DIVINE INTERVENTION – WEATHER
Another factor that the sources would surely record is divine intervention in the form of weather. Not only are the sources silent on any relevant meteorological events, but it also takes a particular constellation of circumstances for the weather to specifically favor one side over the other, and more often than not, the key role of weather is to make movement more difficult and so favors the defender. Fog or darkness can assist the infantry in maintaining surprise, but this would very likely have been mentioned in the sources, and Kasserine anyway was a mechanized attack.
THE MEASURE OF THE MAN
About Fredendall’s person and career, let us assume we can piece together highlights as we can from the mass of Roman commemorative stelae, which yield a wealth of prosopographical data and allow us to construct legion stationings and individual careers. (See e.g. Speidel, Riding for Caesar) In Fredendall’s case, we may find stelae of him as an acting lieutenant colonel at the Western Front in 1918, another one in Washington DC in 1936 as a full colonel, celebrating his successful landing in Oran in late 1942 as a major general, and finally as the commandant of the Central Defense Command in Memphis TN as a lieutenant general in 1944. It is a worthy career progression, without any indication of failure.
True, Fredendall was relieved of his command, while others – notably Patton – were promoted and remained in theater; Fredendall too was promoted, but it is a time-honored tradition for the military to cover up embarrassing failures by promoting and then side-lining the responsible individual. However, it was quite common, and would similarly have been evident from the career progression of other officers, for US high command to remove commanders who had experienced reverses, only to re-appoint them again a few months later, where they often performed with distinction. In contrast to other commandants sent home in disgrace to serve out their time in a Pentagon cubicle, Fredendall was promoted and given a responsible job. That Fredendall was not re-assigned to an active command could simply have been down to his age. (Fredendall – like Patton – was technically above the age cut-off US high command had put in place for active command assignments, but Marshall insisted that Fredendall get a command)
6. SUMMARY
It is probably fair to say that the US defeat at the Kasserine Pass was primarily due to multiple command failures, with Fredendall failing as a commander both at a technical and a leadership level, which in turn precipitated the performance failures of the officers and men under his command; the same troops that fled so ignominiously at the Kasserine Pass performed competently later on. The US forces at the Kasserine Pass were under strength, but that was not a primary reason for the defeat, nor was there any major discrepancy in the number or quality of the equipment. The faulty doctrine was also not a determining factor; the US Army doctrine had its weaknesses and some adjustments were made, but it is hard to see them as causal for the events at the Kasserine Pass, as indeed they were not in the US Army’s subsequent performance. Another failure at the Kasserine Pass had been that the infantry was expected to use bazookas to defend against the German armor, but had not been trained in their use. This, again, was not a failure of doctrine. Fredendall had broken up his units into detachments that were too small and too widely dispersed; but this was a failure to apply the doctrine, not a failure of doctrine. This, like the absence of field fortifications on the front line, could be seen in archaeology, but our researcher faces three hurdles, one epistemological, one institutional, and one compound:
The epistemological hurdle is: It takes a very experienced observer to notice what is not there. Our hypothetical historian would need a comprehensive and expert familiarity with tactical doctrine, to the level of a graduate of the World War II US Army general staff, to see that the troops should have entrenched, had the time to entrench, but did not; to see that Fredendall split his units into parcels too small and too widely dispersed to be effective. For the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, we have the recorded judgment of Fredendall’s peers, raised in the same culture he was and benefiting from the same education he did; for the Middle Ages, we are rarely so lucky, and when we are, we need to have the confidence to trust the source. (A good example of a historical situation – the famous cavalry charge by the Hospitallers at the Battle of Arsuf 1191, during the Third Crusade – re-interpreted on the basis of military education is in Stephen Bennett, The Battle of Arsuf/Arsur, a reappraisal of the charge of the Hospitallers.
The institutional hurdle relates to the tension between archaeologists, who wear Wellies and dwell in the mud, and historians, who comb dusty archives. Again, seeing things that are not there requires complex processes of reflection and awareness. The archaeologists, on the battlefield, need to know what to look for, be sensitive to atypical manifestations, and develop procedures for ascertaining that the expected features cannot be found; and the historian side needs to be able to communicate the complexity of the matter to the archaeology side.
The compound hurdle involves sources of information that are not academic; living history reenactors or maybe even gamers may have insights that could inform the academic discussion and inquiry. This is admittedly less likely with my chosen simile since the realizations I have set out could only be won by the geeky study of the contemporaneous manuals, which I have excluded, or full-fledged re-enactment, which is not realistically feasible – but with e.g. the tactical application of horses, plate armor or bladed weapons, the issue is more easily grasped. Integrating these insights into academic discussion and validating them is a challenge in and of itself.
The lessons I want to drive home are:
1) We need to read the sources with a military eye – does the source make sense from the point of view of a sophisticated military practitioner of the day, well versed in contemporary state-of-the-art training, regulation, and tactics? (*) If it does not, why might that be? Is the author ignorant, or does he want to make a completely different point? He may be wanting to defend or protect certain individuals who were involved, or conversely create a scapegoat. Or maybe he is not interested at all in the actual events on the battlefield but has recycled a battle description from the Bible or a Classical author in order to lend the winning side the aura of divine favor or historical destiny. It is a fraught process; we know we cannot uncritically take historical sources at face value, as objective observers, but we also cannot simply reject statements in a source that happen not to fit our paradigm. An informed and reasoned dialogue with the source is essential. (*) For a plausible attempt see Ledbetter, ‘Contemporary Military Concepts’, involving the 1575 victory of Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu against Takeda Katsuyori at the Battle of Nagashino; another is Kirk/McQuinn, ‘Archeology and the Second Battle of Sackets Harbor”, establishing, on the basis of archaeology, that the militia performed better than their reputation at that Revolutionary War encounter; or Simonds, ‘Answering the Question ‘Why?’, analyzing the Confederate commander’s tactical decisions at the Civil War Battle of Roanoke Island.
2) Archaeology is immensely important but needs to be read with knowledge. What is not there is at least as important as what is there, and is much more difficult to ‘see’, since it presupposes an ability to recreate a plausible story, one that fits with the military capabilities, training, regulations, and tactics of the time. Based on such a story, are we seeing the right traces in the archaeology, and in the right place, and if not, why not? And if we’re seeing something that shouldn’t be there – why?
3) We tend to focus on the tangible: The archaeology, the sources. We are less comfortable dealing with issues that are based on deductions from military reasoning, even though in reality such considerations are no less valid. It is also a lot of work since we first need to understand the essence of the military thinking of the time, and then apply it to the situation – much can go wrong in that process, and there is little to guide us to the correct path, so getting a paper through peer review is a challenge. Furthermore, it is a truism, confirmed repeatedly by military literature, that organization, tactics, training, command procedures, leadership, and morale are immensely important to military success – but again, these do not manifest themselves in the archaeology, and references in the sources have to be very precise to be useful. The reason I chose the Kasserine Pass as a template is that the root cause of the American failure so clearly lies in an intangible area: The failure was first and foremost one of command, if not exclusively Fredendall’s; and it was an egregious failure, for which neither Fredendall’s personal history nor the performance of the US Army gives obvious clues. A high-level history of Operation Torch, comparable to the run-of-the-mill medieval campaign chronicle, might show that the Allies failed in achieving their objective (a capture of Tunisia before the year-end of 1942) due to learning on the job, bad coordination, struggles with logistics, and German-Italian action. In such a chronicle, the Kasserine Pass would be a mere blip in the general trajectory, meriting maybe a couple of lines.
But there are clues; they are not blindingly obvious and have to be teased out of the interplay between archaeology, sources, and military plausibility. Still, they are there; maybe some meticulous archaeologist or diplomatist has seen them, recorded them, but failed to appreciate their significance. Chasing them down and rearranging the evidence in sensible order may well release their obscured meaning, and provide a fascinating challenge to today’s researchers.
7. LITERATURE
Bennett, Stephen, ‘The battle of Arsuf/Arsur, a reappraisal of the charge of the Hospitallers’ in Jochen Schenk and Mike Carr (Eds.), The Military Orders Volume VI (Part 1): Culture and Conflict in The Mediterranean World (London: Routledge, 2016), 44-53
Cohen, Eliot A., and Gooch, John, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (London: The Free Press, 1990)
David, Saul, Military Blunders: The How and Why of Military Failure (London: Robins, 1997)
Evans, Eric G., The Battle of Kasserine Pass: Defeat is a Matter of Scale, Master Thesis, School of Advanced Military Studies, United States Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 2016
Kirk, Matthew, and Corey McQuinn, “Archeology and the Second Battle of Sackets Harbor: Why the Militia Deserves its Due”, in Smith (Ed.), Preserving Fields of Conflict, 79-84
Ledbetter, Nathan H., “Contemporary Military Concepts As Interpretive Frameworks For Understanding The Conduct Of Historical Warfare”, in Smith (Ed.), Preserving Fields of Conflict, 65-68
Michno, Gregory, The Secret of E Troop: Custer’s Gray Horse Company at the Little Bighorn (Missoula MT: Mountain Press, 1994)
Simonds, Lucas, “Answering the Question “Why?” in the Study of Battlefields: The Example of the Battle of Roanoke Island”, in Smith (Ed.), Preserving Fields of Conflict, 161-166
Smith, Steven D. (Ed.), Preserving Fields of Conflict: Papers from the 2014 Fields of Conflict Conference and Preservation Workshop, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina – South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2016
Speidel, Michael P., Riding for Caesar: The Roman Emperors’ Horse Guard (London: Batsford, 1994)
Sutherland, T. and A. Schmidt, “Towton, 1461: An Integrated Approach to Battlefield Archaeology”, in Landscapes 4/2 (2003), 15-25.
Taylor, Craig, “English Writings on Chivalry and Warfare during the Hundred Years War”, in Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen: Essays in Honour of Maurice Keen, Peter Coss and Christopher Tyerman (Eds.), (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), 64-84
