As panzers probed the defenses late on 16 February, Lieutenant Colonel Hightower commanded a screening force in front of the CCA and CCC units just moving into position. Two platoons of Company B, 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion, participated in an effort to extricate the 6th Armored Infantry, which had been unable to disengage from the enemy. The maneuver succeeded, but the TDs became embroiled in a rear-guard action against three German tank columns, during which the tank destroyers were cut off.
The rest of Company B had spent the day searching out firing positions until ordered to deploy in a cactus patch with no field of fire whatsoever. Hidden by the plants, Lieutenant Edson and the rest of men were unaware that German armored columns passed to the north and south in the evening gloom.
Lacking orders to withdraw and unable to contact combat command headquarters where the battalion CO had gone in search of instructions, the battalion executive officer, Major Walter Tardy, ordered battalion elements to escape if they could. He could not reach Company B by radio, so he told Company A to find a Company B patrol to pass the instructions. About midnight, the tank destroyers dispersed and filtered back to American lines under heavy machine-gun fire. Following a route scouted by the pioneer platoon, the men drove through or around various obstacles and wadis that they never would have attempted in daylight. Machine-gun tracers paralleled one column on both sides. Most of the TDs crept into Sbeitla by dawn. The town presented a picture of crowded confusion as the TDs worked their way through the streets amidst exploding German shells.27
Captain Redding led Company C into Sbeitla somewhat later and found the town deserted. He contacted division headquarters to offer the services of his six remaining guns but was told to get off the net. He next radioed the combat command, which instructed him to take up positions at a spot that by now was behind German lines. Redding wisely joined the rest of the battalion west of Sbeitla.28
At 0314 hours on 17 February, 1st Armored Division transmitted to all subordinate units, “We are going to hold. Use every available trick you know. We are going to stick here. We will lick those bastards yet.”29
German troops attacked in force at 0900 hours.30 CCB had deployed the men of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion in an outpost line a few miles east of the main line of resistance.31 The tank killers were strafed there by Allied aircraft and shelled by American artillery during the morning.32 About 1145, the 601st reported that its command post was under attack by fifty tanks from one direction and a combined tank-infantry force from another. Lieutenant Colonel Herschel Baker requested reinforcements but was told to fall back on American lines, fighting a delaying action as he came.33 Some of the TDs fired smoke and were able to shift about and maintain fire for about half an hour, but the battalion gave way under overwhelming pressure.34 The informal battalion history recorded what happened next: “Confusion was king that day. There was no communication between units, no traffic control, no organization, and no order. It was every man for himself, and Heinie take the hindmost. Halftracks went sailing by jeeps as if the jeeps were standing still, and M4s tore down the road, three abreast, in chariot race style! It was a sad day for the new, inexperienced American Army.”35
Several hours later, men from the 601st were spotted passing the CCB CP. Upon questioning, they said that the battalion had been dispersed, and that they had been ordered to regroup at Kasserine. Staff officers regrouped all the TD men they could find on the spot and turned them over to Baker when he reappeared.36
The Americans held their ground at Sbeitla until 1500 hours. II Corps now ordered the 1st Armored Division to withdraw through Kasserine Pass—except for CCA, which departed northward via Sbiba. Combat Command B screened the main retreat. The remnants of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion, supported by a company of infantry, was ordered to act as rearguard. They were nearly overrun. As German fighters strafed the retreating Americans, the 601st’s CP radio halftrack stalled. Sergeant Jagels dismounted, calmly extracted the air filter, held it up to the sunlight, and observed, “Look at the dirt in that goddamn thing!” The last American troops cleared the pass at about 0300 hours on 18 February. By its own admission, the 1st Armored Division had suffered defeat in detail.37
The 701st screened the withdrawal of CCA, with its remaining guns falling back in leap-frog fashion. When darkness fell, the command disengaged and slipped away. It lost one M3, but no men, during the action.
Rommel’s attack on Gafsa, meanwhile, had found the town abandoned, so Rommel advanced with his detachment from the Afrika Korps and some twenty-five tanks from the Italian Centauro Division toward Feriana. As of 16 February, Stark Force (built around the 26th RCT, 1st Infantry Division, commanded by Col Alexander Stark) was dug in around Feriana protecting the withdrawal of units into positions on the heights north of Thelepte.
The green 805th Tank Destroyer Battalion had moved into Feriana on 10 February,38 and its recon men quickly became the eyes and ears of Stark Force; they conducted daily patrols of likely approaches to the town. Company A had left the battalion for Sbeitla on 14 February, but Company B returned following the evacuation of Gafsa.
The battalion’s reconnaissance jeeps the morning of 16 February rolled down the road toward Gafsa, and the men noted that the usual Allied military traffic had disappeared. At 1130 hours, the patrol reported that it had sighted the enemy. Shortly thereafter, the first shells fell on a Stark Force outpost at Djebel Sidi Aich. TDs from Company B deployed beside the road to Gafsa to cover the recon team as it barreled back into Feriana.
Captain William Zierdt of Company C had deployed one TD platoon supported by a recon platoon to guard the pass leading to Feriana. A German fighter flew low over Zierdt’s position. When its pilot waved, Zierdt waved back. Weeks later, after experiencing combat and learning to fear aircraft, Zierdt would accidentally shoot down a Spitfire.39
In the early afternoon, Stark ordered Zierdt to destroy the guns that were thought to be firing on the American outpost. The company sent two platoons through the pass, but the crews could spot no guns. Stark now ordered the two platoons to take up positions along the Feriana-Gafsa highway. Unable to reach the company by radio, the battalion operations officer had to deliver the order in person.
The Company C TDs came under fire from the north, and the men became a bit excited as it was their first time in combat. The M3s engaged what the crews thought to be 75mm guns. Months of training and demonstrations for congressmen and senators while back at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, paid off, and the crews performed extremely well.40
Perhaps because they had revealed their position, the tank destroyers soon were taking fire from the rear, as well. The TDs withdrew closer to Feriana. Company B, meanwhile, spotted approaching tanks and opened fire. After a brisk fight during which two TDs were knocked out, the company pulled back somewhat on orders from Stark.
Late in the day, Colonel Stark issued orders for a counterattack the following morning. The tank destroyers were instructed to execute a flank attack from the east in support of the main effort. Inasmuchas Company C still could not be reached by radio, the instructions were passed to the battalion operations officer over a field telephone located at an outpost near the tank destroyers. Colonel Anderson Moore, meanwhile, was instructed to take elements of his 19th Engineer Combat Regiment and a battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment to Kasserine Pass and organize a defense.41