Page:Charles Robert Anderson - Tunisia - CMH Pub 72-12.djvu/11

 had time for only one planned daylight mission from more distant fields. The Atlas Mountains also created a weather difference that worked against the Allies in the early months of the campaign. Axis pilots enjoyed more clear days east of the mountains, while Allied pilots west of the range lost many days to rain. These conditions meant that Axis squadrons had the time and weather to react to targets of opportunity such as armor columns and infantry concentrations, while Allied air units had to be content to bomb fixed targets such as airfields and supply areas.

Kesselring and Nehring allowed their bloodied adversaries no rest. Early on the morning of 1 December a strong counterattack came out of Djedeida. In two columns spearheaded by forty tanks and supported by deadly dive bombers, the German-Italian attackers hit Blade Force, sending its units into a hasty withdrawal south. The road quickly became congested with vehicles of all types, which only made a more inviting target for enemy artillery and dive bombers. In the first four days of December the Germans and their Italian allies built up momentum and pushed the Allies back from Djedeida, securing it as an Axis strongpoint, then farther west to take Tebourba. After a brief pause the Germans resumed their offensive, taking Djebel el Guessa, a key hill mass four miles south of Tebourba, and in the process mauling elements of the U.S. 6th Armored Infantry Regiment. Still the German tanks and dive bombers came and for the next four days pushed the Allies farther west. Finally on the 10th, Allied units held a defensive line just east of Medjez el Bab. The string of defeats in December cost them dearly: over 1,000 missing (prisoners of war), and 73 tanks, 432 other vehicles, and 70 artillery pieces lost.

Frustrated and furious, Eisenhower wrote a scathing description of Allied performance in the Tunisia Campaign. To Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall he confided his view that American and British operations had thus far managed to violate every accepted tactical principle of warfare and would be condemned in the military school system for decades to come.

Despite the string of defeats, General Anderson aimed another attack at Tunis, this one scheduled for 22 December. The continued but slow buildup had brought Allied force levels up to a total of 20,000 British, 11,800 American, and 7,000 French troops. A hasty intelligence review showed about 25,000 combat and 10,000 service troops, mostly German, across their line of departure. Allied commanders hoped that a quick strike and numerical superiority would offset Axis air support and the increasingly heavy rains which had begun to affect Allied mobility. The first contact seemed to justify such hopes.