Victory in North Africa
After Bizerte and the other Allied victories, German resistance just fell apart. They were pushed against the sea, with nowhere to go, and no hope of being evacuated. Allied air power had cut off naval shipping and air transport to Italy. A series of surrenders followed for the next few days.
The first of these happened near Bizerte, and Carol Johnson documented it in a drawing. This seems to be the only image of this surrender, which stopped most of the fighting in North Africa.
Operation Vulcan pushed the Germans from the west and south to a small peninsula, near Tunis, the Cap Bon. As the German forces were concentrated, and sea lanes cut, so that naval evacuation was impossible, the Allies concentrated aircraft and artillery at acks. On May 8, 1943, there were more than 2000 sorties flown and more than 1000 artillery attacks on the remaining German forces, concentrated in an area just 7000 meters wide. By now, confronted with insurmountable forces and unable to escape, the German will to resist just evaporated. The piecemeal surrender of German forces began on the next day.
The Surrender of General Krause and the Afrika Corps
The main surrender started at 9:50 AM on May 9th, when a Mercedes limousine draped with a white flag arrived at II Corps headquarters, and a freshly shaved German officer asked, “What are your terms for surrender?”
Major General Erny (Ernest Nason) Harmon, commander of the First Armored Division, consulted with Lt. General Omar Bradley, the commander of II Corps and General Harmon’s own commander.
Here are details of that day from http://ww2.debello.ca/african/end.html:
It was shortly after 11 that morning when Harmon telephoned corps. His gravelly voice rasped noisily over the miles of field wire from his CP near Ferryville.
“A couple of Krauts just drove in under a white flag. They want to talk surrender. What d'ya want me to tell them? Or do you want to come up and handle this stuff yourself?”
“I'll stick by here, Ernie,” I said, in the event something happens elsewhere. “Just tell them we have no terms. It must be unconditional surrender.”
“You won't have any trouble with this gang,” he answered. “They're chewed up pretty badly. They've even asked for an armistice to work things out since they have no communications. I've already stopped my tanks and ordered them to cease fire.”
“Good. I'll call the other divisions and tell them to halt in position. No sense in taking any more casualties unless we have to.”
“I'm going to send one of my officers back with them to see that they follow our instructions. Suppose I send Maurice Rose?” Rose, then a Colonel, was Harmon's brilliant young chief of staff.
“Fine, Ernie,” I replied. “but have Rose make certain they don't destroy their weapons. They are to collect their guns in ordnance piles and run their vehicles into pools. Tell them that if we catch them trying to destroy their stuff the armistice is off. We'll shoot the hell out of them.”
At 11:40 that May morning Major General Fritz Krause, the poker-faced artillery commander of the Afrika Korps, listened stonily to Harmon's instructions. Twenty minutes later surrender was negotiated for the II Corps front. Thus at noon on May 9, 182 days after the North African invasion, 518 days after Pearl Harbor, the American army secured its first unconditional surrender of Axis forces.
At 3 that afternoon Krause was joined in Harmon's CP by a group of senior officer colleagues. In huge Mercedes-Benz staff cars, weighted down with baggage, they had turned out in crisp dress uniforms, as though to stiffen their pride in defeat.
“You would have thought the bastards were going to a wedding,” Harmon said in telling me of their arrival.
At 12:50, General Harmon reported the surrender of the 10th Panzer and 15th Panzer Divisions. Eventually, the number of enemy prisoners reached almost 40,000.
Tall, distinguished and scholarly looking, Krause accepted the defeat with good grace.
Surrender of German commander General von Arnim
After the Allied attacks on May 6, Hitler ordered the overall German commander, German Colonel- general (Generaloberst) Hans Jürgen von Arnim, to fight to the last man. But von Arnim took the order to mean to fight until their last tank shell.
With tank ammunition exhausted, and the rest destroyed by von Arnim, on May, 12th, General von Arnim surrendered to the British, not wanting to be taken by the French. He had asked British General Kenneth Anderson, commander of the British First Army and overall commander of the Allied effort in North Africa for terms. “Unconditional surrender” was the message he received back, and "Also the handing over of all weapons and plans for mine fields and assistance in sweeping the mined fields."
The terms were delivered to von Arnim as he stood haughtily in his headquarters, which patrols by the 4th Indian division had already found. His face turned purple. His big right fist hammered at the palm of his left hand. The iron cross over his heart trembled as his whole body shook with anger. He refused to sign. But later he surrendered.
While all this was going on von Arnim sent a final message to Hitler, who had commanded him to fight to the bitter end. "I report that the order to defend Tunisia to the last cartridge has been carried out," his message said. His radio operator, who sent the final message to Hitler in reply to vain urgings by Hitler and Premier Benito Mussolini to fight to the end, added, apparently on his own initiative: "Everything has been destroyed. We are closing down forever."
His surrender was initially to Lt. Colonel Lionel Showers, commanding the Second Gurkhas, a battalion of the Indian Fourth division. “I was never so surprised in all my life,” the Colonel said.
While the British were polite to von Arnim, General Eisenhower refused to meet with him to accept his sword in surrender.
Von Arnim served the rest of the war as a British prisoner of war interned along with 24 other German general officers at Camp Clinton, Mississippi,
Von Arnim (left), leaves Tunisia for England after his surrender, Wikipedia
Surrender of General von Liebenstein and Field Marshal Messe
Field Marshal Meese surrenders to Gen. Freyberg from digilander.liberto.it
On May 13, 1943 temporary corps commander, New Zealand Lieut. Gen. Sir Bernard
Freyberg accepted the surrender of Field Marshal Giovanni Messe, commander of the 1st Italian Army, and Major General Kurt von Liebenstein, commander of the German 164th Light Afrika Division.
His troops were ordered to turn themselves over to the nearest Allied unit, to destroy no more materiel, and to furnish plans of any mine fields in their sectors. He himself, after radio communication with the headquarters of General Freyberg, British 10 Corps
commander, surrendered in the grade of Field Marshal, to which he had been promoted that very morning. This was the last of the major surrenders in North Africa. Thus ended hostilities in Tunisia.
Prisoners
As II Corps units pushed on to cut the Bizerte-Tunis road, they found Axis units in a state of collapse. Enemy troops were surrendering in such large numbers that they clogged roads, impeding further advance.
The last of some 275,000 Germans and Italians surrendered on May 10. By May 13, all of the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered. When Axis generals began surrendering on May 9 the six-month Tunisia Campaign entered its final days.
Most Afrika Korps POWs were transported to the United States and held in places like Camp Shelby in Mississippi until the end of the war.
For the first time in the war, the British claimed more German prisoners than the number of British captives in Germany.
Ernie Pyle wrote about German POWs in “German Supermen Up Close,” dated May 8, 1943:
“The main impression I got, seeing German prisoners, was that they were human like anybody else, fundamentally friendly, a little vain. Certainly they are not supermen. Whenever a group of them would form, some American soldier would pop up with a camera to get a souvenir picture. And every time, all the prisoners in the vicinity would crowd into the picture like kids.”
38 Generals surrendered overall, including Gustav von Vaerst, Fritz Krause, Karl Bülowius, and Willibald Borowietz of the German Army, and Generals Kurt Bassenge and Georg Neuffer of the Ger- man Air Force. They were initially in custody at Headquarters, II Corps, near Mateur, Algeria. Some spent the rest of the war in prisoner camps in the US.
Here is a partial list of captured German generals:
Gen. Oberst von Arnim (Hans Jürgen): OB Heeresgruppe Afrika Gen. d. Pz. Tr. von Vaerst (Gustav): OB 5. Panzerarmee
Gen. Lt. Borowietz (Willibald): Kdr. 15. Panzerdivision
Gen. Lt. Freiherr von Broich (Friedrich): Kdr. 10. Panzerdivision Gen. Lt. Graf von Sponeck (Theodor): Kdr. 90. Leichte Division
Gen. Maj. Dipl. Ing. Bassenge (Gerhard): Luftwaffe
Gen. Maj. von Hülsen (Heinrich Hermann): Kdr. 21. Panzerdivision Gen. Maj. Krause (Friedrich): Kdr. 334. Infanteriedivision
Gen. Maj. Freiherr von Liebenstein (Kurt): Kdr. 164. Leichte Division Oberst i. G. von Quast (August Viktor): Chef des Stabes 5. Panzerarmee Oberst i. G. Irkens (Josef): Kdr. Pz. Rgt. 8 (15. Pz. Div.)
Oberst i. G. Pomtow (Heinz): Ia Heeresgruppe Afrika
North Africa had cost the Axis about 515,000 casualties vs. less than half of that for the Allies.
Casualties, by Country
Allies
United Kingdom, British Commonwealth
Estimated 220,000 dead, wounded, missing and captured, including 35,478 confirmed dead
Free France
16,000 killed, wounded and missing.
United States
2,715 killed; 8,978 wounded; 6,528 missing.
Principal material losses
1,400 aircraft destroyed;
2,000 tanks destroyed.
Axis
Italy
22,341 dead or missing; 340,000 captured.
Nazi Germany
18,594 dead; 3,400 missing; 130,000 captured.
Vichy France
1,346 dead; 1,997 wounded.
Principal material losses
8,000 aircraft destroyed;
6,200 guns, 2,550 tanks and
70,000 trucks destroyed or captured. 2,400,000 gross tons of shipping sunk
There were similar number of deaths on both sides. the difference in overall loses were primarily in the number of captives. Since the Allies won, they captured about 275,000 more Axis troops.
A column of Germans coming to surrender. A German military car, a Volkswagen Kübelwagen, is on the road besides the column, pro ably carrying German officers.
