The Bavarian Gate

16

Dancing in a Vacuum

Oran surrendered on the second day-Algiers, farther east, ' had already surrendered to the British-and all of Algeria was nominally in allied hands. Mostly the French had not fought very hard; they'd had their orders and a Gallic sense of honor, but their hearts weren't in it. Surrendering may have hurt their pride, but most of them disliked or even hated being allied with the Nazis.

Meanwhile, the Allied high command was concerned that the Germans would move to occupy the airfields in eastern Algeria and neighboring Tunisia, where there was a power vacuum. The Ales had only a few divisions in all of Algeria, concentrated in the north. On the other hand, though nominally Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps occupied neighboring Tunisia, his forces there were concentrated near the east coast, where they were engaged with the British 8th Army near the Libyan border.

So on November 15th, most of 2nd Battalion jumped on Youks les Bains Airfield, half expecting to be met by German paratroopers. Instead there was a small number of poorly equipped French infantry, who preferred Americans to Nazis. With no fighting necessary there, Colonel Raff sent a company on foot to take and hold Tebessa Airfield nine miles away, near the Tunisian border. They found no Germans there either. Raffs assigned responsibility was the defense of Youks les Bains and Tebessa airfields, which stretched his battalion thin, but he phoned Allied headquarters in Algiers, asking permission to occupy the central Tunisian town of Gafsa, which controlled key mountain roads. The French told him there still were no Germans there. General Clark approved only a reconnaissance, however, and "not one step farther" than Gafsa Then the British General Anderson, in charge of allied ground forces in Algeria, countermanded even that limited permission.

Raff pretended he hadn't gotten the countermand, and his idea of a reconnaissance was more than liberal. It seemed to him that Gafsa and its airfield were a prize the Germans would grab if he didn't. Besides, he was looking for a fight.

As Gafsa was eighty miles southeast of Tebessa via a mountain road, the French commander at Tebessa provided him with two dilapidated, green and white civilian buses, so covered with dirt as to be nearly camouflaged by it. Raff, his broken ribs taped and padded, loaded twenty men in each bus, and started off with them down the road. Macurdy was included because he spoke fluent German. Being within easy range of German fighter planes, Raff had a machine gun mounted atop each bus, with gunners to man them. He had no artillery and no air support.

As reported, there were no Germans in Gafsa, just a French unit of thirty chasseurs, light reconnaissance cavalry stationed there to keep a finger on the local pulse. The French commander really did have his finger on that pulse-in fact on the pulse of all Tunisia-and knew the country intimately. So the two commanders set about to do as much with their tiny forces as they could.

Meanwhile the distant generals decided it had been a good idea after all, and the paratroopers in Gafsa were increased to all of eighty-five.

Back in England, British airborne officers had told Raff that the Germans didn't like operating at night. So Raff sent men by jeep, civilian car, even a hitchhiker on a train, on small nocturnal demolition raids and reconnaissance patrols. Sometimes troopers went out on their own. Macurdy tried his hand at that, with a sergeant named Cavalieri, whose Italian was as good as Macurdy's German.

Then Macurdy got transferred to Kasserine, just in time to miss a sharp fight-the "Battle of Gafsa"-with German troops and Italian light tanks. Fortunately Raff's tiny army just been reinforced by a company from the 1st Infantry Division, and a platoon from the 701st Antitank Battalion.

Meanwhile the troopers had just learned that their battalion was no longer part of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, and hadn't been for weeks. The 503rd, with a new 2nd Battalion, was being shipped to Australia, halfway around the world; Raffs Ruffians had been redesignated the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion. The plan was to expand it to a full regiment, when enough qualified troopers were available.

It was at Kasserine that Macurdy's mail caught up with him. He got seven letters from Mary, and realized he'd written her only once since leaving England. Her most recent letter said she'd miscarried again, and he sensed her deep disappointment. That night he wrote her a three-page letter -long by his standards. It would have been longer, but as he pointed out, there wasn't that much to say that the censors wouldn't delete.

Then, having written Mary, he wrote his parents for only the third time in his life.

Rommel began taking more interest in western Tunisia, and in the first week in December, German and Italian troops occupied the strategic but undefended Faid Pass. The further enlarged Gafsa garrison was sent to take it from them. The troopers at Kasserine were also sent, and arrived in time for the second (and final) day of fighting, which ended with the surrender of the surviving Axis troops. It was Macurdy's first taste of real combat since he'd left Yuulith-his first ever that involved firearms instead of swords, bows, and pikes.

Soon afterward, the paratroopers at Gafsa were replaced by straight infantry. Macurdy's company was moved to the airfield at Thelepte, to protect it and carry out patrols. It was the only company of 509ers left in Tunisia. The rest of the battalion had been sent to Boufarik on standby, several hundred miles northwest, near Algiers.