Kasserine Pass 1943: America's First Defeat Against Rommel

General Omar Bradley called it the worst performance in the history of the U.S. Army. This episode examines the Battle of Kasserine Pass in February 1943, when green American forces met Rommel's veterans in the Atlas Mountains of Tunisia and were routed. We set the stage with Operation Torch, Montgomery's drive from El Alamein to Tripoli, the run for Tunis, and why Allied aircraft based 200 miles away on Malta could not stop Axis reinforcements crossing from Sicily.

From the French defenders firing World War I shrapnel rounds at Faid Pass to the American armor lured into a U-shaped valley lined with hidden 88mm guns, we break down the tactical lessons the U.S. had refused to learn from the British. We cover commanders directing units from maps in rear bunkers, infantry crushed in shallow shell scrapes by turning Panzers, the defeat at Sidi Bou Zid, Lloyd Fredendall's withdrawal, the Italian high command's decision to split Rommel's attack between Kasserine and Sbiba, the Bersaglieri assault on the high ground, and the massed Allied artillery at Thala that finally stopped the 10th Panzer Division. The episode closes on the firing of Fredendall, the arrival of Patton, and the sweeping reforms that forged a modern army.

• Why the 88mm anti-aircraft gun was so lethal against early Sherman tanks
• How a textbook German feint turned an American pursuit into a slaughter
• Rivalry inside the Axis: von Arnim withholding Tiger tanks from Rommel
• General Harmon countermanding the order to pull back the guns at Thala
• Over 3,300 U.S. casualties and 183 tanks lost, and what Eisenhower changed afterward