Operation Ochsenkopf, 1943: the Tigers stopped at Hunt's Gap

Early on 26 February 1943 the outposts of the 5th Battalion, the Hampshire Regiment, reported heavy mortar fire. Soon afterward a long line of tanks came down the road toward Sidi Nsir, a handful of stone houses and a railway station in the hills of northern Tunisia. Behind them lay the British supply base at Béja and, beyond it, the whole of the First Army's front. The Hampshires and a battery of field guns had been put there for exactly this moment: to buy time.²

Ochsenkopf is far less known than Rommel's attack at Kasserine a week earlier, which has overshadowed it. John Rickard of HistoryOfWar.org calls it a minor offensive carried out at the expense of Rommel's more promising plans, though he argues it had a clearer purpose than English-language histories usually allow.³

Background: after Kasserine

By February 1943 the two Axis armies in North Africa were squeezed into Tunisia: von Arnim's 5th Panzer Army in the north, facing the British First Army, and Rommel's army in the south, facing Montgomery's Eighth Army at the Mareth Line. They had been pushed there by the Allied landings in Algeria and Morocco in November 1942 and by the long retreat from El Alamein. In mid-February the Axis struck the Americans in central Tunisia, but Rommel's drive through the Kasserine Pass ran out of steam, and on 22 February Field Marshal Kesselring approved breaking it off.⁴ › Erwin Rommel

Von Arnim already had plans of his own. Kesselring authorized him to keep the Allies under pressure in the north while Rommel regrouped, and on 23 February von Arnim chose a limited spoiling attack toward Medjez el Bab. The next morning he flew to Rome to see Kesselring, and the limited attack grew into an offensive along the whole front of the 5th Panzer Army, from the coast to the Bou Arada valley. The US official historian George Howe records that Rommel, now commanding Army Group Africa, was flabbergasted by what he called a completely unrealistic plan.⁵

The plan was not without logic. The British line ran close to Bizerte and Tunis, and the road from Djebel Abiod through Béja was the first good north-south road behind it; cutting it anywhere could force the British back into the mountains, and Medjez el Bab was a vital road junction. The British official history adds that success would have denied the Allies the good tank country running from Medjez el Bab toward Tunis. The difficulty was the terrain: German columns would be strung out on single mountain roads, unable to support each other.⁶

Armies and commanders

The main effort fell to Corps Group Weber, which was to take Béja and envelop Medjez el Bab. Its spearhead was Kampfgruppe Lang under Colonel Lang: 77 tanks, among them 14 Tigers of the 501st Heavy Panzer Battalion, with 15 Panzer IVs lent by Rommel's 21st Panzer Division. Other battle groups were to attack over the hills toward Medjez el Bab and around Bou Arada, while the Manteuffel Division struck along the coast road toward Djebel Abiod. The British official history notes that Ochsenkopf was strictly the name of Weber's attack, while von Manteuffel's was called Ausladung, though higher Axis commanders used Ochsenkopf for both.⁷

Facing them was the British First Army. Its 46th Division, newly arrived in Tunisia, held the north of the front from the coast to Oued Zarga, with the 139th Brigade near Sedjenane and the 128th Brigade, three battalions of the Hampshire Regiment, astride the road from Mateur to Béja. Farther south stood the 78th Division and the improvised Y Division, with French troops and the 1st Parachute Brigade.⁸

The battle in phases

Sidi Nsir

The 5th Hampshires held Sidi Nsir, about twelve miles in front of the 128th Brigade's main position, as a forward base meant to delay any attack and give time for the main line at Hunt's Gap to be reinforced. With them was 155 Battery of the Royal Artillery. There had been warnings: late on 25 February air reconnaissance spotted German tanks and troop carriers on the move, and that night the Germans fired flares and machine guns for long periods, which the Hampshires took to be cover for the noise of tanks moving up.⁹

The attack opened with heavy mortar fire on Hill 609, the observation height north of the village, which German infantry took at about ten o'clock. Then the Germans worked along the hills on either side until they could fire into the defenders from both flanks. Dive bombers hit the guns and the ammunition trucks, and the road that brought shells to the battery was cut. The field guns fought until they were knocked out one by one or blown up by their own crews, and a frontal assault by tanks, led by a Tiger, finally overran the position.¹⁰

The defenders held for about twelve hours, until around six in the evening. That night the survivors made their way back through soaking rain to the 2/4th Hampshires at Hunt's Gap: the regimental museum puts them at about a hundred men, the British official history at 120 Hampshires and nine gunners of 155 Battery.¹¹

Hunt's Gap

The day bought at Sidi Nsir was enough. By the time the Germans reached the long defile east of Ksar Mezouar that the British called Hunt's Gap, the position held five field batteries, an anti-tank battery and air support. On 27 February the German column came down the road with platoons of four tanks spread among armored cars and lorried infantry, and drove into what amounted to an ambush. The leading vehicles could neither turn nor leave the road. At least eleven tanks were never recovered, and British sappers blew up others abandoned in the confusion after dark.¹²

On 28 February the Germans tried again, with tanks on the road and infantry in the hills on either side. By now Churchill tanks had arrived and taken up hull-down positions, and the armor made no progress. The fighting went on around Ksar Mezouar for several more days, but by 1 March Lang seems to have had only five tanks fit to fight, and Weber ordered him onto the defensive.¹³

The flanks

Farther south the envelopment of Medjez el Bab came to little. A German regiment struck two battalions of the 3rd Algerian Infantry near Toukabeur and Chaouach and forced them back, but the Germans did not press close to the town's artillery and broke off on 2 March. Around Bou Arada German paratroopers gained ground on the first day and were driven back on the next by the British counterattack.¹⁴

Only in the far north did the Axis make real progress. The Manteuffel Division cut the track to the radar station at Cap Serrat, the British pulled back from El Aouana and on 4 March lost Sedjenane. The fight for the Tamera valley drew in the 1st Parachute Brigade, and by 19 March the Germans were within two and a half miles of Djebel Abiod before they ran out of strength. Kesselring reported 1,600 Allied prisoners taken on that front.¹⁵

Turning point

The offensive was decided in the narrow valley at Hunt's Gap on 27 and 28 February. The British official history puts Lang's defeat down mainly to the excellent British artillery fire, to rain-soaked ground on which his tanks could not maneuver, and to well-staged infantry attacks during which sappers destroyed damaged tanks that could otherwise have been recovered. Howe adds that von Arnim had sent his tanks into mountain country where they were trapped without room to maneuver, and wasted most of his infantry in the open Bou Arada valley. Above all, in Howe's judgment, the effort came too late: it might have succeeded if it had been coordinated with Rommel's drive on Thala.¹⁶

Aftermath

On 28 February Rommel directed that the offensive must both succeed and stop, and by 4 March Weber's corps had gone over to the defensive. The cost fell on the irreplaceable armor. On 3 March the 5th Panzer Army admitted the total loss of 22 tanks, with another 49 disabled, and on 1 March Weber was down to six operational tanks. Von Arnim claimed 2,500 prisoners for more than 1,000 casualties of his own, but his staff had to admit the same day that German losses were higher than those inflicted on the Allies.¹⁷

Rommel was furious that the Tigers he had not been given at Kasserine had been squandered in the north. In Howe's reading the Axis did gain something: they held the heights above the road from Medjez el Bab to Oued Zarga and kept Medjez under threat, and the British would have to clear those hills before the drive on Tunis could resume. In the far north the British 139th Brigade counterattacked at the end of March and by 1 April had regained every position it had lost.¹⁸ › Montgomery vs Rommel

Legacy and memory

For the Hampshire Regiment, Sidi Nsir became one of the defining days of its war. The regiment's museum tells the story as a battalion put out in front precisely to absorb the blow, which it did, and the official histories on both sides of the Atlantic agree that the day it won made the defense of Hunt's Gap possible. The British official history singles out the battle at Hunt's Gap as a sample of how hard the fighting was along the whole front, and notes that it fell mostly on the 46th Division, newcomers who had much to learn.¹⁹

Rickard argues that the plan is too easily dismissed. Had the Germans reached their objectives, he writes, the Allied offensives that followed would have had to start much farther back and fight their way out of the mountains. The price of trying, in tanks that Germany could no longer replace, is the other half of the verdict: Howe puts the tank losses at almost 90 percent, and the British official history judges that by the evening of 1 March Weber himself saw little chance of success.²⁰ › 26 February in military history