The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II by Stephen Ambrose

of the finest tactical organizations that he had ever seen.” By the first week in May, the German bridgehead was reduced to the area immediately around the cities of Bizerte and Tunis. On May 7, British troops moved into Tunis itself; that same day Bradley sent Eisenhower a two-word message-“Mission accomplished.” His II Corps had captured Bizerte. Only mopping-up operations remained to clear the Axis completely out of Tunisia.  Eisenhower spent the last week of the campaign at the front, and it made a deep impression on him. In February he had told his wife, Mamie, that whenever he was tempted to feel sorry for himself he would think of “the boys that are living in the cold and rain and muck, high up in the cold hills of Tunisia,” and be cured.  In May he heard about a story in the American press on his mother; the story stressed Ida’s pacifism and the irony of her son being a general. Ike wrote his brother Arthur that their mother’s “happiness in her religion means more to me than any damn wisecrack that a newspaperman can get publicized,” then said of the pacifists generally, “I doubt whether any of these people, with their academic or dogmatic hatred of war, detest it as much as I do.” He said that the pacifists “probably have not seen bodies rotting on the ground and smelled the stench of decaying human flesh. They have not visited a field hospital crowded with the desperately wounded.” Ike said that what separated him from the pacifists was that he hated the Nazis more than he did war. There was something else. “My hated of war will never equal my conviction that it is the duty of every one of us . . . to carry out the orders of our government when a war emergency arises.” Or, as he put it to his son John, “The only unforgivable sin in war is not doing your duty.”
    On May 13 the last Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered. Eisenhower’s forces captured 275,000 enemy troops, more than half of them German, a total bag of prisoners even larger than the Russians had gotten at Stalingrad three and a half months earlier. Congratulations poured in on Eisenhower from all sides. He told Marshall he wished he had a disposition that would allow him to relax and enjoy a feeling of self-satisfaction, but he did not. “I always anticipate and discount, in my own mind, accomplishment, and am, therefore, mentally racing ahead into the next campaign. The consequence is that all the shouting about the Tunisian campaign leaves me utterly cold.”
    Eisenhower knew that the North African campaign had taken too long-six months-and cost too much: his forces had lost 10,820 men killed, 39,575 wounded, and 21,415 missing or captured, a total of 71,810 casualties. But it was over, and his men had won. His own great contribution had been not so much directing the Anglo-American victory, but insisting that they won as Allies. Thanks in large part to Eisenhower, the Alliance had survived its first test and was stronger than ever.
    Rommel realized that it was all up for his Afrika Korps. His bold bid at Kasserine Pass had failed and now it was only a question of time.  In March 1943, Rommel called Col. Hans von Luck to come see him at his headquarters near Benghazi. Luck drove up and together they dealt with some of the supply problems. Then Rommel asked Luck to go for a walk. Rommel regarded Luck as almost a second son, and he wanted to talk. “Listen,” Rommel said, “one day you will remember what I am telling you. The war is lost.” Luck protested hotly. “We are very deep in Russia,” he exclaimed. “We are in Scandinavia, in France, in the Balkans, in North Africa. How can the war be lost?”
    “I will tell you,” Rommel answered. “We lost Stalingrad, we will lose Africa, with the body of our best-trained armored people. We can’t fight without them.  The only thing we can do is to ask for an armistice. We have to give up all this business about the Jews, we have to change our minds about the