The Road to Cape Bon

by CAPTAIN RICHARD LLEWELLYN

THE heights of Hammam Lif command the only road to Cape Bon. Wide enough for four lines of traffic, well-metaled, this road was the only route available to the British tank force attacking south from Tunis.

Marshal von Arnim entrusted the task of holding the heights to a regiment of Hermann Göring Panzer Grenadiers, crack troops of the Afrika Korps, in the hope that they would deny entry to the British armor and give him time to entrench his troops among the mountains of Cape Bon. The eventual collapse and surrender of Marshal von Arnim’s forces was finally brought about by the cutting off of his line of retreat into the Cape Bon peninsula.

Subsequent information shows that the fall of Hammam Lif was as disastrous as it was unexpected, and this disaster was brought about by the Guards, supported by the Divisional Artillery, who stormed the heights; the Armored Brigade was then able to smash through the defile.

1

IT WAS midday on May 8, in the year 1943. Scarlet bands on the caps of staff officers showed almost purple in the deep shadow of the square, mud-bricked church at Madilene, where maps rattled and a single voice dictated: “This is Hammam Lif. These heights command the only road to Cape Bon; 88-millimeter guns are mounted there in strength, but too well dug in to be got at by shell fire. Only infantry can clear the position, and it must be cleared at any cost. At once.”

A lieutenant colonel of Foot Guards saluted, and turned away into brilliant midday sunlight, doubling through a lane of cypress to climb aboard the hot steel of his carrier, bracing himself for the lunging pull of the turn. The dispatch rider ahead, making heavy way over loose sand ruts, got lost in tangled scrolls of rough whitish dust that gritted the eyes and dried the mouth, sheeting the patient gray shapes of waiting transport along the roadside, which sometimes, through breeze-blown gaps, showed the Mailed Fist, the badge of the Royal Armored Corps, on their battle plates, or else, transformed by camouflage, were so many pairs of windscreen eyes glittering in a sudden passage of the sun.

Away from the crowded olive groves, cooler winds piled the dust in waves that powdered and broke against the cactus hedges, showing the long mauve sprawl of hills away to the right, ending, far over on the left, in the five bare peaks of Hammam Lif. The carrier sucked the road through its square snout, careening past the battalion moving up in tracked convoy, grinding through the miles to the farm on the cross tracks. A small Arab boy, almost hidden under a hive of a straw hat with carnations stuck all round the turned-down brim, sat at the corner, wriggling ten pink-nailed brown toes before small pyramids of unripe lemons in three neat rows.

The lieutenant colonel left the carrier and got through a gap in the cactus, watching the quiet heights through his glasses, moving inch by inch along the ridge, up and down the flanks, marking the rain channels cutting up from ground almost to crest, watching for signs of the enemy. But except for birds that flew among dwarf bushes of wild thyme and rosemary and rocks outcropping here and there along the top, the five hills were bare, silent, lifeless.

The road was filling with the dust of transport, setting down the battalion by platoons that formed up and marched into the olive groves below the heights. Company commanders were hurrying into a group beside the carrier. Signalers reeled out cable between the trees, and a Red Cross flag broke on the dressing station where pioneers were knocking in the tent pegs. The padre filled a couple of cans over at the water truck, taking them back to the rack near the operating table, and waited, watching the surgeon sterilizing his instruments.

In the olive groves, among jumbled hundreds of oil containers thrown aside by retreating panzers, platoons were taking off their equipment. Cloth bandoliers of cartridges were dumped in piles from the trucks.

The group round the carrier broke away in a ring of salutes. Platoon officers formed groups around their company commanders. Battle positions were pointed out, start lines, routes of advance, and objectives. Again the groups broke up and platoon officers ran to join groups of N.C.O. section commanders, relaying orders. Processions of pairs carried long green boxes of grenades to be primed. Bren gunners wiped heavy magazines, ridding them of travel dust.

Farther down the road, machine guns poked black muzzles through holes in the farm walls, and the mortar platoon hacked out firing pits in the hedge side among the twisted roots of cactus. In front of them, on a bare stretch of sand below the heights, a smashed tank filled the wind with the bitter stench of burning metal; and a few yards off, a dead donkey lay stiffly gray, straight-legged as a toy.

Whistles blew in the olive groves. Sergeant majors were marshaling their companies on the start line. Second hands of watches jerked nearer to Zero.

Artillery cracked in the rear — squat fat whacks that shook the teeth and clouted the ears. A squadron of tanks wheeled off the road and lifted their guns at the crests, spitting bright red puffs that burst up there in creamy spouts centered with vicious yellow. Tracer bullets eased upwards in curving gray streams.

In the taut shade of the farm wall, three Arab women, three patches of dull red and blue, plaited each other’s hair, with no thought, it seemed, beyond the interweave of long black braids.

2

WATCH hands ticked over Zero. Up on the forward edge of the olive grove, company commanders gave the order to advance.

In the dressing station, the padre stopped rolling bandages to watch files of inch-high figures in khaki drill break away from the thick green growth of the trees and march across the open ground toward the foot of the right-hand hill, six hundred yards away. On the left, a second company was marching out of the plantations, but the lines of trees were no more precise than the orderly ranks of Guardsmen, each with his own breath of dust to mark his way across the bare red sand.

Echoing gunfire rolled with the sound of a thousand tumbling barrels, but still the hills were quiet, without a sign of life, four-hundred-foot heights of barren silence, sharp-crested and remote.

The marching files were halfway across the flat, beyond all hope of cover, and ugly yellowy brown spurts ripped up the earth all round them, rising in lanes of dust where the bullets struck deep. The little figures were falling, twisting sideways, kicking, struggling to get up, and lying still.

The ranks went on, closing in to fill the gaps.

The crash of machine-gun fire could be heard from a dozen holes in the rocks above, but still no enemy movement could be seen. Reserve companies poured fire on the crests without targets. Artillery pounded any hole or crack that might have been a hiding place. Mortars dropped bombs along the crest and on the flanks. But still the machine guns crashed and still the marching files went forward, slowly, toward the foot of the heights, at every step losing more little figures that fell forward or dropped sideways, and struggled to get up, and then lay still.

Leading platoons reached the slopes of wild thyme and rosemary and went deeper in, climbing the steep sides of the rain gullies, under cover once more, but only from snipers and machine guns. Grenades, thrown from above, rolled down on them, exploding in the narrow way, and if the whitehot rags of steel failed to find a mark, splintered rock flew up and cut to the bone.

Where the slope was almost sheer, three quarters of the way to the crest, the first Guardsmen out of the gully saw the heads of their enemy over a boulder-ringed dugout just below the ridge, and went up at them, almost on all fours. But their bayonets were given no chance of a wetting. Thirty yards away was far enough. Shrill yelps of fright were heard clearly above the crash of fire. Holding their hands high above their heads, the Germans crawled out on their knees and ran down the slope toward the advancing company, losing balance and falling, some of them, all the way down to the flat.

But positions on the hilltops on both flanks were ripping cross fire into the sections closest to the ridge, pinning them down among the rocks and thorns. Snipers, among the wild thyme on the brow of the highest hill, searched for platoon and section commanders. One by one they fell, and even as they lay, were shot again.

The square bulk of the carrier rattled out from the tree line, carving a thick, furling rut of bright yellow dust that rose behind it like the tail of a meteor, and stopped while the lieutenant colonel watched the advance. Up on the peak, a sniper lifted his head to roll grenades down among a section inching up on him. The lieutenant colonel put away his glasses and took a rifle out of the rack. In his crow’s-nest of rocks on the summit, starkly outlined against the pink and blue of the afternoon sky, the Nazi was shot as he lifted to throw, and leading Guardsmen heard the square helmet clank tinnily against the shale behind the parapet.

A third company was leaving the tree line below, marching toward the foot of the hill. Again machine guns cut long, splashing swathes in the red sand, and again the little figures fell, twisting, struggling, lying still. But the files marched on, without a turn to right or left, or even a backward look.

The men on the slope were crawling inch by inch upward to the crest, trying to cross over on the other side to deal with the mortars and search out the snipers. But the crest was under heavy, instant fire from the other side of the valley, and the slightest move brought more casualties. A company commander walked up the length of the hill, despite the whiplash of near misses, and looked over the crest to see the strength of the enemy positions for himself, and walked down again to report that, unless his company was to be wiped out, no advance was possible until darkness gave cover.

From where the leading troops lay, three hundred feet above sea level, they saw the broad sweep of Tunis Bay reaching far out, on the left, to the white villas of Carthage. Midway, the cream and white clustered city of Tunis still quivered in the heat, with the domes of its mosques in sweeps of mauve shade, set in dark parks of cypress green. Just below the heights, the square French houses of Hammam Lif, each in its own garden, showed whitewashed roofs and lines of forgotten washing that waved in the late afternoon breeze. Beside the beach, at a small yellow villa gaping with brown wounds of shell fire, a pair of white socks tap-danced on an unseen wire. Only the beetle movement of tanks up and down the streets, and the long orange flashes of German guns, gave any sign of war.

Beyond all, half a mile away over the white beach, the unrumpled Mediterranean lay waiting, gently blue, striped with broad ribbons of spring leaf green. A sunken ship looked out as though in surprise, showing only the tip of a funnel and the mizzen tops of its mast, pink in the flush of the setting sun.

3

THE long climb and the tension of battle in the hot afternoon hours had tired the men on the ridge, but there was no hesitancy when a platoon officer gave an order to charge the crest under cover of lowering shadows. The men rose to one knee, clear targets, and snipers worked the faster.

But now a feeling was at work among them, common to men under constant fire, when the indignity of having to crouch in a hold under duress suddenly produces a compound of frigid anger and devil-may-care — when all sense of fear is lost in a desire to close with the enemy and destroy him wholly and utterly, come what may.

At the same time, enemy troops seemed to become aware that darkness would give cover for prowling men. More of them, from positions along the ridge, were giving themselves up, and as they left their posts the Guardsmen got closer to the peak. But four or five hundred yards to the left the 88-millimeter guns still commanded the road, denying its use to the waiting armor, and Hermann Göring Panzer Grenadiers were still in hiding and able to shoot.

The company on the left flank charged over the crest, and at the same time the platoons nearest the peak went for the machine-gun posts to their front, rushing the ridge and sliding down the steep bank on the other side, instantly re-forming to engage the enemy from the new position. But the Nazis preferred not to fight at close quarters. One after another, in twos and threes, and then in half dozens, they came out with their hands up, refusing to fight when the bayonets came too near.

At last, the right-hand hill was clear of the enemy, and as night drew on, the scarlet flash of their machine guns gave away the remaining hiding places along the crest to the left, making attack simpler though not easier. Sections chose their objectives and went for them one after another. More platoons got over the ridge, working towards the coast road and gun emplacements. A wounded officer led a handful of men into the valley, fighting a way along the dry river bed and out into the streets of Hammam Lif itself, in the rear of the guns.

When all three hills to the right were reported clear, only the saddle joining the last two hills remained, and the peak beyond. Two hundred yards of massive rock, holed by engineers, deeply sheltered and firmly held, commanded all approaches.

Minute by minute, tired, thirsty, the men crept forward, dodging bursting grenades when they could, groveling in shallow pits when machine-gun bursts ripped the rocks all round them to gravel that cut their faces, slashed their clothing, tore steel helmets off, and knocked the rifles out of their hands.

Wounded, dying, and dead lay where they were in the chill of early evening; and time and time again, sections lying in cover cursed the stretcher bearers for attracting fire as they climbed about the slopes, taking helpless men away, ignoring curses, bullets, bombs, and shell fire alike, easing the heavy burdens down the steeps, foot by foot, to the carriers that waited to take them to the dressing station. Wounded men crying out in pain, hidden among the rocks and rosemary, were searched out, bandaged, given water, and sent to sleep with a grain of morphia.

In the middle of the saddle, the strongest post was taken with the bayonet from the front and rear, but the steel points never got nearer than thirty yards. The gunners came out with their hands up, docile, shaking, watching the silver spikes big-eyed, sidelong, often turning hurriedly about, fearing sharp threat from the rear. As the night got darker, the thirty-yard boundary increased to a hundred, and forward sections, hearing shouts far away on the last hill, lit matches to show volunteer prisoners where to come for sanctuary.

Yard by yard, nest by nest, and dugout by dugout the platoons fought on, leaving their casualties to mark a trail, and the racking streams of machinegun fire that in the utter darkness had been so brightly pink were one by one, suddenly, blackly, still.

The battle was over.

Sweat dried and blood clotted in cool sea-borne gusts that brought from below the steady, pulsing menace of the armor forming up for the break through; and down in the lamplit dressing station, the padre held the ruffling pages of his little book, writing in the names of those who lay so quietly beneath the turned-up blankets.

On the crests, weary men slept at arms among the wild thyme and rosemary, or else stood sentry along the five bare peaks of Hammam Lif.

The road to Cape Bon was open.