The Battle of the Mareth Line begins

Late on the evening of 20 March 1943 General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army opened its attack on the Mareth Line – old French fortifications in southern Tunisia, behind which General Giovanni Messe’s Italian-German army had been standing on the defensive since February. It was the Eighth Army’s first major operation since the Second Battle of El Alamein, fought four and a half months earlier. The plan, code-named Pugilist, combined two blows: a frontal infantry attack across the dry bed of the Wadi Zigzaou on the coastal sector of the line, and a wide march by General Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand Corps through the mountains and desert to the west, towards the Tebaga Gap.

The popular account, according to which Montgomery’s forces then began breaking through the Mareth Line, needs to be made more precise. The first days of the battle brought no breakthrough. The British did seize a small bridgehead beyond the Wadi Zigzaou, but they failed to get their heavy weapons across it; on 22 March a German counter-attack took back most of the ground they had won, and during the night of 23–24 March the remnants of the units were withdrawn behind the wadi. The decision came only a few days later, with the outflanking of the line from the west.

Montgomery’s plan

The Eighth Army had been facing the Mareth Line since mid-February. Its preparations for the attack were interrupted on 6 March by a blow from three German panzer divisions at Medenine, which the British, forewarned by decrypted German signals, beat off with anti-tank gunfire. In the process the Axis forces lost a good many tanks that could have been useful in the defence of the line. A few days later Erwin Rommel left Africa, and command of Army Group Africa passed to General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim.

Montgomery knew what the line he intended to take looked like. Its design and weak points were known to General Georges Catroux, who had directed its construction in the 1930s and in 1943 was in Algiers, offering the British his advice. The French had not extended the fortifications west of the mountains, because they regarded the desert plateaux there as impassable to vehicles. Back in January, however, patrols of the Long Range Desert Group had found a passage through the mountains, named Wilder’s Gap after the New Zealand officer who led the patrol, and had proved that it could be used to reach the Tebaga Gap between the Djebel Tebaga and Djebel Melab ranges. Beyond the gap the road led through El Hamma to Gabès on the coast, in the rear of the whole Mareth position.

The plan was for General Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps to attack frontally near the coast and draw the Axis reserves on to itself, while the New Zealanders, reinforced by the British 8th Armoured Brigade, artillery and General Philippe Leclerc’s Free French column, made for the Tebaga Gap and then El Hamma. The 2nd New Zealand Division with its attached units was designated the New Zealand Corps; according to various studies it numbered more than 25,000 men, around 150 tanks and several thousand vehicles. General Brian Horrocks’s X Corps, with the 1st Armoured Division, waited in reserve, ready to exploit success wherever it appeared. At the same time, in the west, the American II Corps, under the command of General George Patton since 6 March, was to advance from the Gafsa area to threaten Messe’s lines of communication and tie down part of his reserves.

The defenders of the line

Messe’s army, renamed the Italian First Army in February, consisted of several Italian infantry and motorised divisions and German light and panzer divisions, many of them exhausted by the retreat across the whole of Libya. The coastal sector, around the village of Zarat, was held by the Italian 136th Division Giovani Fascisti; further inland stood, among others, the Italian Trieste, La Spezia and Pistoia Divisions and the German 90th Light Division. Behind the line, in reserve, waited the 15th Panzer Division, weakened by its losses at Medenine. The desert passage in the west was at first held only by weak detachments of the Italian Saharan group.

The Eighth Army had a clear numerical advantage over its opponent, especially in tanks, artillery and aircraft, and its supplies came in through Tripoli, captured in January. The Mareth Line, however, was a position where that advantage counted for little. The Wadi Zigzaou, whose bed in places had steep banks a dozen or more metres high and water and mud at the bottom, formed a natural anti-tank ditch. Behind it stood concrete bunkers, machine-gun nests and anti-tank guns, and the approaches were covered by minefields in which Axis soldiers had laid tens of thousands of mines over the preceding months.

Night on the Wadi Zigzaou

The attack was preceded after dark on 20 March by a bombardment from several hundred guns. Two brigades of the British 50th (Northumbrian) Infantry Division – the 151st Brigade, made up of battalions of the Durham Light Infantry, and the 69th Brigade – went down into the bed of the wadi opposite Zarat and climbed the far bank on scaling ladders. Sappers were to level the descents and lay fascines in the bed, over which the Valentine infantry tanks of the 50th Royal Tank Regiment would cross. The crossing quickly became jammed: the first tanks bogged down on the bottom, burning fascines blocked the passage, and fire from the fortifications made it impossible for the sappers to work. By the morning of 21 March only some of the tanks and not a single anti-tank gun had got across the wadi.

The infantry nevertheless managed to take several strongpoints on the far bank and form a narrow bridgehead. In this fighting Lieutenant Colonel Derek Seagrim, commanding the 7th Battalion of the Green Howards, personally helped to place the ladders under fire and led his men against two enemy positions; he was awarded the Victoria Cross for this, but never received it – he was killed at the beginning of April in the next battle. During 21 March the British tried to widen the bridgehead and bring more vehicles across, but rain fell during the night and turned the bottom of the wadi into a quagmire.

The 15th Panzer Division counter-attacks

Messe and his German subordinates quickly realised that the bridgehead was poorly supplied and lacked anti-tank cover. On the afternoon of 22 March the 15th Panzer Division counter-attacked, supported by German infantry and soldiers of the Giovani Fascisti. The Valentines, armed with light guns, were no match for the German tanks and guns, and the rain and mud hampered artillery and air support. According to British studies, the British lost several dozen tanks that day – the figure most often given is around 30–35 – and several hundred men taken prisoner, and the bridgehead shrank to a few strongpoints right on the edge of the wadi.

On the morning of 23 March Montgomery concluded that the frontal attack would not bring a decision. According to his later accounts and the memoirs of his chief of staff, Francis de Guingand, he had decided to change the plan during the night, after reports that most of the bridgehead had been lost. The main effort was now to shift west: Horrocks’s X Corps with the 1st Armoured Division was ordered to take the long route through the desert in the wake of the New Zealanders, while the 4th Indian Division was to cross the mountains nearer the line to outflank its inland end. During the night of 23–24 March the 50th Division’s infantry was withdrawn from the bridgehead behind the Wadi Zigzaou. The attack near the coast had cost it heavy losses, but it had tied down for several days the 15th Panzer Division – the strongest reserve at Messe’s disposal.

The left hook

The second part of the operation was unfolding at the same time as the attack near the coast. The New Zealand Corps had set out from its assembly areas in the south during the night of 19–20 March and, marching by night through Wilder’s Gap and across the desert plateau, was approaching the Tebaga Gap. On its western flank marched Leclerc’s column, which on 10 March, near the oasis of Ksar Ghilane, had beaten off an attack by a German battle group with tanks and armoured cars. The surprise Montgomery had been counting on was only partly achieved: Axis aircraft and reconnaissance detected the movement of a large column, and Messe began shifting the German 164th Light Division and the 21st Panzer Division towards the gap.

On 21 March the New Zealanders reached the entrance to the gap, and during the night of 21–22 March they captured a forward hill marked on the maps as Point 201. Freyberg, however, did not commit his tanks to the gap at once, preferring to wait until the situation became clearer. Some historians believe that a chance was lost at that moment, because over the following days German divisions occupied the gap and the attack stalled in front of new defensive positions.

Its place in the war

The first days of the Battle of the Mareth Line were a setback for Montgomery, though not a defeat. The Eighth Army did not break through the fortifications, and the 50th Division suffered its heaviest losses since El Alamein. It turned out that the method that had brought victory in Egypt – a night infantry attack through minefields under cover of massed artillery – failed where a natural obstacle prevented tanks and guns from following the infantry across. At the same time the frontal attack fulfilled part of its purpose: Messe could not throw all his reserves against the New Zealanders, and for several days the Axis’s attention was divided between the coast, the Tebaga Gap and the American advance from the direction of Gafsa.

Montgomery, moreover, was able to abandon a failed plan quickly and shift the weight of the attack to where the defence was weaker. The move of X Corps to the west prepared the blow which on 26 March, after hours of air and artillery preparation, broke through the Tebaga Gap and opened the road to El Hamma. Messe’s army then had to abandon the Mareth Line and fall back to a position on the Wadi Akarit, which Rommel had wanted to defend from the outset. There, in the first days of April, the Eighth Army fought its next battle, and it then linked up with the American forces and the British First Army advancing from the west. In May 1943 the Axis forces, pushed back into the northern tip of Tunisia, surrendered.

The Mareth Line, built by the French against the Italians, in March 1943 defended the Italians and Germans against the British – and, like the Maginot Line before it, it failed not where it was strong but where its builders had assumed no one could get through. The fighting on the Wadi Zigzaou showed, however, that even obsolete fortifications, manned by determined soldiers and backed by an armoured reserve, could cost an attacker dearly. The Allies were reminded of this a few months later in Sicily and Italy, where the war would once again be fought in mountains, in rain and on fortified defensive lines.