Rommel on the Mareth Line

At the beginning of February 1943 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s German-Italian Panzer Army was completing the retreat that had begun three months earlier at El Alamein. Its units were moving from Tripolitania into southern Tunisia and occupying the old French fortifications of the Mareth Line, built in the 1930s against Italy. Behind them came General Bernard Law Montgomery’s British Eighth Army. According to British accounts, its first units crossed the Libyan–Tunisian border on 4 February – indeed “within two days”, as war chronicles usually put it.

That date and description need refining, however. The withdrawal into Tunisia was not a single day’s event but went on throughout the first half of February. Rommel himself had crossed the border as early as 26 January, and Italian infantry had been manning the Mareth fortifications since the end of January. The last Axis soldiers left Libya on 12 or 13 February (sources differ by a day), and the rearguard reached the Mareth Line only on 15 February. Nor was the Eighth Army the first Allied force to enter Tunisia from the south: patrols of the British Long Range Desert Group had been reconnoitring southern Tunisia since January. Yet only the arrival of the Eighth Army meant that the war in North Africa was now concentrated in a single country, where the Axis forces faced two Allied armies: Montgomery’s from the east, and the British First Army, the Americans and the French from the west.

The end of the road through Libya

Rommel’s retreat began after his defeat at El Alamein in early November 1942. An army that only a few months earlier had stood a hundred kilometres from Alexandria was now falling back through Egypt, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, pursued by the Eighth Army and bombed from the air. In mid-December it abandoned its positions at El Agheila, and after Montgomery’s January offensive it gave up Tripoli without a fight; the British entered the city on 23 January. From El Alamein to the Tunisian border Rommel’s army had covered more than 2,000 kilometres.

From the outset Rommel wanted to conduct the retreat faster than the Italian Comando Supremo and Adolf Hitler wished, halting only as long as necessary to avoid being encircled. In his view Libya could not be held: there was not enough fuel, tanks or ammunition, and the Allies commanded the air and the sea. His goal was to reach Tunisia, where Axis forces had been gathering since the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria in November, combined since December into the Fifth Panzer Army under General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim. Joining the two armies gave the Axis, at least for a time, the advantage of interior lines.

French fortifications against Italy

The Mareth Line was France’s answer to the Italian threat to Tunisia. Planning began in 1934, and the government in Paris put up the money for its construction in 1936, when Benito Mussolini was drawing closer to Hitler and the Italians were massing ever larger forces in neighbouring Libya. The fortifications cut across the coastal plain where the roads from Libya into the interior of Tunisia converged: from the shore of the Gulf of Gabès westwards, along the dry bed of the Wadi Zigzaou, whose steep banks formed a natural anti-tank obstacle, as far as the Matmata Hills. Depending on the account, the line was between about 35 and about 50 kilometres long, according to whether the forward positions in the hills are included. It consisted of concrete blockhouses and machine-gun and anti-tank gun positions, protected by wire entanglements and ditches. The French judged the desert plateaux west of the hills to be impassable for vehicles and did not extend the fortifications there.

After the fall of France and the armistice of June 1940 the fortifications were disarmed under the supervision of the Italian-German armistice commission. When Axis troops occupied Tunisia in the autumn of 1942, work began on bringing the line back into use. German and Italian engineers deepened the ditches, reinforced the blockhouses with concrete, installed anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns in them and laid minefields; by March 1943, according to British estimates, some 100,000 anti-tank and 70,000 anti-personnel mines had been laid. In front of the main position an outpost zone was prepared, reaching several kilometres to the south.

Rommel had no faith in the position. He called it a line of obsolete French bunkers that in no way met the demands of modern warfare, and above all he feared that it could be outflanked from the west, through the hills and the desert – like every earlier position on which he had tried to stop Montgomery. He would have preferred to fall back a further 60 kilometres or so, to a position on the Wadi Akarit north of Gabès, where between the sea and the salt lakes (the chotts) there was only a narrow neck, a dozen or so kilometres wide, that could not be outflanked. The Comando Supremo, however, ordered the Mareth Line to be held. Its garrison consisted mainly of Italian infantry divisions, supported by the German 90th and 164th Light Divisions and the 15th Panzer Division.

The Eighth Army at the border

Montgomery had no reason to hurry. His army stood at the end of a supply line more than two thousand kilometres long, and the port of Tripoli, wrecked by German engineers, was only just beginning to receive ships. During the first days of February the Eighth Army brought up fuel and ammunition, while its leading units, with the 7th Armoured Division at the front, advanced slowly along the coast over mined roads and demolished bridges. Meanwhile, in Tripoli on 3 and 4 February, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on his way back from Casablanca, took the salute at parades of the victorious troops and told the soldiers that Rommel, a “fugitive from Egypt, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania”, was now trying to present himself as the defender of Tunisia.

According to British accounts, the first units of the Eighth Army crossed the Tunisian border on 4 February. They were not entering entirely unknown territory: on 2 February a Long Range Desert Group patrol that had made its way far to the north across the desert, to the area of Gafsa, made contact with First Army troops advancing from the west – one of the first contacts between the forces advancing from the east and from the west. Earlier, patrols of the same unit had found a route through the hills west of the Mareth Line, named “Wilder’s Gap” after the patrol commander, by which the fortifications could be outflanked. Montgomery meant to make use of this knowledge.

The advance on the Mareth Line proper began in mid-February. The German rearguard fell back from one delaying position to the next and on 15 February withdrew behind the fortifications. On 16 February the British took Ben Gardane, on 17 February Medenine, and on 18 February Foum Tataouine to the south of it. From 17 February the Eighth Army dug in opposite the Mareth Line and prepared to assault it.

All of Libya in Allied hands

War chronologies often state under 5 February 1943 that the Allies now controlled the whole of Libya. This is premature by a few days: on the western edge of Tripolitania, between Zuwara and the Tunisian border, German and Italian rearguards held on for another week, the last of them crossing the border on 12–13 February. In every other respect, however, the matter was settled. The coast as far as Zuwara was in the hands of the Eighth Army, and in the south of the country the Free French campaign in the Fezzan had come to an end.

General Philippe Leclerc’s column, which had set out from Chad in December – according to French accounts some 4,000 African soldiers and 600 Europeans – had taken the Italian forts and oases of the desert south in January and reached Tripoli on 25 January. On 2 February, at the oasis of Ghadames, where the borders of Libya, Tunisia and Algeria meet, Leclerc met General Delay, commander of the French troops from southern Algeria. The meeting was symbolic: de Gaulle’s soldiers, who had been fighting since 1940, joined hands with the French army of North Africa, which as recently as November had still obeyed Vichy. Leclerc’s force came under Montgomery’s command and was to fight on the desert flank of the Mareth Line.

Conquered Libya came under the military rule of the victors. Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were run by a British military administration, the Fezzan and Ghadames by a French one. In Tripoli Italian officials remained at their posts, and Italian law remained in force until the end of the war. The country’s future was still open. As early as January 1942 the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, had given an assurance in the House of Commons that after the war the Senussi, who had fought on the British side, would not return to Italian rule. Their leader, Emir Muhammad Idris al-Senussi, became king of an independent Libya in 1951 as Idris I. For Italy the loss of Libya – a colony conquered in 1912 and settled with thousands of colonists by the Fascist regime – meant the end of its African empire.

Rommel, Messe and Arnim

For Rommel himself the retreat into Tunisia meant the end of his independent command in Africa, at least on paper. The field marshal had been exhausted and ill for months, and in Rome and Berlin he was increasingly blamed for the loss of Libya. On 26 January, immediately after crossing the border, he received word from the Comando Supremo that on account of his health he would be relieved of command once the army had occupied the Mareth Line; the timing of the handover was left to him. His designated successor was the Italian General Giovanni Messe, who in 1941–1942 had commanded the Italian expeditionary corps in the Soviet Union and was regarded as one of Italy’s ablest commanders. Messe arrived in Tunisia in February. In the second half of the month the German-Italian Panzer Army was renamed the Italian First Army under his command, and its former headquarters became the headquarters of Army Group Africa – the date most often given is 23 February.

Rommel, however, had no intention of leaving without a fight. In northern Tunisia the front had frozen after the December fighting for Longstop Hill, when the winter rains halted the Allied advance on Tunis. In the west, in the mountains of the Eastern Dorsal, the Axis forces faced the Americans of II Corps and the poorly armed French. On 30 January the German 21st Panzer Division, under Arnim’s command, took the Faïd Pass from them, and American counter-attacks failed. Rommel saw an opportunity: before Montgomery could bring his forces up to the Mareth Line, which was bound to take several weeks, it would be possible to strike at the inexperienced Americans, rout them, threaten the Allied bases in Algeria and return south before the Eighth Army was ready to attack. Arnim had plans of his own and did not want to place his panzer divisions under Rommel’s command. The dispute was settled by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German Commander-in-Chief South, and ultimately by the Comando Supremo. In early February two separate operations were agreed: Arnim was to strike at Sidi Bou Zid and Rommel at Gafsa. The lack of a unified command on the Axis side was to weigh heavily on their course.

On the other side of the front the Allies were also putting their command in order. At the Casablanca Conference it had been decided that once the Eighth Army entered Tunisia it would come under General Dwight Eisenhower, and that both British armies and the American and French forces would be directed by General Harold Alexander as commander of the new 18th Army Group. Montgomery’s entry into Tunisia thus closed not only the Libyan campaign but also the period in which the desert war had been a separate, British theatre of operations.

Place in the war

Occupying the Mareth Line gave Rommel a few weeks’ respite and a freedom of movement that he immediately exploited. On 14 February Arnim attacked at Sidi Bou Zid, and a day later Rommel’s troops occupied Gafsa, which the Americans had abandoned. A few days later Rommel led the thrust through the Kasserine Pass, which inflicted a heavy defeat on the Americans but failed to achieve its strategic aim. On 6 March, on his way back south, he attacked the Eighth Army at Medenine, but Montgomery, forewarned by intelligence, had prepared his defence and the attack broke down with heavy tank losses. Three days later Rommel left Africa for good.

Rommel’s fears about the Mareth Line proved justified. In the Battle of the Mareth Line, which began on 20 March, the British frontal assault on the fortifications along the Wadi Zigzaou was repulsed, but General Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand Corps outflanked the position through the hills and desert to the west – precisely the route the French had left unfortified because they considered it impassable. At the turn of March and April Messe’s army had to abandon the Mareth Line, and in early April it also lost the position on the Wadi Akarit. The two Allied armies then joined hands and pushed the Axis forces into the northern tip of Tunisia, where they surrendered in May 1943; by various estimates between about 230,000 and 250,000 German and Italian soldiers were taken prisoner.

The Eighth Army’s entry into Tunisia in February 1943 thus closed the long desert campaign, fought since 1940 along the coast of Libya and Egypt, in which the front had swung back and forth by hundreds of kilometres time and again. The war of manoeuvre in the open desert, in which Rommel had built his legend as the “Desert Fox”, was over. The war in North Africa had become a struggle for a last bridgehead, which Hitler and Mussolini decided to hold at any cost, sending division after division to Tunisia – the very divisions that would be missing a few months later for the defence of Sicily and Italy.