Word: gafsa
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...InNorth Africa Hersey takes the place of Senior Foreign News Editor Charles Wertenbaker, who spent three months at the front in Tunisia, followed the Americans to Gafsa, to Maknassy, to El Guettar, to Fondouk and almost to Mateur. He missed the dramatic entry into Tunis only because he had flown home to give you his eye-witness appraisal of just how each American division acquitted itself-as part of our final report on the North African victory...
...people at home to know how they had fought. It was important that the people understand the nature of their accomplishments, and the reasons for their failures. Between March 18 and the end of the campaign last week, our U.S. divisions were almost continuously on the offensive, from Gafsa in the south to the tip of Tunisia at Bizerte. They were the 1st, the 9th and the 34th Infantry and the 1st Armored Division. Now that most restrictions of censorship have been lifted, it is possible to tell something of how each fought...
...Gafsa & El Guettar. On the night of March 17-18 General Terry Allen's 1st Division traveled 45 miles by truck to launch a surprise attack on Gafsa at daybreak. Purpose: to establish Gafsa as a supply base for the Eighth Army. The first shell that pitched toward Gafsa that morning opened the campaign that ended at Bizerte and Tunis. It was the 1st Division's first action as a complete division since it landed in Oran in November. So successful was it that the enemy got out of Gafsa without a fight, and three days later...
Meanwhile the 1st Armored Division had taken Maknassy, north of Gafsa, but was unable to push through the hills beyond. Reason: insufficient infantry. So about half the division was shifted to El Guettar for the new 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...
Executor of this break-through and temporary commander of the U.S. II Corps (as Lieut. General George Patton had been at Gafsa and El Guettar, where it had been expected that tanks would be supreme) was Major General Omar N. Bradley, a top-notch infantry soldier. Tall, wiry and grey, General Bradley is as tough as his hardest topkick. He was an outstanding athlete at West Point. When a new 550-yard obstacle course was opened under his supervision at Camp Claiborne in Louisiana, he personally tested its 14 hazards at top speed...