Word: djebel
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...Battle of Africa became history last week. To the U.S. soldiers who fought their way across Tunisia's dust-whipped plains and along the bald ridges of Djebel Berda and Djebel Tahent it was history of a peculiarly intimate kind, for in battle each soldier is alone. To Private Alvan Mendelsohn it was a foxhole on a hilltop beyond El Guettar, reading a magazine when the shelling got heavy by day and at night lying there waiting to know if his number was coming up. To Corporal Isaac Lorenzo Moroni Parker it was the sonofabitching Kasserine Pass. To Private...
...Germans had 31 tanks put out of action that day; they lost heavily in both men and materiel during those four days of fighting. When the 1st Division retired from the southern ridge called Djebel Berda at the end of the fourth day, it was to prepare for a fresh offensive. By that time the men were so tired that, as one battalion commander, Lieut. Colonel Ben Sternberg, put it, "if you'd told a man a German was on the other side of a rock he wouldn't have given a damn." But, the Colonel added...
...offensive. A dozen miles east of El Guettar the hills come close together in a narrow pass, and after that there is flat going to the sea. The plan was for the 1st Division to seize the hills to the north, for the 9th to take Djebel Berda and the other hills to the south, then for the ist Armored to push through the pass and see what it could do. This would keep the enemy engaged while Montgomery was attacking toward Gabes, and with luck the armor might get through to Rommel's rear...
...which had been assigned the job of clearing the rim of the plain of Tunis and running out on to the plain itself. The First had done most of this job. The height known as Long Stop Hill (TIME, May 3) was firmly in its hands. One last hill, Djebel bou Aoukaz, known to the troops as The Bou, remained before the open plain. The hill was British one day and German the next. At week's end the hill was German...
Field Marshal Kesselring could and probably did expect the Allies to take other commanding heights (such as the beachhead's highest hill, 4,250-ft. Djebel Zaghouan) and then, when artillery and lookouts commanded the lesser places, to drive up the broad valleys. Doubtless he had concentrated in those valleys the things which General Eisenhower last week said had become, not just an obstacle, but a weapon in Tunisia-the land mine. On the hills Kesselring was deeply dug in, with plenty of the 81-mm. mortars which have always been a weapon but are especially an obstacle...