The 19th Engineer Combat Regiment

Road builders

The 19th Engineer Combat Regiment was a corps engineer regiment of the U.S. II Corps, commanded in early 1943 by Col. Anderson T. W. Moore, a West Point graduate of the wartime class of June 1918. Like other engineer combat regiments of the period, it was built around two battalions of lettered companies. Biographies of two of its soldiers say it landed in Algeria with the assault echelon of Operation Torch in November 1942 and that its companies spent the winter maintaining the main supply routes, repairing airfields, building bridges and clearing mines (University of Utah profile of Epifanio Gonzales; Bedingfield, profile of Cpl. Steve Tonsick).

In central Tunisia that work mattered more than anything the regiment might do with rifles. II Corps held a long, thin front supplied over a few poor mountain roads from the railhead at Tébessa. The work also produced the regiment’s least glamorous assignment. In January and February one of its companies spent about three weeks drilling and blasting tunnels into the rock of the ravine southeast of Tébessa where Maj. Gen. Lloyd R. Fredendall had placed his corps headquarters, the site the troops called Speedy Valley. The sources this collection relies on do not show that the tunnels were ever finished or used; the headquarters moved back to El Kouif during the German advance, and the digging ended (Chapter 2).

Combat engineers were armed and trained to fight. The Army’s 1941 field manual on operations, FM 100-5, expected them to defend the minefields and obstacles they built, and went further: “In emergencies they may participate in the defense as infantry” (par. 639). But the 19th had been used as builders, and many of its men had little infantry training. One popular account says only one officer in the regiment, a captain, had been in combat before (American Heritage, December 1991); the official history does not confirm it.

Into the gap, 16–18 February

After the destruction of Combat Command A at Sidi Bou Zid, II Corps fell back to the Western Dorsal. On 16 February Moore sent a small mine-laying party into the Kasserine Pass. Early on 17 February Fredendall ordered Moore’s force, the 19th Engineers and the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, to hold a line east of the village of Kasserine until the 1st Armored Division’s columns had passed through it, and then to organize the pass for defense. During the night of 17–18 February Moore moved his units back into the gap (Howe).

The pass follows the valley of the Oued Hatab between Djebel Chambi to the south and Djebel Semmama to the north; beyond the narrows the road forks for Thala and for Tébessa. Moore put the infantry battalion astride the Thala road on the northern side. His engineers took the southwestern side, from the Hatab to Hill 812 on Djebel Zebbeus, across the Tébessa road; Company B was away with the force guarding the Dernaïa position northwest of Fériana. The main line ran for almost three miles and held about 2,000 men. Moore planned a triple belt of mines across the roads, covered by small arms and machine guns, two batteries of 105 mm howitzers of the 33d Field Artillery Battalion and a battery of French 75s, with patrols on the heights and a reserve company on each side (Howe).

The plan was sound. The conditions were not. The units arrived at night, in rain and fog, on ground most of the men had never seen by daylight, and the river, running in a deep wadi inside the pass, split the position in two. The official history illustrates the state of the defenses with a memorandum by 1st Lt. Edwin C. Dryden of the 19th Engineers. An engineer lieutenant, ordered at about 7:30 p.m. on 18 February to lay a field in front of the 26th Infantry, found that no one at the infantry company knew of the job, and his infantry detail joined him only at about 3:30 a.m. With entrenching tools that were nearly useless in the rocky ground, and dawn coming, the detail “merely strewed the mines unburied across a gap about 100 yards wide” (Howe).

19 February: the minefield holds

That night Fredendall had telephoned Col. Alexander N. Stark Jr. of the 26th Infantry and, by the regiment’s after-action report, told him to go to Kasserine and “pull a Stonewall Jackson” (Howe). Stark’s command of the whole improvised force, Stark Force, was recorded at 7:30 a.m. on 19 February. Moore kept command of the southwestern half. The German attack had already begun: at daybreak the 33d Reconnaissance Battalion tried to rush the pass and was stopped. The Afrika Korps assault group, Kampfgruppe DAK, under Generalmajor Karl Bülowius, then attacked on both sides of the river. Bülowius was himself an engineer, since October 1942 the senior engineer officer of Rommel’s panzer army (Chapter 5).

At 3:30 p.m. German tanks and infantry drove northwest along the Tébessa road into the engineers’ sector. They crossed the Wadi Zebbeus and came up against the American minefield under machine-gun and antitank fire from Hill 712 and Djebel Zebbeus and artillery fire from farther back. Five German tanks were knocked out at the minefield “while the 19th Engineers, reinforced, fought stubbornly on ground cut by ravines and low ridges,” in Howe’s words. A company of German mountain troops trying to work around the engineers’ right flank above Hill 812 was driven off. At dusk the Germans broke off the attack. The pass had held.

The danger lay across the river. German infantry had taken Hill 974 on Djebel Semmama, and after dark a detachment reached Hill 1191, which looks down on the whole floor of the pass. During the night Company A, 26th Infantry, was cut off on the mountain. On their own side the engineers spent the night under pressure from German patrols but, as far as the record shows, faced no sustained attack (Howe).

20 February: over the hills

At 8:30 a.m. Bülowius attacked again with both battalions of Panzer Grenadier Regiment Afrika, supported by his artillery, his 88 mm guns and a battery of new rocket launchers. The Italian 5th Bersaglieri Battalion attacked on the Chambi side, against the engineers. The broken ground west of Hill 712 and accurate American artillery and mortar fire slowed them (Howe).

Then the line gave way. “Just before noon,” Howe wrote, “an enemy column penetrated between two of Colonel Moore’s companies, and shortly afterward, observers spotted enemy tanks and infantry getting through the mine field on the Tébessa road. By noon, Colonel Moore’s command post had been overrun and his command was falling back.” Radio contact between the American tanks nearby and the headquarters had broken down. The French gunners, out of ammunition, disabled their 75s and left them; the tank destroyers and then the tanks pulled out. A coordinated Axis attack under five battalions of artillery cleared the rest of the pass late in the afternoon, and an Italian tank battalion pushed five miles down the Tébessa road. The remnants of the engineers fell back toward Djebel el Hamra and Tébessa (Howe; Chapter 6).

The regiment reported 11 killed, 28 wounded and 89 missing in the pass, 128 in all (Howe, citing the regiment’s historical records). A profile of one of its soldiers gives 117 casualties for the 1st Battalion alone on 20 February (University of Utah); the two figures probably reflect different counts taken at different times.

What the record shows

A popular version of the story has a few hundred raw engineers left alone in the gap who ran at the first sight of German tanks. The record does not support it. The engineers held half the pass as part of a force of about 2,000 men that was reinforced through the battle. They held through all of 19 February, stopped the first tank attack at their minefield, and lost their position only around noon on the 20th, when German and Italian infantry came over the hills and between their companies. Most of their losses, 89 of 128, were missing: the mark of a unit overrun and scattered, not of one that fled before the fight.

The lesson engineers take from Kasserine is in the last clause of the 1941 manual’s paragraph on mines, which were to be “covered by fire to prevent removal by the enemy” (FM 100-5, par. 688). On 19 February the fire was there, and the mines stopped the tanks. On 20 February the Germans took the fire away by climbing, and the mines became only a delay. A minefield on the road is only as good as the troops on the ridge above it.

The Americans had fought superbly.

Rommel’s columns were stopped at Thala and Djebel el Hamra on 21 and 22 February, and the Axis forces withdrew back through the pass on the 23rd, leaving mines and demolitions behind them. For the rest of the Tunisian campaign the 19th did road work and combat engineering for the 1st and 34th Infantry Divisions and the 1st Ranger Battalion, keeping more than 360 miles of road open by one account and turning tracks into dirt roads for the advance in March (University of Utah; Bedingfield). The regiment went on to Sicily and Italy, including the crossing of the Rapido in January 1944. Moore received the Legion of Merit for his service in 1943 and 1944.

The insignia, rendered

Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. Army engineers wore the Corps of Engineers’ turreted castle as their branch insignia, and the drawings borrow that castle.

Timeline

1. November 1942The regiment lands in Algeria with the assault echelon of Operation Torch.
2. January–February 1943Its companies keep II Corps’ roads and airfields open; one company tunnels shelters at corps headquarters near Tébessa.
3. 16 February 1943Moore sends a small mine-laying party into the Kasserine Pass.
4. 17–18 FebruaryMoore’s force covers the 1st Armored Division’s withdrawal east of Kasserine, then moves into the pass at night.
5. 18–19 February, nightMines are laid in rain and darkness; in front of the 26th Infantry they are strewn unburied across a 100-yard gap.
6. 19 February, 7:30 a.m.Col. Stark formally takes command of Stark Force; Moore keeps the southwestern half.
7. 19 February, 3:30 p.m.German tanks and infantry attack along the Tébessa road; five tanks are knocked out at the engineers’ minefield.
8. 20 February, 8:30 a.m.Panzer grenadiers, rocket launchers and Bersaglieri attack; the Bersaglieri strike the engineers’ side.
9. 20 February, noonAn enemy column breaks in between two engineer companies; Moore’s command post is overrun.
10. 26 February 1943American troops walk back through the pass behind men clearing the road of Axis mines.

People of the unit

Read the full story

• Chapter 5: The Pass: The 19th Engineers and Stark Force, 19–20 February
• Chapter 4: Sbeitla, Gafsa, Fériana and Thelepte: The Long Retreat
• Chapter 2: Faïd, Sened and the Eastern Dorsal: A Thin Line in the Mountains
• Chapter 6: Thala and Djebel el Hamra: Where Rommel Was Stopped
• The Kasserine Pass collection and atlas

By the numbers

The 19th Engineers at Kasserine by the numbers

128casualties in the pass, 19–20 February 1943: 11 killed, 28 wounded, 89 missing

c. 2,000men in Col. Moore’s line, engineers plus the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry

5German tanks knocked out at the engineers’ minefield on 19 February

~3 milength of the main line across the pass

1½ daysthe engineers held their half: all of 19 February and the morning of the 20th

360+miles of road the regiment kept open later in the campaign, by one account

What the regiment lost in the pass

Casualties of the 19th Engineer Combat Regiment, 19–20 February 1943 (men)

Missing

89

Wounded

28

Killed

11

Source: Howe, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West (CMH, 1957), ch. 24, citing the regiment’s records. A University of Utah profile gives 117 casualties for the 1st Battalion alone on 20 February, probably a different count.

The size of the fight

Men on the American side of the southwestern half of the pass. Regimental strength is a range from popular accounts and is uncertain.

Moore’s line (engineers + 1st Bn, 26th Infantry)

c. 2,000

19th Engineer Combat Regiment

1,200–1,400

Regiment’s casualties, 19–20 Feb

128

Source: Howe, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West (CMH, 1957), ch. 24; American Heritage, “A Place to Be Lousy In” (December 1991).

In pictures

More photographs

In the art of World War II

Insignia, posters and art

We Clear the Way — Engineers Rush Tanks Immediately: A Message from North Africa 1st Armored Division: Old Ironsides Afrika Korps Prisoners

Explore the Art of World War II →

Sources

• George F. Howe, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West, United States Army in World War II (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1957), chapters 22–24, with notes citing the after-action reports of the 26th Infantry, the 19th Engineer Regiment and II Corps, Col. Moore’s memorandum of 8 March 1943 and 1st Lt. Edwin C. Dryden’s memorandum of 20 May 1943.
• War Department, FM 100-5, Field Service Regulations: Operations (22 May 1941), paragraphs 639 and 688.
• Military Times Hall of Valor, record for Anderson T. W. Moore.
• University of Utah Veterans Day honoree profile, “Epifanio Gonzales” (19th Combat Engineer Regiment); Gary Bedingfield, Baseball’s Greatest Sacrifice, “Steve Tonsick.”
• American Heritage, “A Place to Be Lousy In” (December 1991); Warfare History Network, “Panzer Strike at Kasserine Pass.”
• Further reading: Martin Blumenson, Kasserine Pass (1967); Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn (2002); Alfred M. Beck and others, The Corps of Engineers: The War Against Germany (CMH, 1985).