Kermit Carlson, a Minnesota farmboy, was a radioman attached to the 19th Combat Engineers defending the Kasserine Pass - a barren corridor he had never heard of until the Germans wanted it.
Of the 1,200 men in the battalion on Feb. 18, 1943, only 125 remained the next day. The rest were killed, wounded, captured or scattered, as a battle- hardened war machine gave the untested U.S. Army a bloody baptism.
″I prayed that night. And I haven’t missed a prayer in 50 years. That’s how scared I was,″ said Carlson, who earned a Bronze Star from a foxhole in Tunisia on the northern tip of Africa.
The Axis disaster at El Alamein coincided with Operation Torch, three Allied landings in French North Africa far to the west. The Torch landings were mainly an American effort, and though the troops were green they were confident of victory. Rommel seemed trapped between American forces advancing to block his retreat and British forces in hot pursuit to his rear.
Field Marshal Rommel had performed wonders in two years of desert warfare, earning him the respect and ultimately the admiration of friends and enemies alike. Allied air and naval forces often reduced his supplies to a trickle, and he was usually outnumbered by his British foes. Adolf Hitler was preoccupied with his ongoing Russian campaign and failed to appreciate the strategic significance of the North Africa. Many of Rommel's fellow officers were old-school aristocrats bred in the Prussian tradition, and to them he was a middle-class upstart.
In spite of all these difficulties Rommel won a number of brilliant victories and came within an ace of capturing the Suez Canal, key the Middle East and Britain's lifeline to India and East Asia. Rommel led from the front, a man who was a masterful tactician and strategist, imbued with an offensive spirit that exploited enemy weaknesses. Rommel became larger than life, a man christened with the sobriquet “Desert Fox”
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