Word: guettar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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 First Class Michael Scotto di Clementi it was digging a slit trench...
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...
...never got through, and to this extent El Guettar was a failure. The fault was not with the 1st Division, which took all its objectives on schedule. It was partly the fault of the 9th, which took ridge after ridge only to leave pockets of the enemy in its rear. The Germans had mortars sunk in gullies which could be captured only by hand-to-hand combat. They had heavy artillery which covered the hills on both sides of the pass and the valley between. And they had observation posts on the highest peaks which could direct their fire anywhere...
Correspondents who saw the British 6th Armored Division break through at Fondouk two weeks later felt that the U.S. armor might have shown more daring at El Guettar. True, the hills to the south of the pass had not been cleared, but a determined thrust might have forced the pass and flanked the enemy in those hills. True, there were minefields in the pass, but so there were at Fondouk, and there the British sacrificed some 40 tanks to plough through. But whatever shortcomings were revealed at El Guettar, they taught some valuable lessons. If U.S. troops learn best...