The night after our tank defeat at Sidi bou Zid I drove back to our cactus patch near Sbeitla.  [. . .]

There was artillery fire east of Sbeitla when I went to bed.  [. . .]

[. . .] when Corporal Nikolin came back, he said just five words, “German tanks are in Sbeitla.”

Brother, I had that tent down and my jeep packed in world-record time.  But still the final order to move didn’t come.  Everybody was ready, so we just stood around in the darkness, waiting.  The cactus patch, and the empty holes where the tents had been, looked strange in the dim moonlight.  Then, suddenly, a giant flame scorched up into the dark eastern sky.  We had set off our gasoline dump.  In a minute red flares began to shoot out from the glow—that was the ammunition dump.

We knew it was all over at Sbeitla.  All that ammunition that had traveled so far, at such expense and so much human toil—there it was, shooting off impotently into the sky, like a Fourth of July celebration.  Shells exploded continuously.  It sounded like a terrific battle.  We watched, talking little, walking around to keep warm.

After a couple of hours the evacuation order still hadn’t come.  So I pulled my bedroll off the jeep, unrolled it on the ground beside the front wheels, crawled in and pulled the mackinaw over my heard to keep the accumalating frost off my face.  I never slept sounder in my life than during the next three hours.

When I awakened, it was just dawn.  Trucks were rolling past the edge of our cactus patch.  The continuous line headed out toward the highway.  It seemed that we had started the withdrawal.  Such things as kitchen trucks and supply trains went first.

Our combat teams were holding this side of Sbeitla, so there really was plenty of time.  But we expected a terrific battle to develop right under our chins during the forenoon.  The outlook seemed dark.  [. . .]

With full daylight came the planes, just as we expected.  But they were our planes that time.  They were overhead all morning, and all afternoon.  We had the sky that day.

Finally, it became obvious that our withdrawal was going to be accomplished without too much opposition from the Germans.  [. . .]

The withdrawal of our forces from the vast Sbeitla Valley, back through Kasserine Pass, was a majestic thing in a way.  It continued without a break for twenty-four hours.  It had no earmarks whatever of a retreat, it was carried out so calmly and methodically.  It differed in no way, except size, from the normal daily convoys of troops and supplies.  [. . .]

[. . .]

It simply could not have been done better.  Military police patrolled the road with jeeps and motorcycles to see that there was no passing, no traffic jamming, no loitering.  Not many of our American trucks brok down; and those that did were immediately taken in tow.  There were almost no accidents.

It was hard to realize, being a part of it, that it was a retreat—that American forces in large numbers were retreating in foreign battle, one of the few times in our history.  We couldn’t help feeling a slight sense of humiliation.  Yet while it was happening, that humiliation was somewhat overcome by our pride in the orderliness of the accomplishment.

The withdrawal from Feriana and Thelepte airdrome was separate, and smaller than ours. [. . .]

There was never anything built aboveground at Thelepte, because the field had to take too much bombing.  Everything was underground—offices, sleeping quarters, and the rest.  Nothing showed aboveground, except the planes themselves and the little knee-high mounds that were the dugout roofs.

One officer, just as he left, tacked on his dugout door a big newspaper map of the latest Russian line, so the Germans could see it when they came.

There were French civilian refugees on our road, but not enough to hinder traffic.  Most of them walked, carring brown suitcases and bundles.  I noticed they did not carry much, so they apparently had faith in our coming back.  There were few Arabs in the stream.  The Arabs usually stayed put.  They get along, whoever comes to take charge of their country.

[. . . . . .]

One thing you folks at home must realize is that the Tunisian business up to then was mainly a British show.  Our part in it was small.  Consequently, our defeat was not so disastrous to the whole picture as it would have been if we had been bearing the major portion of the task.

We Americans did the North African landings and got all the credit, although the British did help us.  The British were doing the Tunisia job and would get the credit, though we were giving them a hand.  That was the way it had been planned all the time.  That was the way it would be carried out.  And it would really be the British who would run Rommel out of Tunisia.

The fundamental cause of our trouble over here lay in two things: we had too little to work with, as usual, and we underestemated Rommel’s strength and especially his audacity.

Both military men and correspondents knew we were too thinly spread in our sector to hold if the Germans were really to launch a big-scale attark.  Where everybody was wrong was in believing they didn’t have the stuff to do it with.