The Eighth Army in Sfax

On the morning of 10 April 1943 the leading units of the British Eighth Army entered Sfax, a port on Tunisia’s east coast and the country’s second-largest city. The Axis forces had abandoned it without a fight: after its defeat on the Wadi Akarit, General Giovanni Messe’s Italian First Army was falling back in haste towards the hills at Enfidaville, some 150 kilometres to the north. The capture of Sfax was another stage in the pursuit that had begun three weeks earlier with the breaking of the Mareth Line – and also the occasion for one of the best-known anecdotes about General Bernard Montgomery.

Pursuit along the coast

After Messe’s army withdrew during the night of 6–7 April, the Eighth Army followed it across the coastal plain. The landscape was changing: the stony semi-desert of southern Tunisia gave way to the vast olive groves of the Sahel, ideal for ambushes, and the roads were cut by numerous wadis. The pursuit was led by Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’s X Corps, with 2nd New Zealand Division and 1st Armoured Division, followed by XXX Corps. German and Italian rearguards blew bridges and mined roads but put up no serious resistance; the British took prisoners by the thousand, many of them surprised to find the enemy already behind them. From the Wadi Akarit to Enfidaville the Eighth Army covered some 240 kilometres in just a week, and the total number of prisoners taken during the pursuit ran to several thousand.

For months Sfax had been a target of Allied air raids, since part of the supplies for the Axis army in southern Tunisia passed through its port. The port and the waterfront districts were badly damaged. The British set about restoring it as quickly as possible so that it could receive supplies for the Eighth Army, whose lines of communication then stretched all the way back to Tripoli.

Decisions on the Axis side

Arnim and Messe had no illusions about the position of their forces. With the loss of the Gabès gap, the Italian army could no longer halt the Eighth Army on the open coastal plain, and its divisions had been so badly bled that some existed in name only. Withdrawing all the way to Enfidaville, abandoning Sfax and Sousse without a fight, was the only way to join up with the Fifth Panzer Army defending Tunis and form a shorter common front. At the same time Hitler and Mussolini met at Klessheim and decided that Tunisia was to be defended to the end – as a forward bastion of Europe that would tie down Allied forces and delay an invasion of Italy. The defenders were ordered to hold the bridgehead but were not given the means to do so: with every week less fuel, ammunition and food reached them, and shipping across the Strait of Sicily was all but paralysed.

For the Allies the rapid advance along the coast also had practical value. Every port captured shortened the supply lines of the Eighth Army, which since leaving Egypt had relied in turn on Tobruk, Benghazi and Tripoli, while the airfields around Sfax and Sousse allowed Allied aircraft to operate still closer to the Axis shipping lanes.

The Flying Fortress wager

The capture of Sfax also went down in history because of a bet. According to the accounts of Montgomery himself and of General Dwight Eisenhower, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, had promised half-jokingly, during a visit to Eighth Army headquarters a few weeks earlier, that if the British reached Sfax by 15 April Montgomery could have anything he wanted. Montgomery asked for a B-17 Flying Fortress with an American crew at his personal disposal – and took the wager entirely seriously.

When his troops entered Sfax he immediately sent a signal to headquarters demanding payment. Eisenhower was annoyed: he felt that Smith had said it merely to encourage, and aircraft were in short supply at the front. Nevertheless he ordered that Montgomery be given the bomber and its crew, which thereafter served as his personal transport. According to his biographers, General Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, rebuked Montgomery for this escapade. Historians cite the affair as an example of the Eighth Army commander’s style – his self-assurance and love of publicity, but also his lack of tact in dealing with the Americans, which in the years that followed repeatedly hampered cooperation between the allies.

Sousse, Kairouan and Enfidaville

The pursuit continued. From the west, through the Fondouk gap, Lieutenant General John Crocker’s IX Corps emerged on to the plain after forcing its way through the pass on 8–9 April with heavy losses. Its task was to cut off Messe’s army, but it arrived too late: on 11 April the British 6th Armoured Division entered Kairouan, the holy city of Tunisia’s Muslims, after the Axis columns had already passed northwards. On 12 April X Corps took Sousse, and the next day its leading units halted a few kilometres short of Enfidaville.

There the pursuit ended. At Enfidaville the mountains come almost down to the sea, leaving a narrow strip of plain towards Hammamet. Messe’s army, reinforced by German units, occupied a position in these hills that could not be outflanked. During the night of 19–20 April Montgomery attacked it in Operation Oration. The village of Enfidaville was taken, and after heavy fighting the 2nd New Zealand Division captured the rocky height of Takrouna, where men of the Māori Battalion distinguished themselves – Lance Sergeant Haane Manahi, who led the attack on the summit, was recommended for the Victoria Cross but in the end received a lesser award, which the Māori for decades regarded as an injustice. Further attacks, however, brought only losses, and on 21 April Montgomery called them off. The Eighth Army, which had been in pursuit since El Alamein, was no longer to play the main role in deciding the campaign.

Place in the war

The capture of Sfax and Sousse meant that the Axis forces had lost the whole of Tunisia’s central and southern coast. The bridgehead of Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim’s Army Group Africa had shrunk to the north-eastern corner of the country: an arc of hills running from Enfidaville past Medjez el Bab to the coast west of Bizerte, with Tunis, Bizerte and Cape Bon behind it. In so small an area several hundred thousand Axis soldiers were wholly dependent on supplies from Sicily, which Allied aircraft and warships had almost completely cut off. In April the Germans tried to bring in supplies by large transport aircraft, but Allied fighters shot dozens of them down over the Strait of Sicily.

Because the Enfidaville position proved too strong, General Harold Alexander shifted the weight of the final offensive to the First Army’s sector in the Medjerda valley, to which he also transferred some of the Eighth Army’s divisions. On 6 May 1943 the Allies broke through the defences there, on 7 May they entered Tunis and Bizerte, and on 13 May the last Axis forces in Africa surrendered. Some 250,000 Germans and Italians went into captivity. The ports of Sfax and Sousse, rebuilt by the Allies, soon served as bases for the preparations for the landings in Sicily in July 1943.