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In February 1943, the United States army saw its first major battle of World War II. They confronted the German Afrika Korps in the mountains of Tunisia at Kazerine Pass. It was, to put it bluntly, a disaster and one of the most humiliating defeats in the history of the American military. However, in the aftermath of the defeat, the Americans shocked everyone by completely turning things around in just a matter of weeks. Learn more about the Battle of Kazarene Pass and the American Army's baptism by fire on this episode of Everything Everywhere. Daily. Carvana is so easy. Just a click and we've got ourselves a car.
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To understand the debacle at Kazarene Pass, we need to go back to before the war began and even to the country's founding. The United States never had a great land army other than the American Civil War and the First World War. When large armies were briefly assembled, the United States always had one of the smaller armies for a country of its size and economy. The nation viewed itself as a naval power, given its location between two oceans, and there was little need for a major land force that could be used in North America. When the US entered World War I, it once again assembled a large army quickly. However, after 1918, the US demobilized the army with extraordinary speed. The wartime army of 4 million shrank to roughly 200,000 by the early 1920s. The political mood favored isolationism and fiscal restraint. The National Defense act of 1920 reorganized the army into a small regular army, a National Guard component, and an organized reserve. But Congress Consistently underfunded it, Mechanization lagged, and modern tanks, artillery and aircraft were scarce. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, the US army ranked 17th in the world in size behind Portugal. It was smaller than the armies of Romania and Bulgaria. Its officer corps contained talented individuals, but many had never commanded large formations in combat. All of this became relevant when the Americans landed in Morocco in November of 1942 for Operation Torch, which began the American North African campaign, which I covered in a previous episode. The Germans entered the Tunisian campaign with undisguised contempt for American military capability, an attitude shaped partly by ideological assumptions about democratic societies and partially by the early evidence of American performance in the Torch landings, which had been technically clumsy. General Hans Jurgen von Arnim's assessment, shared widely among German commanders, was that American soldiers were physically soft, that their officers were incompetent, and that they would not fight when pressed. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, after observing the early fighting, wrote that the Americans were fantastically cowardly. In his personal notes, though, he added the important qualification that they learned quickly and that their equipment and logistics were formidable. After the American landings, the Germans had retreated to defensive positions in the mountains of Tunisia. The place where the Americans finally entered combat was Kazerine Pass, a two mile wide gap in the Dorsal mountains of central Tunisia. The Battle of Kazerine pass unfolded between February 19 and February 24, 1943, when German forces under Erwin Rommel struck the US 2nd Corps positioned in central Tunisia. The battle was a disaster for the Americans. American units spread thinly across wide fronts and lacking effective coordination, were hit by fast moving combined arms attacks supported by artillery and air power. When Rommel's forces swept through the pass, American units disintegrated with surprising speed, abandoning equipment and positions in what veteran German soldiers regarded as a rout. German forces exploited gaps, overran defensive positions, and forced a disorderly American retreat westward. Although the Germans ultimately failed to achieve a major breakthrough due to logistical constraints and growing Allied resistance, the battle exposed severe weaknesses in American command deployment and battlefield coordination. There were so many problems that it's hard to pinpoint just one as the cause of the debacle. At the leadership level, the fundamental problem was General Lloyd Fredendall, commander of the Second Corps. Frendahl established his headquarters some 70 miles behind the front in an elaborate underground bunker whose construction occupied a significant portion of his engineer battalion. For weeks, he communicated through a confusing private system of codenames, issued orders that bypassed division commanders to deal directly with regiment and even battalion commanders, and demonstrated A near total failure of battlefield situational awareness. He also possessed a corrosive personal contempt for his subordinate commanders, particularly General Orlando Ward, the 1st Armored Division, who he actively undermined. Eisenhower's aide, Captain Henry Butcher, recorded that Eisenhower privately expressed serious doubts about Fred and all even before the battle, yet failed to act on them in time. Below the army corps level, the tactical dispositions were equally flawed. American units were scattered across in a broad front in what were called penny packets, small detachments assigned to defend individual passes in the eastern dorsal mountains. Rather than being concentrated for mutual support and counterattack. This approach violated fundamental combined arms doctrine and stripped American commanders of the mass necessary to respond to a concentrated armored thrust. For example, when the Germans struck at Sidi Bau Zid on February 14, 1943, several days before the battle, the 1st Armored Division's Combat Command A was destroyed piecemeal, with two relief columns sentenced sequentially rather than simultaneously, each in turn overwhelmed by superior German anti tank fire and coordination. Training deficiencies compounded these leadership problems. Most American units had received only a few months of training stateside before deployment, and that training had frequently been unrealistic. Maneuvers in the Louisiana exercises of 1941 had exposed problems in combined arm coordination, but the lessons had not fully percolated into unit level practices. By the time of Operation Torch, infantrymen did not know how to work effectively with tanks. Tankers did not understand how to use infantry and artillery to suppress anti tank guns before closing to engagement range. The performance at Kazerine Pass appeared to confirm German suspicions about the American military. But the disaster at Kazerine is not the end of the story. What happened next is what made this battle episode worthy. The American response to Kazarene Pass was swift and ultimately highly effective. Eisenhower moved in days to replace General Frednall with General George S. Patton, who arrived at Second Corps Headquarters on March 6, 1943 and immediately transformed the command atmosphere. Where Fred Nall had been remote and contemptuous of his senior officers, Patton was present, demanding and intensely focused on combat discipline. As a proxy for combat readiness, he enforced uniform regulations with seemingly petty strictness, such as fining officers for appearing without helmets or neckties. But the underlying purpose was to signal that the era of slack, comfortable soldiering was over. His chief of staff, General Omar Bradley, later wrote that Patton slapped the Corps to attention within days of his arrival. Beyond the change in command style, substantial tactical reforms also followed rapidly. The penny packet Defensive positions were abandoned in favor of concentrated, mutually supporting positions. Combined arms coordination was enforced through training and by attaching tank, destroyer and artillery units more directly to infantry formations. Air ground coordination, which had been nearly non existent at Kazerine, was systematized under a newly appointed air support commander, Brigadier General Lawrence Cutter, who helped develop the direct support procedures that would become standard doctrine only six weeks later. The Americans were able to put these changes to the test when they met the Germans again at the Battle of El Guetar. The Battle of El guetar unfolded on March 23, 1943, when German forces launched a deliberate armored attack against well prepared American positions held Primarily by the US 1st Infantry Division in southern Tunisia. Expecting a counteroffensive after Kazerine, American commanders positioned their troops in depth with infantry anchoring the line and artillery centrally controlled behind them. As German tanks advanced through the narrow valley, they were funneled into kill zones and met by concentrated artillery fire supplemented by anti tank guns and infantry weapons. Repeated German assaults were broken up with heavy losses, and attempts to exploit gaps failed under sustained fire. It was the first clear American success against German armor in the war. Patton pushed the corps forward aggressively afterward, and while the terrain and German resistance limited exploitation, Second Corps demonstrated that Kazaream Pass had been an aberration, not a prophecy. The battles of Kazerine Pass and El Guatar were not decisive battles that turned the tide of the war. They are not on a par with the battle of Stalingrad or D Day. However, the battles had extremely important downstream ramifications for how the war was to be conducted over the next two years. Structurally, the army used the Tunisian campaign to accelerate reforms that had been theoretically understood but not yet institutionalized. The separation of tank destroyer doctrine from armored doctrine was reconsidered. Combined Arms Task force organization became standard. The army ground forces under General Leslie McNair accelerated the revision of training programs and the replacement system was reformed to provide combat units with better trained fillers. The personnel consequences were also significant. Fredendahl's relief was not an isolated event. The Tunisian campaign produced a systematic culling of senior officers who had demonstrated unfitness for command under fire. Eisenhower, who was criticized for failing to relieve Fred Null earlier, became more decisive in removing commanders. Thereafter, the professional culture of the officer corps began to shift towards greater emphasis on results rather than seniority. Psychologically, Kasserine Pass became a reference point against which subsequent American performance was measured and by which the remarkable speed of the American military learning was demonstrated. Within two years of their worst defeat, the American forces were conducting complex multicore operations in France and Germany with a sophistication that seemed impossible in the Tunisian mountains. The Battle of El Guetar forced a noticeable shift in German perceptions of the American army, particularly for Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. After Kasserine, Rommel and other German officers had viewed US forces as inexperienced, poorly led and tactically clumsy, a judgment reinforced by the Americans early collapse. El Guitar challenged that view. The Germans encountered disciplined defensive positions, well coordinated artillery and an ability to absorb armor attacks without panic. German post battle assessments noted the effectiveness of American artillery control and the speed with which US units had corrected earlier mistakes. While Rommel still believed American troops lacked the combat instincts of veteran German formations, he no longer regarded them as a soft opponent and recognized that they were learning at an unusually rapid pace. As for the broader North African campaign, Kasserine Pass ultimately failed to achieve Rommel's strategic objectives. The Allied line had held, the retreat was contained, and within three months all Axis forces in North Africa had surrendered. The quarter million prisoners taken in the Tunisian capitulation of May of 1943 represented a strategic catastrophe for Germany and Italy that than offset whatever tactical embarrassment American forces had suffered in February. The speed of recovery between Kasserine and El Guetar was not accidental. It reflected genuine institutional capacity for self criticism and adaptation, strong logistical foundations, and at crucial moments the presence of commanders like George Patton, who understood that armies are made as much by will and discipline as by doctrine and equipment. The ultimate lesson of February and March 1943 in Tunisia was not that American soldiers could not fight. It showed that the Americans had something more powerful than raw fighting ability. They were able to adapt and learn. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kieffer. Today's review comes from Listener so Mona On Apple podcasts in the United States they write the Banality of Evil episode. Thank you so much for your Wonderful podcast. My 12 year old and I have enjoyed listening for just over a year. I wanted to share what this particular episode called to mind as I listened. I'm a fan of James Baldwin and his quote about love having never been a popular movement came to mind this part in particular. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person, you could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide in yourself not to be. I apologize for the length of this review, but it is fueled with gratitude. Well, thanks Mona. I'm so happy that you and your 12 year old enjoy the show and I always appreciate the feedback. Remember, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you too can have it read on the show.