The Python

General Dwight Eisenhower and General Sir Harold Alexander arrived on the battlefront--Eisenhower to confer with his Allied officers, Sir Harold to take personal command of the Allied troops retreating across central Tunisia. The situation early last week was that critical.

From Kasserine Pass, Major General Lloyd Fredendall's weary young U.S. infantrymen, artillerymen and tankmen had fled across the valley. They had lost their swagger. They had abandoned their dead and their good equipment along the muddy, bloody roads. They had been handicapped by a lack of motor vehicles. Some of them fought blindly in small, isolated groups. For all of them it had been a humiliating retreat. On their heels came the triumphant troops of the Axis, driving westward and northward in three columns. Foul weather held most of the Allied air forces ground-bound. There appeared to be no stopping the Germans and their Italian allies.

A great opportunist, like all good soldiers, Rommel was ready to exploit any gain. And he was a gambler. If he were lucky and could crack Thala, he would have access to the Kremamsa Plateau, could pour troops onto that flatland, could drive against the flank of the British First Army which sprawled across the top of Tunisia. Then the whole Allied strategy in North Africa would have to be recast. This was the crisis when the weary young men braced themselves and Allied reinforcements rushed up to give them aid.

Last Ditch. The story of the next few days was the story of a desperate Allied stand. British artillery and lumbering new Churchill tanks rolled up to block the pass at Sbiba. In the area of Tebessa--the Allied base for Central Tunisia--U.S. cannon and armor, supported by strong air units operating in dubious flying weather, pounded and slashed at the German onrush. In the critical Thala sector British armor, probably drawn from the First Army's reserves, and fresh U.S. artillery fought through the afternoon and into the night.

Watching the Thala battle, Drew Middleton of the New York Times wrote: "British [tank] units sustained the first shock, then counterattacked heavily. All this time the American guns in the hills were sounding a somber song of frustration for the enemy. Supported by infantry that had been heavily bombed on its way to the front, the Germans continued their efforts to break through until night fell. . . . "Broken guns and burned-out tanks were strewn across the sandy plain and the knobby hills. The ground was dotted with the bodies of men. . . . By this morning the fighting had died down."

On that morning, as suddenly as they had started their drive ten days before from Faid Pass (TIME, Feb. 22), the Germans turned tail and withdrew.

In the Bottleneck. Rommel had met more resistance than he had apparently bargained for. His troops had become exhausted, overextended and overtaxed. The Eighth Army in the south was showing signs of opening its assault. And perhaps there was another explanation for the turnabout: Fredendall's young men had learned their lessons fast. Said Eisenhower of the U.S. troops: "All complacency has now been dropped."

Back across the littered valley they went. Allied planes, capitalizing on a momentary break in Tunisia's rainswept skies, swarmed into the air. The Luftwaffe failed to fend them off. Anything in Major General Carl Spaatz's command that would fly took to its wings to strafe Axis columns, bomb the bottleneck of Kasserine Pass through which the Germans had to make their withdrawal. Flying Fortresses and fighter bombers were loaded with bombs and sent soaring through the mists of the Pass, sowing their explosives helter-skelter, certain of hitting something as the Axis troops squeezed through. Artillery pounded the retreating Axis forces.

Rommel left Italians to fight a rearguard action, pulled his precious Panzer troops out and Sputh along the road to Feriana and Gafsa, east towards Faid Pass--the roads over which Fredendall's U.S. troops had beat a hasty retreat northward only two weeks before.

At week's end the Axis was still in flight. Rommel was reported to be evacuating Feriana and plowing up the Allied airfield at Sbeetla which he had seized the week before.

Eyes South. Rommel had lost his gamble. In northern Tunisia, Colonel General Juergin von Arnim stabbed at Lieut. General Kenneth A. N. Anderson's mud-stuck front, apparently hoping to divert Allied strength from Rommel's hard-pressed front. Two savage attacks, made in a driving rain, were launched at Allied positions facing Mateur. Another attack was aimed at the Allied sally port of Medjez el Bab. Others, further south, sprang from Bou Arada. All but the Mateur attacks came to grief on muddy roads which impeded enemy tanks. The Mateur action continued to blaze at week's end.

It was plain that there was still plenty of flexibility and daring in the enemy. To trap and crush him in Tunisia would be, in the words of one military strategist, "like trying to box a python." It was a python with at least two heads (Rommel and von Arnim), with eyes along its whole length.

This week some of those eyes must have been turned south, where the Eighth Army was edging closer & closer to the Mareth Line. Rommel might choose to abandon the Line, make his stand in the narrow neck between the Chott Djerid (salt lake) and the coast at Gabes. It was up to the veteran troops of General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery to close the trap on the python at that end.

Eisenhower had more supplies, particularly motor vehicles, than he had when Rommel broke through at Faid. When he had clear skies overhead and firm looting on the ground, the British First Army in the north, the Americans and British at the center could be expected to close all the sides and end the python's convulsive resistance. But not before.

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