The Battle of Kasserine Pass

Podcast Transcript

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 Kasserine 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 Kasserine Pass and the American Army’s baptism by fire on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

To understand the debacle at Kasserine 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. 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 U.S. demobilized with extraordinary speed. The wartime army of four 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. Modern tanks, artillery, and aircraft were scarce.

In 1939, on the eve of war in Europe, the U.S. 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 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 partly by the early evidence of American performance in the Torch landings, which had been technically clumsy.

General Hans-Jürgen 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 Marshall 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 Kasserine Pass. A two-mile-wide gap in the Dorsal mountains of central Tunisia.

The Battle of Kasserine Pass unfolded between February 19 and 24, 1943, when German forces under Erwin Rommel struck the U.S. II 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 is 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 II Corps. Fredendall established his headquarters some seventy 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 code names, 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 of the 1st Armored Division, whom he actively undermined.

Eisenhower’s aide, Captain Harry Butcher, recorded that Eisenhower privately expressed serious doubts about Fredendall 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 a broad front in “penny packets”, small detachments assigned to defend individual passes in the Eastern Dorsal 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 Bou 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 sent in sequentially rather than simultaneously, each in turn overwhelmed by superior German antitank fire and coordination.

Training deficiencies compounded these leadership failures. 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-arms coordination, but the lessons had not fully percolated into unit-level practice by the time of Torch.

Infantrymen did not know how to work effectively with tanks; tankers did not understand how to use infantry and artillery to suppress antitank guns before closing to engagement range.

The performance at Kasserine appeared to confirm German assumptions about the American military.

The disaster at Kasserine is not the end of this story, however. What happened next made this battle episode worth it.

The American response to Kasserine Pass was swift and, ultimately, highly effective. Eisenhower moved within days to replace Fredendall with General George S. Patton, who arrived at II Corps headquarters on March 6, 1943, and immediately transformed the command atmosphere.

Where Fredendall had been remote and contemptuous of his senior officer, 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 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 nonexistent at Kasserine, was systematized under the newly appointed air support commander, Brigadier General Laurence Kuter, 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 Guettar.

The Battle of El Guettar unfolded on March 23, 1943, when German forces launched a deliberate armored attack against well-prepared American positions held primarily by the U.S. 1st Infantry Division in southern Tunisia.

Expecting a counteroffensive after Kasserine, 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, II Corps demonstrated that Kasserine Pass had been an aberration, not a prophecy.

The battles of Kasserine Pass and El Guettar were not decisive battles that turned the tied 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 Lesley 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 significant. Fredendall’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 Fredendall earlier, became more decisive in removing commanders thereafter. The professional culture of the officer corps began to shift toward 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 American military learning was demonstrated.

Within two years of their worst defeat, American forces were conducting complex multi-corps operations in France and Germany with a sophistication that had seemed impossible in the Tunisian mountains.

The Battle of El Guettar 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 U.S. forces as inexperienced, poorly led, and tactically clumsy, a judgment reinforced by the Americans’ early collapse.

El Guettar challenged that view. The Germans encountered disciplined defensive positions, well-coordinated artillery, and an ability to absorb armored attacks without panic.

German post-battle assessments noted the effectiveness of American artillery control and the speed with which U.S. 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.

For the broader North African campaign, Kasserine Pass ultimately failed to achieve Rommel’s strategic objectives. The Allied line held, the retreat was contained, and within three months all Axis forces in North Africa had surrendered.

The 250,000 prisoners taken in the Tunisian capitulation of May 1943 represented a strategic catastrophe for Germany and Italy that more than offset whatever tactical embarrassment American forces had suffered in February.

The speed of recovery between Kasserine and El Guettar 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 Patton who understood that armies are made as much by will and discipline as by doctrine and equipment.

The 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 Oetken 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 never having 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 by gratitude.

Thanks, Mona! So happy that you and your 12-year-old enjoy the show, and I always appreciate the feedback.

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