Breaking the Mareth Line

On the afternoon of 26 March 1943 an attack opened at the Tebaga Gap in southern Tunisia that decided the Battle of the Mareth Line. The New Zealand Corps of General Bernard Freyberg and the British 1st Armoured Division, preceded by several hours of fighter-bomber attacks and a heavy artillery bombardment, broke through the German defences between the Djebel Tebaga and Djebel Melab ranges. During the night the tanks reached the road to El Hamma and the coastal town of Gabès, in the rear of General Giovanni Messe’s army, which for a week had been beating off frontal attacks on its fortifications. The operation was codenamed Supercharge II, in memory of Operation Supercharge, which had broken the front at El Alamein in November 1942.

The popular account – that the British broke the Mareth Line, threatening the entire German army, and that the Germans fell back northwards – needs some qualification. The fortifications along the Wadi Zigzaou themselves were never broken: the frontal attack of 20–23 March was repulsed, and the battle was decided by outflanking the line from the west, through mountains and desert that the French had judged impassable when they built it. Nor was the threatened army German; it was Italo-German – Messe’s Italian First Army, made up mostly of Italian divisions. Finally, the withdrawal was no rout: Messe managed to halt the British short of El Hamma and over the following days pulled most of his forces back to a position on the Wadi Akarit, some tens of kilometres to the north.

Stalemate at the gap

The New Zealand Corps – the 2nd New Zealand Division reinforced by the British 8th Armoured Brigade, artillery and General Philippe Leclerc’s Free French column – reached the mouth of the Tebaga Gap on 21 March after several night marches across the desert. On the night of 21–22 March it took a forward hill but could get no further. Messe moved the German 164th Light Division and 21st Panzer Division to the area of the gap, where they occupied positions on the hills and mined the passage.

When a German counter-attack on 22 March retook most of the British bridgehead over the Wadi Zigzaou, General Bernard Montgomery shifted the weight of the battle westwards. On 23 March Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’s X Corps, with 1st Armoured Division, was ordered to follow the New Zealanders, and Horrocks took command of the whole force in the area of the gap. For Freyberg, older and senior in rank, who had for years exercised independent command, being placed under a younger general was hard to accept; in practice the two commanded jointly, and according to witnesses their relations were cool.

The German-Italian side hesitated over what to do. The commander of Army Group Africa, Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, was more worried by the American attack in central Tunisia, around Maknassy and El Guettar, which threatened to cut the roads behind Messe’s army. By 25 March he was inclined to pull it back to the Wadi Akarit, while Messe and the commanders on the spot preferred to counter-attack first. This indecision meant that when the British struck, the Axis forces were scattered between the coast, the gap and the American sector.

The Supercharge II plan

The attack was prepared within a few days. The New Zealand infantry were to attack on a two-brigade front – 5th Brigade on the right, 6th Brigade on the left – led by the tanks of 8th Armoured Brigade and behind a creeping barrage from the artillery of the New Zealand Corps and X Corps. Once two successive objectives had been taken, 1st Armoured Division was to pass through the breach and, after moonrise, advance by night on El Hamma. On the night of 25–26 March a New Zealand battalion captured the hill known as Point 184, from which the Germans had been observing the approaches.

What was new was the part played by air power. The attack was timed for late afternoon, when the sun would be in the defenders’ eyes and the westerly wind would blow dust towards them. During the preceding night heavy bombers struck roads and camps behind the Axis lines, and from early afternoon Air Vice-Marshal Harry Broadhurst’s Desert Air Force kept up continuous attacks on a narrow sector: light bombers bombed the defensive positions, while every quarter of an hour fresh waves of P-40 Kittyhawk fighter-bombers and Hurricane tank-busters arrived to strafe and bomb guns and vehicles from low level, covered by Spitfires. Targets were marked with coloured smoke, and an RAF officer with the ground troops directed the pilots by landmarks on the ground. Such direct battlefield support raised doubts at air headquarters – there were fears of heavy aircraft losses and of mistakes in identifying targets – but Broadhurst won his superiors over, and the attack itself later became a model for the air-ground cooperation that the Allies developed in Italy and Normandy.

The attack of 26 March

The artillery opened fire at 4 p.m., and the tanks of 8th Armoured Brigade moved off behind the barrage, followed by carriers and the New Zealand infantry. The defenders of 164th Light Division and 21st Panzer Division evidently did not expect an attack in broad daylight and were taken by surprise; the dust, smoke and setting sun made it hard for them to see. The British tanks had orders not to stop, and the infantry followed them quickly, taking the first objective and then the second, although many German positions continued to hold out behind them. On the left flank the attackers bypassed on both sides a minefield covered by anti-tank guns and opened a path for 1st Armoured Division.

The heaviest fighting was for the hills on the right flank, from which the Germans could sweep the whole gap with fire. One of them was Point 209, held by a battalion of panzergrenadiers from 164th Division. The attack on its forward slope was led by a company of the 28th (Māori) Battalion. Second Lieutenant Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa Ngarimu’s platoon took an intermediate summit and held it throughout the night against repeated German counter-attacks; Ngarimu, twice wounded, was killed on the morning of 27 March while repelling the last of them. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross – the first Māori serving with the New Zealand forces to receive it. The defenders of Point 209 itself surrendered on 27 March after an artillery bombardment.

By nightfall a gap had opened in the defences. At around 11 p.m., when the moon rose, 1st Armoured Division passed through the breach and set off in columns for El Hamma, some 30 kilometres away. On the morning of 27 March the 15th Panzer Division, brought over from the coastal sector, struck the New Zealanders’ right flank, but was beaten off by 9 a.m., and by that evening resistance in the gap had been broken.

Withdrawal to the Wadi Akarit

1st Armoured Division, however, was halted short of El Hamma, where the Germans had hastily assembled a screen of anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. This resistance, which lasted until 29 March, saved Messe’s army from encirclement. Messe realised that the Mareth Line was lost. The withdrawal of troops from the fortifications had begun as early as 26–27 March, and on 28 March he ordered all units to abandon the line; at the end of the month British troops of XXX Corps moved into the empty positions. The Axis forces fell back in good order to the position on the Wadi Akarit, which Rommel had always considered better than the Mareth Line – a narrow passage between the sea and the salt lakes that could not be outflanked.

Meanwhile Freyberg persuaded Horrocks that the New Zealanders should not advance on the fortified El Hamma but should turn right, straight across difficult country towards Gabès. On 29 March the New Zealanders entered the town; on the same day the Germans abandoned El Hamma, while the German panzer divisions and 164th Light Division covered the withdrawal with delaying actions. Montgomery congratulated Freyberg and Horrocks on the “left hook” that had brought about the collapse of the entire Mareth position.

Losses

Casualty figures usually cover the whole Battle of the Mareth Line rather than 26 March alone. According to British accounts, the Eighth Army lost around 4,000 killed, wounded and missing between 20 and 31 March, a large share of them from 50th Division, which had suffered heavily at the Wadi Zigzaou, as well as many tanks. According to the New Zealand official history, the New Zealand Corps lost 945 men and 51 tanks in the fighting for the Tebaga Gap. According to the same sources the Axis forces lost more than 7,000 prisoners, including some 2,500 Germans. 164th Light Division lost most of its weapons and vehicles, 15th Panzer Division was badly bled, and the Italian “La Spezia” and “Pistoia” Divisions lost so many men that some Italian units later had to be merged. Axis killed and wounded are not known precisely.

Place in the war

The Battle of the Mareth Line was the last of the Eighth Army’s great battles that had begun in Egypt: after El Alamein its road across Libya led from one Axis defensive position to the next, and the Mareth Line was the strongest of them. Its fate was decided in the same way as the earlier ones: the defenders were dislodged not where the fortifications were strongest but where they could be outflanked. Montgomery, who after the failed attack on the Wadi Zigzaou swiftly shifted the weight of the battle westwards, showed that he could change his plans in the course of a battle; his critics, however, reproach him for letting Messe’s army slip out of the trap, and for a left hook that in its first days was too weak and too cautiously handled.

More important than the capture of the line itself was the way it was achieved. Hours of fighter-bomber attacks on a narrow sector of the front, closely coordinated with artillery and tanks, heralded a way of waging war that the Allies perfected in the years that followed. According to many air historians, it was then, in Africa, that aircraft first became on such a scale the “flying artillery” of infantry and tanks.

The withdrawal of Messe’s army to the Wadi Akarit brought closer the link-up of the Eighth Army with the forces advancing from the west. In early April the British attacked this position too, and a few days later their patrols met Americans of II Corps. The Axis armies found themselves in the north-eastern corner of Tunisia, around Tunis and Bizerte, where they surrendered in May 1943. The North African campaign, which had begun in September 1940 with the Italian invasion of Egypt, was thus drawing to a close.