As the armoured might of the veteran panzer divisions poured out of the passes to attack, the British reaction showed that they were prepared and waiting so that instead of a drive round the flank and rear of 8th Army's artillery belt the panzers were being compelled to make a frontal assault against massed gun fire. Even before the panzer block had shaken out into attack formation the Royal Artillery had opened up and a quarter of the attack force lay smashed and broken. The panzers withdrew to come on again at 13.00hrs but this drive, too, collapsed in a hurricane of British fire, Cramer, the new commander of Africa Corps, saw himself faced with a string of disasters. His armoured thrusts had failed with a loss of 55 tanks and 10 times as many human casualties, the 10th Panzer had reached Medeinine but could carry the advance no further forward and there w.ere reports of a British column of 400 vehicles advancing towards Medeinine from Ben Gardane. Finally the attack by 90th Light had been a blow into empty space for the British had simply moved back before the blow fell.
Cramer had no choice but to break off the attack and as the panzer columns withdrew during the night it was clear to the German commanders that they had shot their last bolt. The last major German offensive in Africa had opened and died on the same day and from this point on, with the exception of local and minor excursions with limited means and with strictly limited objectives, the Army Group Africa would play only a defensive role and that for a limited period. The life of the Axis forces in Africa could now be measured in weeks. The initiative had passed into Allied hands and was never to be recovered.
Rommel flew to Rome where Commando Supremo accepted that the Mareth Line should be evacuated and that new positions, the Schott Line, should be taken up. This new position would reduce the length of front and saving of men would allow these to form a thicker concentration of units at sensitive points. Rommel proposed an even more dramatic solution, nothing less than a reduction of the bridgehead to a compact defensive area manned by a battle hardened and tenacious garrison. All irreplaceable specialist troops would be flown back to the mainland together with the superfluous rear echelon troops.
These men represented a constant drain on the supplies of the Axis armies. At the beginning of March 1943, the strength of the Army Group was nearly one-third of a million men with a proportion of two Italians to one German. But not all these men were fighting troops and, indeed, there was a far higher proportion of non-combatants to be found in Africa than in other theatres of operation. The Italian administrative 'tail' had been organised for a massive colonial Army with a vast African empire and to this number was added the rear echelon units of divisions which had long since passed into British prisoner-of-war camps. Thus, by March 1943, there were three non-combatants to every fighting soldier and even General Messe's energetic combing out of men to form infantry battalions could not produce sufficient infantry to defend a battle line which ran for over 500 miles. The situation had deteriorated back to that which it had been in November 1942; that is no continuous line but a system of strong points between which patrols secured the ground against Allied assault.
Rommel's plan was rejected out of hand by Hitler and Mussolini who ordered that the Schott line be held to the last. In the Fuhrer's eyes Tunisia had to be held at all costs for the Axis presence tied up Allied men and shipping which might be used elsewhere. Secondly, Tunisia commanded the Sicilian narrows and for as long as Tunisia held, the Allies could not use it as a springboard from which to invade the mainland of Europe.
Rommel then drew Hitler's attention to the situation regarding fuel, ammunition, and reinforcements and commented on how the supply situation had deteriorated. The Royal Navy dominated the sea routes and no ships had arrived in North African ports. Only individual German military ferries could now reach Africa and the amounts they brought in were insignificant. Crippling losses - 80 per cent was an accepted figure - to the sky trains of Junkers 52 transport machines had all but stopped supplies arriving by air. In short the situation was disastrous.
The losses in transport aircraft were unbelievably high and every unit could report numbers of men who had been killed in transit. Elements of the 999th Division were in one sky train from which 18 aircraft carrying men of the division were shot down in flames over the Mediterranean and, indeed, the divisional commander who had set off from Sicily with most of his staff perished en route to Tunisia.
Hitler, for reasons which he never made public, did not allow Rommel to return to Africa so that the Army Group passed under the command of von Arnim who began to prepare it for the final battles.
Mareth Line
The British barrage which opened Montgomery's offensive at Mareth poured a flood of high explosives upon the Axis lines and in the fierce infantry fighting which followed the Young Fascist Division was driven from its position within a matter of hours. Determined to regain the lost ground the Italian troops went in at dawn with the bayonet and recaptured the heights. But this British assault was only a holding attack and from the area of Fort Tata-houine, to the south-west of the line, poured the forces for the main thrust. Farther to the north Patton's armoured division was thrusting towards the Gabes Gap. The under-gunned and under-manned units of the Axis desert army were under assault from the south, the south-west, and the west.
Despite this inferiority in everything but courage, the German and Italian infantry held out through the heaviest and longest bombardments which they had ever endured, backed by waves of Allied bombers who, arrogantly confident of superiority in the air, flew in rigid and close formation to cascade their bomb loads upon the front line troops and the rear areas alike. Not only did the Axis soldiers hold out - in some sectors they rose out of their positions to counter-attack and to recover the ground which they had had to void. [26]
By 23 March, Montgomery had failed in his attempt to force a decision on the south-western front and regrouping his forces, thrust them in a long arc to outflank the Axis positions by driving in a north and then north-westerly direction south of Djebel Tebaga in the direction of El Hamma. In this sector 90th Light Division held the ground and took the full force of the violent British assault. German units were rolled over as 2nd Armoured Brigade struck deep into the German line. The 90th Light swung back, regrouped, and counter-attacked but the end result could not be gainsaid. Montgomery's left hook had torn open the German flank and withdrawal to the Schott position was the only solution. Then came the deadly thrust by the New Zealanders, whose night attack strode across pak-fronts and artillery belts into the area behind 90th Light, and threatened to drive to the sea. But then the advance was halted and before it could roll forward again von Liebenstein, the commander of Africa Corps, had formed an assault group and put it into action against 8th Army. A pincer operation by both panzer divisions then drove into the New Zealand flank and brought the British advance to a halt while the remainder of Africa Corps took up its positions along the Schott Line.
The end of March saw the beginning of the tightening of the noose around the Axis forces in Tunisia. From the probing attacks on the western and south-western sectors of the front the emphasis then fell upon the southern flank where 8th Army, having regrouped after the Mareth battles, was shepherding the desert veterans of 1st German/Italian Panzer Army into a killing ground towards a situation which would end the campaign.
The position which the Germans called the Schott line blocked the 18-mile gap between the Schott el Fedjadj and the sea. The battle which was foughi along this line is known to British military historians as the battle of Wadi Akarit. The Schott line ran from south of Djebel Heidoudi, via Djebel Tebaga Fatnassa and Djebel Roumana along the Wadi Akarit to the Mediterranean. The coastal plain north-west of Gabes is only five miles wide at its narrowest point and across the greatest part of this is the steep-sided, deep, anti-tank obstacle of the Wadi Akarit. The mountains of the Schott el Fadjadj were impassable to tanks coming from the west and the only danger lay on the western flank behind the Schott line for, from the direction of El Geuttar and Maknassy, strong United States tank forces might drive and overwhelm the 10th Panzer Division which held the position near those places.