TIME's Foreign News and Battlefronts Editor Charles Wertenbaker returned last week from a three months' assignment as war correspondent in North Africa. This is his report on how the U.S. Army fought:
The Battle of Africa became history last week. To the U.S. soldiers who fought their way across Tunisia's dust-whipped plains and along the bald ridges of Djebel Berda and Djebel Tahent it was history of a peculiarly intimate kind, for in battle each soldier is alone. To Private Alvan Mendelsohn it was a foxhole on a hilltop beyond El Guettar, reading a magazine when the shelling got heavy by day and at night lying there waiting to know if his number was coming up. To Corporal Isaac Lorenzo Moroni Parker it was the sonofabitching Kasserine Pass. To Private First Class Michael Scotto di Clementi it was digging a slit trench beside the colonel's tent in an oasis and wondering if anybody remembered Micky Scott of Our Gang comedies. To Major General Terry Allen it was a satisfying pride in his 1st Division and an occasional chance to talk polo with a British major over a cup of tea. To many another soldier it was a grave in a clearing at Bèja, in the Valley of the Medjerda.
To all the men of the four divisions that fought through those last three months it meant a great deal for the people at home to know how they had fought. It was important that the people understand the nature of their accomplishments, and the reasons for their failures. Between March 18 and the end of the campaign last week, our U.S. divisions were almost continuously on the offensive, from Gafsa in the south to the tip of Tunisia at Bizerte. They were the 1st, the 9th and the 34th Infantry and the 1st Armored Division. Now that most restrictions of censorship have been lifted, it is possible to tell something of how each fought.
Gafsa & El Guettar. On the night of March 17-18 General Terry Allen's 1st Division traveled 45 miles by truck to launch a surprise attack on Gafsa at daybreak. Purpose: to establish Gafsa as a supply base for the Eighth Army. The first shell that pitched toward Gafsa that morning opened the campaign that ended at Bizerte and Tunis. It was the 1st Division's first action as a complete division since it landed in Oran in November. So successful was it that the enemy got out of Gafsa without a fight, and three days later the ist pushed 18 miles to El Guettar and into the hills beyond.
In these steep, rocky, treacherous hills, broken by gullies and chasms, the 1st Division fought for four days and nights without rest or relief. Three times the 10th Panzers counterattacked, first with tanks followed by infantry, next with infantry followed by tanks, the third time by infantry infiltration supported by tanks. All three attacks were beaten off. On the day of the heaviest attacks the Germans sent in nearly 100 tanks, in two waves, and the first wave penetrated the 1st Division's positions. Cut off from its base, the infantry stood its ground, as only the best-trained, best-disciplined troops will do, until artillery and antitank guns drove the tanks back.