The Battle of Longstop Hill

On 22 December 1942, in rain and darkness, British Guardsmen moved off against Djebel el Ahmera, a hill about ten kilometres north-east of Medjez el Bab in northern Tunisia. The British called it Longstop Hill, after the cricket fielding position far behind the wicket whose job is to stop the balls that others have let through. The hill commanded the valley of the Medjerda and the road to Tunis, so without it no attack on the Tunisian capital could succeed. After three days of fighting, on Christmas Day, the hill was back in German hands, and from then on the Germans called it the Weihnachtsberg – Christmas Mountain.

The battle was the last attempt to take Tunis in 1942. Its failure meant that the campaign in Tunisia would last until the spring.

After Tebourba

Three weeks earlier the Battle of Tebourba had ended in an Allied defeat. The German 10th Panzer Division had thrown the British 78th Infantry Division and the American Combat Command B of the 1st Armored Division back from Tunis, and General Charles Allfrey’s V Corps had withdrawn to the line of hills in front of Medjez el Bab: Longstop Hill on the north bank of the Medjerda and Bou Aoukaz on the south. On 10 December the Americans lost more tanks at Bou Aoukaz, bogged down in the mud. A few days later the Allies shortened the front and gave up the hill itself, which the Germans then occupied.

Dwight Eisenhower and the commander of the British First Army, General Kenneth Anderson, had not, however, given up on Tunis. The race for Tunis, begun after the landings in North Africa, had been lost, but it seemed that a single well-prepared attack would be enough to break the still weak Axis bridgehead. The main attack was to go in immediately afterwards, just before Christmas. The first step was to be the recapture of Longstop Hill, to cover the left flank of the main thrust along the Medjerda.

Meanwhile, to the south-east, the situation in the whole theatre was changing. On 12 December Rommel had left his positions at El Agheila and was retreating across Tripolitania, while in Tunisia Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, commander since 9 December of the Fifth Panzer Army, was receiving more and more units. With every week of delay the bridgehead was becoming harder to take.

Guardsmen and Americans on the hill

The task was given to the 2nd Battalion, Coldstream Guards, of the 1st Guards Brigade, which after taking the hill was to hand it over to the American 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, of the US 1st Infantry Division. The Guardsmen were then to return to reserve for the main attack. The plan thus assumed that the enemy on the hill was weak, and that one battalion would be enough to take it and another to hold it.

During the night of 22–23 December, in torrential rain, the Coldstreams attacked and after hard fighting took Point 290 and the railway halt of Halte d’el Heri at the foot of the massif. Believing that they held the whole of Longstop Hill, they handed over the positions to the Americans on the morning of 23 December. This was a reconnaissance error: the massif had a second, higher summit, Djebel el Rhar, separated from Djebel el Ahmera by a shallow saddle, and the Germans were holding on there. The Americans, who did not know the ground, found themselves under fire from two directions.

The Germans counter-attacked that same day, 23 December. Part of the American battalion was pushed off the summit, and the rain turned the slopes into mud that neither ammunition vehicles nor guns could get up. The Guardsmen, who had already gone down the hill, were ordered back. At 5 p.m. on 24 December they attacked again and retook Point 290. According to some studies they also broke onto Djebel el Rhar during the night, but they were unable to take or consolidate the whole massif.

On the morning of Christmas Day the Germans struck from the north with tanks. They scattered a company of French colonial troops guarding the flank, got into the defenders’ rear and at around 9 a.m. retook Point 290. General Allfrey concluded that further fighting was pointless and ordered a withdrawal. By 26 December both sides stood roughly where they had been before the battle, and Longstop Hill remained German.

Losses were heavy for so small a battlefield. According to George F. Howe’s American official history, the battalion of the 18th Infantry lost 9 officers and 347 men killed, wounded and missing, and the Coldstream battalion 178 men. For the American infantry, which had been fighting in Africa only since November, it was one of its first such costly clashes with the Germans.

Christmas Eve with Anderson: Eisenhower calls off the attack

The fate of the attack on Tunis was decided before the fighting for the hill was even over. On 24 December Eisenhower came up to the front, to Anderson’s headquarters and to V Corps, to judge the conditions for himself. What he saw he described after the war in his memoirs: in a field beside the road four soldiers were vainly trying to drag a motorcycle out of the mud. It had been raining for a week, the clay fields would bear neither tanks nor lorries, and aircraft could not take off from the waterlogged forward airfields. Anderson and his commanders persuaded Eisenhower that an attack in such conditions would end in disaster. Eisenhower agreed to postpone the offensive indefinitely – in practice until the weather improved, that is, until the spring.

That same evening news reached Anderson’s headquarters that Admiral François Darlan, with whom the Allies had concluded an agreement in November bringing North Africa over to their side, had been shot in Algiers. Eisenhower set off for Algiers at once. Political matters occupied him for the following weeks, and the front in Tunisia went quiet.

The 1st Armored Division and Operation Husky

Some chronologies record under 22 December that the rest of the American 1st Armored Division, “earmarked for Operation Husky”, arrived in North Africa. This is inaccurate. Operation Husky, the landing in Sicily, was decided on only in January 1943 at the Casablanca Conference, and the 1st Armored Division took no part in it: the armoured division that fought in Sicily was the US 2nd Armored. General Orlando Ward’s division came to North Africa for the Tunisian campaign. Its Combat Command B had landed near Oran on 8 November and fought at Tebourba, while the remaining units arrived through Oran in successive convoys in November and December and were then moved up to the Tunisian front. Soon the whole division was to be deployed in central Tunisia, where in February 1943 it suffered heavy losses at the Kasserine Pass. It reached Italy only in the autumn of 1943.

Regiments turned into battalions

It is also recorded under 24 December that the US Army was “reorganising combat arms regiments into separate groups and battalions”. This refers to the reform carried out by General Lesley McNair’s Army Ground Forces. McNair believed that supporting units – artillery, tanks, tank destroyers, anti-aircraft artillery and engineers – should not be permanently tied to large regiments, but should form separate battalions. These battalions were to come under small group headquarters, which army or corps command could assign wherever they happened to be needed and easily regroup. This saved cadres and equipment and allowed forces to be tailored to the task.

It is hard to point to a single decision of 24 December 1942 that either began or completed this reform. It was a process spread over 1942–1943: non-divisional regiments of artillery and other arms were broken up into battalions and groups mainly in 1943, and most armoured divisions were reorganised, abolishing their armoured regiments in favour of separate battalions, from the autumn of 1943 (the 1st Armored Division in the summer of 1944 in Italy). The experience of Tunisia, where American units fought split up into small task forces, influenced the further course of the reform.

Place in the war

The Battle of Longstop Hill closed the year 1942 in Tunisia. The plan to take Tunis before the winter, which had guided Operation Torch, finally collapsed, and both sides began to prepare for a long campaign. The Axis gained time to bring more divisions into Tunisia and to receive there Rommel’s army retreating from Libya. The Allies had to move more troops to the front, build airfields and roads, and above all sort out the command of the British, American and French forces.

Longstop Hill remained in German hands for four months, barring the road from Medjez el Bab to Tunis. The British took it only in Operation Vulcan, on 23–26 April 1943. Djebel el Ahmera was captured on 23 April by the 8th Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, of the 78th Division’s 36th Brigade, and Major John Anderson, who took over command of the battalion during the attack, was awarded the Victoria Cross for the action. Djebel el Rhar was taken on 26 April by a battalion of the Buffs and Churchill tanks of the North Irish Horse, which climbed slopes considered impassable to vehicles. It was defended by troops of the German 999th Light Africa Division. Two weeks later, on 7 May, the Allies entered Tunis, and on 13 May 1943 the Axis forces in Africa surrendered.