The run for Tunis

On 15 November 1942 the leading units of the British 78th Infantry Division crossed the border between Algeria and Tunisia and entered the coastal town of Tabarka. The same day American paratroopers seized the airfield at Youks-les-Bains near the border, and further columns set off eastwards from the Algerian ports taken a few days earlier. So began the so-called run for Tunis: an attempt to take Tunis and Bizerte before the Germans and Italians could dig in there. Some chronologies say that the British set off “westwards”; in reality they were heading east, from Algeria towards Tunisia.

The race lasted two weeks and ended in failure. By the end of November Allied tanks and infantry were 20–30 kilometres from Tunis, and on 29 November a British parachute battalion dropped behind enemy lines south of the city. But what is sometimes described as a “minimal success” was in fact the exhaustion of the offensive: the Axis forces had proved faster and stronger, and at the beginning of December they went over to the counter-attack.

A vacuum in Tunisia

The plan for Operation Torch assumed that Tunisia, a French protectorate several hundred kilometres from the nearest landing beaches, would be taken by a rapid advance overland. No landing in Tunisia itself was planned: there were not enough troops or ships for one, and the port of Tunis lay within range of aircraft from Sicily and Sardinia. The planners also expected stiff French resistance, so the first convoy echelons carried mostly infantry and few vehicles. At Algiers the unloading of motorised units began only on 12 November, four days after the landings.

The Axis powers reacted faster than the Allies had expected. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German Commander-in-Chief South, sent the first aircraft to Tunis as early as 9 November; Allied reconnaissance counted some 40 German aircraft at El Aouina airfield that day and about a hundred the next. The French Resident-General in Tunisia, Admiral Jean-Pierre Esteva, remained loyal to the Vichy government and closed the airfields and ports to neither side. An airlift from Sicilian airfields began, which within a few weeks, according to figures cited in the literature, carried some 15,000 soldiers to Tunisia, while 176 tanks, more than 130 guns and over a thousand vehicles reached Tunis and Bizerte by sea. By the end of November elements of three German and two Italian divisions were already in Tunisia. The Germans and Italians entered Bizerte, the great French naval base, without a fight. On 12 November General Walther Nehring, former commander of the Afrika Korps, who had been wounded at the Battle of Alam el Halfa, was appointed commander of the new XC Army Corps in Tunisia. He arrived in Tunis on 17 November with Kesselring’s orders to form a bridgehead and push it as far west as possible.

The French troops in Tunisia under General Georges Barré sided neither with the Axis nor with the Allies. Barré withdrew them from the towns into the mountains in the west of the country and took up a line from Téboursouk to Medjez el Bab, with its important bridge over the Medjerda river, which carried the road from Algeria to Tunis.

The march east

The forces the Allies could throw into the race were modest. On 9 November Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson took command in Algiers of the Eastern Task Force, renamed the British First Army. Although it was called an army, in its first days it had at its disposal practically only two brigade groups of General Vyvyan Evelegh’s 78th Infantry Division, an armoured regimental group from the 6th Armoured Division called Blade Force, some artillery, commandos and paratroopers. It was supported by an American tank battalion and, a little later, by Combat Command B of the US 1st Armored Division. The commander-in-chief of Operation Torch, General Dwight Eisenhower, knew this was a gamble: success depended on whether the air forces and navies could slow the movement of Axis troops.

The first step was to seize the ports and airfields of eastern Algeria. On 11 November the British 36th Infantry Brigade landed unopposed at Bougie (Béjaïa), but German aircraft sank several ships there, and because of supply difficulties the troops reached the nearby airfield at Djidjelli (Jijel) overland only on 13 November. On 12 November the 3rd Parachute Battalion seized the airfield at Bône (Annaba), and commandos arriving by sea took the port. This was made easier by Darlan’s order, which on 10 November halted French fighting against the Allies throughout North Africa.

On 15 November, the day from which the race is reckoned, the advance guards of the 36th Brigade entered Tabarka, and the US 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion dropped near Youks-les-Bains and took the airfield; on 17 November a detachment of the battalion seized the airfield at Gafsa in central Tunisia. On 16 November the British 1st Parachute Battalion dropped at Souk el Arba (Jendouba) and pushed on towards Béja. The Allies advanced along two roads: the northern one, along the coast towards Bizerte, and the southern one, through the valleys towards Medjez el Bab and Tunis.

Progress soon slowed. On 17 November at Djebel Abiod the 36th Brigade ran into a German battle group – according to British figures, 17 tanks, about 400 paratroopers and self-propelled guns. The British destroyed eleven tanks but, with no armour of their own, were held up for nine days. The Luftwaffe ruled the skies over the roads, because Allied aircraft were flying from distant bases in Algeria, and the few forward airfields were short of fuel, ammunition and ground crews. On 19 November Nehring demanded that General Barré let his troops through the bridge at Medjez el Bab. Barré refused, and his soldiers beat off two German attacks, but without tanks or heavy artillery they had to withdraw. French historians regard Barré as the first general of the Armistice Army to resume the fight against the Germans with his men.

The political uncertainty lasted until 22 November, when the agreement between General Mark Clark and Admiral François Darlan formally placed French North Africa on the Allied side. This made it possible to send to the front units that had until then been held back in case of French resistance. By that time, however, the Axis forces in Tunisia had grown to the size of a corps and outnumbered the attackers.

The last leap

Anderson gathered his columns at Djebel Abiod and Béja and set the attack for 24 and 25 November. The 36th Brigade was to advance on Mateur and Bizerte, the 11th Brigade along the Medjerda valley on Medjez el Bab and then on Tebourba, Djedeida and Tunis. Colonel Richard Hull’s Blade Force was to move along side roads between the two brigades and strike Tebourba and Djedeida from the flank. In the north torrential rain delayed the attack, and when the 36th Brigade moved off on 26 November it ran into an ambush prepared by Nehring at Jefna; the leading battalion lost 149 men, and the German paratroopers held the hills on either side of the road until the last days of the fighting in Tunisia in 1943. In the south the 11th Brigade was held up at Medjez el Bab.

Blade Force got furthest. On 25 November a company of American M3 Stuart light tanks under Major Rudolph Barlow broke through into the enemy rear to the airfield at Djedeida and destroyed more than twenty aircraft, including Ju 87 dive bombers, before withdrawing for lack of infantry. The raid alarmed Nehring, who feared that the garrison at Medjez el Bab would be outflanked and withdrew it closer to Tunis during the night. Early on 26 November – or, according to some sources, on the evening of 25 November – the British entered the abandoned Medjez el Bab, and then Tebourba. On 27 November the Germans counter-attacked and inflicted heavy losses on the 11th Brigade but did not throw it back. On 28 November British troops and American tanks attacked Djedeida, which according to various studies lay 20–30 kilometres from Tunis. The attack broke down under the fire of anti-tank guns; Combat Command B lost 19 tanks in the town. The Allies never got closer to Tunis in 1942.

Paratroopers at Oudna

Under 29 November chronologies note that the offensive in Tunisia achieved a “minimal success” that day. On that day Lieutenant Colonel John Frost’s British 2nd Parachute Battalion dropped onto the plain at Depienne, about 50 kilometres south of Tunis. It was to destroy aircraft on the airfields around Oudna, threaten Tunis from the south and link up with the columns which, according to the plan, were to attack Djedeida and Tunis again on 2 December.

The plan fell apart the very next day. The airfield at Oudna turned out to be abandoned, and the renewed attack from the west was called off. Frost learned by radio that no one would come to his aid. The battalion, hemmed in by German tanks, infantry and aircraft, fought its way for several days some 80 kilometres west to the Allied lines at Medjez el Bab. According to British figures it lost 23 killed and wounded and 266 missing, most of them taken prisoner – roughly half its strength. The wounded who had been left behind fell into German hands.

The “minimal success” of 29 November thus consisted mainly in the fact that the forward units were still holding on at Tebourba and Djedeida. At the same time, fresh units of the British 1st Guards Brigade began arriving at the front that day, and Combat Command B was preparing a new attack. It never took place: on 1 December the Germans struck first.

Place in the war

At the beginning of December General Wolfgang Fischer’s German 10th Panzer Division, newly arrived in Tunisia, attacked at Tebourba. After several days of heavy fighting the British and Americans lost the town and fell back a dozen or so kilometres west, to the hills above the Medjerda. The last attempt to take Tunis before winter was ruled out around Christmas by rain and mud, and Eisenhower admitted that the race had been lost. In December command in Tunisia passed to General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim with the newly formed 5th Panzer Army, and from February 1943 the troops of Erwin Rommel, retreating from Libya after their defeat at El Alamein, also took up positions in the south of the country.

Defeat in the run for Tunis had far-reaching consequences. The Allies, who had counted on ending the fighting in North Africa in 1942, had to wage a six-month campaign in the Tunisian mountains, including the crisis at Kasserine in February 1943. The landing in Sicily was put back to the summer of 1943, and the invasion of France to 1944. At the same time Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, having resolved to defend Tunisia at all costs, sent there several hundred thousand soldiers and vast quantities of equipment, most of which went into captivity in May 1943 after the fall of Tunis and Bizerte – some 250,000 men, according to various estimates. For the Americans the winter fighting in Tunisia became a painful school of war against the Wehrmacht.

The German troops who occupied Tunis brought persecution with them. From December 1942 the occupation authorities forced the local Jewish community to supply thousands of forced labourers to work on fortifications and imposed levies on it. This continued until the liberation of Tunisia in May 1943.