The capture of Tunis and Bizerte

At the beginning of May 1943 the Axis forces in Africa were holding out only in the north-eastern corner of Tunisia – an area roughly a hundred kilometres by a hundred around Tunis, Bizerte and the Cape Bon peninsula. They were pressed from the west by General Kenneth Anderson’s British First Army, in the north by General Omar Bradley’s American II Corps, in the centre by the French XIX Corps and from the south, at Enfidaville, by General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army. The land forces as a whole were directed by General Harold Alexander as commander of the 18th Army Group, and the Allied Commander-in-Chief in the theatre was General Dwight Eisenhower.

Popular chronologies record under 1 May that the Allies were “tightening the ring around the trapped Germans in the Tunis area”, and under 7 May that Tunis was taken by the British First Army while the Americans occupied Bizerte at the same time. Both statements are accurate, with one qualification: those trapped in the Tunisian bridgehead were not only Germans but also Italians, who made up almost half of the Axis forces and, on the southern sector at Enfidaville, most of the defenders. Both days belong to the last phase of the fighting: the end of Operation Vulcan at the turn of April and May, and Operation Strike, which on 7 May brought the capture of both cities.

The ring tightens (late April – 5 May)

The last Allied offensive in Tunisia, Operation Vulcan, began on 22 April. Its best-known episode was the capture of Longstop Hill by the British 78th Infantry Division on 26 April – the hill that since December 1942 had barred the Allies’ way down the valley of the Medjerda to Tunis. Yet the front did not break. The Germans threw their last armoured reserves into counter-attacks, and the British V Corps advanced from hill to hill, paying a high price for each one.

In the north the American II Corps, moved in April from southern Tunisia – after the Battle of Wadi Akarit its front had been “pinched out” by the Eighth Army advancing along the coast – was undergoing its most important test. Some 100,000 soldiers had marched behind the British First Army to the northern end of the front, on to the road from Béja to Bizerte. The key to the German defence here was Hill 609 (Djebel Tahent), from which the Germans controlled the whole surrounding area with artillery fire. Bradley decided against bypassing the height and threw General Charles Ryder’s 34th Infantry Division against it – the same division that had suffered heavy losses in central Tunisia during the winter and had a reputation as a weak unit. From 27 April the division assaulted the steep slopes under crossfire from the neighbouring hills, supported by a dozen or so tanks of the 1st Armored Division. By 30 April the summit was in its hands, and on 1 May it beat off several German counter-attacks. The Barenthin parachute regiment defending the hill was almost destroyed. In American military tradition the fighting for Hill 609 is regarded as the moment the US Army came of age – it was its first undisputed success of the campaign.

At the same time General Manton Eddy’s 9th Infantry Division was fighting its way through hilly, wooded country north of the Bizerte road, while General Terry Allen’s 1st Infantry Division attacked the hills to the south of it. After losing Hill 609 the Germans fell back to a new line based on the salt lake of Ichkeul, barely twenty-odd kilometres from Bizerte. On 2 May the Americans took the Kef en Nsour hills overlooking the plain, and on 3 May tanks of General Ernest Harmon’s 1st Armored Division entered Mateur, an important road and rail junction halfway between Bizerte and Tunis. The German defence in the north had been broken.

In the south the situation was different. The Eighth Army, which after taking Sfax in mid-April had reached Enfidaville, was stuck in the mountains north of the town. The attacks on Takrouna and the neighbouring hills had cost the New Zealanders and Indians much blood, and an attempt to break through by the British 56th Infantry Division, freshly arrived from Syria, failed on 30 April. That day Alexander and Montgomery concluded that an attack from the south had no chance. Montgomery was given the task of tying down enemy forces, and Alexander transferred the Eighth Army’s best units to the First Army: the 7th Armoured Division – the famous “Desert Rats” – the 4th Indian Infantry Division and the 201st Guards Brigade. They joined the 1st Armoured Division, which had already been moved there. This regrouping decided the outcome of the campaign.

The plan for Operation Strike

The new plan was simple and ruthless. Instead of attacking on a broad front, as in Operation Vulcan, the First Army was to strike at a single point – in the Medjerda valley, on a narrow sector only a few kilometres wide along the road from Medjez el Bab to Tunis. The main blow was entrusted to IX Corps, commanded, after General John Crocker had been wounded, by General Brian Horrocks, who had come from the Eighth Army. Two infantry divisions – the British 4th and the 4th Indian – were to hack open a breach into which two armoured divisions, the 6th and 7th, would pass at once, with orders to drive straight for Tunis without looking to their flanks. General Charles Allfrey’s British V Corps was to cover the left flank of the attack, and the American II Corps was to continue its advance on Bizerte. General Louis-Marie Koeltz’s French XIX Corps tied down Axis forces in the mountains near Pont-du-Fahs and Zaghouan.

Anderson made sure of surprise. Dummy tanks were set up on IX Corps’ sector at Bou Arada, far from the point of attack, and the arrival of the 7th Armoured Division in the Medjez el Bab area was concealed. On 5 May, in a preliminary attack, V Corps took Djebel Bou Aoukaz – the hill the Guards had fought for in vain a week earlier – and secured the flank. Against four assault divisions with several hundred tanks, the Germans on this sector had the weakened regiments of the 15th Panzer Division and the Hermann Göring Division and a few dozen serviceable tanks, which were moreover almost out of fuel. For weeks Allied aircraft and warships had been cutting supplies across the Strait of Sicily: in April, in Operation Flax, several hundred German transport aircraft were shot down over the sea, and most ships bound for Tunis went to the bottom.

6 May – the breakthrough

The attack began at 3.30 a.m. on 6 May. Some six hundred guns concentrated on a front of a few kilometres fired well over ten thousand shells within a few hours, and from dawn Allied bombers and fighter-bombers circled ceaselessly over the battlefield. That day Allied aircraft flew more than two thousand sorties – the most in the whole war in Africa up to that point. The defenders, stunned and cut off from communications, resisted only here and there. By late morning the infantry of the 4th Division and the 4th Indian Division – the latter had come all the way from Egypt to Tunisia – had broken through the German positions. At about noon the tanks of the 6th and 7th Armoured Divisions passed into the breach. By evening the British columns stood at Massicault, halfway to Tunis, and behind it there was no longer any organised defence. At the headquarters of General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim’s Army Group Africa it was understood that the front had been broken and there was nothing left to plug the gap.

7 May – Tunis and Bizerte

On the morning of 7 May the British pushed on, past abandoned guns, burning vehicles and growing groups of Axis soldiers walking into captivity of their own accord. In the afternoon, at about 3.30 p.m. – the sources differ here by a quarter of an hour or so – armoured cars of the 11th Hussars from the 7th Armoured Division and reconnaissance units of the Derbyshire Yeomanry from the 6th Armoured Division drove into Tunis. The city was taken by surprise: in the streets and cafés the British came across German soldiers who had not managed to withdraw, and some of them surrendered without a fight. Snipers were still firing in a few places, but there was no organised resistance in the city. The population – French, Italians, Tunisians and the large Jewish community, which had lived through six months of German occupation in fear, subjected to levies and forced labour – greeted the soldiers with flowers and wine.

That same afternoon, several dozen kilometres to the north-west, the first units of the American 9th Infantry Division entered Bizerte – Tunisia’s main naval port, ruined by months of Allied air raids. The Germans withdrew from the city, blowing up the port installations. Out of consideration for the French, Bradley agreed that the ceremonial entry into the city the next day should be led by the French Corps Franc d’Afrique, a volunteer formation fighting alongside the Americans on the northern flank. For the American army, which in the February battle at the Kasserine Pass had suffered its first painful defeat at the hands of the Wehrmacht, the capture of Bizerte was a satisfaction: II Corps had won it on its own and under its own command.

The front breaks up and Cape Bon

The fall of Tunis and Bizerte split the Axis forces into several isolated parts. In the north, between Bizerte and Tunis, were the remnants of General Gustav von Vaerst’s Fifth Panzer Army. In the mountains near Zaghouan German units held out against the French. In the south, at Enfidaville, stood General Giovanni Messe’s still intact Italian First Army with the remnants of the German Afrika Korps. The greatest danger for the Allies was that these forces might withdraw into the mountainous Cape Bon peninsula and hold out there for weeks, as the Americans had done on the Bataan peninsula in 1942, or attempt an evacuation by sea to Sicily.

Alexander allowed neither. Instead of clearing Tunis, the 6th Armoured Division turned south-east and on 8 May attacked Hammam-Lif, where the narrow coastal strip between the mountains and the sea was defended by Germans with 88 mm anti-aircraft guns. After two days of fighting the British tanks broke through – partly by driving along the shore, in the water – and on 10 May reached Hammamet, sealing off the base of the peninsula. The Axis troops retreating to Cape Bon were walking into a trap.

From the sea the way was closed by the navy. On 7 May Admiral Andrew Cunningham, the Allied naval commander in the Mediterranean, launched an operation with the telling code name Retribution – a reference to the losses his destroyers had suffered in 1941 during the evacuations of Greece and Crete. He sent his ships a short order: “Sink, burn and destroy. Let nothing pass.” Destroyers from Malta and Bône and British and American motor torpedo boats patrolled the waters around the peninsula day and night. The Italian fleet did not leave port, and the Germans made no organised attempt at evacuation. Several hundred people trying to escape in small boats were intercepted at sea, and according to various calculations only a few hundred got through to Italy. There was no Tunisian Dunkirk.

The collapse came quickly. On 8 May the German 334th Infantry Division laid down its arms between Mateur and Tebourba. On 9 May von Vaerst surrendered to Bradley with the remnants of the Fifth Panzer Army – II Corps alone took about 40,000 prisoners in the final days. On 11 May some 22,000 Germans in the mountains near Zaghouan surrendered to the French. Resistance, ever more hopeless, continued only in the south.

Its place in the war

The capture of Tunis and Bizerte ended the Tunisian campaign in the military sense – what followed in the next few days was merely the rounding up of prisoners and the elimination of the last pockets. On 12 May Arnim was taken prisoner, and on 13 May Messe surrendered; the last Axis forces in Africa laid down their arms, and about a quarter of a million German and Italian soldiers went into captivity. For the Germans and Italians it was a defeat comparable with Stalingrad: against the advice of their own commanders, Hitler and Mussolini had for six months sent division after division and aircraft after aircraft to Tunisia, and now they had lost them with no possibility of retreat.

For the Allies, 7 May 1943 was the end of a road that had begun in November 1942 with the landings in North Africa and the unsuccessful run for Tunis. Tunisia was the first campaign in which the British, American and French armies fought together against the Germans under a unified command. It was here that the commanders who would later lead the war in Europe – Eisenhower, Alexander, Bradley, George Patton – learned to work together, and here that the American army, humiliated at Kasserine, gained its self-confidence. On 20 May a great victory parade of British, American and French troops was held in Tunis.

Control of the Tunisian coast also meant that the Mediterranean – for the first time since 1940 – lay open to Allied convoys, which no longer had to sail round Africa. From the ports of Tunis and Bizerte, less than 150 kilometres from Sicily, the invasion of that island was launched two months later, and with it the war moved on to Italian territory.