“It would prove to be the U.S. Army’s first major triumph against the German army in World War Two.” 

By Stephen L. Moore

FIRST LIEUTENANT John Yowell would never forget his first chance encounter with Major General George S. Patton.

It came on March 10, 1943, as the fiery U.S. Army commander was conducting inspections of his 1st Infantry Division and 1st Armored Division in the desert of Tunisia.

Three months after the Allied landings in North Africa, the U.S. Army was in a bad state, having suffered heavy losses in battles at Sidi bou Zid and Kasserine Pass during February 1943, near the western border of Tunisia. Major General Lloyd Fredendall had been relieved of his command of the U.S. Army’s II Corps, replaced Patton, a former tank commander who meant business.

Upon arriving at his new headquarters on March 6, Patton—soon promoted to lieutenant general—set to work implementing stronger discipline within his troops. “Old Blood and Guts” barked at soldiers and fined those he found without proper uniform neckties and leggings. Patton’s railings did not discriminate, and one of the units he addressed was the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion.

Tall and lean, John Dee Yowell had been nicknamed “Slim” while attending Texas A&M before the war. He was in conversation with several other officers of his battalion when Patton approached. Among them was Yowell’s platoon commander, 25-year-old First Lieutenant Lawrence Marcus—a Harvard graduate who hailed from Dallas, Texas, where his Jewish family’s retail fashion business, Neiman-Marcus, continued to thrive even during wartime. Yowell and some of the officers had grizzled faces and wore wool-knit caps instead of combat helmets.

“Every man old enough will shave every day,” Patton snapped. “Officers will wear ties into combat.”

Having spoken these words, Patton advanced to within a foot of Lieutenant Marcus’s face and snapped, “Any anyone wearing a wool knit cap without a steel helmet will be shot!”

Patton’s message had its desired effect on every other group of soldiers he called out. Serious business was at hand in the Tunisian desert. Lieutenant Yowell’s 1st Platoon of Company B would soon be driving into combat against German armored divisions of superior Panzers. The 601st would face their opponents with their lightly armored anti-tank vehicles, known as M3 Gun Motor Carriages. Built on a rear half-track chassis with regular wheels in the front for steering, the M3s provided the handling of a truck with the capabilities of a tank.

The 20-foot-long, nine-ton half-tracks were nimble, capable of speeds up to 45 mph on level terrain. Each sported a 75mm main gun. Being largely open-air, the half-track offered little protection to its five-man crew from desert heat, blowing sand and the occasional North African thunderstorm. Each M3 was thinly armored, offering enough protect to ward off small arms fire, but were prone to destruction when facing artillery shells or enemy tank fire. The men called them “Purple Heart boxes,” a grim reference to the U.S. Army decoration for combat wounds.

Two weeks after witnessing Patton unleash on Lieutenant Marcus, Slim Yowell was preparing his platoon for combat. Patton’s II Corps was on the offensive, working to seize the Eastern Dorsal chain of the Atlas Mountains from the Axis forces, in a move that would threaten the right rear of the Germans and Italians defending the Mareth Line facing Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army.

During that time, the U.S. 1st Infantry Division had seized the town of Gafsa and occupied the oasis of El Guettar with little opposition. But the 601st had suffered casualties on the afternoon of March 21 to German Stuka dive bombers. Lawrie Marcus was among the men seriously wounded when a bomb exploded near his half-track. By the following day, Yowell’s 1st Platoon of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion was preparing for a major engagement with the Germans.

The 601st commander, Lieutenant Colonel Herschel Baker, offered his battalion a blunt message on the morning of March 23. In their previous encounters with German tanks at Ousseltia and Sbeitla, his M3 crews had run from the superior Panzers. This time, they were to hold on and fight it out, regardless of the odds.

During the day on March 22, Baker’s men had reconnoitered the El Guettar valley. That evening, his men dug in to defensive positions in front of artillery crews, ready to protect their supply lines against an expected advance by German armored forces. The strength of Baker’s operational units was thirty-one heavy destroyers (75mm guns mounted on half-tracks) and six light 37-mm destroyers.

His crews sweated through the overnight hours, building up sand around their half-tracks to help disguise them. The M3s were positioned on either side of the main road leading from the Tunisian towns of Gafsa and Gabes. Sergeant John Nowak, the machine gunner for Slim Yowell’s half-track, spent hours with fellow tankers hacking at the rough ground with picks and shovels. By 3 a.m. on March 23, he was exhausted, and his vehicle was among those closest to the nearby German tanks. “But it was still dark,” Nowak wrote in his diary. “It was hard to distinguish anything.”

The German forces that Yowell and Baker’s men faced were under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who sent his 10th Panzer Division forward to assault the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division, which was pushing eastward along the Gafsa-Gabes highway. Assembling about nine miles east of El Guettar, Generalmajor Fritz von Broich’s force consisted of about 6,000 men, 50 serviceable Panzers, a company of tank destroyers and an assault gun battery.

The roar of von Broich’s tanks could be heard around 4 a.m. as they advanced. Thirty minutes later, elements of the 601st’s Recon Company fired on a German motorcycle scout team and captured one of the riders. Through rapid interrogation, Lieutenant Colonel Baker learned that the Germans planned to commence their offensive around 5 a.m. with a sizable number of 10th Panzer heavily-armored tanks.

Right on time, Yowell’s 1st Platoon heard the German armored vehicles clanking forward. With him were eight gun trucks and their crews. Within minutes, one of his M3 commanders, Sergeant Willie Nesmith, reported a Panzer rolling forward in the moonlight only a thousand yards from his position.

“Fire when you see fit!” Yowell ordered.

A minute later, the 601st tank destroyer teams did just that. Their first 75mm armor-piercing rounds knocked out two of the advancing German tanks, but two of Yowell’s destroyers could not lower their barrels enough to take the leading Panzer under fire. The lieutenant had them back up a hundred yards to obtain the proper elevation, and then begin firing. One of Yowell’s crews knocked out another two Panzers with seven well-placed rounds.

As Sergeant Adolph Raymond’s M3 landed solid hits against an enemy Mark IV tank, German tankers hit Raymond’s half-track with at least three direct hits. Platoon Sergeant Mike Stima used a jeep-mounted .50-caliber machine gun to provide covering fire as Raymond’s crew sprinted for safety.

As dawn began to break, Lieutenant Yowell saw four to five lines of German tanks advancing, each appearing to contain at least a dozen Panzers. By 5:20 a.m., other 601st platoons were firing on the German tanks, scoring hits but slowly suffering their own losses. As various M3s were hit and set ablaze, the surviving tank destroyers fell back to assume new positions to continue the fight.

Near the Gabes road, Stima continued to fire from Yowell’s M3 as German panzergrenadiers began to surge forward a thousand yards away. As more light bathed the desert battlefield, the Germans began laying down heavy smoke screens along the far ridges. Sergeant Nesmith’s M3 blasted apart another Mark IV tank at 800 yards, but soon suffered a direct hit. His platoon soon reduced to only four operational tank destroyers, Yowell rallied his men to keep up the fight.

Gunner Nowak assisted Stima in pouring more than three thousand rounds of .50-caliber machine gun bullets into the surging infantrymen. Yowell, frustrated by the lack of visibility in the rising dust and smoke, knew his thin-skinned M3s were no match for the advancing German tanks. He ordered his four surviving crews to move to the next ridge line. En route, Nesmith’s M3 took more hits, and was permanently disabled. Nowak and Yowell assisted four wounded survivors from Nesmith’s vehicle to a three-quarter-ton truck, while Stima protected them with machine gun fire.

After two hours of fighting, Yowell could see that German infantrymen were heavily positioned and that his meager force was running short of ammunition. Whittled down to just three half-tracks and a personnel carrier, the lieutenant decided it was high time to race for the hills to prevent any further destruction. His fight for the remainder of March 23 became one for survival.

During the late morning, Brigadier General Ted Roosevelt ordered the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion forward to assist. The unit claimed destruction of 10 Mark IV tanks, but suffered four of its heavier M-10 tank destroyer knocked out, and 19 tankers killed or wounded.

By mid-morning, Herschel Baker’s 601st had helped turn back one German armored advance. Combined with the advance from its sister 899th Battalion, the smaller tank destroyers had knocked out dozens of enemy tanks before their own losses forced the surviving units to fall back toward safety. Men around General Roosevelt cheered as the Germans were seen to retreat eastward to regroup, while hauling away their own damaged tanks for repairs.

George Patton was pleased that his forces had halted the Axis advance by noon, but two batteries of his own artillery battalions had been overrun. Lieutenant Colonel Baker ordered Lieutenant Yowell to move north and northeast from the hills after dark in order to reach friendly infantry positions. Baker learned through radio intercepts that the Germans were planning a second push around 1640 that afternoon.

This time, his remaining tank destroyer crews were ready, supported by additional artillery pieces. When the Germans pushed forward again through the area U.S. troops were now calling “Death Valley,” they were met by a rain of high-explosive shells and high volumes of machine gun fire.

“It was like mowing hay,” Baker recalled, as he watched scores of German infantrymen being cut down.

Patton’s II Corps stood its ground as evening approached. After two hours of fighting during the afternoon engagement, German panzergrenadiers were seen to be falling back behind a ridge at the east end of the valley. The morning battle had been a duel of tanks and artillery, but the evening event had simply been a massacre.

Baker’s few remaining tank destroyers had weathered the final enemy storm. Twenty-one of his destroyers had been hit and disabled, but eight would later be repaired. Against a superior foe, his men had fired more than fifty thousand rounds of 75-mm shells, .50-caliber, .30-caliber, and .45-caliber machine gun bullets. His men believed they had knocked out more than two dozen German tanks and had forced the enemy to retreat.

Lieutenant Yowell, down to three tank destroyers, and eleven men, had spent the late afternoon of March 23 in concealment. As evening approached, his small group moved toward friendly positions. Men walked in front of their half-tracks to reconnoiter routes through the rugged hills. In some tight spots, gunner John Nowak and others chipped away rocks to make holes wide enough for their M3s to squeeze through. It was nearly noon on March 24 when Yowell’s survivors found their way back to the balance of its 601st Battalion.

Mentally and physically exhausted, Nowak found that his battalion comrades had written them off. Amongst handshakes and back slapping, one tanker told him, “We never expected to see you guys alive again!”

The Battle of El Guettar was in its opening stages, and it would be early April 1943 before the final outcome was decided. For George Patton, it would prove to be his first big victory, and the U.S. Army’s first major triumph against the German army in World War Two.

Among the units Patton could thank for slugging it out against superior Axis forces during the morning hours of March 23 had been men like Slim Yowell and John Nowak, survivors of the “Purple Heart Box” battalion who had exceled under the most dire of situations.

Stephen L. Moore is the author of Patton’s Payback from Penguin Random House. He is the author of multiple books on World War II, Vietnam and Texas history, including As Good As Dead, Pacific Payback and Texas Rising.

Sources:

Atkinson, Rick. An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943. New York, NY: Picador, 2002, 441.

Baker, Herschel D. “Tank Destroyer Combat in Tunisia.” Tank Destroyer School, 117, January 1944, pg. 17 (TIS Library); accessed via http://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlesPDFs/TD_Combat_in_Tunisia_Jan_1944.pdf

Baker, Herschel D. “Battle Operations Report.” March 28, 1943. See tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlesPDFs/601st_Battle_Operations_Report_El_Guettar_Mar_23_1943—10_pages.pdf

Barron, Leo. Patton’s First Victory: How General George Patton Turned the Tide in North Africa and Defeated the Afrika Korps at El Guettar. Lanham, MD: Stackpole Books, 2018, 54.

Marcus, Lawrence.  Interview from Patton 360 video, Episode 2: Rommel’s Last Stand.

Morrison, Thomas. Letter on Gafsa-Gabes Road, 4-5; accessed tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/601st-Pers_Narr_T._Morr_Gafsa_Rd.pdf

Nowak, John. Personal memoirs.

Schick, Albert. Combat History of the 10. Panzer-Division, 1939-1943. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: J J. Fedorowicz Publishing, Inc., 2013, 499.

Stima, S/Sgt. Michael W. Company B, 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion. Statement, 27 March 1943. Accessed tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs/601st_Op_Statements_Co_B_Mar._27_1943–15pages.pdf, 1-2.

Yowell, 1st. Lt. John D. Platoon Commander, 1st Platoon, Company B, 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion. “Battle Operations of Lt. John D. Yowell,” 27 March 1943. Accessed tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs/601st_Op_Statements_Co_B_Mar._27_1943–15pages.pdf, 1-2.