With such weaknesses there could be no line in depth, indeed there was no line as such and it was not protected by a sufficient artillery force. Although the country into which the Panzer Army was withdrawing favoured the defence, the steep djebels reduced the effectiveness of Allied armour, there was no avoiding the issue that a concentrated infantry offensive would crumple the German front at Mareth like paper. Such reserves as could be scraped together once put into the line to restore a difficult situation would leave nothing to halt a further Allied penetration. The obvious solutions were either to withdraw to more favourable positions — in Rommel's opinion the Gabes area - or to carry out a series of spoiling attacks to delay the Allied build-up for the final blow.
The difficulties facing the armies in Africa were still not appreciated either at OKW or at Commando Supremo and neither Rommel's requests nor von Arnim's questions on supplies were granted or answered. Von Arnim indeed was to comment bitterly that one cannot fire from guns the shells which lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
For the German commanders the situation was nothing short of calamitous. The 5th Panzer Army had only 34 serviceable tanks and Rommel's Army a total of 89 German and 24 Italian vehicles. The amounts of material reaching Africa fell a long way short of the absolute minimum and of the average figure of 90,000 tons per month no less than 25 per cent would be sunk before it had reached Tunisia. Thus the amount which would actualls arrive in the country would be barely sufficient for an army which was not engaged in active fighting. When Hitler was made aware of the African theatre's critical supply situation he immediately ordered the tonnage to be raised to 150,000 tons but gave no proposals on how this fantastic target could be achieved.
The only firm statement which Rommel received from Kesselring was Hitler's order that the Mareth Line was to be held to the last and that any British moves to outflank the defensive positions were to be met with offensive operations. Once again the Fiihrer was either ignorant of the true facts or chose to ignore the facts that the Army had only 1.5 per cent of its battle requirements and only 0.5 per cent of its stated ammunition needs. In any case there was insufficient fuel to carry out Hitler's demand for aggressive operations.
With von Arnim, Kesselring fared even worse than with Rommel. Rommel had never had any of the promises fulfilled which OKW, or Hitler, or the Commando Supremo had made to him in respect of supplies and arms but this situation was a completely new one to von Arnim who expected promises and schedules to be kept. To Kesselring's criticisms of his conduct of the Army, von Arnim asked what his role was and received the reply that he was to halt any Allied advance by weakening this while 1st Panzer Army held Mareth to the last. Arnim then referred to the constant shortages in supplies, arms, and men but this was ignored and Kesselring asked instead the reasons for moving his panzer divisions. The simple answer, von Arnim replied, was that in the north there was a strong Allied army, in the south there was the strong 8th Army, and in the centre the growing power of an American Army whose strength he estimated as three divisions and against which he could throw only one regiment. He returned to the question of supplies but Kesselring refused to be drawn into stating actual tonnages or figures and then left to fly back to the unreal world of Commando Supremo and the OKW [25], where paper divisions had the strength of real ones, where ships and convoys were never sunk, and where armies, at least on paper, were always up to strength. He left behind him in Tunisia the men of the Axis armies, actors in a tragedy whose prologue began at Mareth at 20.30hrs on the evening of 16 March.
But before the British blow fell Rommel had planned and executed his pre-emptive blow at Mareth. His proposal for a pincer operation was rejectee as unworkable by Messe and other officers for they considered that the advance by the northern pincer, in total darkness, and across areas in which the Germans had laid extensive mine-fields with sophisticated anti-handling devices, to be impossible. Gaps, they said, would have to be blown through the mine-fields and such activity would warn the 8th Army both of the time and the direction of the attack. Rommel allowed himself to be influenced and changed his plan to a direct and frontal assault upon the British concentration and artillery area.
The Panzer Army Africa attack opened at dawn on 6 March, two days later than planned, and this short period had been sufficient for Montgomery to reorganise his forces. The German plan was for 10th, 15th, and 21st Panzer Divisions to move down upon the British while 164th Division protected one flank of the thrust and Mannerini Group defended the area to the west. The 90th Light would make a diversionary attack southwards. The 10th Panzer emerged from the mountain passes and drove towards Metameur while the combined strength of 15th and 21st Panzer passed through the Pistoia Division and struck towards the hills north-east of Metameur around which the British artillery was grouped.
As the armoured might of the veteran panzer divisions poured out of the passes to attack, the British reaction showed that they were prepared and waiting so that instead of a drive round the flank and rear of 8th Army's artillery belt the panzers were being compelled to make a frontal assault against massed gun fire. Even before the panzer block had shaken out into attack formation the Royal Artillery had opened up and a quarter of the attack force lay smashed and broken. The panzers withdrew to come on again at 13.00hrs but this drive, too, collapsed in a hurricane of British fire, Cramer, the new commander of Africa Corps, saw himself faced with a string of disasters. His armoured thrusts had failed with a loss of 55 tanks and 10 times as many human casualties, the 10th Panzer had reached Medeinine but could carry the advance no further forward and there w.ere reports of a British column of 400 vehicles advancing towards Medeinine from Ben Gardane. Finally the attack by 90th Light had been a blow into empty space for the British had simply moved back before the blow fell.
Cramer had no choice but to break off the attack and as the panzer columns withdrew during the night it was clear to the German commanders that they had shot their last bolt. The last major German offensive in Africa had opened and died on the same day and from this point on, with the exception of local and minor excursions with limited means and with strictly limited objectives, the Army Group Africa would play only a defensive role and that for a limited period. The life of the Axis forces in Africa could now be measured in weeks. The initiative had passed into Allied hands and was never to be recovered.
Rommel flew to Rome where Commando Supremo accepted that the Mareth Line should be evacuated and that new positions, the Schott Line, should be taken up. This new position would reduce the length of front and saving of men would allow these to form a thicker concentration of units at sensitive points. Rommel proposed an even more dramatic solution, nothing less than a reduction of the bridgehead to a compact defensive area manned by a battle hardened and tenacious garrison. All irreplaceable specialist troops would be flown back to the mainland together with the superfluous rear echelon troops.
These men represented a constant drain on the supplies of the Axis armies. At the beginning of March 1943, the strength of the Army Group was nearly one-third of a million men with a proportion of two Italians to one German. But not all these men were fighting troops and, indeed, there was a far higher proportion of non-combatants to be found in Africa than in other theatres of operation. The Italian administrative 'tail' had been organised for a massive colonial Army with a vast African empire and to this number was added the rear echelon units of divisions which had long since passed into British prisoner-of-war camps. Thus, by March 1943, there were three non-combatants to every fighting soldier and even General Messe's energetic combing out of men to form infantry battalions could not produce sufficient infantry to defend a battle line which ran for over 500 miles. The situation had deteriorated back to that which it had been in November 1942; that is no continuous line but a system of strong points between which patrols secured the ground against Allied assault.