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Back across the littered valley they went. Allied planes, capitalizing on a momentary break in Tunisia's rainswept skies, swarmed into the air. The Luftwaffe failed to fend them off. Anything in Major General Carl Spaatz's command that would fly took to its wings to strafe Axis columns, bomb the bottleneck of Kasserine Pass through which the Germans had to make their withdrawal. Flying Fortresses and fighter bombers were loaded with bombs and sent soaring through the mists of the Pass, sowing their explosives helter-skelter, certain of hitting something as the Axis troops squeezed through. Artillery pounded the retreating Axis forces.
Rommel left Italians to fight a rearguard action, pulled his precious Panzer troops out and Sputh along the road to Feriana and Gafsa, east towards Faïd Pass—the roads over which Fredendall's U.S. troops had beat a hasty retreat northward only two weeks before.
At week's end the Axis was still in flight. Rommel was reported to be evacuating Feriana and plowing up the Allied airfield at Sbeëtla which he had seized the week before.
Eyes South. Rommel had lost his gamble. In northern Tunisia, Colonel General Jürgin von Arnim stabbed at Lieut. General Kenneth A. N. Anderson's mud-stuck front, apparently hoping to divert Allied strength from Rommel's hard-pressed front. Two savage attacks, made in a driving rain, were launched at Allied positions facing Mateur. Another attack was aimed at the Allied sally port of Medjez el Bab. Others, further south, sprang from Bou Arada. All but the Mateur attacks came to grief on muddy roads which impeded enemy tanks. The Mateur action continued to blaze at week's end.
It was plain that there was still plenty of flexibility and daring in the enemy. To trap and crush him in Tunisia would be, in the words of one military strategist, "like trying to box a python." It was a python with at least two heads (Rommel and von Arnim), with eyes along its whole length.
This week some of those eyes must have been turned south, where the Eighth Army was edging closer & closer to the Mareth Line. Rommel might choose to abandon the Line, make his stand in the narrow neck between the Chott Djerid (salt lake) and the coast at Gabès. It was up to the veteran troops of General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery to close the trap on the python at that end.
Eisenhower had more supplies, particularly motor vehicles, than he had when Rommel broke through at Faïd. When he had clear skies overhead and firm looting on the ground, the British First Army in the north, the Americans and British at the center could be expected to close all the sides and end the python's convulsive resistance. But not before.