So here it is, footnotes removed, an excerpt from The Boldest Plan is the Best:
Raid on El Djem
By
mid-December [1942], the Germans had two armies in Tunisia. General Juergen von
Arnim’s Fifth Panzer Army was in the north around the ports of Tunis and
Bizerte. General von Arnim had counterattacked the British First Army and held
them at the mountain line approximately fifty miles west of Tunis. Field
Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had retreated from Libya into southern
Tunisia under pressure from the British Eighth Army. Rommel, under orders from
the Axis high command not to retreat further, held the Mareth Line, a fortified
border between Tunisia and Libya.
Hitler was attempting to
resupply his armies in North Africa through the ports in the north. Those
supplies for the Afrika Korps that were not lost to Allied attacks at sea, were
sent south by rail. Rommel’s army was consuming 400 tons of fuel a day.
Stopping the flow of supplies would cripple Rommel’s ability to maneuver in the
south. General Anderson’s First Army headquarters believed that the German
supply line would be cut by destroying a key railroad bridge near the village
of El Djem. The steel girder bridge was on the coastal railroad line between
the cities of Sousse and Sfax. The Air Corps had hit it multiple times with
bombers and again with fighters shooting rockets. The bridge would not come
down.
The original concept for
parachute troops was more like what we think of today as Rangers or Special
Forces. The 2/509’s initial training emphasized hand-to-hand fighting and
demolitions. Some unknown staff officer must have remembered this or perhaps
they had read of the exploits of the paratroopers in the press. Regardless, the
order came down from Allied Forces Headquarters for a platoon from the 2/509th
to jump into the area of El Djem, some sixty air miles behind enemy lines, and
blow up the bridge from the ground.
The original order called
for two officers and twenty-one enlisted men, making up an assault-security
team and a demolition team, to jump in at 2100 hours on December 20. After
blowing the bridge, the raiders were to move to a spot for a pickup by
aircraft. Whoever wrote the original order must have thought that the
paratroopers were supermen who could do anything. It specified that each man
would “act as [an] Intelligence agency,” capturing papers and documents,
capturing officers, and cutting telephone lines. Secondary tasks were included
such as creating diversions in the enemy’s rear area and acting “generally
as guerrillas.” First Lieutenant John Martin, the demolitions platoon leader,
was chosen to lead the raid, with Second Lieutenant Dan DeLeo leading the
assault team.
Ignoring the fanciful
“intelligence agency” directives, the mission was actually doable. That is, if
the platoon was dropped where they needed to be, they did not encounter any
sizeable enemy force and were able to make it to their pickup point before
daybreak. Then the changes came. First, the aircraft pickup was canceled.
Reasons were not provided, but it was assumed that the Air Corps thought the
risk of losing their aircraft was too great. Nevertheless, the risk of losing
paratroopers was not. The raiding force would have to walk out and exfiltrate
to the nearest Allied unit.
Lieutenant Colonel Doyle
Yardley, as battalion commander, could make the final call on who would go on
this mission. Rather than arguing with higher headquarters and getting the
mission canceled (as the men believed Raff would have done), Yardley decided
that he did not want to lose his best men on an operation that was starting to
look like a suicide mission. He based his roster decision on men he thought
would “most easily be replaced.” Yardley removed Lieutenant Martin and Corporal
Lloyd Bjelland from the demolition team and radioman Ellis Bishop. Second
Lieutenant DeLeo would now command the operation.
Dan DeLeo was new to the Geronimos, but he was not
an inexperienced soldier. DeLeo had joined the Illinois National Guard in 1937
and rose to the rank of sergeant. He obtained his commission in 1942 just
before entering active duty. After jump school, he came to England with the
replacements for the 2/509th PIR. DeLeo had been placed in charge of the rear
detachment of replacements in England. He and the other replacements had come
to North Africa by ship a couple of weeks after Operation Torch. They were
reunited with the rest of the battalion at Maison Carrée.
The changes to the
mission were made before Yardley briefed DeLeo. The Lieutenant did not know
that he or any of the men on his roster were considered to be “easily
replaced.” On the bright side, foreign languages would not be a problem on this
mission. DeLeo spoke Italian. One of his men, Sergeant John Betters, could
speak Arabic. Another, Private Roland Rondeau, also spoke fluent French. Added
to the raiding force were two French paratroopers, First Sergeant Jean
Guilhenjouan and Corporal Paul Vullierme, to act as guides. Both had served in
the area for several years and both spoke Arabic. The mission was postponed
until Christmas Eve and then rescheduled again. DeLeo’s group, now numbered at
32 men, left Maison Blanche the morning of December 26 in three C-47s. After a
brief stopover at Tebessa, they continued on to the airstrip at Thelepte where
they spent the remainder of the day. The jump was scheduled for 2200 hours that
night.
Colonel Raff says that he
did not “know that much” about the mission until the three C-47s landed at
Thelepte. He tried to stall the mission for a day in order to arrange an
aircraft pickup. Unfortunately higher headquarters overruled him and the
mission still had to go that night. Knowing how much trouble transport pilots
had in finding drop zones in the dark, Raff asked Lieutenant Colonel Phil
Cochran to go along as a copilot. Cochran was the commander of the P-40 fighter
squadron and had personally attacked the bridge in daylight. Raff figured that
if any pilot could find the bridge at night, Cochran could. Raff also advised
some of the men going on the mission to kill any Arabs that they encountered,
as they could not be trusted and would probably alert the enemy to their
presence. Oddly, and for reasons unknown, Raff did not have this discussion
with Lieutenant DeLeo.
The flight to the drop
zone took about an hour. As the aircraft crossed the “lines” near Godsin there
was some flak, but none of the aircraft were hit. Even with Cochran on the
flight, they were unsure of the exact location of the bridge. They circled a
small town, decided it was El Djem, and then flew to where they thought the
drop zone was. No injuries were sustained on the jump, but one man was missing
and the troopers were unable to locate one of their equipment bundles. This was
a common occurrence on a night jump, and they decided that there was probably
enough TNT in the one bundle to drop at least the center span of the bridge.
Before the raiding party
set out for the bridge, a group of five Arabs appeared at the drop zone. Some
of the men insisted that they follow Raff’s advice and kill them, but the
lieutenant would not allow it. DeLeo offered them some of their parachutes,
prized by the Arabs, for their silence. The platoon headed east toward the rail
line under the heavy burden of their equipment plus an extra 500 pounds of
explosives.
An hour and a half later,
they reached the railroad tracks. Here they turned south, assuming they had
been dropped at the right location. In the dark of night, they could only see a
few yards, so it was difficult to fix their location in the desert. They had to
trust their plan. The paratroopers encountered another Arab, this one with a
donkey cart. The Americans pressed the Arab into service to help carry the
burden of the large amount of TNT. But an extra 500 pounds was too much for the
donkey and after a time DeLeo let that Arab go free as well. We do not know why
the lieutenant did not confirm his position with Arabs, unless perhaps at this
point he was confident that they had been dropped at the right location and all
was going to plan. Regardless, after hours of marching in the dark, DeLeo
realized that they should have come to the bridge by now.
The men took cover in an
olive grove to rest. In the morning twilight, the lieutenant was able to take a
compass reading on some nearby hills and, with the help of his French guides,
fix his location. He now knew for sure that the pilots had dropped them south
of the bridge instead of north of it. They had spent the night walking away
from the bridge. He told the men that they were nearly twenty-two miles south
of their objective.
All of the paratroopers
knew that there was no way they could march twenty-two miles back to their
objective in broad daylight. The best that DeLeo could do was to cause some
damage and then get his men out. Their chosen target was a small building next
to the tracks that they spotted another hundred yards down the tracks, near a
cut through a small hill. It had electrical wires leading to it and they
thought that the building was for controlling switches on the line. The
demolition men set their charges to the building and roughly 100 yards of
track, all set to blow at the same time.
By now the enemy was
closing in on them. DeLeo had posted security men up and down the tracks.
Within minutes of each other, paratroopers came running up to report enemy
soldiers in at least platoon strength were approaching on foot from both the
north and the south. While they were setting their charges, a switching car
came down the tracks, and German soldiers onboard traded shots with the
paratroopers. The Germans decided to wait for their reinforcements to arrive
and withdrew back up the line. DeLeo shouted for everyone to move west and take
cover. The demo men lit a three-minute fuse. They could see more enemy soldiers
arriving in trucks farther down the tracks.
The ground shook under
their feet as 500 pounds of explosives went off all at once. Dirt, ties, rails,
and other debris flew hundreds of feet in the air. While the explosion must
have shocked the approaching enemy into momentary inactivity, the paratroopers
immediately started double-timing to the west. The Americans quickly split up
into groups of two to six each and headed for home as best they could with
enemy soldiers closing in on them from three directions.
The two French
paratroopers, Sergeant John Betters, Private Frank Romero, and Private Roland Rondeau
stayed with Lieutenant DeLeo. The six men moved out together almost at a dead
run. They came to a road and followed it. Soon a cargo truck appeared with a
lone driver. The six paratroopers stepped out into the road with their weapons
leveled and commandeered the truck. DeLeo sat in front with the Italian driver.
The lieutenant wrapped a sheet over his head to look like an Arab while the
other men climbed in the back and remained hidden under a tarpaulin. This guise
allowed them to travel for some miles that included a harrowing passage right
through a column of German soldiers marching on the road. Sensing the need to
get off the main route, DeLeo had the driver turn onto a secondary road heading
west which soon degenerated into nothing but a camel track. Eventually, the
truck landed in a ditch, broken beyond repair.
Before proceeding on
foot, Sgt Betters advocated killing the Italian. As with the Arabs they had
encountered, DeLeo wouldn’t hear of it. The Lieutenant gave the Italian 300
francs to compensate him for his broken truck and hoped that he would think
favorably of the Americans, or at least not report their presence for a while.
The group proceeded on foot, traveling by night and hiding during the day. The
language skills of the group came in handy in gaining information and bartering
for food during their odyssey. According to Rondeau, “After a couple of days, we
gave it up [hiding during the day]. I guess we got a little cocky, and we hiked
all the way in day and night until we got to our lines.”
DeLeo’s group eventually
stumbled into a French outpost, only after walking into a minefield while
approaching it. The French defenders were kind enough to show them the way out
of the minefield, after which they called Raff’s headquarters to let them know
that the paratroopers were back. A truck was sent to pick up the wayward
Americans. They had been gone nearly two weeks and DeLeo estimated that they
had traveled about 120 miles to get back to Allied lines.
Besides DeLeo’s group, only Private Charles Doyle and Private Mike Underhill made it home to the 2/509th while they were still in North Africa. Those two privates, moving individually, endured a similar ordeal to those who were with DeLeo. That meant that only eight soldiers who went on the raid at El Djem made it back to Allied lines. Sixteen others survived the war after serving time as prisoners of the Axis. One, Staff Sergeant Manuel Serrano, would rejoin the unit in Italy after escaping from a POW camp there. The remaining eight raiders are presumed to have been killed by the enemy. Just prior to leaving North Africa, Lieutenant Dan DeLeo had the opportunity to visit the bridge near El Djem. It was still standing. The lieutenant knew when he saw the sixteen stone pillars that held up the double-tracked steel girder bridge, that his raiding party could have never carried enough explosives to blow it. He was confident that he and his men had done as much damage twenty miles south as they would have been able to do had they found the bridge that fateful night. The raid at El Djem was the third and last combat jump for the 2nd Battalion of the 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment in North Africa.
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