla” and “Mareth Museum”

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 4: The Long Retreat

After the war the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge) gathered the German dead of the campaign from provisional cemeteries at Bizerte, Mateur, Sfax and elsewhere, and from field graves across Tunisia, into a single war cemetery at Bordj Cédria, about 25 km southeast of Tunis. Built in 1973–75 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). In February 1943 American burial parties in the reoccupied pass buried German and Italian dead as well as their own; a Signal Corps photograph of 26 February shows Sgt. T. B. Haber of New York City beside the graves of two German soldiers buried by Americans. The Commonwealth dead lie in the CWGC cemeteries, the largest at Medjez-el-Bab (Volksbund; CWGC).

Sources: Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, Bordj Cédria; U.S. Army Signal Corps photo SC 170126; CWGC

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Start with what the family has: discharge papers (for Army enlisted men, usually the WD AGO Form 53-55), letters, photographs, medals and newspaper clippings, which often name the unit. The unit is the key, because most surviving Army records are filed by unit, not by name. Then request the official personnel file from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis; files of service members separated more than 62 years ago are archival and open to anyone for a copying fee, and next of kin can request them as well. Search the National Archives’ Access to Archival Databases (AAD) for the World War II Army enlistment records and, for a prisoner, the World War II prisoners of war data file. Then turn to morning reports, unit records and the division associations named in the chapters. If he served in the 1st Armored, 1st, 9th or 34th Infantry Divisions or the 19th Engineers, the chapters show where his unit was day by day (National Archives).

Sources: National Archives, National Personnel Records Center; National Archives, Access to Archival Databases

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid

Many were. On 12 July 1973 a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis destroyed about 16 to 18 million Official Military Personnel Files, including an estimated 80 percent of the files of Army personnel discharged between 1 November 1912 and 1 January 1960, the period that covers almost every Army veteran of Kasserine. No duplicates, microfilm or indexes existed. About 6.5 million burned and water-damaged files were recovered, so a request is still worth making (National Archives). When a file is lost, the center reconstructs the basic facts of service from other records: about 19 million final pay vouchers, some 7.8 million hospital and treatment admission records of the Army Surgeon General’s Office, Veterans Administration claim files, Selective Service records and unit records, among them the morning reports, which had been removed from the building before the fire and proved especially important (National Archives).

Sources: National Archives, “The 1973 Fire, National Personnel Records Center”; National Archives at St. Louis, “Other Records”

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Morning reports were the daily personnel reports of every Army company, battery and troop: who joined or left, who was wounded, killed, missing, captured, sent to hospital or returned to duty, with dates and often places. The National Personnel Records Center holds the Army’s morning reports from November 1912 on microfilm; they survived the 1973 fire, and an index is available through the National Archives catalog (National Archives). They are arranged by unit and date, not by name, so you need the company and the approximate date. For Kasserine they are especially valuable and especially imperfect. Reports written in retreat were often incomplete, and many men first listed as missing walked back days later or were confirmed as prisoners only when Red Cross lists arrived weeks afterward (Chapter 9). Read the reports of the company for several weeks after the date of the action.

Sources: National Archives at St. Louis, “Other Records”; Chapter 9, from Howe and Wiltse

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid

Many Americans captured at Sidi Bou Zid and Kasserine spent more than two years in captivity. The National Archives’ World War II prisoners of war data file, searchable online through its Access to Archival Databases, lists American prisoners with service number, unit, date of report and, often, camp. Captured officers went first to Italian camps and, from June 1943, to Oflag 64 at Szubin (Schubin) in occupied Poland, the camp set aside for American ground-force officers, whose first inmates had been taken in Tunisia; its column was marched west to Hammelburg in January–March 1945. Enlisted men went to Stalags in Germany, most of them to work. Camp associations and published memoirs, such as those of the Oflag 64 men, fill in the rest. The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, which passed prisoner lists to families during the war, also answers requests about persons detained in the Second World War (National Archives; ICRC).

Sources: National Archives, Access to Archival Databases; International Committee of the Red Cross; Wikipedia, “Oflag 64”

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid

The operational records of Army units in the Second World War, including after-action reports, unit journals and histories, are at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, among the records of the Adjutant General’s Office (Record Group 407). George F. Howe’s official history, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West (1957), is free online and cites the unit reports by name in its notes, which helps in finding them. Unit associations and museums hold much more: the 34th Infantry Division Association for the 168th, 133rd and 135th Infantry; the First Division Museum at Cantigny for the 1st Infantry Division; the 9th Infantry Division association, which publishes its artillery’s march to Thala and its roll of Distinguished Service Crosses; and the descendants’ association of the World War II Ranger battalions. Signal Corps photographs, many dated and captioned by place, are at the National Archives (Howe; the chapters’ sources).

Sources: National Archives at College Park (RG 407); Howe (1957); unit associations cited in Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6

Read more: Chapter 5: The Pass · Chapter 3: Sidi Bou Zid · Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal

First learn whether he was brought home. Under the Return of the Dead program, which ran until 1951, more than 60 percent of American families chose repatriation, so most of the American dead of Kasserine lie in cemeteries across the United States (National WWII Museum). Those who stayed overseas, and the missing, are in the American Battle Monuments Commission’s online database, which gives plot, row and grave at the North Africa American Cemetery at Carthage or the name on the Tablets of the Missing. The Individual Deceased Personnel File (IDPF) made for each dead soldier records the circumstances of death, burial, identification and the family’s choice; these files were not personnel files and were not lost in the 1973 fire, and they are held partly by the National Archives at St. Louis and partly by the Army’s Human Resources Command at Fort Knox. Check the National Archives catalog first, since some have been digitized (ABMC; National Archives).

Sources: American Battle Monuments Commission; National WWII Museum, “The Graves Registration Service in World War II”; National Archives

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory