The capture of Longstop Hill

On the morning of 26 April 1943, Easter Monday, infantry of the Buffs and heavy Churchill tanks of the North Irish Horse broke on to the summit of Djebel el Rhar, the higher part of the massif that the Allies had for four months called Longstop Hill and the Germans the Weihnachtsberg – Christmas Mountain. The tanks climbed slopes so steep that the defenders had considered them impassable to any vehicle, and caught them in their positions. By about 11 a.m. the fighting was over. After four days of bloody attacks the British 78th Infantry Division, known from its emblem as the “Battleaxe” Division, held the whole massif – the last great natural obstacle on the road from Medjez el Bab down the valley of the Medjerda to Tunis.

The usual account, according to which the British finally captured Longstop Hill, a key position on the road to Tunis, is accurate. It is only worth adding that taking the hill did not yet open the road to the city: it was one of several objectives of the First Army’s April offensive, Operation Vulcan, and the decisive breakthrough came only in May.

The Christmas hill

Longstop Hill is a massif of two heights – the lower Djebel el Ahmera and the higher Djebel el Rhar – rising above the Medjerda valley about ten kilometres north-east of Medjez el Bab. Whoever held it commanded the road and railway running through Tebourba to Tunis. The British gave it a name taken from cricket: the long stop is the fielder placed far behind the wicket to stop balls the others let through.

In December 1942, after the failed run for Tunis and the defeat at Tebourba, the Allies tried to capture the massif as part of the preparations for a new offensive against Tunis. In the fighting of 22–25 December, British Guardsmen of the Coldstream battalion and Americans of the 18th Infantry Regiment twice climbed the hill and were twice pushed off it. On Christmas Day the Germans recovered the whole massif, and General Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, postponed the attack on Tunis until the rains had stopped and reinforcements arrived. Throughout the winter and early spring the Germans fortified Longstop, from which their artillery observers could see everything that happened in the valley.

Meanwhile the war in Tunisia had changed its face. In February the Germans routed the Americans at the Kasserine Pass but failed to exploit their success. In March and early April General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army broke through the defences of the Mareth Line and at Wadi Akarit, while General George Patton’s Americans fought at El Guettar. The Eighth Army took Sfax and Sousse and reached Enfidaville, and on 7 April its patrols met the Americans. The Axis forces – General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim’s Army Group Africa – had been pushed back into the north-eastern corner of Tunisia, around Tunis and Bizerte. Their supplies were dwindling: Allied aircraft were sinking ships in the Strait of Sicily, and in the Palm Sunday Massacre and the days that followed they cut the air bridge from Sicily.

Operation Vulcan

The final offensive was prepared by General Harold Alexander, commander of the 18th Army Group, to whom Eisenhower had entrusted the direction of the land forces in Tunisia. Alexander judged that the narrow passage at Enfidaville, where the mountains come down to the sea, was unsuitable for a decisive blow. He shifted the main weight to the western and south-western side of the bridgehead, where British, American and French troops could operate simultaneously. General Kenneth Anderson’s British First Army received reinforcements from the Eighth Army, including the 1st Armoured Division, and the American II Corps, commanded from mid-April by General Omar Bradley, was moved from the south to the northern end of the front, opposite Bizerte. Meanwhile the Eighth Army was to tie down Axis forces at Enfidaville; its attack on the Takrouna and Garci hills, launched on the night of 19–20 April, brought heavy losses and was halted on 21 April.

The operation, named Vulcan, was set for 22 April. The Germans, however, forestalled it with a spoiling attack. On the night of 20–21 April units of the 10th Panzer Division and the Hermann Göring Division, supported by heavy Tiger tanks, attacked the positions of the British V Corps on the edge of the Goubellat plain in Operation Fliederblüte (Lilac Blossom). At first they penetrated several kilometres, but they ran into British artillery positions prepared for the offensive and by the afternoon of 21 April had been driven back with losses. It was the last major German armoured attack in Africa. It did not upset the British plans.

On the evening of 22 April, Maundy Thursday, General Charles Allfrey’s V Corps began its attack. On the right flank the 1st and 4th Infantry Divisions attacked in the Medjerda valley, where there was bitter fighting for Hill 174. On the left flank General Vyvyan Evelegh’s 78th Division was to take the hills north of the river; in these days its 38th (Irish) Brigade seized mountain positions in the Heidous and Tanngoucha area, covering the attack on Longstop from the north-west. The massif itself was to be taken by Brigadier Bernard Howlett’s 36th Infantry Brigade – battalions of the Royal West Kents, the Buffs, the East Surreys and the 8th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders – supported by the tanks of the North Irish Horse and almost all the divisional artillery.

Longstop was defended by the 962nd Africa Rifle Regiment of the German 999th Africa Division, reinforced by the III Battalion of the 754th Grenadier Regiment. The 999th was an unusual formation: according to German and British studies it was made up largely of soldiers with criminal convictions, including political prisoners – communists and social democrats – who had earlier been declared “unworthy of military service” and drafted into penal units. The defenders had, however, had four months to prepare their positions, with well-concealed machine-gun nests, mortars and anti-tank guns.

Good Friday on Djebel el Ahmera

The attack on Longstop was preceded by an all-night bombardment by some 400 guns. Even so, the night assault on Djebel el Rhar by the Royal West Kent and Buffs battalions broke down under machine-gun and mortar fire, and the delay meant that the Scots of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders could not reach their objectives in the dark. On the morning of 23 April, Good Friday, the brigade commander changed his plan: the Argylls and the East Surreys, supported by two squadrons of North Irish Horse tanks, were to take the lower, western summit – Djebel el Ahmera – in broad daylight.

The Scots advanced uphill in formation, through a cornfield and over open slopes, under fire from German machine guns and largely without a smokescreen. At the foot of the hill the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Colin McNabb, was killed by a shell, and soon all the rifle company commanders had been killed or wounded. Command passed to the 25-year-old acting Major John “Jock” Anderson, commander of the leading company. He rallied the scattered men, led the attack on the second objective and, although wounded in the leg, took the summit with a group of only four officers and fewer than forty men. According to his citation he personally led attacks on at least three machine-gun nests, each time being the first to leap into the German position. For this action he received the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for gallantry. He did not enjoy it for long: he was killed six months later, on 5 October 1943, in the fighting at Termoli in Italy.

By the evening of 23 April the Argylls, reinforced by the East Surreys, held Djebel el Ahmera and had taken about 200 prisoners. A night attempt by the Royal West Kents to take the higher Djebel el Rhar failed – mortars broke up the battalion on its start line. On 24 April the East Surreys, a battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment and a squadron of tanks cleared the Sidi Ahmed ridge north of the massif, with its white mosque, which the Germans had turned into a strongpoint. Throughout 25 April, Easter Sunday, the British consolidated their captured positions under fire from Djebel el Rhar.

Tanks on the summit

The decisive attack on Djebel el Rhar began at 8.30 a.m. on 26 April. A feint attack on the southern slopes drew the fire of the German mortars, while the Buffs and a squadron of tanks advanced along the lower slopes from the north. The surprise came from the Churchills. The North Irish Horse tanks descended into the gully between the two summits and began climbing slopes with gradients reaching 1 in 3 in places – ground the Germans had judged inaccessible to vehicles and had not covered with anti-tank guns. The heavy, slow but exceptionally agile Churchill was probably the only Allied tank capable of such a climb.

The first to reach the summit was Sergeant O’Hare’s tank, which wrecked a German command post and took several dozen prisoners. Others rumbled up after it. Tanks and infantry eliminated the strongpoints on the edge of the summit one by one with machine-gun fire and 6-pounder guns, cutting off the defenders’ lines of retreat. By about 11 a.m. the fighting was over. According to British figures the Buffs lost nine killed and 83 wounded, and in the whole battle for the massif some 650 prisoners were taken, including almost all the officers of the III Battalion of the 754th Regiment. One German officer is said to have remarked that when he saw tanks on the ridge he knew it was all over; other prisoners refused to believe that tanks had reached the summit until they saw them.

British losses in the four-day battle were high, especially in the battalions that had attacked over open slopes in broad daylight on 23 April. The Argylls had lost their commanding officer and most of their officers. But the German Weihnachtsberg, which in December had stopped the advance on Tunis, was at last in Allied hands.

The road to Tunis

The capture of Longstop was the most important success of Operation Vulcan, but it was not a breakthrough. On 27 April the British 24th Guards Brigade attacked the next hills on the road to Tebourba – Djebel Bou Aoukaz and Djebel Asoud. The Guardsmen took them, but the Germans, throwing in their last armoured reserves in counter-attacks, recovered some of the positions; after several days of fighting about 80 men were left of the Irish Guards battalion on Djebel Asoud. Two soldiers of the brigade won the Victoria Cross in this fighting. In these days, during the fighting on V Corps’ sector, the British also captured an almost undamaged Tiger abandoned by its crew; as “Tiger 131” it became a valuable object of study and is today an exhibit at the Tank Museum in Bovington.

In the north Bradley’s American II Corps advanced on 23 April through mountainous country towards Mateur and Bizerte. From 27 April the 34th Infantry Division – the same division that had suffered heavy losses in central Tunisia during the winter – assaulted Hill 609, took its summit on 30 April and beat off counter-attacks on 1 May. In the south the British IX Corps and the French XIX Corps failed to break through the defences on the Goubellat plain and at Pont-du-Fahs.

Operation Vulcan petered out at the beginning of May. In eight days V Corps had advanced less than ten kilometres, but it had taken the hills commanding the Medjerda valley and exhausted the German armoured reserves, which could no longer be replaced. Alexander regrouped his forces: he transferred more experienced divisions from the Eighth Army to the First Army and concentrated them in that very valley, under the cover of Longstop. On 6 May Operation Strike began – a blow on a narrow front along the road to Tunis, supported by massed artillery fire and air power. The front cracked within hours, and on 7 May British tanks entered Tunis and the Americans Bizerte. On 13 May 1943 the last Axis units in Africa surrendered; about 250,000 German and Italian soldiers were taken prisoner – more than at Stalingrad. The Germans, who in December 1942 had stopped the Allied march on Tunis at Longstop Hill, lost there in April 1943 the last natural barrier behind which they could have held it. The Tunisian campaign ended the fighting in North Africa and opened the way for the Allies to Sicily and Italy.