The Battle of Tunisia began with the new year and the Ninth Evac was ordered to set up on January 23rd at 1 P.M. in the afternoon. By four o'clock, the hospital was ready and waiting for patients to arrive and that evening the first casualties to be admitted into an evacuation hospital were being treated twenty miles behind the front line.
The weather had slowed down the pace of the Allied armies and we realized the difficulties that our troops would have to encounter before defeating the enemy. Wind, rain and snow made living conditions inside the tents unbearable. Life at the front must have been horrible. There was no coal to heat the stoves in Africa during those days, so we had to go up into the hills and chop down the trees which were then cut into smaller pieces. It was a familiar sight to see the personnel of the hospital sawing and chopping in their spare time and it was a more familiar sight to observe the personnel of the operating room run out into the hills between operations to get enough wood to heat the tent for the next case.
Enemy reconnaissance planes "visited" us daily and snapped our pictures but evidently, they were convinced that we were operating a legitimate non-combatant unit as we never were attacked.
The first serious cases of the Tunisian campaign began arriving late in January and it was here where we were given our first opportunity to speak to the boys who were doing the real fighting. Any attempt to follow the true course of the fighting by piecing together the information that the boys brought back would have been quite foolish since each soldier saw only that particular section of the front on which he was fighting. But the morale and spirit of the boys were reflected in the remarks they made coming through the Receiving tent or just before they were given anesthesia on the operating table. A few of their comments might be worth mentioning.
The Allies were being pushed back but the spirit of the boys was very high. Their opinion of the British fighting soldier wasn't very high however. The majority of our boys stated that the Americans would take an objective, give it to the British to hold and then, in a few days, have to retake it because the Tommies were unable to hold it. No doubt, the British had the same comments to make about the American soldier. Those were the days before the other British Army, the Eighth, showed the rest of the world what courage and bravery really meant. The general consensus of opinion among the fighting American soldiers was that the battle for Tunisia would end with an Allied victory by the end of February. Our boys still were green and thought that the experiences they encountered during their training period and on maneuvers were sufficient to defeat the hardened and experienced German Afrika Corps. The usual remark from a patient just before he was given anesthesia was, "I am more scared now than I was when I was sweating out those 88's". That was before the Medical Corps convinced even the American soldiers that we had the greatest surgeons in the world in the American army.
The junction of the veteran Afrika Corps with Von Arnim's command in Tunisia permitted the enemy to launch offensive strokes against the lightly held portions of the Allied line. On February 14th, enemy artillery and infantry broke through at Kasserine Pass. By the afternoon of February 21st, the Axis forces had advanced an armored thrust 21 miles beyond the pass, threatening Tebessa Pass, the Allied position in central Tunisia, and last but not least, the Ninth Evacuation Hospital which was directly situated between the oncoming German legions and the retreating American Army.
The boys who arrived at our hospital during this period blamed their officers for the sad plight of the front line troops. Their inexperience and inability to think under fire resulted in the loss of life of many American boys. The so-called "90-day wonders" were not the leaders that the O.C.S. schools had hoped. One of the explanations for the German break through at Kasserine was offered by one of our patients, a member of the 9th Division Cannon Company. It seems that a British tank unit was protecting the right flank of this company and when the Germans started the attack, it was ordered to move back. However, it failed to notify the commanding officer of the cannon company. As a result, practically all of the men of this unit were wiped out when the Germans attacked from the right.
There were many stories of lack of coordination between outfits at the front. The 39th Infantry Regiment came up to relieve the 47th (9th Division), but the commanding officer of the latter wasn't notified. During one night, the 39th came up and at dawn, were within two hundred yards of the 47th. Orders to fire were issued and it was only the quick thinking of the commanding officer of the 47th that saved his unit from being wiped out. Stories of American planes strafing American troops marching on the road, and anti-aircraft units shooting at Allied planes were quite numerous during the campaign. But in time, the coordination and efficiency of identification was perfected and the Allies rolled on to eventual victory.
At 5 P.M. on February 20th, German artillery fire could be heard in the distance and the Ninth Evac was ordered to evacuate all their patients and get out as fast as possible. That morning, we could see hundreds of planes moving back to airfields in the rear, the roads were filled with convoys coming back from the front and, as far as we knew, three large pieces of field artillery separated us from General Rommel and his gang.
We worked the entire night evacuating patients (600), packing, pulling down tents, and wondering whether we might be guests of the German Army for breakfast the next morning. Most of us, however, did not realize at the time that the enemy was so near. By 5 A.M., we were ready to leave. Meanwhile, further in the rear, the truckdrivers who had worked the two full days previous, were informed that the Ninth Evac had to be moved, but there were no fresh truckdrivers available. Volunteers were requested to offer their services and at about 11 A.M., the first group of "life-savers" arrived in the hospital area. However, there weren't enough trucks to take care of all of the equipment and personnel (the nurses had already left the previous night). About 100 had to remain behind until the following day.
Their tents torn down, a very cold wind blowing, rain clouds approaching and the German Army ten miles away travelling at a rapid pace, these 100 men had plenty about which to think when they went to sleep that night. Except for the rumble of artillery fire in the distance, however, nothing happened that night to disturb their sleep. The following morning at about nine o'clock, several trucks pulled into the area and the rest of the unit happily climbed aboard. As they left the site of the first set-up of the hospital, they could see the German tanks in the distance and several hours later (we were told), bullets from German machine guns fire and shells strafed the area. The Germans were so confident of pushing forward that, later in the day, several German M.P.s drove into Tebessa to direct traffic. They were easily taken prison by some of our soldiers.
History has proven that the Germans were stopped at a point very close to the exact spot where the Ninth Evac had lived for about one month, approximately half way between Kasserine and Tebessa.
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