An Army at Dawn Read online

  Praise for

  An Army at Dawn

  “A monumental history of the overshadowed combat in North Africa during World War II that brings soldiers, generals, and bloody battles alive through masterful storytelling.”

  —citation for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for History

  “A book that stands shoulder to shoulder with the other major books about the war, such as the fine writing of Cornelius Ryan and John Keegan.”

  —Associated Press

  “Atkinson’s writing is lucid, vivid…. Among the many pleasures of An Army at Dawn are the carefully placed details—shells that whistle into the water with a smoky hiss; a colonel with ‘slicked hair and a wolfish mustache’ a man dying before he can fire the pistols strapped in his holster.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “One of the most compelling pieces of military history I’ve ever read, An Army at Dawn will become a military history and strategy studies classic. Atkinson writes with incredible insight and mastery of the details, and he is always mindful of the larger picture. He goes from the highest political levels to the deepest foxhole without missing a beat. This is history at its finest.”

  —General Wesley K. Clark, U.S.A. (ret.), former NATO supreme commander

  “An engrossing narrative…Atkinson has an impressive command of words, a flair for simplifying complex issues, and a vast reservoir of information…. This is a fascinating work which any reader can enjoy, and professional historians will find perusal of it eminently worth their while.”

  —Arthur L. Funk, Journal of Military History

  “A masterpiece. Rick Atkinson strikes the right balance between minor tactical engagements and high strategic direction, and he brings soldiers at every level to life, from private to general. An Army at Dawn is history with a soldier’s face.”

  —General Gordon R. Sullivan, U.S.A. (ret.), former Army chief of staff

  “What distinguishes his narrative is the way he fuses the generals’ war…with the experiences of front-line combat soldiers.”

  —Raleigh News & Observer

  “Atkinson’s book is eminently friendly and readable, but without compromising normal standards of accuracy and objectivity. More than a military history, it is a social and psychological inquiry as well. His account of the Kasserine Pass disaster alone is worth the price of the book and stands as an exciting preview of the rich volumes to come. I heartily recommend this human, sensitive, unpretentious work.”

  —Paul Fussell, author of Doing Battle and Wartime

  “Rick Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn is a superb account of the Allied invasion of North Africa. From the foxhole to Eisenhower’s supreme headquarters, Atkinson has captured the essence of war in one of the most neglected campaigns of World War II.”

  —Carlo D’Este, author of Patton and Eisenhower

  “Given his success with modern military history, the penetrating historical insights Atkinson brings to bear on America’s 1942–43 invasion of the North African coast are not surprising…. The most thorough and satisfying history yet of the campaigns in North Africa.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “This is a wonderful book—popular history at its best. It is impressively researched and superbly written, and it brings to life in full detail one of the vitally important but relatively ‘forgotten’ campaigns of World War II. What Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote did for the Civil War in their trilogies, Rick Atkinson is doing for World War II in the European Theater.”

  —Professor Mark A. Stoler, author of Allies and Adversaries

  “Atkinson’s book puts him on a fast track toward becoming one of our most ambitious and distinguished military chroniclers….[He] has unpacked facts that will lift many eyebrows.”

  —Bookpage

  “For sheer drama, the Tunisian campaign far overshadowed any other phase of the Second World War. Rick Atkinson has told the story with zest and brutal realism. His account will be a monument among accounts of World War II.”

  —John S. D. Eisenhower, author of Allies and The Bitter Woods

  “An Army at Dawn is an absolute masterpiece. Atkinson conveys both the human drama and historical significance of this campaign with a power and intensity that is nothing short of electrifying. This book is storytelling—and history—at its most riveting.”

  —Andrew Carroll, editor of War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars

  “Rick Atkinson has done a beautiful job of research and writing in An Army at Dawn. This is the North African campaign—warts, snafus, feuding allies, incompetents, barely competents—unvarnished. It whets my appetite for the rest of the Liberation Trilogy Atkinson has promised us.”

  —Joseph L. Galloway, coauthor of We Were Soldiers Once…and Young

  “Rick Atkinson combines meticulous research and attention to detail with an extraordinary ability to tell a story. It is a rich and powerful narrative which is certain to become a classic.”

  —Ronald Spector, author of At War at Sea and Eagle against the Sun

  Also by Rick Atkinson

  The Long Gray Line

  Crusade

  An Army at Dawn

  An Army at Dawn

  THE WAR IN NORTH AFRICA, 1942–1943

  VOLUME ONE OF THE LIBERATION TRILOGY

  Rick Atkinson

  An Owl Book

  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

  NEW YORK

  To my mother and father

  Owl Books

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

  www.henryholt.com

  An Owl Book® and ® are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2002 by Rick Atkinson

  All rights reserved.

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Atkinson, Rick.

  An army at dawn: the war in North Africa, 1942–1943 / Rick Atkinson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Not all images included in the print edition of this title are available in this ebook edition.

  ISBN: 978-0-8050-8724-6

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Africa, North. 2. Operation Torch. 3. Africa, North—History, Military. I. Title.

  D766.82.A82 2002

  940.54'23—dc21

  2002024130

  Originally published in hardcover in 2002 by Henry Holt and Company

  Maps by Gene Thorp

  At last the armies clashed at one strategic point,

  They slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike

  With the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze

  And their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss,

  And the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.

  The Iliad, Book 4

  CONTENTS

  LIST OF MAPS

  MAP LEGEND

  ALLIED CHAIN OF COMMAND

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1. PASSAGE

  A Meeting with the Dutchman

  Gathering the Ships

  Rendezvous at Cherchel

  On the Knees of the Gods

  A Man Must Believe in His Luck

  2. LANDING

  “In the Night, All Cats Are Grey”

  In Barbary

  VILLAIN

  To the Last Man

  “Glory Enough for Us All”

  3. BEACHHEAD

  A Sword in Algiers

  A Blue Flag over Oran

  “An Orgy of Disorder”

  Battle for the Kasbah


  “It’s All Over for Now”

  PART TWO

  4. PUSHING EAST

  “We Live in Tragic Hours”

  A Cold Country with a Hot Sun

  Medjez-el-Bab

  Fat Geese on a Pond

  5. PRIMUS IN CARTHAGO

  “Go for the Swine with a Blithe Heart”

  “The Dead Salute the Gods”

  “Jerry Is Counterattacking!”

  6. A COUNTRY OF DEFILES

  Longstop

  “They Shot the Little Son of a Bitch”

  “This Is the Hand of God”

  PART THREE

  7. CASABLANCA

  The Ice-Cream Front

  Speedy Valley

  “The Touch of the World”

  The Sinners’ Concourse

  8. A BITS AND PIECES WAR

  “Goats Set Out to Lure a Tiger”

  “This Can’t Happen to Us”

  “The Mortal Dangers That Beset Us”

  “A Good Night for a Mass Murder”

  9. KASSERINE

  A Hostile Debouchment

  None Returned

  “Sometimes That Is Not Good Enough”

  “This Place Is Too Hot”

  “Order, Counter-order, and Disorder”

  “Lay Roughly on the Tanks”

  PART FOUR

  10. THE WORLD WE KNEW IS A LONG TIME DEAD

  Vigil in Red Oak

  “We Know There’ll Be Troubles of Every Sort”

  “One Needs Luck in War”

  “The Devil Is Come Down”

  11. OVER THE TOP

  “Give Them Some Steel!”

  “Search Your Soul”

  Night Closes Down

  “I Had a Plan…Now I Have None”

  12. THE INNER KEEP

  Hell’s Corner

  Hammering Home the Cork

  “Count Your Children Now, Adolf!”

  Tunisgrad

  EPILOGUE

  NOTES

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MAPS

  1. Mediterranean and European Theaters in World War II

  2. Operation TORCH, Invasion of North Africa, November 1942

  3. Seizure of Oran, November 8–10, 1942

  4. Landings in Algiers, November 8, 1942

  5. Landings at Fedala, November 8, 1942

  The Capture of Casablanca, November 8–11, 1942

  6. Attack on Mehdia and Port Lyautey, November 8–10, 1942

  7. First Allied Attempt to Reach Tunis, November 15–30, 1942

  8. Tébourba Engagement, December 1–3, 1942

  9. German Attack on Medjez-el-Bab, December 6–10, 1942

  10. Battle for Longstop Hill, December 22–26, 1942

  11. The Winter Line in Tunisia, February 1943

  12. Battle of Sidi bou Zid, February 14–15, 1943

  13. Battles of Kasserine Pass, February 19–22, 1943

  14. Battle of Mareth, March 16–28, 1943

  15. Battle of El Guettar and Maknassy Pass, March 16–25, 1943

  16. Continuing Fight near El Guettar, March 28–April 1, 1943

  17. Battle for Fondouk Pass, April 8–9, 1943

  18. Final Victory in Tunisia, April 22–May 13, 1943

  19. Battle for Hill 609, April 27–May 1, 1943

  An Army at Dawn

  PROLOGUE

  TWENTY-SEVEN acres of headstones fill the American military cemetery at Carthage, Tunisia. There are no obelisks, no tombs, no ostentatious monuments, just 2,841 bone-white marble markers, two feet high and arrayed in ranks as straight as gunshots. Only the chiseled names and dates of death suggest singularity. Four sets of brothers lie side by side. Some 240 stones are inscribed with thirteen of the saddest words in our language: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.” A long limestone wall contains the names of another 3,724 men still missing, and a benediction: “Into Thy hands, O Lord.”

  This is an ancient place, built on the ruins of Roman Carthage and a stone’s throw from the even older Punic city. It is incomparably serene. The scents of eucalyptus and of the briny Mediterranean barely two miles away carry on the morning air, and the African light is flat and shimmering, as if worked by a silversmith. Tunisian lovers stroll hand in hand across the kikuyu grass or sit on benches in the bowers, framed by orangeberry and scarlet hibiscus. Cypress and Russian olive trees ring the yard, with scattered acacia and Aleppo pine and Jerusalem thorn. A carillon plays hymns on the hour, and the chimes sometimes mingle with a muezzin’s call to prayer from a nearby minaret. Another wall is inscribed with the battles where these boys died in 1942 and 1943—Casablanca, Algiers, Oran, Kasserine, El Guettar, Sidi Nsir, Bizerte—along with a line from Shelley’s “Adonais”: “He has outsoared the shadow of our night.”

  In the tradition of government-issue graves, the stones are devoid of epitaphs, parting endearments, even dates of birth. But visitors familiar with the American and British invasion of North Africa in November 1942, and the subsequent seven-month struggle to expel the Axis powers there, can make reasonable conjectures. We can surmise that Willett H. Wallace, a private first class in the 26th Infantry Regiment who died on November 9, 1942, was killed at St. Cloud, Algeria, during the three days of hard fighting against, improbably, the French. Ward H. Osmun and his brother Wilbur W., both privates from New Jersey in the 18th Infantry and both killed on Christmas Eve 1942, surely died in the brutal battle of Longstop Hill, where the initial Allied drive in Tunisia was stopped—for more than five months, as it turned out—within sight of Tunis. Ignatius Glovach, a private first class in the 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion who died on Valentine’s Day, 1943, certainly was killed in the opening hours of the great German counteroffensive known as the battle of Kasserine Pass. And Jacob Feinstein, a sergeant from Maryland in the 135th Infantry who died on April 29, 1943, no doubt passed during the epic battle for Hill 609, where the American Army came of age.

  A visit to the Tunisian battlefields tells a bit more. For more than half a century, time and weather have purified the ground at El Guettar and Kasserine and Longstop. But the slit trenches remain, and rusty C-ration cans, and shell fragments scattered like seed corn. The lay of the land also remains—the vulnerable low ground, the superior high ground: incessant reminders of how, in battle, topography is fate.

  Yet even when the choreography of armies is understood, or the movement of this battalion or that rifle squad, we crave intimate detail, of individual men in individual foxholes. Where, precisely, was Private Anthony N. Marfione when he died on December 24, 1942? What were the last conscious thoughts of Lieutenant Hill P. Cooper before he left this earth on April 9, 1943? Was Sergeant Harry K. Midkiff alone when he crossed over on November 25, 1942, or did some good soul squeeze his hand and caress his forehead?

  The dead resist such intimacy. The closer we try to approach, the farther they draw back, like rainbows or mirages. They have outsoared the shadow of our night, to reside in the wild uplands of the past. History can take us there, almost. Their diaries and letters, their official reports and unofficial chronicles—including documents that, until now, have been hidden from view since the war—reveal many moments of exquisite clarity over a distance of sixty years. Memory, too, has transcendent power, even as we swiftly move toward the day when not a single participant remains alive to tell his tale, and the epic of World War II forever slips into national mythology. The author’s task is to authenticate: to warrant that history and memory give integrity to the story, to aver that all this really happened.

  But the final few steps must be the reader’s. For among mortal powers, only imagination can bring back the dead.

  No twenty-first-century reader can understand the ultimate triumph of the Allied powers in World War II in 1945 without a grasp of the large drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. The liberation of western Europe is a triptych, each panel informing the others: first, North Africa; then, Italy; and finally
the invasion of Normandy and the subsequent campaigns across France, the Low Countries, and Germany.

  From a distance of sixty years, we can see that North Africa was a pivot point in American history, the place where the United States began to act like a great power—militarily, diplomatically, strategically, tactically. Along with Stalingrad and Midway, North Africa is where the Axis enemy forever lost the initiative in World War II. It is where Great Britain slipped into the role of junior partner in the Anglo-American alliance, and where the United States first emerged as the dominant force it would remain into the next millennium.

  None of it was inevitable—not the individual deaths, nor the ultimate Allied victory, nor eventual American hegemony. History, like particular fates, hung in the balance, waiting to be tipped.

  Measured by the proportions of the later war—of Normandy or the Bulge—the first engagements in North Africa were tiny, skirmishes between platoons and companies involving at most a few hundred men. Within six months, the campaign metastasized to battles between army groups comprising hundreds of thousands of soldiers; that scale persisted for the duration. North Africa gave the European war its immense canvas and implied—through 70,000 Allied killed, wounded, and missing—the casualties to come.