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minefield. Montgomery nonetheless took the port of Sfax shortly afterwards. The nutcracker effect of Patton and Montgomery on each side of Rommel was one that was to lead to a ludicrous competitiveness – culminating in outright enmity – between the two men. ‘God damn all British and all so-called Americans who have their legs pulled by them,’ Patton wrote in his diary. ‘I would rather be commanded by an Arab. I think less than nothing of Arabs.’87 Montgomery’s vanity has already been noted, but this is what Patton wrote in his diary before sailing on Torch: ‘When I think of the greatness of my job and realise that I am what I am, I am amazed, but on reflection, who is as good as I am? I know of no one.’88 Yet there was a sentimental side to the bruiser too: Patton wept at his ADC’s funeral and put flowers on his grave before leaving the North African theatre.

The final part of the campaign from March 1943 saw Mark Clark’s II Corps – Patton had passed on the command in order to plan for the invasion of Sicily – attacking the northern sector of the Axis defensive position, and some particularly tough fighting by the US 34th Division for a defensive position called Hill 609. Only twenty months earlier, that division had been composed merely of National Guard units from Iowa and Minnesota. Anderson’s First Army and Montgomery’s Eighth Army also played crucial roles, which were reallocated by Alexander to ensure that the British and Americans jointly took the glory for expelling the Axis from Africa.

Constantly refusing Rommel’s reasonable and strategically sound requests to extricate his forces from Africa, Hitler proceeded in early 1943 to make precisely the same mistake that he had at Stalingrad in late 1942, reinforcing defeat and issuing ‘Stand or die’ orders that amounted to demands for suicidal resistance for no appreciable gain. Yet Bradley took Bizerta on 7 May, the same day that the British finally entered Tunis. The British suffered heavily in the Tunisian campaign: of the 70,000 Allied casualties in Tunisia, more than half were British and, of those, two-thirds were suffered by the First Army.89 The Eighth Army has taken much of the glory and the attention of history, but the First Army deserves recognition too.

For there was plenty of glory to be shared by the end of the campaign. Although an ill Rommel was himself evacuated from Tunis back to Germany on 9 March, his successor General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim was captured on 13 May, along with no fewer than 230,000 other POWs, 200 tanks and 1,200 guns. ‘The Tunisian campaign is over,’ Alexander cabled Churchill. ‘We are masters of the North African shore.’ Six days later Churchill chose the opportunity of his speech to the US Congress to underline the point about ‘the military intuition of Corporal Hitler’ that he had made in London back in February. To be an object of fear and hatred was perfectly acceptable to Hitler, but Churchill wanted to transform him into one of derision and mirth. The master of parliamentary ridicule had spotted a way of mocking ‘Corporal Hitler’, as he increasingly took to calling him, and he unerringly grasped it. ‘We may notice’, he said of German strategy in Africa, ‘the touch of the master hand. The same insensate obstinacy which condemned Field Marshal von [sic] Paulus and his army to destruction at Stalingrad has brought this new catastrophe upon our enemies in Tunisia.’90

10

The Motherland Overwhelms the Fatherland

January 1942–February 1943

Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.

A lieutenant in the 24th Panzer Division at Stalingrad, 19421

In their original conception the plans for Operation Barbarossa had not even mentioned the city of Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd). Hitler’s idea was to reach a line running from Archangel in the north to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, with Leningrad, Moscow and the Volga river, upon which Stalingrad lies, well within the German-occupied zone. Yet because by the summer and autumn of 1942 Leningrad and Moscow still held out, and