Rommel had gone and his trail was stone cold, but it took more than a day for Allied troops to cross the Grand Dorsal in numbers. "Our follow-up was slow," Harmon later conceded, "and we let them get away." Ward had graciously offered Harmon his staff, then scribbled a terse note to Beetle Smith at AFHQ headquarters. He could no longer work under Fredendall. Mutual distrust had become intolerable. Dejected and silent, reduced to two staff officers and a driver, he set up a tent near Robinett's command post to await a reply from Algiers. An aide noted that Ward "feels very low and needs rest."

Light snow fell on the American and British soldiers picking their way through Kasserine Pass on the morning of February 25. The desolate landscape was "cluttered with wrecked German and American airplanes, burned out vehicles, abandoned tanks, [and] scattered shell cases," Robinett reported. Ration tins, unfinished love letters, a pair of boxing gloves: the detritus of battles lost and won. Italian prisoners in black-plumed helmets dug graves for bodies now ripe beyond recognition; an American soldier sat guard in a jeep, chewing gum and reading a Super-man comic. Severe orders were issued against looting, and the throaty sound of tommy guns echoed in the snow. Tunisians ran, or fell.

Even if Allied troops had been roused to hot pursuit, Rommel's sappers discouraged audacity. All nine bridges between Sbiba and Sbetla had been demolished, as had thirteen others around Kasserine. More than 43,000 German mines had been planted. East of the pass, Allied "vehicles were blowing up on the minefields in all directions," said one British officer. "A most unpleasant and windy business." Battery-operated mine detectors shorted out in the damp weather, forcing engineers armed with bayonet probes to "spread out like caddies and golfers looking for a lost ball." Soldiers also watched for the telltale sign of dismembered camels, whose flat feet usually provided enough pressure to detonate the eleven pounds of TNT in a Teller mine.

A precise tally of casualties at Kasserine remains elusive, in part because of uncertainty over the French, Italian, and Tunisian tolls. American losses exceeded 6,000 of the 30,000 men engaged in the battle. Of those, half were missing. (German records, ever precise, listed 4,026 Allied soldiers of all nationalities captured.) Fredendall's corps lost 183 tanks, 104 half-tracks, more than 200 guns, and 500 jeeps and trucks. British losses were relatively light, apart from the poor Leicesters and a few dozen tanks, and the Germans suffered fewer than 1,000 casualties, including 201 dead.

Some American units were mauled nearly beyond repair, among them the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 1st Armored Regiment-temporarily combined to form the understrength 23rd Battalion. The 3rd Battalion of the 6th Armored Infantry, so badly carved up at Oran during Operation RESERVIST, was again gutted at Kasserine, shrinking from 750 men to 418. Half the survivors lacked shoes, like ragamuffin Valley Forge soldiers. "Our people from the very highest to the very lowest have learned that this is not a child's game," Eisenhower told Marshall.

"The proud and cocky Americans today stand humiliated by one of the greatest defeats in our history," Harry Butcher scribbled in his diary. "There is a definite hangheadedness." From Fad Pass to Thala, the Americans had been driven back eighty-five miles in a week, farther than at the infamous "bulge" in the Belgian Ardennes nearly two years later. At least in terms of yardage lost, Kasserine may fairly be considered the worst American drubbing of the war.

Grievous as the past ten days had been, the Allies had suffered a tactical, temporary setback rather than a strategic defeat. Rommel had failed to reach the Allied supply depots, failed to force the British First Army to withdraw from northern Tunisia, failed to gut the offensive capacity of Allied forces, who would soon make good their losses. Seasoned German soldiers proved themselves wily and ruthless, and Axis commanders demonstrated the battlefield virtue of leading from the front. But the Axis high command was more riven with rivalry and inefficiencies than even its Allied counterpart-a poor standard indeed.

Both sides had violated key principles of war to the detriment of their respective causes; they had, among other errors, failed to maintain contact with a retreating foe to exploit his derangement. The Axis had made this mistake at both Sidi bou Zid and Thala. Rommel, moreover, had violated the cardinal precept of concentration by twice dividing his force and attacking at too many places at once. Arnim had been right: the anabasis in mountainous country with a modest, footsore force was too ambitious, particularly without Arnim's wholehearted support.

Allied failings were painfully evident, again. Portions of five American divisions had fought around Kasserine, but almost never intact. Leaders came and leaders went, sometimes changing twice a day as if washing in and out with the tide. Strangers commanded strangers. For years, Fredendall would be castigated for the poor American showing; like several of his subordinate commanders, he was overmatched, unable to make the leap from World War I's static operations to modern mobile warfare. But Robinett made a fair point after the war: that it was "dead wrong" to blame Fredendall exclusively. "Possibly," he wrote, "one would have to search all history to find a more jumbled command structure than that of the Allies in this operation."

That error could be laid at Eisenhower's door. Even as Rommel was forcing the pass on February 20, Eisenhower summoned reporters to a press conference in Algiers and took "full responsibility for the defeat"-remarks he then placed off the record. He acknowledged underestimating French vulnerability and stretching the Allied line to the breaking point. Subsequently he expressed regret at not having insisted, in November, on subordinating French troops to the Allied chain of command, and at allowing the dispersal of American forces as far south as Gafsa. Moreover, he wrote after the war, "had I been willing at the end of November to admit temporary failure and pass to the defensive, no attack against us could have achieved even temporary success."

There were other, unacknowledged failings. He had recommended-but not demanded-that Fredendall counterattack vigorously on February 22, just as he had recommended but not demanded the concentration of the 1st Armored Division in mid-February. He expressed surprise in late February that the 37mm "squirrel rifle" and 75mm half-track "Purple Heart box" proved no match for German panzers, although these deficiencies had been recognized for months. During the "wearing and anxious" week after his trip to Sidi bou Zid, he spent so much time dictating explanations to the chiefs of staff that Marshall chided him: "I am disturbed by the thought that you feel under necessity in such a trying situation to give so much personal time to us.... You can concentrate on this battle with the feeling that it is our business to support you and not to harass you."

Certainly he had done some things well, even very well. He cannibalized the U.S. 2nd Armored and 3rd Infantry Divisions for reinforcements, and hurried the 9th Division artillery to its gallant rendezvous at Thala. He worked on rearming the French; redesigned American training methods; unleashed Alexander; overhauled his intelligence operation; and parried Churchill, who had sent an annoying message insisting that the Tunisian campaign be finished by March and the Sicily invasion launched in June. "We must be prepared for hard and bitter fighting," Eisenhower told the prime minister on February 17, "and the end may not come as soon as we hope."

He studied his mistakes-this practice was always one of Eisenhower's virtues-and absorbed the lessons for future battles in Italy and western Europe. And he steeled himself for the remote prospect that his first big battle might have been his last. To his son John, he wrote: "It is possible that a necessity might arise for my relief and consequent demotion.... It will not break my heart and it should not cause you any mental anguish.... Modern war is a very complicated business and governments are forced to treat individuals as pawns."

Eisenhower could take heart that for the first time-notably in the successful defense of Djebel el Hamra-American commanders showed some capacity for combined arms combat, the vital integration of armor, infantry, artillery, and other combat arms. That art, like fighting on the defensive and operating within an allied coalition, had been given short shrift in stateside training; soldiers were forced to learn where lessons always cost most, on the battlefield.

The coordination of ground and air forces remained dismal, however. Fratricide flourished despite standing orders not to fire at airplanes until fired upon. In three Allied fighter groups alone, friendly fire destroyed or damaged thirty-nine planes. And error cut both ways: disoriented B-17 Flying Fortresses on February 22 missed their intended targets in Kasserine Pass by ninety air miles, killing many Tunisians and battering the British airfield near Souk el Arba. Apologies were issued, along with a few thousand dollars in reparations.

Beyond the modest combined-arms showing, three bright gleams radiated from Kasserine's wreckage. First was the competence of American artillery at Sbiba, at Djebel el Hamra, and at Thala. Second was the mettle under fire displayed by various American commanders, among them Irwin, Robinett, Andrus, Gardiner, and Allen, and comparable mettle in British commanders. Third was the broad realization that even an adversary as formidable as Erwin Rommel was neither invincible nor infallible. He and his host could be beaten. This epiphany was not to be undervalued: they could be beaten. Amazingly, barely two months would elapse between the "hangheadness" of Kasserine and the triumph of total victory in Tunisia.

Demolitionists removed the guncotton and fuzes from the dumps at Tebessa. Exhausted men slept a sleep too deep even for nightmares. After ten days of cacophonous slaughter, an eerie silence fell over the battlefield, broken in the smallest hours of the morning by the hammer of typewriters in the adjutants' tents, where clerks labored all night to transform the holiest mysteries of sacrifice and fate into neat lists of the missing and the wounded and the dead.

Part Four

10. THE WORLD WE KNEW IS A LONG TIME DEAD

Vigil in Red Oak

SOUTHWEST Iowa's second winter of war had passed, and hints of the second spring could be seen in the blooming crocuses and felt in the afternoon sun that ventured farther north each day. In Red Oak and Villisca and Clarinda, as in the rest of the country, war remained a bit abstract even as fragmentary reports of the first big American battle against the Germans began winging westward from Africa. Iowans knew the war vicariously, through newsreels and letters home, yet it remained a thing manifested more as an absence than as a presence. The junior college in Montgomery County had closed for lack of students. Weeds sprouted on the unused baseball diamond at American Legion Park. Nurses and young doctors had all gone off, and old Doc Reiley was persuaded to emerge from retirement to fill the gap. The Red Oak Taxicab Company hired female drivers for the first time. No one drove much, because even those with gasoline rationing cards were restricted to four gallons a week, except for farmers and other essential worthies, who got somewhat more.

Everyone soldiered on. In Red Oak, the Grand showed movies nearly every night and double features on Saturday. Kids swarmed to the Green Parrot downtown for sodas after school. J. C. Penney's shelves were often barren, but customers wandered in anyway, as if shopping were an act of imagination rather than of commerce. The Red Oak Stalking Tigers-no one fully appreciated the irony of that mascot, of course-prepared to play in the district basketball tourney. A student production of Room for Ten drew a big crowd to the school gymnasium. As planting season approached, a worrisome machinery shortage was eased by the state War Board's wise decision to increase Montgomery County's quota of plows and cultivators.

Even if the battlefront seemed far removed, patriotism ran deep. The Victory Day book drive had already collected 500 volumes, and school-children in Red Oak, asked to buy $900 in war bonds to underwrite the purchase of one jeep for the Army, bought enough bonds to finance nine. Great War veterans planned an elaborate commemoration for March 9, 1943, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day when Company M first went over the top to face German fire in 1918.

The first inkling of bad news from Tunisia came disguised as good news. The Red Oak Express of February 22 ran a front-page story by the Associated Press beneath the headline "Moore Leads Escape from Nazi Lines." Datelined "on the Tunisian Front," the article recounted how the former Boy Captain-"red-eyed, haggard, and weak from lack of food and water"-had led many in his battalion to safety from a hill surrounded by German soldiers. Everyone in Montgomery County agreed that in a tight spot Bob Moore was a very good man to have around. But few other details emerged over the next two weeks other than sketchy dispatches about a fight in a remote place called Kasserine.

The initial telegrams reached Red Oak on the evening of March 6; by midnight there were more than two dozen, nearly identical: "The Secretary of War desires me to express his regret that your son has been missing in action in North Africa since February 17." Townsmen in bib overalls or gabardine suits gathered on the broad portico of the Hotel Johnson, next to the Western Union office. Leaning against the double Ionic columns, they smoked and talked and listened as the courthouse clock on Coolbaugh Street chimed the hours.

Most next of kin were easy to find. Mae Stifle, a widow who had raised eight children, worked as a housekeeper at that very hotel. She got two telegrams within fifteen minutes telling her that two sons, Sergeant Frank and Private Dean, were missing; in the morning, a third telegram added her son-in-law, Darrell Wolfe, to the list. "Some people don't believe in prayer," she said, "but I pray for my boys every day." The Vern Bierbaum family also lost two sons, Cleo and Harold, and a son-in-law, and their son-in-law's brother. Both Gillespie boys were missing; their father, who ran the feed store, tucked the telegrams inside the family Bible. Those who had left the county were harder to track down, like Lois Bryson, who now worked the four-to-midnight shift installing hydraulic tubing at the Martin bomber plant in Omaha. Eventually, word reached her that her husband, Fred, was also missing. He had joined Company F in Villisca when he was seventeen.

On March 11, the Express printed a headline no one could dispute: "SW Iowa Is Hit Hard." The photographs of missing boys just from Red Oak filled four rows above the fold on page one. "War consciousness mounted hourly in Red Oak, stunned by the flood of telegrams this week," the article began. The busiest man in town was a boy, sixteen-year-old Billie Smaha, who delivered wires for Western Union. "They kind of dreaded me," Billie later told the Saturday Evening Post. "I never wore a Western Union hat because I thought that would scare them too much when I went up to the door."

Wild rumors flourished. Shenandoah, Iowa, supposedly had lost 500 men-even though barely one-quarter that number were serving in North Africa. The truth was grim enough. Clarinda had lost forty-one, Atlantic forty-six, Glenwood thirty-nine, Council Bluffs thirty-six, Shenandoah twenty-three, Villisca nine. Red Oak's toll reached forty-five, nearly a third of Company M, which altogether had lost 153 men, among them the commander and six lieutenants. Total losses for the 168th Infantry Regiment included 109 officers and 1,797 enlisted men. "There is no place to my knowledge where in this war there has been such a large group from such a comparatively small area," an Army official told the Council Bluffs Nonpareil.

Everyone soldiered on, again. The Great War anniversary commemoration was canceled. When letters began arriving from prison camps, it became clear that most of those missing had, blessedly, been taken prisoner. Many ended up in Stalag III-B with French, Russian, and Dutch soldiers, while officers typically went to an Oflag in Silesia. "Mom and Dad, I have no clothes except shirt, pants, shoes, and field jacket, and up 'til a few days ago they hadn't been off for a month," Lieutenant DuaneA. Johnson of Red Oak wrote from Germany in March. "Send the food parcel first. I don't care if it's all chocolate." Letters also came from those who had narrowly escaped capture or death. "I lost everything but my rifle, new fountain pen, shovel, and my life," Sergeant Willis R. Dunn wrote his parents in Villisca. "So I'm thanking God for that."

The Ladies' Monday Club redoubled its book drive; collection boxes soon occupied all four corners of the town square. The VFW collected safety razors for the German camps. War Dads, an organization of the sort that in a later day would be called a support group, grew large and active. A speech by an Iowa college teacher who had been interned by the Germans for seven months while working in Egypt drew 900 people to the Methodist church on a Sunday night in mid-March; latecomers had to stand in the choir loft, behind the robed singers.

The telegrams kept coming. Billie Smaha stayed busy. Life magazine arrived to document Red Oak's misfortune; the brief article included a two-page aerial photo of the town with labels denoting the houses of those missing, captured, or dead. A New York Herald-Tribune reporter calculated that "if New York City were to suffer losses in the same proportion in a single action, its casualty list would include more than 17,000 names." In Red Oak, population 5,600, small plaques eventually honored the fallen at the Elks Club and the Ko-z-Aire Furnace Company, and photos of those smiling boys in smart uniforms stood on mantels and pianos all over town. At the Washington School, a teacher named Frances Worley kept an honor roll in a scrapbook; before the names of those lost she set gold stars, just like the stars she pasted on especially meritorious homework papers.

The second spring of the war came. Buds stippled the oak trees and the wild geese came back and the creek bottoms sang with life. Grass greened between the headstones that spilled down the hillside cemetery east of town. People went about their business as before, but the war was inside them now, as it would be inside a thousand other communities before peace returned. "Red Oak came as close to any town in America to knowing what the war was all about," wrote a local historian. Surely it was true.

"We Know There'll Be Troubles of Every Sort"

ROMMEL'S army had slipped from Kasserine back across the central Tunisian plateau toward the Eastern Dorsal. As February yielded to March, the opposing lines took roughly the same shape they had held before the Valentine's Day offensive knocked the Americans nearly into Algeria. The Axis territorial gain amounted to a fragile salient in lower Tunisia; it bowed as far west as Sbetla and Gafsa on flat, indefensible terrain that Rommel knew he could not hold against a determined attack. Commanders on both sides recognized that a final campaign in Africa would be fought on a shrinking battlefield-for now, the eastern third of Tunisia. Here, in a ragged rectangle fifty miles wide and 300 miles long, two Allied armies would confront two Axis armies in a climactic struggle for control of the continent and the southern Mediterranean.

In the north, Arnim's Fifth Panzer Army secretly prepared to widen the bridgehead around Tunis and Bizerte by recapturing some of the territory held since early winter by Anderson's First Army. In the south, Rommel regrouped his Panzer Army Africa and pondered how to stop Montgomery's Eighth Army, which in the past four months had traveled more than a thousand miles from Egypt to begin pushing into Tunisia from western Libya.

And in the center, where II Corps remained under Anderson's tactical command, the Americans buried their dead, turned their backs to Kasserine Pass, and waited to see who would lead them forward.

The Carthaginians of antiquity-notoriously poor losers-had often punished their defeated generals with crucifixion. Whether Eisenhower had this cautionary Tunisian precedent in mind is uncertain, though he was, it is true, a devoted student of the Punic Wars. In any case, to avoid an equivalent fate for himself he had begun looking for scapegoats while the ashes of Kasserine were still warm. In a message to Marshall he minimized his losses, asserting with some legitimacy that "this affair is only an incident" in the broader African campaign. Yet the reeling defeat and 6,000 American casualties sent morale plummeting throughout the theater; sixty ambulances had shuttled the evacuated wounded to hospitals from the Oran airfield. "It's pretty discouraging," Eisenhower's deputy Everett Hughes wrote in his diary. "I can't make heads or tails of the whole war. We have men but no organization. Who does what?" Censorship kept the home front ignorant of the full extent of Allied losses, but Eisenhower knew that soon enough the truth would out and alarm would spread.

First to go was his intelligence officer, Brigadier Eric E. Mockler-Ferryman, whom Eisenhower believed had relied excessively on Ultra to divine enemy intentions. The brigadier went quietly. "If a man is not wanted," he observed, "argument won't change the situation." Eisenhower asked London to send him a British replacement "who has a broader insight into German mentality and method." Lesser heads soon rolled, too, among them Stark's. He was sent home on March 2 and would later serve with distinction in the Pacific. McQuillin's relief came soon after Stark's. Tunisia, as Paul Robinett observed, was fast becoming "a professional graveyard, particularly for those in the upper middle part of the chain of command." Alexander strongly considered cashiering Anderson; unable to persuade Montgomery to relinquish the Eighth Army chief of staff as a replacement, he instead decided to keep Anderson but to "watch him very closely."

Orlando Ward also awaited the ax. As he told his diary, "F and I do not have enough room." "F," of course, was the crux. For months Eisenhower had handled Fredendall with the tongs appropriate for a presumed Marshall protege, even while privately voicing regret at not sending Patton to Tunisia instead. The commander-in-chief had also, inconveniently, twice written notes commending the II Corps commander for his leadership during Kasserine, and had praised him to Marshall as a "stouthearted" battle captain worthy of a third star. If, as Moltke once claimed, a general needed to lose an entire division before becoming truly experienced, then Fredendall's seasoning was well advanced.

But reports from the front could hardly be ignored. Ernie Harmon was scathing. "He's no damned good," he told Eisenhower on February 28, on his way back to Morocco. "You ought to get rid of him." Fredendall was a "common, low son-of-a-bitch," Harmon added, "a physical and moral coward." Truscott reported that II Corps was unlikely to "ever fight well under his command." Even Alexander chimed in. "I'm sure," he told Eisenhower, "you must have a better man than that."

A final verdict came from an officer who had just arrived in Africa, another West Point classmate from '15 sent to help however Eisenhower deemed fit. On March 5, during a break at a command conference near Tebessa, Eisenhower asked Major General Omar N. Bradley to step onto the porch of the mansion where they were meeting.

"What do you think of the command here?" Eisenhower asked, pulling furiously on a cigarette.