The Battle of Medenine

On 6 March 1943 German and Italian troops attacked the positions of the British Eighth Army at Medenine in southern Tunisia. The attack, code-named Operation Capri, was led by three German panzer divisions – the 10th, 15th and 21st – supported by German and Italian infantry. General Bernard Montgomery, forewarned by intelligence, had had time to prepare an anti-tank defence on which the attack broke within a single day. In the evening it was called off, and the Axis forces returned to their starting positions. It was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s last battle in Africa.

Popular summaries state that Rommel was “forced to retreat”. This needs qualifying. At Medenine the Axis suffered a clear defeat and its units fell back to the Mareth Line, from which they had launched the attack – but this was not a retreat by the whole army. Rommel himself left Africa a few days later, not as a result of the battle but because of illness and the decision of Hitler, who did not allow him to return.

A spoiling attack

At the beginning of February 1943, after its long retreat from Egypt and Libya, Rommel’s army occupied the Mareth Line – old French fortifications across the gap between the mountains and the sea south of Gabès. In front of it the Eighth Army was assembling, and on 17 February it took Medenine. Rommel used the time afforded him by the slow British build-up to strike at the Americans in the west. The attack through the Kasserine Pass inflicted a heavy defeat on them, but on 22 February Rommel broke it off, and by 25 February his divisions were back in their starting positions. On 23 February he took command of the new Army Group Africa, and his former army, renamed the Italian First Army, passed to the command of General Giovanni Messe.

Rommel knew that Montgomery was preparing to assault the Mareth Line. He wanted to forestall him: to strike at the Eighth Army before it had concentrated all its forces, destroy its forward grouping at Medenine and delay the British offensive. At a conference on 28 February Rommel, Messe and the panzer division commanders discussed the plan. Rommel proposed attacking closer to the coast, where the British might not expect it, but his subordinates considered the ground there to be mined and covered by artillery. He gave way, and the plan was drawn up by Messe and the acting commander of the Afrika Korps, General Heinz Ziegler. The attack was set for 6 March so that the divisions that had fought at Kasserine would have time to make good their losses. Rommel was ill and exhausted at the time; some historians stress that the plan was not entirely his own work.

Under the plan, the Afrika Korps group, led by General Hans Cramer, was to come down from the Matmata hills and strike from the west: the 10th Panzer Division towards Metameur near Medenine, the 21st Panzer Division in the centre and the 15th Panzer Division further north. Reconnaissance units were to cut the road from Tataouine, and an infantry group, including Italian units of the Spezia and Trieste divisions, was to attack frontally along the coast. Some 140–160 tanks, according to various sources, were assembled for the attack. German and Italian aircraft were to cover the attack and bomb the British airfields.

A warning from Bletchley Park

At the end of February Montgomery had few troops at Medenine. Most of his tanks were hundreds of kilometres to the rear, and the assault on the Mareth Line could not be ready before about 20 March. The British, however, were reading German radio traffic encrypted with Enigma. As early as 25 February the codebreakers at Bletchley Park informed Montgomery that the attack at Kasserine had been broken off, and on 28 February they decrypted Rommel’s orders showing that an attack on the Eighth Army was being prepared. Within a few days and nights Montgomery rushed reinforcements to Medenine: General Bernard Freyberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division, armoured brigades and artillery. According to the British official history, by 4 March he had some 400 tanks, 350 field guns and 470 anti-tank guns there, and the Desert Air Force (the Eighth Army’s tactical air arm) had assembled twice as many aircraft as the Axis air forces.

The defence was organised by General Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps: the 51st (Highland) Division, the 7th Armoured Division and the New Zealanders, with General Philippe Leclerc’s Free French, who had recently come across the Sahara from Chad, on the southern flank. The key was the anti-tank guns, including the new 6-pounders, dug in and camouflaged on the hills. Montgomery forbade them to open fire at long range, and the artillery was to wait until the attackers came within range of as many guns as possible. The tanks were kept back as a reserve. Early on the morning of 6 March Bletchley Park sent a further warning of the direction and time of the attack.

6 March

At 6 a.m., in fog, the Axis artillery opened fire, and tanks and lorries carrying infantry began to come down from the hills. The blow fell exactly where the British expected it. The 15th Panzer Division, turning north, ran into the fire of the anti-tank guns of the 131st Infantry Brigade and the Scots Guards. The armoured columns of the 10th Division approached the Tadjera Kbir hill on the New Zealand front, came up against a dummy minefield and turned straight into the muzzles of the hidden guns – the 6-pounders knocked out several tanks at a range of a few hundred metres. The tanks of the 21st Division wandered along the ridges under artillery fire. In the south, German reconnaissance units attacked Leclerc’s Frenchmen on the Tataouine road without success.

In the afternoon the Germans committed their infantry, but the concentrated fire of the British and New Zealand artillery broke up every attack before it could develop. In the course of the day XXX Corps’ artillery fired some 30,000 shells. The Axis air forces threw in everything they had but achieved little against the superiority of the Desert Air Force and strong anti-aircraft defences. At around 8.30 p.m. Rommel accepted Messe’s proposal to call off the attack: continuing it threatened losses that would make it impossible to defend the Mareth Line. During the night and on 7 March the Axis forces withdrew to their starting positions; rain hampered the British pursuit.

While the battle was still in progress, Montgomery wrote to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, that Rommel was attacking him in daylight with tanks while he had hundreds of dug-in anti-tank guns, 400 tanks and masses of artillery – it was “a real present”, and the enemy “must be mad”.

Losses

The casualty figures differ in detail, but the scale of the Axis defeat is beyond dispute. According to the American official historian George Howe, the Germans lost 61 killed, 388 wounded and 32 missing, and the Italians 33 killed, 122 wounded and 9 missing; at least 41 tanks failed to return. The British official history gives some 635 Axis soldiers killed, wounded and missing and 44–56 tanks lost; other studies give a figure of about 50. Montgomery put the Eighth Army’s losses at about 130 men. By their own account the British did not lose a single tank – the Germans claimed to have destroyed six.

Rommel leaves Africa

The defeat at Medenine sealed Rommel’s own fate. The field marshal had been ill for months, and as early as January he had been told that he would be relieved of his command on health grounds. After the battle he noted that its failure had caused great despondency at headquarters, and he regarded keeping the army in Africa as suicide. On 9 March he handed over command of Army Group Africa to General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim and flew to Europe, intending to persuade Hitler to shorten the front and ultimately to evacuate the troops from Tunisia. At his headquarters near Vinnytsia, Adolf Hitler rejected his arguments, awarded him the Diamonds to the Knight’s Cross on 11 March – he was the first soldier of the army to receive them – and sent him on sick leave. He never returned to Africa. His departure was kept secret until the surrender of the Axis forces in Tunisia; the propaganda machine did not want to associate the popular commander with defeat.

Messe retained command of the First Army on the Mareth Line, while Arnim, until then commander of the Fifth Panzer Army in northern Tunisia, was henceforth responsible for the whole front. Above them both stood Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and the Italian Comando Supremo.

Place in the war

For Montgomery, the Battle of Medenine was a repeat of the Battle of Alam el Halfa in August 1942: an enemy whose intentions were known from radio intelligence attacked a prepared defence and lost tanks it could no longer replace. For the first time, however, the burden of the defence rested almost entirely on the anti-tank guns and artillery rather than on British tanks. The defeat was so clear-cut that the Germans began to suspect a leak, and Montgomery was rebuked for doing too little to disguise the source of his knowledge.

The attack did not delay the British preparations. On 20 March the Eighth Army began its assault on the Mareth Line, and at the end of the month, after the New Zealanders had outflanked the fortifications from the west, it forced Messe’s army to retreat to the Wadi Akarit. Meanwhile the US II Corps struck at Gafsa and El Guettar, and at the beginning of April the two Allied armies linked up. The last Axis armoured forces, bled white in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass and at Medenine, were no longer able to stop the offensive, which in May 1943 ended with the surrender of Army Group Africa and the capture of some quarter of a million German and Italian soldiers – Arnim and Messe among them.

For Rommel, Medenine closed a two-year chapter in which his name had become a symbol of the desert war. He later held commands in northern Italy and in France, where in 1944 he prepared the coastal defences against the Allied invasion.