Page:Charles Robert Anderson - Tunisia - CMH Pub 72-12.djvu/13

 Free French government was questionable, and the issue of French reliability arose all over again in Allied command bunkers and foxholes.

General Eisenhower found nothing to celebrate over Christmas 1942. He and his subordinate commanders concluded that their string of defeats could be ended only by making major changes in the way they were fighting Axis armies. They would have to do more than simply replace personnel and equipment losses and try another dash to Tunis. They would have to build a multi-division force with hundreds of tanks and much stronger air support, and they would have to coordinate pressure against the Axis on a front hundreds of miles long. They would also have to wait for the weather to clear. These preparations required a minimum of two months.

With the Allies still trying to carry out a quick thrust to Tunis in December, the shape of the opposing orders of battle that would decide the outcome of the Tunisia Campaign could already be discerned. Kesselring was bringing up to full strength General Juergen von Arnim's Fifth Panzer Army, successor headquarters to Nehring's XC Corps, consisting of the Division von Broich, a heavily armored unit in the Bizerte area, the 10th Panzer Division in the center before Tunis, and the Italian Superga Division on the southern flank. On the opposite side, Eisenhower transferred units from Morocco and Algeria eastward into Tunisia, bringing in fresh troops as fast as they could be prepared. On the north, Anderson's Eastern Task Force would become the five-division British First Army, with three more divisions soon joining the 6th Armoured and 78th Infantry Divisions already in Tunisia. On the south the basis of a two-division anti-Nazi French corps was being laid. In the center Eisenhower planned a full American corps, to be commanded by Maj. Gen. Lloyd R. Fredendall. With regiments from Algeria and Morocco, the U.S. II Corps would eventually include the larger part of six divisions: the 1st, 3d, 9th, and 34th Infantry and the 1st and 2d Armored.

The stage of conflict shifted south in January 1943. As the British Eighth Army pushed the German-Italian Panzer Army west across Libya, General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel sent staff officers to the port of Sfax, 150 miles south of Tunis, to prepare for a juncture of Axis forces in Tunisia and Libya. The possibility of a Rommel-von Arnim link-up greatly concerned Allied planners because these combined armies could sweep westward into Algeria and Morocco, where the Allies held only coastal enclaves. To head off this threat Eisenhower subordinated capture of the Bizerte-Tunis bridgehead to operations in central and southern Tunisia.