Michael Peck
Beware a Desert Fox when he’s cornered.
It was North Africa, in the winter of 1943, and American soldiers were feeling cocky as they prepared for their first ground battle against the Germans in World War II. So far, it hadn’t been a bad war for the U.S. Army. The GIs were well fed, well paid and well equipped, especially compared to their threadbare and envious British allies. Even better, their baptism by fire had been to splash ashore in Algeria and Morocco in November 1942, where the defenders had been unmotivated Vichy French soldiers who soon capitulated.
Maybe defeating Hitler wouldn’t be so hard, after all.
The GIs should have remembered what the British had learned the hard way: never underestimate the Germans. Soon Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, admiringly dubbed the “Desert Fox” by the British, would teach the rookie Americans a lesson on the art of war at a dusty defile called Kasserine Pass.
Perhaps the Americans could be forgiven for a little cockiness. Rommel’s legendary winning streak had come to an end at El Alamein in November 1942. Pursued by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army, Rommel had abandoned his Italian cannon fodder and retreated five hundred miles along the North African coast, from Egypt to Tunisia.
For almost two years, the British and German armies in Africa had danced to the same routine: the British attacked and outran their supplies, the German fell back on their bases and counterattacked, the British retreated and counterattacked, rinse and repeat.
This time was different. While the Eighth Army cautiously pursued Rommel from the east, the British First Army and U.S. II Corps landed in Algeria and Morocco on the western end of the Mediterranean. Which meant Rommel was being squeezed from two sides, caught between Allied pincers and the deep blue sea.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/kasserine-pass-americas-most-humiliating-defeat-world-war-ii-19574
