Chapter 11
The plan Eisenhower had laid out was unorthodox and daring, though it was not where the Americans had hoped to attack in March. Their original plan had been to secure Ghafsa, El Guettar, and then to demonstrate to threaten Maknassay further east. It was Ryder’s meeting engagement with Rommel’s 15th Panzer Division that had unhinged plans on both sides. After that sharp check, Ryder’s 34th Infantry Division had taken up defensive positions and dug in, its advance on Ghafsa clearly not possible. But this had compelled Rommel to leave most of 15th Panzer there, while the rest of the division had to move south through Gafsa to stop the advance of the French.
With 7th Panzer near Thelepte, and most of 21st Panzer at Kasserine, those three divisions had formed a solid defense against any move of the kind initially anticipated. Stopped at Kasserine, it was Patton’s bold shift to the northeast in the effort to reach Bou Aziz that had set up the opportunity now to be pursued in Operation Hammer. That move had forced the Germans to cover all the passes through the Western Dorsal, and this task had fallen to the 21st Panzer Division while both 7th and 15th Panzers still remained to the south. None of those passes were strongly held, except Kasserine.
The main body of 21st Panzer remained at Kasserine Pass—four Panzergrenadier battalions and four companies of panzers. The closest pass was the Douleb Gap, about 25 kilometers NE of that force, manned by a company of pioneers and one panzer company. A similar force held further northeast at Sibiba, and the division recon and AT battalions held at Rohia, the pass closest to Bou Aziz. Once reconnaissance confirmed the passes were lightly held, Eisenhower saw his opportunity.
The lightning strike by the 82nd Airborne was debated by Eisenhower’s staff, and General Mark Clark. Some thought the risk too high, for the Germans still had potent fighter defenses, but the plan to surge Allied fighter support was laid in, and Eisenhower eventually opted to take the risk.
To prepare for the attack, the 34th Infantry was finally ordered to pull back and assume defensive positions screening Tebessa. This allowed Terry Allen, chastened by Patton, to deploy his 1st Division on the ridgeline opposite the Germans holding Kasserine. Allen was expected to attack that pass as part of the plan, with 1st Armored on the secondary road from Thala to the north, and Harmon’s 2nd Armored striking from Bou Aziz through the pass at Rohia.
All the American armor had been in reserve, largely deployed on the road that Patton had used to race for Bou Aziz, and all these passes connected to it. The element of surprise could therefore be maintained until the night of the attack, when the armor would leave their reserve positions and begin to move to the passes. The transports were positioned at airfields very close to the front, Tebessa, Les Bains, Le Kouf, each to embark one regiment of the 82nd. All the artillery would be lifted from further back at El Boughi. In all there would be 9 battalions of paras dropped, with one engineer battalion and two artillery battalions.
It would be the largest Allies airborne operation to date, a brief hop of no more than 100 kilometers from the nearest airfield at Tebessa, and the gamble would pay off handsomely. A few German fighters at the airfield east of Kasserine got up to cause a few problems, but they were quickly pounced on by the thick roving bands of Allied fighters. Ridgeway’s men largely got through intact, though three transports were shot down. Yet by dawn that day, the German supply hub at Sbeitla was completely surrounded by the 82nd Airborne Division. The only question now was whether Patton could get to them before the Germans could.
But the new man on the scene, Walther Nehring, was shocked by the reports coming in that morning. The first was a frantic radio call saying that there were American troops at Sbeitla. He assumed it was a commando raid, until the full scale of the attack was reported twenty minutes later. Then, when von Bismarck reported that all the passes on the Western Dorsal were under heavy attack, the situation became clear, and very disconcerting. Von Bismarck’s entire division was engaged, but there was no action at all in front of Funck’s 7th Panzer Division near Thelepte. So he immediately called to order a kampfgruppe assembled and sent to Sbeitla at once.
That would send a motorcycle recon battalion, one company of panzers down the road, through Kasserine and on to the airfield 15 kilometers northeast. There they ran into 3/509 Para battalion, which had landed and stormed that field in the predawn hours, shooting up several Stukas before the remaining planes could take off. A battery of SPG artillery and 1st Battalion of the 6th Panzergrenadiers was right behind those lead elements, and Ridgeway’s morning would start to heat up very soon.
Yet that move was nothing more and an expedient measure, the least Nehring could do given the shock and surprise of this attack. He was going to need something more than a kampfgruppe, and now the withdrawal of the US 34th Division would figure heavily in the outcome of this battle. It basically left 15th Panzer free in the south, and Nehring had already ordered it north the previous day, as the Italians had sent up the Littorio Division to keep an eye on the French southwest of Ghafsa.
One look at the map told the division commander, Heinz von Randow, what the Americans were planning. Randow, like von Bismarck in the 21st Panzer, was living a charmed life. Both men had lost their lives to land mines by this time in the war, but here, they were both still alive and well. Now he saw that he could take the main road through Kasserine, following the KG sent earlier, but instead, he shifted his division onto a secondary road that led due east from Thelepte. It would swing around a ragged mountain ridge and then approach Sbeitla from due south. That was where he wanted to make his counterattack.
No one had ordered him to do this, but the move was a typical example of how experienced German officers would exercise their own initiative and react with lightning quick reflexes in a crisis. If the Americans took the considerable risk of making this parachute attack on Sbeitla, then it was clear to Randow what they wanted to do. From that town, Highway 13 led directly to Faid Pass, continuing on to the coast at Sfax. Randow therefore wanted to interpose his division east of Sbeitla, astride that road, and also controlling the key junction at Kern’s Cross, where Highway 3 crossed Highway 13.
The American Army had built up like water behind a great dam, he thought. Those mountain passes through the Western Dorsal are the spillways, and if that dam breaks, then they can sweep right down the valley into the coastal plain. It is an audacious plan, one that Rommel would appreciate if he were here, and I know exactly how he would move to stop it. Everything will rest on my division at the outset. I must establish a good blocking position, and then get after those paratroopers. So I will send the Pioneers and a battalion of infantry down this road and up through Kern’s Cross to cover the easternmost flank. Von Funck is already moving up through Kasserine. It’s as good a plan as we can devise for now, but we will have to watch our left, particularly at Ghafsa.
One of the spillways had collapsed. The weight of Harmon’s 2nd Armored Division, had broken through the defense at Rohia, and now a torrent of mechanized wrath was flowing down the narrow river valley of the Hathob towards Sibiba. There the river would run almost due east and up over an arcing series of highland ridges again, a secondary levee that could become a very difficult obstacle. There was but one narrow gap in that wall of stony hills, at a place called Ket el Amar, which was being defended by the Recon Battalion of 21st Panzer.
The Americans brought up engineers to cross the river to the southern bank, and began to organize an attack with a company of engineers, armored cav backed by Shermans. At the same time, the 157th RCT had found a track leading east north of the river where it flowed above the easternmost portion of the ridgeline, Jebel Abiod. It would be tough going, through that narrow river gorge flanked by the ridge to the south, and heavy woodland to the north, but if they could get east that way, they would eventually reach Highway 3 where it ran southwest from Fondouk towards Sbeitla. They would be joined by 1st and 4th Ranger Battalions under Colonel Darby, the best scouts they might have.