The Panzers That Broke America at Kasserine Charged El Guettar. Then They Met the M10s

Before the sun cleared the hills east of Elgetta, a signal flare climbed over the Chunisian Valley and 50 German tanks began to roll down out of the pass. If you were a gunner in one of the American tank destroyers dug in on the low ridge across that valley floor, you had never once fired your gun at an enemy in your life, and neither had a single man in your battalion.

The vehicle under you was so new that most of the world had never heard its name. It had rolled off a ship a few weeks earlier and driven straight to the desert. And the men steering the tanks coming toward you were not strangers to this army. 5 weeks before, on the same stretch of Chunisia, the 10th Panza Division had caught the Americans in the open and taken them apart.

Its officers had watched a green American army come undone in a single afternoon, and they had every reason to expect the same thing again. What those German officers wrote in their reports after this particular morning is the whole point of this story. They came expecting to write one thing and left writing another.

This is the day the 10th Panza division met a weapon that had never fired a shot and left the valley with a very different picture of the men in front of them. Let me tell you who was doing the judging because the verdict only matters if the judge is real. The 10th Panza Division was one of the best armored formations Germany had in Africa.

In the middle of February 1943, it had been the hammer at a place called Sidi Borid. Over 2 days there, the 10th Panza and the 21st Panza struck an unblooded American force. They shattered it. German records credit that action with more than 1,600 American casualties and close to 100 American tanks destroyed.

Days later, the same division rolled forward again through the Casarine Pass. And for a week, the American line in central Tunisia looked like it might fold completely. The man in command was General Major Fritz Formb. He was a cavalry officer of the old school born in 1896. A veteran of the First World War who had spent his whole life around horses and then around tanks.

He had taken over the 10th Panza on the 5th of February after the previous commander was lost, and he had held the Knight’s Cross since the summer before. He was not a man who was easy to impress, and by the third week of March, he had good reason to believe he understood exactly what American soldiers were worth in a fight.

He had beaten them once already, badly, only a few miles from where his tanks were now forming up. That is the judge, a professional soldier in one of Germany’s premier tank divisions who had personally watched this same army fall apart [music] 5 weeks earlier. When a man like that comes off a battlefield and changes his mind, it means something.

The Americans he was about to meet were dug in around a desert town called Elgetta. The town of Algatar sat in a bowl of high desert in southern Tunisia ringed by bare rock hills. Holding the sector was the first infantry division, the big red one under Major General Terry Allen. This was General George Patton’s second core and Patton had pushed the division forward along the road that ran between Gavves and Gaffsa right into the ground the Germans wanted.

The infantry was dug in on the ridges and in the waddies, the dry stream beds that cut across the valley floor. The dugin infantry was the least of vom’s problems that morning. The surprise was two battalions of tank destroyers, and one of them was carrying something the German army had not seen before. To understand why that mattered, you have to understand what the American army had decided about German tanks.

After watching France collapse in 1940, the United States Army built a whole branch of service around one idea. If the enemy attacks with mass armor, you do not scatter your anti-tank guns thinly along the line. You pull them. You gather them into fast, hard-hitting battalions, hold them back, and then rush them to the exact spot where the German tanks are trying to break through.

The branch was called the tank destroyer force, and its motto was three words. Seek, strike, destroy. The general behind it, Leslie McNair, put the doctrine plainly. The tank has to advance, he said. So the tank destroyer only needs to find a good position, hide itself well, and ambush the tank as it come. On paper, it was a bold idea.

It had never really been tested in the way it was designed to be tested, which was a full battalion against a concentrated armored attack on a narrow front. And Elgatar would be that test. The first of the two American battalions was the 601st tank destroyer battalion. It fought from a vehicle called the M3, which was a stop gap, and everybody knew it.

Somebody had taken a 75 mm field gun, an old design going back to the First World War, and bolted it onto the bed of a halftrack. A halftrack has wheels in front and tracks in the back and thin sheet metal for side. The gun could hurt a German tank. The vehicle could not take a hit. A crew fighting from an M3 was fighting from behind a gun with almost nothing around them.

The 601st had a score to settle and it had met this exact enemy before. Its commander was Lieutenant Colonel Hershel Baker and his battalion had been in the thick of the disaster five weeks earlier around Sidi Bozid and the Casarene pass where the same 10th Panza division ran over the American line. That first clash had cost the American second core dearly.

By the middle of March before Elgatar, the call had taken more than 5,000 casualties in the Casarine fighting with close to half of those men captured along with heavy losses in tanks, halftracks, and guns. Baker’s battalion had come out of that battering, refitted, and was back in the line. When General Allen laid out his defense at Elgetta, he set Baker’s halftracks on the forward slope of the Elceda Bridge on the inside lip of the desert bowl.

It was exactly where a tank attack coming up the Gabz Road would have to cross their front. Placement would look by the end of the day like one of the shrewdest calls of the battle. The second battalion is the one this story turns on. The 899th tank destroyer battalion had come a long way to reach this ridge. It began life in the summer of 1940 as an anti-tank battalion drawn out of the field artillery of the third infantry division.

The unit trained at Fort Lewis in Washington State, then at Camp Hood in Texas, the home of the whole tank destroyer branch. The men shipped overseas in the middle of January 1943 and landed in North Africa on the 26th of that month, and it arrived carrying brand new equipment that the men had barely had time to learn.

The vehicle was the M10. It was built on the hull of a Sherman tank, so it moved like a tank and was armored like a light one, but the top of its turret was left open to the sky. In that open turret sat a high velocity 3-in gun, a real tank killing weapon with a flat, fast shot that could punch through German armor at ranges where the old halftrack guns struggled.

The trade for that firepower was the open top. The crew of five had good protection to the front and sides up to about 2 in of steel on the gunshield. overhead. They had nothing. Grenades and shrapnel from above were the price of that open turret. But the gun was the best thing the tank destroyer branch had yet put into the field, and Elgato would be the first time it ever fired in anger.

The gun itself had an unusual history. The 3-in weapon in the M10 was not a fresh design. The army had a stock of older heavy guns on hand, and engineers adapted one of them into an anti-tank piece, the 3-in gun that armed both the M10 and the heavy tanks of the day. What that gave the crews was reach. Where the 75 mm halftrack gun had to let a German tank come in close before it could be sure of a hit, the 3-in could kill from farther out.

Its flat, high velocity shot could punch through most German tanks then in service and hit hard when it landed. In a fight where the enemy is trying to close the distance and overrun you, being able to open fire first and from farther away is the whole difference between winning the jewel and losing it. The men of the 899th had trained on that gun in Texas.

They had never yet fired it at anything shooting back. So picture the ground before dawn on the 23rd of March. The first infantry division on the hills. The 601st scattered across the valley in its thin skinned halftracks. The 899th moving up in the dark with its new M10s. Most of the crews about to see combat for the first time in their lives.

and American engineers had done one more thing that would matter enormously in the next few hours. Across the mouth of the valley they had laid a curving belt of mines running from the salt flats called Chot Elgatar across the ga road and along the Kedab Wadi to the base of Arise the maps called hill 336. Vonroch attacked in the dark.

The official United States Army history of the campaign written by George How puts the first movement at around 3:00 in the morning, striking the southern flank of the first infantry division along the Gabis road. His division had assembled during the night near a hill east of the valley, and it came forward in a formation built for shock.

Tanks and self-propelled guns rolled westward with infantry riding in carriers spaced between them. The whole mass moving in what the American observers described as a great hollow square behind and above. German 88 mm guns were positioned to cover the advance and to hammer the American artillery on the heights.

At 5 in the morning, with the darkness still complete, a German motorized force was already probing the southern slopes with gunfire, feeling for the edges of the American position. And then the hollow square came on in earnest. The opening hour went Germany’s way, and to vom it looked exactly like Sidi Boyise.

The panzas rolled over forward. American artillery and infantry positions east of Hill 336. There was close confused fighting in the half light, some of it handto hand. The American losses in those first positions were heavy. Two field artillery battalions and some of the infantry were overrun. If you were one of those German commanders standing in a turret watching American gun crews abandon their pieces in the gray light, you had every reason to believe you were watching a rerun of February.

Then the tanks reached the minefield. The Kdab Wadi and the belt of mines running from it were where the morning turned. A tank that rolls into a dense minefield does one of two things. It stops or its crew climbs down under fire to clear a path by hand. Either way, [music] the tank stops moving. A stopped tank is a target.

As the leading panzas slowed and bunched up at the mines, the rest of the American artillery that had not been overrun found the range and the tank destroyers went to work. The 601st fought its halftracks, the only way halftracks could survive. They fired from a position, then reversed out of it fast before the German gunners could answer, then found a new spot and fired again, darting and shooting across the valley floor.

It was a knife fight. The thin skinned M3s paid for every shot. German fire and the panzas themselves tore into the battalion. By the end of the day, the 601st had lost around two dozen of its guns, according to How’s account, with only a couple recoverable and just nine left able to. That is close to the whole battalion gone.

It is the honest cost of this battle, and it is not the reason the battle is remembered. The reason it is remembered is what happened to the German tanks. As the panzas hung up on the minefield and the American guns and tank destroyers concentrated their fire, the 10th Panza division began to come apart on the valley floor.

How’s official history states it plainly. The 601st and 899th tank destroyer battalions knocked out nearly 30 enemy tanks, and the minefield stopped eight more. The 899th’s new M10s, firing their 3-in guns in combat for the first time, were in the middle of it. By 900 in the morning, the attack that had opened so well for von bridge had stalled, and the surviving German tanks were pulling back the way they had come, leaving a line of burning holes across the ground they had almost taken.

It is worth being clear about what did the heaviest work that morning because the official history is clear about it. The tank destroyers stopped tanks at close range and took the credit that gets remembered. But the arm that broke the back of the attack was the American artillery. The first infantry division could mass the fire of many gun battalions onto a single patch of ground and it poured that fire onto the German tanks and the infantry riding with them the moment they bunched up at the minefield.

How’s official history put it in one line. A reinforced American infantry division, well supported by Allied aviation and above all by its own artillery, had stopped the bulk of an enemy armored division. The tank destroyers and the guns worked as one system. The mines stopped the tanks. The artillery caught them while they were stopped.

and the 3-in guns finished the ones that pushed through. Vonroch was not finished. The American commanders knew it because they were listening. American units intercepted German radio traffic through the day and learned that a fresh attack was being prepared for the late afternoon. The Germans were regrouping to come again, this time splitting their force to swing at the American artillery from more than one direction.

At around a/4 to 5 that afternoon, the 10th Panza came back, and this time the 899th M10s, no longer green, were waiting for it. The second attack ran into the same wall of coordinated American artillery and anti-tank fire as the first. The combat team holding that sector reported that its artillery caught the German assault in the open and broke it apart before it could close.

The afternoon attack failed as completely as the morning one had. By evening, the 10th Panza division had been stopped twice in one day, and von Brush pulled it back out of the valley for good. The German record of Elgatar has a hole in it, and this channel does not fill it by putting words in a dead man’s mouth.

The German documents from that day describe what stopped them as heavy anti-tank and artillery. They do not name the M10. The Germans had run into a new weapon and did not yet know what it was called. And Fritz von Britich, who spent the rest of the war as a prisoner after Chunisia fell, was later held at Trent Park outside London.

The British camp where captured German generals were housed and quietly recorded. Plenty of German testimony from that theater exists, but there is no clean, verified line from von Brch that says, “The M10 beat me at Elgatar, and I am not going to invent one for you.” The men who make these stories up for views would hand you a quote right here.

I am telling you it does not exist. When the words are missing, the actions become the testimony, and these actions are plain. This is a division that 5 weeks earlier had chased the American army across central Tunisia and believed it could do it again. On the 23rd of March, it attacked at dawn with 50 tanks and a plan that had already worked once, and by nightfall, it had been thrown back twice and had left roughly 30 tanks burning on the valley floor.

The verdict is written in what the 10th Panza did next, which was withdraw and never repeat its February success in that sector again. The historian Etch Esme in his study of Patton’s command described the fight in almost epic terms. The great hollow square of tanks and self-propelled guns carried all before it in the early morning, he wrote, and two field artillery battalions and some of the infantry were overrun.

Then the tide of battle turned. The rest of the American field artillery and the tank destroyers of the 601st and 899th stood fast and fought. Soon the 10th Panza division faltered and reeled back, leaving 30 burning tanks upon the battlefield. Later in the afternoon, they returned to the attack only to be once more blasted off the field.

That is a German armored division being turned around twice in a single day by [music] men and machines that had never fired a shot in combat when the sun came up. The 899th had paid its own price to [music] do it. Seven of its brand new M10s were lost in the fighting. Seven crews learned what the open turret cost on the very first day the vehicle went to war.

But the battalion’s guns had held their ground when the artillery in front of them was being overrun, and their 3-in shells were part of what stopped a Panza division cold. Elgatar settled more than one day’s fighting. The whole tank destroyer idea, the pulled battalions and the seek strike destroy doctrine that McNair had built had never truly been proven.

Elgatar was the one time in the war that the concept was used exactly as its designers intended. Full tank destroyer effort masked on a narrow front thrown in front of a concentrated German armored attack and the attack was stopped. Everything the doctrine promised on paper, it delivered on that valley floor on the 23rd of March.

Later in the war, the branch would run into trouble because German tanks stopped attacking in the neat mass waves the doctrine was built to def. But on this day, against this attack, it worked precisely as drawn up. There was a bigger picture too and it made the day matter beyond one valley. The Allied plan for southern Tunisia laid out by the British General Harold Alexander wanted Patton’s second core to push hard enough to pull German armor away from the main British effort on the coast.

On the 23rd of March, that plan worked in the most direct way possible. Vonich’s division came to Elgatar and spent itself against the first infantry division instead of being somewhere else. And for the American army, the meaning ran deeper than any map. 5 weeks earlier at Casarine, the same core and the same troops had been handed the worst defeat the United States Army had suffered against the Germans in the war.

Elgatar was the answer to Kasarine. It was the first time an American force stood in front of a full German armored attack and stopped it dead. The men who had been driven back in February held their ground in March. And the M10 had its answer. The weapon that arrived in the desert too new to have a reputation left Elgatar with one.

It went on to become the backbone of the American tank destroyer battalions through the hardest fighting in Europe. The 899th itself would become the first tank destroyer battalion to land in France. Coming ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day, the battalion fought across the Sherbold Peninsula through the hedge and into the Herkin Forest.

It held the northern shoulder of the Battle of the Bulge. It fought all the way to the Rine and across it at Remagan. By the end of the war, the battalion had accounted for dozens of German tanks and thousands of prisoners. All of that history started on a ridge east of Elgatar with a gun that had never been fired at an enemy.

For the men in the panzas, the meaning of the day was simpler and harder. They had come into that valley certain, and the certainty was earned. They really had beaten this army before. This time the enemy did not come apart. This army had laid its minds in exactly the right place and it had masked its guns and held its nerve while its forward positions were being overrun.

And it had a new weapon they could not yet name. The 10th Panza division would keep fighting in Tunisia for another 7 weeks, but the run of easy victories that started at city boz ended in the bowl of desert around Elgata. The American army von Brch thought he understood had changed between February and March and Elgetta is where he found that out.

Go back to the gunner on the ridge from the start of this story. Before dawn on the 23rd of March, he had never fired his gun at another human being. He was sitting in an open topped machine most of the world had never heard of, watching the tanks of a division that had already beaten his army roll toward him in the dark.

12 hours later, that division was pulling back out of the valley for the second time, leaving its wrecked tanks behind it. and the weapon nobody had heard of had a name. The verdict von Brch never wrote down in a quotable line. His division wrote for him in the tracks it left withdrawing from Elgetta. Ordinary men in those tank destroyers, most of them in combat for the first time in their lives, are the reason the story ends the way it does.

The gun mattered. The doctrine mattered, but it was crews who had trained at Fort Lewis and Camp Hood and had never been shot at before that stayed on that ridge when the artillery in front of them was overrun and did the job the plan asked of them. If your father or your grandfather served in the 899th or the 601st tank destroyer battalion or in the big red one at Elgetta, leave his name and his unit in the comments.

This channel exists to keep those names on the record. And if you have ever crewed a tank destroyer or stood next to an M10 in a museum and wondered what it did on its first day at war, now you

The Panzers That Broke America at Kasserine Charged El Guettar. Then They Met the M10s

Before the sun cleared the hills east of Elgetta, a signal flare climbed over the Chunisian Valley and 50 German tanks began to roll down out of the pass. If you were a gunner in one of the American tank destroyers dug in on the low ridge across that valley floor, you had never once fired your gun at an enemy in your life, and neither had a single man in your battalion.

The vehicle under you was so new that most of the world had never heard its name. It had rolled off a ship a few weeks earlier and driven straight to the desert. And the men steering the tanks coming toward you were not strangers to this army. 5 weeks before, on the same stretch of Chunisia, the 10th Panza Division had caught the Americans in the open and taken them apart.

Its officers had watched a green American army come undone in a single afternoon, and they had every reason to expect the same thing again. What those German officers wrote in their reports after this particular morning is the whole point of this story. They came expecting to write one thing and left writing another.

This is the day the 10th Panza division met a weapon that had never fired a shot and left the valley with a very different picture of the men in front of them. Let me tell you who was doing the judging because the verdict only matters if the judge is real. The 10th Panza Division was one of the best armored formations Germany had in Africa.

In the middle of February 1943, it had been the hammer at a place called Sidi Borid. Over 2 days there, the 10th Panza and the 21st Panza struck an unblooded American force. They shattered it. German records credit that action with more than 1,600 American casualties and close to 100 American tanks destroyed.

Days later, the same division rolled forward again through the Casarine Pass. And for a week, the American line in central Tunisia looked like it might fold completely. The man in command was General Major Fritz Formb. He was a cavalry officer of the old school born in 1896. A veteran of the First World War who had spent his whole life around horses and then around tanks.

He had taken over the 10th Panza on the 5th of February after the previous commander was lost, and he had held the Knight’s Cross since the summer before. He was not a man who was easy to impress, and by the third week of March, he had good reason to believe he understood exactly what American soldiers were worth in a fight.

He had beaten them once already, badly, only a few miles from where his tanks were now forming up. That is the judge, a professional soldier in one of Germany’s premier tank divisions who had personally watched this same army fall apart [music] 5 weeks earlier. When a man like that comes off a battlefield and changes his mind, it means something.

The Americans he was about to meet were dug in around a desert town called Elgetta. The town of Algatar sat in a bowl of high desert in southern Tunisia ringed by bare rock hills. Holding the sector was the first infantry division, the big red one under Major General Terry Allen. This was General George Patton’s second core and Patton had pushed the division forward along the road that ran between Gavves and Gaffsa right into the ground the Germans wanted.

The infantry was dug in on the ridges and in the waddies, the dry stream beds that cut across the valley floor. The dugin infantry was the least of vom’s problems that morning. The surprise was two battalions of tank destroyers, and one of them was carrying something the German army had not seen before. To understand why that mattered, you have to understand what the American army had decided about German tanks.

After watching France collapse in 1940, the United States Army built a whole branch of service around one idea. If the enemy attacks with mass armor, you do not scatter your anti-tank guns thinly along the line. You pull them. You gather them into fast, hard-hitting battalions, hold them back, and then rush them to the exact spot where the German tanks are trying to break through.

The branch was called the tank destroyer force, and its motto was three words. Seek, strike, destroy. The general behind it, Leslie McNair, put the doctrine plainly. The tank has to advance, he said. So the tank destroyer only needs to find a good position, hide itself well, and ambush the tank as it come. On paper, it was a bold idea.

It had never really been tested in the way it was designed to be tested, which was a full battalion against a concentrated armored attack on a narrow front. And Elgatar would be that test. The first of the two American battalions was the 601st tank destroyer battalion. It fought from a vehicle called the M3, which was a stop gap, and everybody knew it.

Somebody had taken a 75 mm field gun, an old design going back to the First World War, and bolted it onto the bed of a halftrack. A halftrack has wheels in front and tracks in the back and thin sheet metal for side. The gun could hurt a German tank. The vehicle could not take a hit. A crew fighting from an M3 was fighting from behind a gun with almost nothing around them.

The 601st had a score to settle and it had met this exact enemy before. Its commander was Lieutenant Colonel Hershel Baker and his battalion had been in the thick of the disaster five weeks earlier around Sidi Bozid and the Casarene pass where the same 10th Panza division ran over the American line. That first clash had cost the American second core dearly.

By the middle of March before Elgatar, the call had taken more than 5,000 casualties in the Casarine fighting with close to half of those men captured along with heavy losses in tanks, halftracks, and guns. Baker’s battalion had come out of that battering, refitted, and was back in the line. When General Allen laid out his defense at Elgetta, he set Baker’s halftracks on the forward slope of the Elceda Bridge on the inside lip of the desert bowl.

It was exactly where a tank attack coming up the Gabz Road would have to cross their front. Placement would look by the end of the day like one of the shrewdest calls of the battle. The second battalion is the one this story turns on. The 899th tank destroyer battalion had come a long way to reach this ridge. It began life in the summer of 1940 as an anti-tank battalion drawn out of the field artillery of the third infantry division.

The unit trained at Fort Lewis in Washington State, then at Camp Hood in Texas, the home of the whole tank destroyer branch. The men shipped overseas in the middle of January 1943 and landed in North Africa on the 26th of that month, and it arrived carrying brand new equipment that the men had barely had time to learn.

The vehicle was the M10. It was built on the hull of a Sherman tank, so it moved like a tank and was armored like a light one, but the top of its turret was left open to the sky. In that open turret sat a high velocity 3-in gun, a real tank killing weapon with a flat, fast shot that could punch through German armor at ranges where the old halftrack guns struggled.

The trade for that firepower was the open top. The crew of five had good protection to the front and sides up to about 2 in of steel on the gunshield. overhead. They had nothing. Grenades and shrapnel from above were the price of that open turret. But the gun was the best thing the tank destroyer branch had yet put into the field, and Elgato would be the first time it ever fired in anger.

The gun itself had an unusual history. The 3-in weapon in the M10 was not a fresh design. The army had a stock of older heavy guns on hand, and engineers adapted one of them into an anti-tank piece, the 3-in gun that armed both the M10 and the heavy tanks of the day. What that gave the crews was reach. Where the 75 mm halftrack gun had to let a German tank come in close before it could be sure of a hit, the 3-in could kill from farther out.

Its flat, high velocity shot could punch through most German tanks then in service and hit hard when it landed. In a fight where the enemy is trying to close the distance and overrun you, being able to open fire first and from farther away is the whole difference between winning the jewel and losing it. The men of the 899th had trained on that gun in Texas.

They had never yet fired it at anything shooting back. So picture the ground before dawn on the 23rd of March. The first infantry division on the hills. The 601st scattered across the valley in its thin skinned halftracks. The 899th moving up in the dark with its new M10s. Most of the crews about to see combat for the first time in their lives.

and American engineers had done one more thing that would matter enormously in the next few hours. Across the mouth of the valley they had laid a curving belt of mines running from the salt flats called Chot Elgatar across the ga road and along the Kedab Wadi to the base of Arise the maps called hill 336. Vonroch attacked in the dark.

The official United States Army history of the campaign written by George How puts the first movement at around 3:00 in the morning, striking the southern flank of the first infantry division along the Gabis road. His division had assembled during the night near a hill east of the valley, and it came forward in a formation built for shock.

Tanks and self-propelled guns rolled westward with infantry riding in carriers spaced between them. The whole mass moving in what the American observers described as a great hollow square behind and above. German 88 mm guns were positioned to cover the advance and to hammer the American artillery on the heights.

At 5 in the morning, with the darkness still complete, a German motorized force was already probing the southern slopes with gunfire, feeling for the edges of the American position. And then the hollow square came on in earnest. The opening hour went Germany’s way, and to vom it looked exactly like Sidi Boyise.

The panzas rolled over forward. American artillery and infantry positions east of Hill 336. There was close confused fighting in the half light, some of it handto hand. The American losses in those first positions were heavy. Two field artillery battalions and some of the infantry were overrun. If you were one of those German commanders standing in a turret watching American gun crews abandon their pieces in the gray light, you had every reason to believe you were watching a rerun of February.

Then the tanks reached the minefield. The Kdab Wadi and the belt of mines running from it were where the morning turned. A tank that rolls into a dense minefield does one of two things. It stops or its crew climbs down under fire to clear a path by hand. Either way, [music] the tank stops moving. A stopped tank is a target.

As the leading panzas slowed and bunched up at the mines, the rest of the American artillery that had not been overrun found the range and the tank destroyers went to work. The 601st fought its halftracks, the only way halftracks could survive. They fired from a position, then reversed out of it fast before the German gunners could answer, then found a new spot and fired again, darting and shooting across the valley floor.

It was a knife fight. The thin skinned M3s paid for every shot. German fire and the panzas themselves tore into the battalion. By the end of the day, the 601st had lost around two dozen of its guns, according to How’s account, with only a couple recoverable and just nine left able to. That is close to the whole battalion gone.

It is the honest cost of this battle, and it is not the reason the battle is remembered. The reason it is remembered is what happened to the German tanks. As the panzas hung up on the minefield and the American guns and tank destroyers concentrated their fire, the 10th Panza division began to come apart on the valley floor.

How’s official history states it plainly. The 601st and 899th tank destroyer battalions knocked out nearly 30 enemy tanks, and the minefield stopped eight more. The 899th’s new M10s, firing their 3-in guns in combat for the first time, were in the middle of it. By 900 in the morning, the attack that had opened so well for von bridge had stalled, and the surviving German tanks were pulling back the way they had come, leaving a line of burning holes across the ground they had almost taken.

It is worth being clear about what did the heaviest work that morning because the official history is clear about it. The tank destroyers stopped tanks at close range and took the credit that gets remembered. But the arm that broke the back of the attack was the American artillery. The first infantry division could mass the fire of many gun battalions onto a single patch of ground and it poured that fire onto the German tanks and the infantry riding with them the moment they bunched up at the minefield.

How’s official history put it in one line. A reinforced American infantry division, well supported by Allied aviation and above all by its own artillery, had stopped the bulk of an enemy armored division. The tank destroyers and the guns worked as one system. The mines stopped the tanks. The artillery caught them while they were stopped.

and the 3-in guns finished the ones that pushed through. Vonroch was not finished. The American commanders knew it because they were listening. American units intercepted German radio traffic through the day and learned that a fresh attack was being prepared for the late afternoon. The Germans were regrouping to come again, this time splitting their force to swing at the American artillery from more than one direction.

At around a/4 to 5 that afternoon, the 10th Panza came back, and this time the 899th M10s, no longer green, were waiting for it. The second attack ran into the same wall of coordinated American artillery and anti-tank fire as the first. The combat team holding that sector reported that its artillery caught the German assault in the open and broke it apart before it could close.

The afternoon attack failed as completely as the morning one had. By evening, the 10th Panza division had been stopped twice in one day, and von Brush pulled it back out of the valley for good. The German record of Elgatar has a hole in it, and this channel does not fill it by putting words in a dead man’s mouth.

The German documents from that day describe what stopped them as heavy anti-tank and artillery. They do not name the M10. The Germans had run into a new weapon and did not yet know what it was called. And Fritz von Britich, who spent the rest of the war as a prisoner after Chunisia fell, was later held at Trent Park outside London.

The British camp where captured German generals were housed and quietly recorded. Plenty of German testimony from that theater exists, but there is no clean, verified line from von Brch that says, “The M10 beat me at Elgatar, and I am not going to invent one for you.” The men who make these stories up for views would hand you a quote right here.

I am telling you it does not exist. When the words are missing, the actions become the testimony, and these actions are plain. This is a division that 5 weeks earlier had chased the American army across central Tunisia and believed it could do it again. On the 23rd of March, it attacked at dawn with 50 tanks and a plan that had already worked once, and by nightfall, it had been thrown back twice and had left roughly 30 tanks burning on the valley floor.

The verdict is written in what the 10th Panza did next, which was withdraw and never repeat its February success in that sector again. The historian Etch Esme in his study of Patton’s command described the fight in almost epic terms. The great hollow square of tanks and self-propelled guns carried all before it in the early morning, he wrote, and two field artillery battalions and some of the infantry were overrun.

Then the tide of battle turned. The rest of the American field artillery and the tank destroyers of the 601st and 899th stood fast and fought. Soon the 10th Panza division faltered and reeled back, leaving 30 burning tanks upon the battlefield. Later in the afternoon, they returned to the attack only to be once more blasted off the field.

That is a German armored division being turned around twice in a single day by [music] men and machines that had never fired a shot in combat when the sun came up. The 899th had paid its own price to [music] do it. Seven of its brand new M10s were lost in the fighting. Seven crews learned what the open turret cost on the very first day the vehicle went to war.

But the battalion’s guns had held their ground when the artillery in front of them was being overrun, and their 3-in shells were part of what stopped a Panza division cold. Elgatar settled more than one day’s fighting. The whole tank destroyer idea, the pulled battalions and the seek strike destroy doctrine that McNair had built had never truly been proven.

Elgatar was the one time in the war that the concept was used exactly as its designers intended. Full tank destroyer effort masked on a narrow front thrown in front of a concentrated German armored attack and the attack was stopped. Everything the doctrine promised on paper, it delivered on that valley floor on the 23rd of March.

Later in the war, the branch would run into trouble because German tanks stopped attacking in the neat mass waves the doctrine was built to def. But on this day, against this attack, it worked precisely as drawn up. There was a bigger picture too and it made the day matter beyond one valley. The Allied plan for southern Tunisia laid out by the British General Harold Alexander wanted Patton’s second core to push hard enough to pull German armor away from the main British effort on the coast.

On the 23rd of March, that plan worked in the most direct way possible. Vonich’s division came to Elgatar and spent itself against the first infantry division instead of being somewhere else. And for the American army, the meaning ran deeper than any map. 5 weeks earlier at Casarine, the same core and the same troops had been handed the worst defeat the United States Army had suffered against the Germans in the war.

Elgatar was the answer to Kasarine. It was the first time an American force stood in front of a full German armored attack and stopped it dead. The men who had been driven back in February held their ground in March. And the M10 had its answer. The weapon that arrived in the desert too new to have a reputation left Elgatar with one.

It went on to become the backbone of the American tank destroyer battalions through the hardest fighting in Europe. The 899th itself would become the first tank destroyer battalion to land in France. Coming ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day, the battalion fought across the Sherbold Peninsula through the hedge and into the Herkin Forest.

It held the northern shoulder of the Battle of the Bulge. It fought all the way to the Rine and across it at Remagan. By the end of the war, the battalion had accounted for dozens of German tanks and thousands of prisoners. All of that history started on a ridge east of Elgatar with a gun that had never been fired at an enemy.

For the men in the panzas, the meaning of the day was simpler and harder. They had come into that valley certain, and the certainty was earned. They really had beaten this army before. This time the enemy did not come apart. This army had laid its minds in exactly the right place and it had masked its guns and held its nerve while its forward positions were being overrun.

And it had a new weapon they could not yet name. The 10th Panza division would keep fighting in Tunisia for another 7 weeks, but the run of easy victories that started at city boz ended in the bowl of desert around Elgata. The American army von Brch thought he understood had changed between February and March and Elgetta is where he found that out.

Go back to the gunner on the ridge from the start of this story. Before dawn on the 23rd of March, he had never fired his gun at another human being. He was sitting in an open topped machine most of the world had never heard of, watching the tanks of a division that had already beaten his army roll toward him in the dark.

12 hours later, that division was pulling back out of the valley for the second time, leaving its wrecked tanks behind it. and the weapon nobody had heard of had a name. The verdict von Brch never wrote down in a quotable line. His division wrote for him in the tracks it left withdrawing from Elgetta. Ordinary men in those tank destroyers, most of them in combat for the first time in their lives, are the reason the story ends the way it does.

The gun mattered. The doctrine mattered, but it was crews who had trained at Fort Lewis and Camp Hood and had never been shot at before that stayed on that ridge when the artillery in front of them was overrun and did the job the plan asked of them. If your father or your grandfather served in the 899th or the 601st tank destroyer battalion or in the big red one at Elgetta, leave his name and his unit in the comments.

This channel exists to keep those names on the record. And if you have ever crewed a tank destroyer or stood next to an M10 in a museum and wondered what it did on its first day at war, now you