24

Saga of the Nibelungs

WITH EVERY NEW day, the news from North Africa had been getting better, the President had felt—under American leadership and arms.

By the end of April, American forces in North Africa outnumbered British, French, and other national contingents 60 percent to 40. From a frontline west of Bizerte that ran first south, then east to Enfidaville on the Tunisian coast, more than three hundred thousand Allied troops were preparing to launch Operation Strike: the final Allied offensive in North Africa to drive the Axis forces into the sea. Italian troops were beginning to desert in increasing numbers, but German troops were paradoxically selling their lives ever more dearly in battles to hold onto djebels and hilltops many thousands of miles from their homes—infused with a blind, arrogant loyalty to their comrades, scorn for their opponents, and a suicidal unwillingness to question either what they were doing in North Africa or why they maintained such slavish faith in their führer.

Certainly the Führer was indifferent to their fate. At his meeting with Mussolini near Salzburg on April 8, he’d dismissed out of hand the notion of a negotiated armistice with Stalin, or revival of the Ribbentrop Pact. As at Stalingrad, he was banking upon his understanding of the unique German psyche: that the members of his chosen Volk would stay loyal to each other, whatever happened; and that, in the manner of the Nibelungen myths, they would only gain greater nourishment for their national pride from stories of heroic valor and self-sacrifice, even death in distant fields. Nibelungentreue—whether on the Volga or in the mountains of Tunisia. Not dishonorable retreat or evacuation.

The tenacity and blind courage shown by soldiers of the Wehrmacht to their comrades in battle in North Africa certainly suggested Hitler was right. German casualties had escalated as the end approached, yet in contrast to Italian troops, far from dispiriting the German survivors, the likely outcome appeared to make no discernible dent on their morale in the field. Nor would the Führer countenance plans for Axis flight. Just as he had ordered von Paulus to die rather than surrender his last remaining forces at Stalingrad, so now Allied code breakers read with amazement the decrypted signals in which, from his East Prussian headquarters at the Wolfschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, the Führer not only ordered more infantry reinforcements to be flown into the last Axis redoubt—which was now down to only sixty-seven panzers—but declined to permit the word evacuation to be spoken.

The Saga of the Nibelungs was thus being enacted—in real life. Allied planners had assumed in early April that Hitler could, if he chose, save as many as thirty-seven thousand men of the Wehrmacht per day by evacuation—the better to defend the shores of mainland Europe. There came, however, no such order. Instead, on April 13, the Führer had dispatched his historic cable to General von Arnim, in command of the quarter million Axis troops in Tunisia. Except for a few “useless mouths” to be airlifted or shipped out of Tunisia, the Axis forces were ordered to fight to the death¹—killing as many of the Allies as possible before they were themselves felled.

It was a bloody, tragic prospect. Yet thanks to his insistence on Torch as the means by which American forces could first learn how to defeat the vaunted Wehrmacht in battle before embarking on a Second Front, it was also a tribute to the President’s patience and determination not to undertake military operations beyond the capabilities of his forces. General Patton—“our greatest fighting general,” he called him²—had restored morale in II Corps after Kasserine, and was now slated to command all American troops in Husky, the invasion of Sicily, in July—which would allow the Allies to rehearse a major assault landing, this time against Axis defenders, not Vichy French. Meantime, U.S. air forces were beginning to take a huge toll of Axis shipping as well as of the Luftwaffe. Above all, despite the mischief being sewn by the American and English press—delighting in the rivalry between U.S. and British exploits in the field—General Eisenhower was doing a magnificent job in holding together the Allied military coalition in North Africa.

This, more than anything, was what reinforced the President’s faith in the outcome of his grand strategy. Hitler and Hirohito might well wish to see their populations obliterated rather than save them, but as long as the Allies held together and continued to build upon their combined strength, they would prevail, he was certain. The timetable General Eisenhower had given him at Casablanca for clearing North Africa of Axis forces, as the final Allied offensive kicked off on May 6, 1943, looked remarkably prescient—indeed, in a brilliant armored coup, British tanks from Montgomery’s Eighth Army, stalled beneath the high ground at Enfidaville, performed a magnificent end run, or left hook, which took them into the city of Tunis itself within twenty-four hours, on May 7—where they took the unconditional surrender of all Axis troops there. Infantry and tanks of General Bradley’s U.S. II Corps force simultaneously smashed their way down from the mountains in the northwest—including famously bloody combat around Hill 232—into the port city of Bizerte.

General von Arnim’s days, perhaps hours, seemed numbered—U.S. and RAF planes swooping on any German or Italian vessel attempting to leave North African shores, while Luftwaffe attempts to fly in final supplies were shot down.

By contrast, the Queen Mary—the vessel bearing the British prime minister—was making a mercifully safe passage across the Atlantic—indeed was approaching the East Coast of the United States surrounded by U.S. destroyers and escort vessels, the sky above thick with U.S. planes watching for U-boats as it made its way toward the Statue of Liberty without mishap. Ensconced in the grand staterooms he’d ordered to be reconstructed for his voyage (the transatlantic liner having earlier been converted into an Allied troopship), Mr. Churchill was toasting every new report from London and Algiers: drunk not so much from champagne as sheer excitement over the imminent Allied victory in Tunisia—one that would soon exceed the German Sixth Army surrender at Stalingrad.

After his long years of military failure, the Prime Minister felt wonderfully, arrogantly alive, his staff later recalled: seemingly certain he could, by the force of his ebullient personality and the scores of staff officers and advisers he was bringing with him, reverse the agreements he’d made on behalf of his country at Casablanca.