The Battle of Tebourba

At the beginning of December 1942, in northern Tunisia, some 30 kilometres west of Tunis, a battle was fought that settled that the war in North Africa would not be over by Christmas. On 1 December General Wolfgang Fischer’s German 10th Panzer Division struck at the British and American units that a few days earlier had taken the small town of Tebourba on the Medjerda river. After four days of heavy fighting, on 4 December, the Germans retook Tebourba and the Allies withdrew westwards, towards Medjez el-Bab.

Some chronologies list 2 December as a day of “heavy fighting in Tunisia” in which German forces are being “pushed into the last corner of North Africa”. The first part of that description is true; the second is not, at least not in December 1942. At Tebourba it was the Germans who were attacking and the British and Americans who were falling back. The Axis bridgehead in Tunisia was not shrinking but growing: new units arrived in Tunis and Bizerta every day by air and by sea. The Axis forces found themselves in the “last corner” of Africa only in the spring of 1943, when they were being pressed from the west by the First Army and from the south by the British Eighth Army, which in December 1942 was still in Libya.

Before the counter-attack

The battle was a direct consequence of the run for Tunis – the attempt, launched a few days after the Allied landings in North Africa, to seize Tunis and Bizerta by a rapid advance from Algeria. At the end of November the British 11th Infantry Brigade of the 78th Infantry Division took Tebourba, and its attack on nearby Djedeida broke down on 28 November. Also in the area of the town were the British armoured Blade Force and the American Combat Command B of the 1st Armored Division – a grouping of tanks, motorised infantry and artillery that had reached the front in the last days of November. The Allies planned a new attack on Djedeida and Tunis for 2 December. With that in mind, Lieutenant Colonel John Frost’s parachute battalion was dropped near Depienne on 29 November.

On the other side the commander was General Walther Nehring, formerly commander of the Afrika Korps, who since mid-November had headed the German XC Corps in Tunisia. His superior, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, German Commander-in-Chief South, pressed him not to wait passively for the next Allied attack but to push the enemy as far from Tunis as possible. Nehring was given the means to do so: the 10th Panzer Division, a veteran of the French campaign and the Eastern Front, which was being brought from France via Italy. Its units arrived in Tunisia piecemeal, so on 1 December Fischer had only part of the division at his disposal. According to the US official history (George F. Howe, Northwest Africa), this amounted to about 40 tanks, mostly Panzer IIIs, and about 15 75 mm anti-tank guns, reinforced by paratroopers and infantry from other units.

The 10th Panzer Division was also given a few tanks of a kind the Allies had not yet seen. At the end of November the first Tiger I heavy tanks of the 501st Heavy Tank Battalion (schwere Panzer-Abteilung 501) arrived in Bizerta. There were only a handful of them – four, according to the battalion’s history – but they were the first Tigers to fight the Western Allies. Until then, from August 1942, they had been used only in small numbers near Leningrad.

An attack from three sides

Fischer divided his forces into battle groups named after their commanders. Group Koch, made up mainly of paratroopers and infantry, was to pin down the Allies on the south bank of the Medjerda. Group Lüder, with one tank company, attacked from the north, from the Chouigui pass, while Group Hudel, with two tank companies and led by Fischer in person, struck from the east and north-east. A fourth group, named after Djedeida, was held in reserve near that village. The aim was to encircle Tebourba and cut off the troops in it from their only line of retreat, towards Medjez el-Bab.

The attack began on the morning of 1 December; according to Howe, Group Lüder went in at 7.45 a.m. The first blow fell on Blade Force, positioned north of the town. The British, equipped with light and medium tanks with weaker armament, had no answer to the German tanks and anti-tank guns. By evening Blade Force had been shattered and thrown back towards Tebourba, and on the evening of 2 December its remnants were withdrawn from the battlefield. The defence of the town was taken over by the 11th Brigade and the American Combat Command B. On the same day, 1 December, three Tigers crossed the Medjerda near Djedeida and went into action in the olive groves east of Tebourba, and on 2 December a fourth supported Group Lüder, which was working round the town from the west.

Combat Command B, under Brigadier General Lunsford Oliver, tried to counter-attack, but the American crews were fighting German armour for the first time and suffered heavy losses from well-sited anti-tank guns. Attacking by companies, without reconnaissance or infantry support, the American M3 Lee and Stuart tanks drove straight into the fire. The lessons the Americans drew from those days proved very costly to learn.

Hill 186 and the fall of Tebourba

The heaviest ordeal was endured by the 2nd Battalion, the Hampshire Regiment, newly arrived from the 1st Guards Brigade and placed under the 11th Brigade. From 1 December it defended the hills east of Tebourba, the so-called Tebourba Gap, against the battle group from Djedeida. On 2 December the battalion held its positions at the cost of very heavy losses, and during the night it fell back about three kilometres to a new line. The order for a further withdrawal, issued that day, never reached it. On 3 December the Germans took Hill 186 (Djebel Maïana), which Howe regards as the decisive point of the battle. In the fighting for it Major Herbert Le Patourel distinguished himself: with four volunteers he silenced several German machine-gun nests, and when his men fell he fought on alone. Believed killed, he was awarded the Victoria Cross; in fact he had been wounded and taken prisoner.

According to British figures, the Hampshire battalion lost about three-quarters of its strength in this fighting, and the neighbouring 1st Battalion, the East Surrey Regiment, nearly 60 per cent. After the battle the three battalions of the 11th Brigade numbered, according to Howe, about 660 men, not counting stragglers. On the evening of 3 December the remnants of the British infantry withdrew along a narrow road beside the Medjerda under fire from both sides, abandoning vehicles and guns. At about 11 a.m. on 4 December the Lüder and Djedeida groups entered Tebourba.

Fischer reported the capture or destruction of 55 tanks, four armoured cars, several dozen guns and mortars and about 300 vehicles, and the taking of 1,000–1,100 prisoners. These figures come from the victor’s report, cited in the US official history, and should be treated as an estimate, but the scale of the defeat is not in doubt. German losses were markedly lower, although the stubborn defence by the British and Americans cost Fischer several days that he never made up.

The retreat from Tebourba

After the fall of Tebourba the Allies no longer had the strength to think of Tunis. The headquarters of General Charles Allfrey’s V Corps, newly arrived from Britain, moved into the sector and took over all the units in the Medjerda valley: the bled-white 78th Infantry Division, the 6th Armoured Division, the American Combat Command B, paratroopers and commandos. Allfrey judged that the weakened units facing Tebourba could easily be encircled and ordered them back about ten kilometres, to the hills on either side of the river: Djebel el Ahmera, which the British called Longstop Hill, and Bou Aoukaz. At the headquarters of General Kenneth Anderson’s First Army even a withdrawal behind Medjez el-Bab was considered, but Dwight Eisenhower, Allied Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, refused to give up the town, which guarded the only good crossing of the Medjerda and the road to Tunis.

The last act of the battle was played out on 10 December. German tanks attacked Combat Command B near Bou Aoukaz, and when the American tanks moved to counter-attack, they bogged down in waterlogged fields and were picked off one after another. During the night, as they withdrew along a flooded road, the Americans abandoned more vehicles that could not be pulled out of the mud. According to English-language studies, Combat Command B lost 18 tanks that day, which, coming on top of its losses at Tebourba, deprived it of any offensive capability for several weeks.

That ended the mobile phase of the fighting for Tunis. The Allies stood on the Medjerda, a dozen or so kilometres further from Tunis than at the beginning of December, while the Axis built up a bridgehead that was to hold out for more than five months.

Why the Allies lost the race

The Battle of Tebourba was the culmination of the run for Tunis, which the Allies had begun a few days after landing in North Africa in Operation Torch. Its outcome was the result of several causes, described by British and American historians alike.

The first was air power. The Luftwaffe operated from hard-surfaced airfields at Tunis and Bizerta, a quarter of an hour or so from the battlefield by air, and Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers attacked columns and positions almost unhindered. Allied fighters took off from airfields in Algeria, at Bône and Souk el-Arba, more than a hundred kilometres away and liable to turn into mud after rain. For most of December the Axis held air superiority.

The second cause was logistics. The Allies were advancing at the end of a long, single-track railway and winding roads from Algiers, and each battalion that reached the front went into action on its own. The Germans had the ports and airfields of Tunis right behind them. The third was strength: the 78th Division and Combat Command B were too weak to take Tunis and at the same time too dispersed to repel a concentrated armoured attack. Finally came the weather. From the beginning of December torrential rain fell in northern Tunisia, turning fields into quagmires and favouring the side defending the roads and hills.

Von Arnim and the Fifth Panzer Army

Victory at Tebourba did not save Nehring’s post. In Rome and at Hitler’s headquarters the general was regarded as too cautious: in his reports he stressed the weakness of the bridgehead, the shortage of supplies and the risk of an Allied attack, which Kesselring took for pessimism. Hitler had in any case decided that Tunisia was to be defended by an army, not a corps. On 8 December Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, until then commander of a panzer corps on the Eastern Front, flew into Tunis, and on 9 December he took command of the newly formed Fifth Panzer Army. Nehring returned to Europe.

Von Arnim took over forces that in the space of a month had grown from a few improvised battalions to several divisions, German and Italian. His task was to hold Tunis and Bizerta and to keep open the link with Tripolitania, through which Erwin Rommel’s panzer army was retreating. The two commanders did not care for each other, and the lack of a common superior on the spot was to take its toll in February 1943. Fischer himself did not live to see the end of the campaign: he was killed on 1 February 1943 when his car ran over a mine.

Place in the war

The Battle of Tebourba closed the first chapter of the Tunisian campaign. The hope that Tunis and Bizerta would fall into Allied hands within a few weeks of the landings proved illusory. The Germans and Italians gained time to bring more divisions to Tunisia, and Rommel had somewhere to retreat to. The last December attempt to renew the advance on Tunis was the attack on Longstop Hill on 22–25 December, which ended in failure. Eisenhower then postponed the offensive until the weather improved.

Throughout the winter the front in northern Tunisia stood still, and in February 1943 it was the Axis that attacked again, this time in the south, at Sidi Bou Zid and at the Kasserine Pass, where the US 1st Armored Division suffered another heavy defeat. Only in the spring, after the First and Eighth Armies had been brought together under the joint command of Harold Alexander, did the Allies push the Axis forces into the “last corner” of Africa. They took Tunis and Bizerta on 7 May, and on 13 May 1943 the last Axis units in Africa capitulated. Between 230,000 and 250,000 German and Italian soldiers, according to various estimates, were taken prisoner, von Arnim among them.

Paradoxically, the December victory at Tebourba turned against the Germans. Had Tunis fallen in December 1942, Hitler would have lost a few divisions in Africa. Because he held it, he sent more and more there, and in the spring of 1943 he lost them all at once. For the British and the Americans, especially the latter, the December fighting was the first hard lesson in fighting an experienced enemy – in infantry–tank cooperation, air cover and coalition command – a lesson they went on catching up on throughout the campaign.