The Battle of Wadi Akarit

By early April 1943 the Axis forces in Tunisia were defending an ever smaller area. From the west and north they were pressed by Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson’s British First Army, in the centre of the country by Lieutenant General George Patton’s US II Corps, and from the south by the Eighth Army of General Bernard Montgomery, which, after breaking the Mareth Line, had come up against the last good defensive position on the coast – the Wadi Akarit, north of Gabès. During the night of 5–6 April and the following day the British and Indians broke through this position, and on 7 April, as the Italo-German army fell back northwards, the leading units of the Eighth Army met Americans advancing from the west. The Allied front in Tunisia became continuous.

War chronologies record under 1 April that the Allies “continue to push the Germans into the corner of Tunisia”, and under 7 April that the Americans from the west and the British from the east joined up “near Gafsa”. Both statements need some qualification. In southern Tunisia most of the defenders were Italians: General Giovanni Messe’s Italian First Army, which held the Wadi Akarit, consisted mostly of Italian divisions, stiffened by a few German ones. And the meeting took place not at Gafsa itself, which the Americans had already taken in March, but on the road from El Guettar to Gabès, several dozen kilometres further east.

The situation in early April

After the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 (Operation Torch), the Germans and Italians had managed to occupy Tunisia and throughout the winter held a bridgehead around Tunis and Bizerte. In February they tried to regain the initiative – at Sidi Bou Zid and the Kasserine Pass they inflicted painful losses on the Americans – but lacked the strength to exploit their success. From 9 March, after Rommel’s departure for Europe, all Axis forces in Tunisia were commanded by Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim as commander of Army Group Africa.

At the end of March the Axis position deteriorated markedly. The Eighth Army, after a bloody frontal attack at the Wadi Zigzaou, outflanked the Mareth Line through the Tebaga Gap and forced Messe’s army to retreat. At the same time Patton’s II Corps was attacking eastwards from the Gafsa area: in the El Guettar valley the US 1st Infantry Division repulsed an attack by 10th Panzer Division on 23 March, while further north the 1st Armored Division tried in vain to break through the hills at Maknassy. The Americans’ aim was to break out on to the coastal plain and threaten the rear of Messe’s army, but German and Italian units on the mountain ridges held them up throughout the end of March and the first days of April. In northern Tunisia the First Army was preparing to attack towards Tunis, while the French XIX Corps held the central sector.

This was the “pushing into the corner” that the chronologies mention under 1 April: the Allies had superiority in men and materiel and an increasingly clear command of the air, and their air forces and navies were cutting supplies across the Strait of Sicily ever more effectively. Yet the Axis could not be driven into the sea while it still held the Gabès gap.

The Gabès gap

The position on the Wadi Akarit, long identified by Rommel as the best place to defend southern Tunisia, closed a gap a dozen or so kilometres wide between the Mediterranean and salt marshes that formed an extension of the Chott el Djerid. Unlike the Mareth Line, it could not be outflanked through the desert – it had to be attacked head-on. From the coast the line ran along the dry bed of the Wadi Akarit, impassable to tanks, then over the hill of Djebel Roumana, screened by an anti-tank ditch, and in the west it rested on the steep, jagged massifs of Djebel Fatnassa and Djebel el Meida.

It was held by the Italian XX and XXI Corps: the Trieste, Giovani Fascisti, La Spezia and Pistoia Divisions, reinforced by the German 90th and 164th Light Divisions, with 15th Panzer Division in reserve. Most of these units had already been badly bled in earlier battles.

The night attack of the 4th Indian Division

Montgomery intended to strike on a narrow front with Lieutenant General Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps: the 51st (Highland) Division was to attack Djebel Roumana, the 50th (Northumbrian) Division the centre of the position, and Major General Francis Tuker’s 4th Indian Division the left flank. Tuker, however, persuaded him that instead of striking at the gap at the foot of the hills, his division should seize the mountain massifs themselves, which the Italians regarded as almost impassable. Such a task suited his battalions perfectly, including Gurkhas from Nepal, who had been trained for mountain warfare on India’s North-West Frontier. The Indians were to move off in darkness, several hours ahead of the rest of the army and without a preliminary bombardment that would have given away their intentions.

Late in the evening of 5 April Indian and Gurkha battalions began silently climbing Djebel Fatnassa. Much of the fighting was with bayonet and kukri, for individual positions on the ridges and in the ravines. For capturing one of them, defended by machine guns, Subedar Lalbahadur Thapa of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Gurkha Rifles, was awarded the Victoria Cross. By dawn the division had taken most of the massif, and in the morning its units descended on to the plain behind the position, several kilometres in the defenders’ rear, taking thousands of prisoners, mainly from the La Spezia and Pistoia Divisions.

The attack of 6 April

At 4.15 a.m. on 6 April, after a bombardment by several hundred guns, the 51st and 50th Divisions went into the attack. The Scots of 152nd Brigade took the crest of Djebel Roumana and cleared lanes through the minefield and across the anti-tank ditch, while 153rd and 154th Brigades attacked along the coast. In the centre the 50th Division ran into fierce resistance from well dug-in Italian infantry, armed with numerous machine guns and grenades; the 6th Battalion, Green Howards, lost more than 120 killed in this attack, and Private Eric Anderson of the 5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment, was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for carrying wounded men out of the line of fire. Troops of the 4th Indian Division helped the 50th Division across the anti-tank ditch in front of it.

In the morning Tuker believed that the road north lay open and demanded that Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’s X Corps, with 1st Armoured Division and 2nd New Zealand Division, be committed at once. The reserves, however, were brought forward slowly, and in the meantime Messe threw everything he had into a counter-attack: he moved 164th Light Division from the western hills to the centre, and in the afternoon sent in 15th Panzer Division together with 90th Light Division. Their blows fell mainly on the Scots on Djebel Roumana. The 7th Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, beat off several attacks; its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lorne Campbell, though wounded, directed the defence throughout the day and was also awarded the Victoria Cross. Part of the hill changed hands more than once, but by evening the breach had been held.

At dusk on 6 April Messe concluded that the position could not be held. His divisions had lost most of their men and equipment, and the Americans were still pressing from the west, tying down the German panzer divisions that had until then faced El Guettar. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and the Comando Supremo in Rome urged continued resistance, but Arnim agreed to a withdrawal. During the night of 6–7 April the Italian army quietly fell back north towards the position at Enfidaville, about 240 kilometres away. At dawn on 7 April the British found empty trenches in front of them.

The meeting on the road to Gabès

The withdrawal from the Wadi Akarit also uncovered the American front. The Axis units that had held II Corps on the hills east of El Guettar for two weeks had to pull back to avoid being cut off. On 7 April the Americans advanced along the road from El Guettar towards Gabès, and at around 5 p.m. their leading elements met the Eighth Army’s reconnaissance – according to most accounts, armoured cars of the 12th Lancers. The meeting place lay on the road from Gafsa to Gabès, several dozen kilometres east of Gafsa and El Guettar.

The meeting was above all symbolic: soldiers of an army that had come more than two thousand kilometres from El Alamein through Egypt and Libya shook hands with soldiers who had landed in Morocco and Algeria five months earlier. From then on the Allies had a single continuous front in Tunisia, from the Mediterranean in the north to the coast in the east, and the Axis forces were holding out only in the north-eastern part of the country. Militarily, what mattered more was that the Americans had failed to cut the retreat route of Messe’s army in time. General Harold Alexander, commander of 18th Army Group, decided that the Eighth Army, not II Corps, would lead the further pursuit along the coast, and soon moved the Americans to the northern sector of the front.

Fondouk

Alexander made one more attempt to cut off Messe’s retreating army with a thrust from the west. Lieutenant General John Crocker’s IX Corps – the British 6th Armoured Division, a brigade of 46th Infantry Division and Major General Charles Ryder’s US 34th Infantry Division – was to pass through the Fondouk gap and emerge on to the plain near Kairouan, across the Axis line of retreat. On 8 April the Americans, forced by Crocker to make a frontal attack across open ground, were pinned down by fire from the hill of Djebel Haouareb and suffered heavy losses. On 9 April the British 26th Armoured Brigade forced its way through the mined pass, losing several dozen tanks. The pass was taken, but too late: Messe’s army had already got away to the north. Crocker publicly blamed the Americans for the failure, which poisoned Anglo-American relations in Tunisia for a long time, and the 34th Division was withdrawn for retraining – although many historians consider that the fault lay chiefly with the plan imposed by the corps commander.

Losses

According to the British official history, the battle on the Wadi Akarit cost the Eighth Army about 1,300 killed, wounded and missing and 32 tanks; other studies give higher figures, of up to about 2,000 men. Axis losses were much greater. Some 7,000 soldiers were taken prisoner, the overwhelming majority of them Italians. 15th Panzer Division was seriously weakened, 164th Light Division lost most of its weapons and vehicles, the La Spezia Division dwindled to the strength of a company and a half, and composite units had to be formed from the remnants of several Italian divisions. Even so, Messe managed to extract the main body of his army from the gap – the British pursuit, as after El Alamein and Mareth, proved too slow to encircle it.

Place in the war

Wadi Akarit was the Eighth Army’s last great battle in the desert and the last position at which the Axis could keep apart the two Allied armies advancing on it. With its loss the Tunisian coast lay open as far as Enfidaville: on 10 April the British entered Sfax, on 12 April Sousse, and over the following days they came up against the mountains that shielded Cape Bon from the south. The battle also won recognition for the 4th Indian Division, whose night attack on Djebel Fatnassa is regarded as one of the finest examples of infantry mountain fighting in the entire African campaign, and it brought three Victoria Crosses.

The link-up of the Allied armies on 7 April also ended the period in which the Americans and British had been fighting two separate wars in Africa. From then on all land forces in Tunisia operated within a single army group under Alexander, who answered to General Dwight Eisenhower. The disputes over who had failed at Fondouk and why II Corps had been unable to cut Messe’s line of retreat showed, however, how fragile trust between the allies still was. The Americans demanded an independent task in the final phase of the campaign; in the second half of April II Corps, taken over by Major General Omar Bradley when Patton returned to preparing the invasion of Sicily, was moved to the northern end of the front, opposite Bizerte.

At the beginning of May 1943 the Allies broke the Axis defences before Tunis and Bizerte, and on 13 May the last German and Italian units in Africa surrendered. Messe, promoted Marshal of Italy the day before, was one of the last to give himself up. Some 250,000 Axis soldiers went into captivity, more than at Stalingrad. Wadi Akarit was one of the last steps on that road – a battle after which the fate of the Axis forces in Africa was sealed.