The Battle of El Guettar

On 23 March 1943, in the valley east of the oasis of El Guettar in south-central Tunisia, the German 10th Panzer Division twice attacked the American 1st Infantry Division and was beaten back each time. It was the first clear success of American troops against the Wehrmacht, won only a month after the defeat at the Kasserine Pass. The battle closed the first stage of the offensive by General George Patton’s II Corps, which on 17 March had taken Gafsa without a fight, and a day later the oasis of El Guettar itself.

Popular chronologies of the war record both events in simplified form. Under 18 March they state that Patton “led his II Corps tanks into Gafsa”, and under 23 March that “American tanks defeated the Germans at El Guettar”. In reality Gafsa was taken on 17 March by the infantry of the 1st Division, and on 18 March the Rangers entered El Guettar. The attack of 23 March, moreover, was stopped not by tank crews but by infantry, artillery and tank destroyers. The American armoured division was fighting further north at the time, near Maknassy.

Patton takes over II Corps

After the February defeats at Sidi Bou Zid and the Kasserine Pass, the American II Corps was battered and dispirited, and its commander, General Lloyd Fredendall, had lost the confidence of his subordinates and of the British. Dwight Eisenhower decided to relieve him. On 6 March 1943 command of the corps was taken over by George Patton, until then commander of I Armored Corps in Morocco. On 12 March he was promoted to lieutenant general. His deputy was General Omar Bradley, who had earlier come to the front as Eisenhower’s observer; in mid-April it was Bradley who took over II Corps from Patton.

Patton had only ten days to prepare the corps for the offensive. He began with discipline. He made soldiers and officers wear helmets, ties and leggings even in the rear areas, fined them for slovenliness, toured the units and addressed them in his own salty style. Many soldiers loathed him for it, but historians generally judge that these measures restored to the corps the sense that it was an army rather than a collection of beaten units. The way of fighting changed too: divisions were to operate as a whole, not broken up into small groups scattered along the entire front as they had been under Fredendall.

II Corps’s task was set by the commander of the 18th Army Group, General Harold Alexander. After Kasserine the Briton had no high opinion of the Americans and gave them a subsidiary role. The corps was to retake Gafsa, establish forward supply bases and airfields there, and threaten the flank and rear of General Giovanni Messe’s Italian First Army, which was defending the Mareth Line against the British Eighth Army. Patton’s attack was to draw the enemy’s reserves on to itself and make it easier for Bernard Montgomery to break through, but it was not to cut the road to the coast. Patton compared his role to that of “Stonewall” Jackson at the Second Battle of Bull Run, who had made the main army’s victory easier. The date of the attack was moved from 15 to 17 March to coordinate it with the Eighth Army’s offensive.

Gafsa and the oasis of El Guettar (17–22 March)

Gafsa, an important road and rail junction in the interior, changed hands more than once during the campaign. The Americans had abandoned it in mid-February, and in March it was held by a small Italian-German garrison. Only a few days before the attack Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was still assuring Mussolini that the town was strongly defended and thickly mined. During the night of 16–17 March General Terry Allen’s 1st Infantry Division drove some 70 km by lorry and before dawn dismounted north of the town. The artillery was ready at eight o’clock, but the infantry waited until ten for the planned air raid. The enemy did not offer battle and withdrew eastwards. Around noon on 17 March the first companies entered Gafsa. The town was full of mines and booby traps, but empty of defenders. The American official history later called the capture an “encouraging exercise” rather than a real battle.

On 18 March Lieutenant Colonel William Darby’s 1st Ranger Battalion took the oasis of El Guettar, some 20 km south-east of Gafsa, also almost without a fight. The Italians of the Centauro Armoured Division withdrew to the hills above the oasis and closed the pass through which the road led to Gabès on the coast. Heavy rain in those days turned the gullies into torrents and slowed the movement of heavy equipment. During the night of 20–21 March the Rangers climbed a steep slope to the rear of one of the Italian positions and took some 200 prisoners. Meanwhile, to the north, General Orlando Ward’s 1st Armored Division took Sened Station and on 22 March reached Maknassy, but it failed to seize the pass beyond the small town. Hill 322, which closed it, was held by a handful of German infantry, among them Rommel’s former personal escort. Patton made no secret of his irritation at Ward’s slowness; at the beginning of April he relieved him of his command.

Meanwhile, during the night of 20–21 March, the Eighth Army had launched its attack on the Mareth Line. The Americans at El Guettar and Maknassy now stood only a few dozen kilometres from the coast road by which Messe’s forces were supplied. The headquarters of General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim’s Army Group Africa, which had taken over control of the whole front after the failed attack at Medenine and the departure of Erwin Rommel from Africa on 9 March, could not ignore this. On 21 March Arnim gave the Afrika Korps his only uncommitted panzer division, General Fritz von Broich’s 10th, with orders to strike towards Gafsa. Arnim, like Rommel, rated the Americans poorly and reckoned that one powerful blow would be enough to drive them back into the mountains.

23 March: infantry against tanks

The Germans assembled east of El Guettar during the night of 22–23 March and moved off along the road from Gabès to Gafsa. General Allen had some of his forces on the offensive at the time: since the previous afternoon two battalions of the 18th Infantry Regiment had been driving the Italians off the hills of the Djebel Berda massif, and the 26th Regiment was advancing along the road on the northern edge of the valley. At around five in the morning, still in darkness, German reconnaissance units began firing on the slopes. At dawn the Americans saw the whole division: tanks and self-propelled guns moving in a tight square, with infantry in half-tracks and lorries in the middle and behind them. From both sides of the valley, from the hills and from the German command post on Hill 369, the whole formation could be seen as plainly as could be.

At first the battle went the Germans’ way. Their column split into three groups. One forced its way in among the hills and overran the positions of the 32nd Field Artillery Battalion and part of the 5th; the second advanced along the road; the third and largest tried to outflank the Americans to the south, along the edge of the salt lake of Chott el Guettar. At some positions there was hand-to-hand fighting, and German tanks came close to General Allen’s headquarters. Allen, urged to move his staff, is said to have replied that he was not going anywhere. Then the attack ran into a belt of mines that the Americans had laid across the valley along the Wadi Keddab. The tanks slowed down, began to manoeuvre and became targets.

The outcome was decided by the artillery and by the tank destroyers of the 601st and 899th Battalions. The latter were equipped with M10 self-propelled guns, which had only recently arrived in Tunisia. According to the American official history, the artillery and tank destroyers destroyed or disabled nearly 30 German tanks, and mines stopped another eight. The Germans later towed away and repaired some of the damaged vehicles, so their permanent losses were smaller. The Americans paid a price too: the 601st Battalion lost 24 guns (only two of which could be recovered) and was left with nine, and the 899th lost seven M10s. At around nine o’clock the Germans pulled back a few kilometres to the east to regroup for a second attack.

The Americans had several hours to prepare. Battalions of the 16th Regiment and the Rangers were brought into positions above the wadi, and jeep drivers, under fire and attacks by Ju 87 dive-bombers, brought up ammunition. The divisional staff knew what forces would take part in the second attack and when it would come; according to American accounts, an intercepted German signal helped. It began after 4.45 p.m., following a dive-bomber raid and at the signal of a siren. The American artillery smothered the attackers with fire before they could reach the infantry positions. A report from the 18th Regiment, which reached headquarters a quarter of an hour or so later, said that the artillery had “massacred” the infantry and that the surviving tanks were turning back. By nightfall the second attack had collapsed completely.

By the evening of 23 March a reinforced American infantry division, supported by aircraft and, above all, by its own artillery, had stopped a Wehrmacht panzer division. In his report to the OKW Kesselring admitted heavy tank losses in the morning attack and attributed the failure of the second attack to Allied superiority. The Italian command, for its part, claimed in its communiqué the destruction of 40 Allied tanks and the capture of 170 prisoners in central and southern Tunisia. The exact losses of both sides on that one day are not known; the American and German tallies differ, and many vehicles counted as destroyed later returned to action.

After the battle

The Germans never again attacked on such a scale. The 10th Panzer Division dug in on the hills east of El Guettar and, together with the Italians, defended them stubbornly. In the following days the enemy even managed to retake some of the Djebel Berda hills. The Americans could not break through towards Gabès: the fighting for Hills 369 and 772, in which the 9th Infantry Division also took part from 28 March, dragged on into the first days of April and cost heavy losses for little gain. The 1st Armored Division was likewise stuck at Maknassy. Patton, bound by the restrictions imposed by Alexander, raged both at his subordinates and at the British tactical air force of Air Marshal Arthur Coningham, whom he accused of failing to provide air cover. The quarrel between the two commanders broke out at the beginning of April.

II Corps’s offensive nevertheless achieved its purpose. The Axis had to send the 10th Panzer Division, and later part of the 21st, to fight the Americans at the very moment when the Eighth Army was attacking the Mareth Line and outflanking it through the Tebaga Gap. At the end of March Messe fell back to positions on the Wadi Akarit. When the British broke through that line too at the beginning of April, American armoured units drove down the road from El Guettar towards the coast on 7 April and met patrols of the Eighth Army.

Significance

The Battle of El Guettar was not a great victory on the scale of the campaign; it is sometimes described in the literature as inconclusive, because the Americans did not break through to the coast. It was, however, of enormous importance for an army that had been fleeing from Kasserine a month earlier. For the first time an American division withstood an attack by an experienced German panzer division and inflicted serious losses on it. It also showed what the US Army had learned in the space of a few weeks: massed artillery directed by forward observers, minefields, and cooperation between infantry and tank destroyers. Historians often stress that it was the firepower of its artillery that from then on became the American army’s hallmark.

For Patton himself his days in Tunisia proved a short but important episode. On 15 April he handed II Corps over to Bradley and returned to planning the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky), where he led the Seventh Army. The 1st Infantry Division, known as “the Big Red One”, later fought in Sicily and Normandy. The first phase of the Battle of El Guettar was depicted in the 1970 film Patton.