WHILE IN LIBYA the Desert Air Force still had command of the skies, for those now struggling in the rain and mud of north-west Africa it was a very different story. Ken Neill and the pilots of 225 Squadron were finding both the conditions and the flying pretty grim. One of their most respected pilots, Peter Rodwell, had been killed. Word reached them that his body had been found and buried with full honours, only for his grave to be robbed and his body stripped. That did little to improve morale. Then there were the attacks by the Luftwaffe, often at night. Neill and his fellow pilots could always tell German planes because they made a different sound, so as soon as they heard them they would dash from their tents and take shelter in slit-trenches. ‘They started dropping anti-personnel mines called Jumping Jacks,’ said Neill.1 ‘They were horrible things.’
Bombed at night and shot at by day. It was nerve-wracking, to say the least, flying at zero feet – they were operating over unfamiliar territory and with no idea when someone might start shooting at them. On one occasion, flak suddenly opened up and moments later there was a blinding flash in front of Neill and something hit his propeller. Tracer was flashing past, and Neill shouted, ‘Break! Break!’ to his fellow pilot. Frantically, he tried to adjust the revs, but the Hurricane was shaking badly. Somehow, he managed to nurse the stricken plane back to Souk el Arba and when he finally touched down again and came to a halt, he saw that a large chunk of one of his propeller blades was missing. He’d been lucky – very lucky.
Meanwhile, General Tooey Spaatz reached Algiers on 13 November, the day he was appointed Theater Commander United States Army Air Forces. Under his command was not only the Eighth Air Force in England, but also the Western Air Command, now designated the Twelfth Air Force, in North Africa. It was a promotion, but Spaatz was not ambitious in that kind of way and had accepted the post both reluctantly and with significant misgivings. Like Eisenhower and Clark, his prime objective when he’d arrived in Britain had been to get bombing Nazi Germany just as soon as possible. The build-up had been slower than expected but now, just as he was laying down a firm logistical base in England for the Eighth, much of his bomber forces, especially, were instead being siphoned off to support TORCH and the unfolding Tunisian campaign. In fact, Eighth Air Force lost some fourteen units of fighters, bombers and transports – amounting to more than half its strength – all of which had been painstakingly built up over the preceding months. The worry was how much this would set back the Eighth Air Force’s operations – which right now were limited to regular raids on U-boat pens and bases along the Atlantic Coast.
Spaatz was also worried that, in creating this new command and a new headquarters, he would only be diluting even more the already overstretched staff officers that were available. However, General Arnold had pressed the point, Eisenhower had wanted it too, so really he’d had no choice but to accept.
There was, however, a further concern, and that was doctrinal. The Eighth was a strategic air force designed to operate on its own, and they had worked out and agreed their doctrine for daylight operations in co-ordination with, but separate from, RAF Bomber Command. The duties for Twelfth Air Force in North Africa, however, were very different: part strategic, part coastal and part tactical in support of ground operations. For this Spaatz had good numbers of aircraft, but inexperienced crews, an untested logistical organization and no doctrine at all for close air support. What’s more, unlike the RAF, which was an independent armed service, the US Air Forces were part of the Army. Eighth Air Force could operate – and was doing so – without interference from the ground forces, but North Africa was already proving a different kettle of fish.
As if to complicate matters further, nor was there a unified command. The Americans were doing their thing in Twelfth Air Force, and the RAF was doing its, and was also split up between Eastern Air Command in Algeria and Tunisia, the Desert Air Force and other units of RAF Middle East. It had been designed in this way to support the landings and on the assumption that Tunisia would be swiftly captured, but with that already looking like wishful thinking, the current set-up and total lack of any co-ordinated close air support doctrine was threatening to undermine the material strength being thrown into the theatre.
The lack of doctrine, however, was hardly surprising: both the British and US troops in north-west Africa were mostly new to war and the air forces had never before directly supported ground troops. Even in Libya, where Mary Coningham had been developing his Desert Air Force into a finely tuned tactical force offering close air support, he and his men were still feeling their way and working out methods on the hoof. What’s more, they only had Eighth Army to support, whereas in north-west Africa there were American, French and British ground forces, all new to fighting and each with different structures and attitudes to air power. Joined-up thinking on air power was decidedly lacking.
That they were feeling their way was completely understandable, however. After all, just three years earlier the US had an air corps amounting to only just over seventy fighter planes; it had come an incredibly long way already in what was, in the grand scheme of things, no time at all. In any case, it was also far better that they worked such matters out now, in North Africa, than crossed the English Channel en masse and tried to find their way of war in Nazi-occupied Europe.
The challenge for Spaatz, then, was to guide and mould his command and help turn them from greenhorns into operationally and tactically seasoned air forces that could very soon win the air war not just in North Africa, but beyond into Europe. Right now, however, with the rain lashing down, with airfields turning to mud, with a massive trans-ocean supply chain, and with ever-more enemy air forces flooding into Tunisia, that was looking like a mighty challenge indeed.
On the ground, meanwhile, the race for Tunis was still on, although during the last week of November things hardly went to plan. The three-pronged attack by the British 78th Division was over-extended, on too wide a front, and without enough men or sufficient equipment. Detachments of US artillery and tanks had been hurriedly sent forward too, but none of these troops had trained together, it was the first time they’d operated shoulder to shoulder and inevitably there were issues of teething. Axis resistance was fierce, but it was really the Luftwaffe that made the difference. Reaching a crescendo during the last days of November, their relentless pounding of the Allied positions proved once again that it was virtually impossible in this modern war to attack successfully against overwhelming air superiority. On 30 November, General Vyvyan Evelegh, the 78th Division commander, recommended to Anderson that he now pause his attack and wait for reinforcements. Anderson had little choice but to agree.
Meanwhile, in Libya, Rommel’s forces continued to press on westwards. Giuseppe Santaniello and the shattered remains of the Trento Division were transferred into the Trieste instead – an unpopular move made worse by the lack of praise from the Trieste for all the past achievements of the now disbanded Trento. Santaniello was not impressed.
Then again, he was hardly in the best of spirits in any case. Endlessly marching in retreat, with little food or water, and being shot up by Allied aircraft was demoralizing to say the least. Every evening he would listen to the radio. As always, the Italian newsreader put on a far more positive slant than was the reality. The response of the Axis, Santaniello heard, would be powerful and terrible; it would show itself at the right moment and then they would strike back. ‘Idiots!’ he grumbled. ‘Last year, when I heard the same words coming from the loudspeakers in the courtyard of the military school at Nocera, I believed them.2 Now that I have experience of the desert and of war, I would tell them to shut up.’ He found such propaganda nauseating.
Unteroffizier Adolf Lamm, meanwhile, had recovered from his dysentery and managed to rejoin his tank unit in 15. Panzerdivision, where he was put with a new crew in a new tank. They were part of the rearguard and were now in action repeatedly. On 14 December, they were holding their makeshift position at Nofilia, trying to hold off and delay the enemy while the rest of the Panzerarmee continued west towards El Agheila. Two days later, aerial reconnaissance warned that a British column was trying to outflank it and so, along with other elements from the Afrikakorps, including Hans von Luck’s recce force, they counter-attacked and, with a combination of panzers and 88s, knocked out around twenty British tanks. For the time being, the danger had been averted.
Rain, wind and mud. By the beginning of December, Pilot Officer Ken Neill and the rest of 225 Squadron were at Souk el Arba – a low, flat oval plateau surrounded by mountains and filled with forlorn-looking fighters and medium bombers, aircraft wrecks, bomb craters and windswept tents. Apart from one battered, square, once-white house, there were no facilities to speak of. The conditions were bad, but 225 had been struggling in the air too: casualties were mounting. They carried out their Tac R – tactical reconnaissance – sorties in pairs, often as low as 50 feet off the deck. ‘The idea behind it was that you were going too fast for anyone to get a gun on you,’ said Neill, ‘but it didn’t work out that way.3 The small arms was lethal, really.’
On the 4th, they’d lost two pilots in a day. That was a big hit for a single squadron. On one occasion, Neill was about to take off with Graham Stewart, another of the 225 pilots, and had begun taxiing when they got a call to hold on and let two Spitfires take off first. Sitting in his cockpit, Neill saw a number of enemy bombers, escorted by fighters, swinging around the far end of the airfield and then, moments later, bombs fell as the Spitfires took off. Neill now watched the station commander walking across the field, calm as anything, as though he were on a Sunday-school picnic, but telling everyone to get under cover. Then a bomb hit one of the hangars and a bit of iron shot across the tarmac and sliced off both his legs, while the Spitfires were shot up and exploded. Then the enemy planes were gone. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Stewart called over to Neill, ‘let’s get airborne.’4
Everyone was struggling, though, the bombers included. Before the campaign, the Allies had thought it unlikely they would come up against the Focke-Wulf 190 in Tunisia, but they had been sent over, along with the Me109s, and many of them were flown by men brimming with experience of the Eastern Front, Malta and the Western Desert. On the same day that 225 Squadron lost two pilots, twelve Bisley medium bombers took off from Souk el Arba and headed off, unescorted, to bomb an Axis airfield. One returned with engine trouble and crash-landed, but as the others approached the target they were pounced on by more than fifty enemy fighters. Not one made it back.
The 97th Bombardment Group were also now in Tunisia, having been posted away from the Eighth Air Force back in England to help in North Africa instead. They had flown several missions already and, on the 3rd, Ralph Burbridge and the crew of All American had flown over Bizerte and at some 20,000 feet had been attacked by Axis fighter aircraft. Their escorts, American twin-engine P-38s, were hammered; nine were shot down. The next day, General Jimmy Doolittle, the US Air Commander, complained to Eisenhower about the problems his men were encountering: Axis radar when they had none, poor levels of maintenance and the excessive distances his men had to fly to reach targets that were just a stone’s throw away for the Luftwaffe.
‘Those are your troubles?’ Eisenhower retorted.5 ‘Go and cure them. Don’t you think I’ve got a lot of troubles too?’
He certainly had and, to make matters worse, the Germans now launched another attack on the British and American troops in the Medjerda Valley, this time coming in around the back and catching the Americans unawares. Tanks of Combat Command B, 1st Armored Division, were now at the front and were sent forward without any artillery support. They swiftly found themselves coming up against the usual screen of anti-tank guns and were shot to pieces. ‘The day’s lessons were deeply disturbing,’ wrote the 1st Armored’s historian.6 ‘The enemy’s armament and tactics had been extremely effective. American armament and tactics had failed.’
Now arriving at the front was Lieutenant-General Charles Allfrey, commander of British V Corps, of which the 78th Division was part. Although the Allies still held the Medjerda Valley, Allfrey took one look and realized they were in no position to attack again imminently, and in fact suggested they pull back. Eisenhower and Anderson agreed they should try to consolidate around a prominent hill called Djebel el Almara, soon renamed Longstop Hill. This took place over two nights and was a further fiasco, as rain began falling once more, turning the valley into a thick, glutinous quagmire. Then the Germans attacked again and their superior fire-power made short work of the American Stuarts sent in to stop them. Nineteen were knocked out, the Allies fell back further, and Longstop, so obviously the key feature of the western end of the Medjerda Valley with its commanding views and dominating position, had fallen into German hands. From there, they would be able to shell the Allied advance, destroy supply lines and use it as a base from which to launch counter-attacks. Taking Tunis was going to be impossible for the Allies until they had captured the Medjerda Valley in its entirety, and that wasn’t going to happen until Longstop was taken back again – which was precisely why the Germans had been swift to attack and move on to it in the first place. Nor would they readily give it up again. Longstop was destined to become one of the most fought-over outcrops of rocky hill of the war so far.
By mid-December, both sides had run out of steam in North Africa. Eisenhower reported to the Joint Chiefs, warning another pause was needed before the offensive in Tunisia was renewed. Planning for TORCH had been quite brilliant and miracles had been achieved, yet no one had really prepared either for such a rapid and determined build-up by the Axis nor such appalling weather. In the mind’s eye, North Africa had been perpetually hot, with palm trees, sand, olive and citrus groves. Few had expected to be operating in conditions more akin to the Ypres salient of 1917.
Combat Command B of the 1st Armored Division had been so badly mauled it had to be withdrawn and its place at the front was taken by the 18th RCT of the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. Meanwhile, Ralph Burbridge and the rest of the 97th BG were moved forward to Biskra, a flat, palm-lined town sitting in the desert beneath the Atlas Mountains and a much better place from which to fly heavy bomber operations. Burbridge and the other officers were quartered in hotels in the town. They quickly appreciated the improved ambience: more places to eat and drink, less rain and fewer marauding Luftwaffe.
Then came a break in the weather, and by 19 December British 78th and 6th Divisions were almost at full strength – some 20,000 men, supported by 11,000 US troops and 39,000 – albeit poorly equipped – French. On the other hand, Kesselring’s build-up of forces had also been continuing unabated. Newly arrived was General Jürgen von Arnim, fresh from the Eastern Front and now commanding what had become the Fifth Panzerarmee. Von Arnim had around 40,000 troops, nearly all German, as well as control of the skies.
None the less, General Allfrey launched his V Corps attack on Longstop Hill on Christmas Eve, with the recently arrived Coldstream Guards attacking and the 2nd Battalion of the 18th RCT supporting. It started raining again as they began and, although the Coldstreams took the heights, the Americans, when they took over, were subjected to a heavy counter-attack. This was eventually repulsed and, with further help from the French, by Christmas Day most of the feature was in Allied hands. Then came the second German counter-attack and the Coldstreams began pulling out. Tragically for the 2/18th RCT, that news never reached them and they were left isolated, outgunned and outnumbered. By the time the message did get through and they were able to extricate themselves, they had suffered 356 casualties. The attack on Longstop, renamed yet again as Christmas Hill by the Germans, had failed.
‘The passage of convoy HX219 followed its, by now, usual peaceful progress,’ recorded Commander Donald Macintyre, seemingly oblivious to the losses back in November; after all, nothing had been sunk on his watch even then.7 It was Boxing Day, and they had passed the lonely outcrop of Rockall off the Outer Hebrides when Macintyre heard the shrill sound of the bell from the Huff-Duff office and moments later he was being urgently called to the bridge. A U-boat had just transmitted a message reporting the sighting of their convoy from a position astern – behind – them. Analysis of the ground wave of the transmission suggested it was only 10–15 miles away. Macintyre was licking his lips. The following day, the convoy would be divided up and its various parts would head on to their final destinations; as Macintyre was well aware, no U-boat would risk attacking this close to the UK, which meant they did not have to worry about evasion tactics or looking after their charges any more. Ordering the escort ship Vanessa off in hot pursuit, Macintyre then signalled the convoy commodore his intentions and ordered his own ship, Hesperus, to head off hunting too.
It was a clear, sparkling winter’s day and calm too, although there was the usual Atlantic swell. As they surged westwards, the green Atlantic spray washed over their bows. David Seeley, his navigator and a keen horseman, commented that normally on Boxing Day there would be a hunt; now they were carrying out their own version of that tradition. Signals began arriving from Vanessa: ‘U-boat in sight on surface. Bearing 235 degrees.’ Then came another warning them the submarine had dived. Hesperus was now about fifteen minutes from the last sighting. Would they get there in time to take part?
But Vanessa failed to make contact and, as Hesperus arrived, Macintyre organized a combined hunt. They began slowly, and on the bridge Macintyre was listening as they probed the depths with their ASDIC. Then, suddenly, he saw a periscope emerge from the water no more than 50 yards away and trained towards Vanessa. It was too close for Hesperus to turn quickly enough, but none the less Macintyre yelled, ‘Full speed!’, then ordered the ship to swing sharply to stern.8 They released a bevy of depth charges, more to startle the U-boat and spoil its aim than expecting to deliver a fatal blow. As the charges exploded, the U-boat dived.
‘The next half hour,’ wrote Macintyre, ‘was a desperately anxious time.’ The return ping on the ASDIC lessened, then disappeared entirely. It seemed they had been given the slip. Relations between Bill Williams, Macintyre’s No. 1, and himself grew strained, each conscious that blame for losing the U-boat lay at both their doors. Then from the ASDIC operator came, ‘Contact!’ The echo was back. Another set of depth-charge attacks, but nothing. Daylight was fading, but Macintyre ordered that more depth charges be brought from the magazine. A further sweep from both ships and by now darkness had fallen. Then came another signal from Vanessa: ‘U-boat on surface. Am ramming.’
Surfaced the U-boat may have been, but it was still operable and set off at full speed to try to out-turn its pursuers. At one point, Vanessa managed a glancing blow and also began shooting at it, but Macintyre ordered them to stop – they were in danger of being hit themselves. Now Hesperus took up the chase. ‘The U-boat turned and twisted,’ noted Macintyre. ‘Every dodge I had ever learnt about ship-handling was brought into play to keep him ahead and in a position to be rammed or depth-charged.’ He could hear and feel the destroyer shudder and growl as an engine was put into reverse in an effort to claw an ever-tighter circle. Two signal searchlights were trained on the sub at all times and very possibly these blinded the U-boat commander because, suddenly, there she was, crossing directly in front of Hesperus’s bows. Stopping the engines to avoid overrunning, Macintyre called out, ‘Stand by to ram.’
It was all over in a moment: the U-boat disappeared from view, then came a grinding crunch as it was cut in half. U-357, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Adolf Kellner, was on its first combat patrol. It sank almost immediately, leaving a widening spread of oil and just six survivors. After congratulations and hand-shakes all round up on the bridge, Hesperus picked up the survivors then assessed the damage caused by the ramming. Nearly a quarter of the length of the ship’s bottom had been ripped off, compartments were flooded and a large stash of Christmas turkey brought back from Argentia was now floating around in oily brine.
None of this damage much affected Hesperus’s ability to catch up with the convoy. As they passed through, giving the ‘Submarine sunk’ signal, the ships responded with noisy blasts on their whistles and sirens. For Macintyre and the crew, it was a thrilling moment. There was also much to be learned from the prisoners, who explained they had been forced to the surface after draining their batteries. They also revealed details of a deception device called Pillenwerfer, a chemical bomb that effervesced on contact with water and which provided an area that returned the ASDIC’s sound beam. While the pursuing destroyer believed it was right above the U-boat, the submarine could use the Pillenwerfer’s shield to sneak away.
They reached Liverpool to a great welcome and a well-deserved stint of leave while the damaged hull was repaired. It was a good start to the New Year.
Macintyre’s latest U-boat-killing voyage had proved once again, as if proof were still needed, the benefit of highly skilled, very experienced and well-equipped escorts. Preventing U-boat attacks and even destroying enemy submarines was no easy matter; it needed mutual support born of well-earned trust, confidence and self-belief, and an innate sixth sense. The Royal Canadian Navy had grown exponentially from a standing start in this war, and remained short of both experience and the latest ASW equipment. Their collective resilience, stoicism and bare-faced courage could not be faulted, and they were absolutely blameless for whatever shortcomings they had. None the less, it clearly made much more sense that the Royal Navy should take on the lion’s share of shepherding convoys through those perilous waters of the midocean air gap.
Before Christmas, at the behest of the Admiralty, Churchill had specifically broached the matter with the Canadian Government and suggested the Royal Canadian Navy relinquish escort duty mid-ocean. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this went down very badly; the Canadians retorted that it wasn’t rapid expansion and inexperience that were the problem but insufficient modern technology and equipment, too many corvettes and not enough destroyers. Unfortunately for the beleaguered Canadians, their next major convoy was the southern route – through the widest part of the air gap – and a slow, and hence more vulnerable, convoy too. Hammered by massed U-boats mid-ocean, the C1 Escort Group was outnumbered four to one and utterly unable to deal with so many submarines attacking literally like wolves. On the second-to-last day of that very long year, Convoy ONS154 lost thirteen ships and that very same day most of the escorts had to hurry to the Azores for refuelling because the tanker that should have replenished them was one of those now lying at the bottom of the ocean. Fortunately, the wolfpacks left them alone after that, but by New Year’s Eve, the Senior Officer Escorts was so mentally and physically shattered, he was ordered straight to bed by the medical officer.
It was true that 80 per cent of all convoy losses since the summer had been on the Canadians’ watch, but it had not been their fault they hadn’t been given the same high-calibre tools as the Royal Navy; nor was it their fault that they had been running slow convoys across the mid-ocean gap at the moment large numbers of U-boats were finally entering the fray. None the less, after ONS154, the RCN conceded, but with a caveat: they would relinquish the mid-ocean air gap for training in British waters, but they also insisted on being re-equipped too.
Meanwhile, Eisenhower and Clark had yet further problems on their hands, this time in the form of their troublesome new allies. Giraud, predictably enough, was being insufferable, demanding greater military control than the Allies would grant him in a million years, while neither Clark nor Eisenhower was much more impressed by the weasly Noguès. The short-term fix – ensuring the invasion worked – was proving to be a Faustian pact that was not so easy to unpick. In an effort to escape Algiers, Eisenhower took a trip to the front. The weather was too bad to fly, so he and his party went by road. On Christmas Eve, they were 20 miles south-west of Béja. A little further on, they went to inspect American troops, who all seemed to be struggling in the mud. One scene particularly caught Eisenhower’s eye: 30 yards off the road, four men were trying to pull a motorbike from the mud but in doing so were only managing to slither in the mire themselves. This pathetic scene seemed indicative of the bigger mire in which his forces now found themselves. Hopes of a swift victory in Tunisia had been dashed; even in North Africa, and even in a modern, technological war, it seemed there was a natural campaigning season, and it was not during December.
At V Corps headquarters at Souk el Khemis, General Anderson told Eisenhower what he already knew: the attack had to be postponed, and for at least six weeks. It was the right call, but no less disappointing for that. Roosevelt, Churchill and the Joint Chiefs would not be happy and Eisenhower would have some explaining to do – but that, as he was rapidly discovering, was the burden of high command.
He was still pondering the issues of command, and what to do about Giraud’s refusal to allow any French troops to serve under Anderson and the British, when Clark rang him and told him to get back to Algiers right away. Amiral Darlan had been assassinated. Driving all night, he reached Algiers by 6 p.m. on Christmas Day, by which time Darlan’s murderer, a youthful anti-Fascist member of the Resistance called Bonnier de la Chapelle, had already been tried, sentenced and executed by firing squad.
Darlan’s death solved more problems than it created. The Allies had been embarrassed by the Deal, and the British, especially, had been unimpressed, no matter how valid the political expediency of the decision at the time. ‘His removal from the scene,’ noted Clark, ‘was like the lancing of a troublesome boil.’9 Now he was gone, so Giraud could take his place, which meant he would no longer be vying to command Allied armies in the field.
Then, on the last day of the year, came the news that the Allied war leaders were coming to North Africa: President Roosevelt, Churchill, the Joint Chiefs of Staff – the whole shooting match. This was to be the Casablanca Conference. There was much for them all to discuss.