The few strategic and all-weather roads extended from the capital or from the principal port of Bizerta westwards towards Algeria, south-westwards to Kairouan, or southwards to Tripolitania. The junctions of roads were of strategic importance and whoever controlled these and the towns which had grown up around them dictated the course of the fighting. As this narrative of the events which took place in Tunisia between November 1942 and May 1943 unfolds then the names of those towns and villages which were important to the campaign will become familiar: Beja, Mateur, Tebourba. Kasserine, Enfidaville, and Medjez el Bab. It is this last named place which was the key to the whole campaign and its capture by the British opened the great offensive which finally brought the war in Africa to a close.

Roads, then, and particularly road junctions were strategically important but it was not necessary to have troops on the highway itself; possession of high ground overlooking the road produced the same result. Thus each side fought to attain or to eject the other side from the mountains or the valley road. [18]

The population of Tunisia was predominantly Arab with a large number of French inhabitants, both military and civilian, and a lesser but still sizeable Italian contingent. These latter hoped for an Axis victory and many were called up to serve in locally raised Italian regiments. The French were divided into those who supported the western Allies and those whose sympathies lay with the Government of Marshal Petain. The Arabs had no strong feelings and were capable of betraying British soldiers to the Germans and German positions to the British with complete impartiality.

The Tunisian campaign can be seen to fall into three distinctive phases. In the first of these, lasting from the Allied landings to the end of December, there was a race to obtain tactically and strategically important positions. During this first period the descents upon Tunisia by both sides were followed by a thrust made by a force, mainly British in content, and aimed at the capture of Tunis and Bizerta. A German counter-attack drove back the weak Allied force and a line was formed along which there was for some time a stalemate.

The second phase began with a resumption of the German offensive aiming to expand the bridgehead area. These attacks lasted until April and within this period there was the major assault upon the American forces forming the right flank of the Allied army in Tunisia. When the United States' forces drove back Rommel's panzer thrust they joined hands with the British 8th Army which had entered Tunisia from the south and thus formed a noose around the Axis armies.

The third phase saw the build-up of strong Allied forces, the tightening of the noose, the switching of some 8th Army Divisions to the 1st Army, and the final thrust from Medjez el Bab which smashed the Germans and their Italian allies.

When compared to the battles of the Titans which were being fought in Russia the events in Tunisia seem of small proportion. The whole Axis force which fought there was not even half the size of any one of the army groups fighting on the eastern front, but it was a campaign that was significant for it showed that the Anglo-Saxon Allies had the capability and the knowledge successfully to mount a major sea-borne invasion. This fact was not lost upon the German High Command who as early as February 1943 telexed an Abwehr [19] appreciation that further sea-borne landings could be expected to take place during March in the Mediterranean area and aimed either at Sicily, Crete, Sardinia, or Corsica.

The Tunisian campaign also 'blooded' the green Americans enabling both the leaders and the led to learn the business of war at combat and at command levels. These lessons they then applied to the fighting which was carried out in Sicily and in Italy where the terrain was much the same as Tunisia. As a military parallel the war in Tunisia was, by accident, to the Allies the same sort of testing ground that Spain had been for the Axis forces.

If the Allies learned much to their future advantage as a result of the fighting in Tunisia then the German and Italian troops were to learn the bitter lesson of their vulnerability to Allied air power. By early spring this superi­ority had driven the Luftwaffe from the skies which it had dominated from the earliest days of the fighting and left, naked to the American and British air attacks, the transport aircraft lumbering slowly through the skies above the Mediterranean and the Axis merchant ships steaming their way through its waters. Both ran an Allied gauntlet and suffered terrible losses. It has been calculated that at the bottom of the sea lie more than twice as many tanks as the desert and Tunisian armies ever received.

Other than the experience of the loss of air cover the fighting in Tunisia provided no new experience for the Germans. Their flexibility in the matter of battle groups, their ability to improvise, the exploitation of time and means to overcome shortages and difficulties were no new phenomena. Only at highest command level was there hesitation and lack of direction. At medium and junior level, as well as at that of the ordinary soldier there was a determination to do the job well, and in this they succeeded.

In a campaign which lasted six months it would not be possible to describe in so few words as this book contains each or every major action. Some are more important or interesting than others and it is these which have been selected to represent the whole. The period covering the landings, the thrust and the riposte leading up to the battle of Longstop Hill in December 1942, is the first to be described. Then follows an account of the fighting in which the Axis forces tried to expand their bridgehead during which period there occurred the action by 10th Panzer Division at Sidi Sou Zid which led to the battle of Kasserine Pass.

By this time the desert army of Erwin Rommel and the panzer army of von Arnim had combined in a prickly partnership with each leader having different ideas of how to conduct operations. British pressure by 8th Army on the southern Tunisian front led to the evacuation of successive defensive positions and illustrating these actions is the account of the fighting by 164th Infantry Division in the Schott and the Enfindaville lines.

The final phase of the war in Africa is covered in a description of the engagements in which 999th (Africa) Division took part on the western front of Tunisia. This division was made up of men convicted for military crimes: desertion, insubordination, striking a superior, and neglect of duty. Only through battle could these men win back their military honour and, although their unit never reached full strength but was made up of individual battle groups, the men served loyally and bravely winning back not only their own self-respect but more important still the respect of their military comrades.

To the desert veterans of both sides the war in Tunisia was completely different to that which they had fought in Egypt and Cyrenaica. The rocky mountains of Tunisia limited the horizons of the men who had come up out of Egypt. For the men of the old Africa Corps there would be no longer the exhilarating hundred-mile advances; no more the battlefield restricted to a 50-mile wide strip of desert south of the Via Balbia; no more the goals of Alexandria and the Suez canal to spur them on. Instead there were the eternal bare hills or djebels, the ever-vigilant OPs, and an awareness to every soldier of the Axis armies that with defeat Tunis would become the first of a series of stepping stones leading on to Sicily, from thence to the mainland of Italy and. finally, to Germany and to the defeat of the German—Italian Axis.