Fredendall Lost Kasserine Pass. Eisenhower Promoted Him Anyway.
The pneumatic drill screamed through solid rock, throwing dust into the cold Algerian air. Engineers from the 19th regiment worked in shifts around the clock, boring two U-shaped tunnel complexes into the wall of a sunless ravine called Speedy Valley. Each shaft ran 160 ft into the cliff face, braced every four feet with 10-in timbers.
The walls and ceilings lined with milled planks overlapped like shingles. Outside, 3,000 support soldiers, signalers, gunners, anti-aircraft crews milled around an elaborate headquarters that included me tents, latrines, and a motorpool. Inside, a short, stocky 59-year-old major general slouched in a canvas chair near a potbelly stove, shuffling a deck of cards.
It was late January 1943, and the man who ordered this construction, who diverted an entire engineering regiment from battlefield preparation to build himself an underground fortress, was not defending a frontline position. He was 70 mi behind it. His name was Lloyd Fredendall and his men had already given this place a second nickname.
They called it Lloyd’s very last resort. Within 3 weeks, those same engineers, the ones drilling tunnels instead of laying minefields, would be among the first Americans to face Irwin Raml’s panzers at Cassine Pass. Many of them had never completed basic rifle training, and the general who put them there would be sitting underground playing solitire, issuing orders that nobody could understand.
This is the story of the worst American battlefield defeat of World War II. the general who caused it and the institutional coverup that followed because what the United States Army did with Lloyd Fredendall after Cassine pass is in my view even more damning than what happened during it. They promoted him.
They gave him a third star and they sent him home a hero. Rick Atkinson in his Pulitzer Prize winning an army at dawn described Speedy Valley as having a valley of the king’s ambiencece 9 milesi southeast of Tbessa, Algeria, accessible only by a serpentine gravel road. It sat in a narrow gulch where sunlight barely reached the floor.
Fredendall had ordered the 19th Engineer Regiment to blast two immense tunnel complexes into the ravine wall, working from a blueprint labeled a second core tunnel job. The parallel shafts were 6 and 1/2 ft high and 5 ft wide. The project took three weeks of roundthe-clock drilling and blasting. His chief engineer, Lieutenant Colonel William Carter, tried to sabotage the project.
Carter later recalled that they had no proper explosives for tunneling and that the men had no experience in the work. To make the digging as unpopular as possible, Carter deliberately scheduled all blasting at night to keep everyone awake. But that did not stop it. Fredendall also ordered a bulletproof Cadillac like Eisenhowers and called Orin periodically to demand faster delivery.
I think the tunnel tells you everything you need to know about this man. Not because generals should be reckless with their own safety. The issue is priorities. Every hour those engineers spent drilling into rock for Fred and Doll’s comfort was an hour they were not spending on minefields, anti-tank obstacles, and defensive works at the front.
When those same engineers became the initial defense of Cassine Pass on February 17th, their lack of infantry training would cost lives. That choice, comfort over combat readiness, defined his entire command. To understand how Lloyd Fredinol ended up commanding America’s first major ground engagement against the Germans, you have to understand the peaceime army that produced him.
Fredendall [clears throat] was born on December 28th, 1883 at Fort Dia Russell near Cheyenne, Wyoming. His father was a career officer. The family secured him an appointment to West Point through Wyoming. Senator Francis Warren, who happened to be John Persing’s father-in-law. Fredendall was dismissed after one semester for failing mathematics and poor conduct.
His mother convinced Senator Warren to reappoint him. He dropped out again after a second semester. West Point refused to take him a third time. He found another way. After a year at MIT, he sat the officer’s qualifying examination in 1906 and placed first out of 70 applicants, earning a commission as second lieutenant of infantry.
He shipped to France in August 1917 with the 28th Infantry Regiment, but spent the entire war as a trainer and instructor. He never heard a shot fired in anger during World War I. What he excelled at was institutional navigation. He graduated from the Command and General Staff School in 1923, placing 31st out of 151. He completed the Army War College in 1925.
He rotated through the right staff positions in Washington, the Statistics Branch, the Inspector General’s Department, the Office of the Chief of Infantry. Each tour brought him closer to the men who controlled promotions and assignments. By December 1939, he was a brigadier general. By October 1940, a major general commanding the fourth infantry division.
The man who catapulted Fredendall to combat command was Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. According to Steven Assad’s award-winning study in Army magazine, Marshall called Fredendall one of the best and told his staff he liked that man because you could see determination all over his face. Lieutenant General Leslie McNair, who ran Army ground forces, placed Fredendall on a short list of three generals capable of commanding all American forces sent to Britain.
At 59, Fredendall was the second oldest of 34 generals who would serve as core commanders during the war. When Eisenhower needed a commander for the central task force in Operation Torch, the 39,000man force landing at Orin, Marshall’s recommendation was decisive. Eisenhower accepted despite initial reservations. If you’re finding this valuable, subscribing genuinely helps.
It tells the algorithm this kind of deep research is worth showing to more people. Now back to Fredendall. After the successful Orin landings on November 8th through 10th, 1942, Eisenhower cabled Marshall in glowing terms. He said he blessed the day Marshall urged Fredendall upon him and that his earlier doubts were completely unfounded.
A month later, Eisenhower rated Fredendall second only to Patton among his core commanders. On November 19th, he actually recommended Fredendall for promotion to Lieutenant General. That recommendation was never withdrawn, and it would matter enormously when the reckoning came. Here is where I think the story turns from embarrassing to genuinely dangerous because Fredendall was not just a mediocre general given too much responsibility.
He was a man whose specific command failures documented in primary sources created the conditions for a catastrophe that killed and captured thousands of American soldiers. His command style combined micromanagement with incoherence. He never visited the front lines during the entire Tunisian campaign, not once.
He directed deployments from maps at his underground command post while issuing orders in a personal code that mixed slang with vague geographic references. Infantry were walking boys. Artillery were pop guns. Locations were described as the place that begins with C rather than by standard grid coordinates. His most notorious order preserved by stenographers and cited by every major historian of the battle went like this.
Move your command, meaning the walking boys, pop guns, Baker’s outfit, and the outfit, which is the reverse of Baker’s outfit, and the big fellows to M, which is due north of where you are now. As soon as possible, have your boys report to the French gentleman whose name begins with J at a place which begins with D, which is five grid squares to the left of M.
That was an actual order issued by an American core commander during wartime. Subordinates spent hours trying to decode it. A Marine Corps Staff Academy study by Brendan McBrreen examined Fredendall’s formal written order of February 11th, 1943, the order that positioned forces for the defense at City Bozid, and found it contained no mission statement, no commander intent, and no overall plan.
McBrreen concluded it was not even a division level order. It was essentially a poorly written brigade order containing detailed guidance to battalions, all issued from a bunker 70 to 100 miles behind the front without Fredendall ever seeing the ground his men would fight on. General Lucian Truscott’s postwar assessment captured the man in full.
Truscot wrote that Fredendall was small in stature, loud and rough in speech, outspoken in his opinions, and critical of superiors and subordinates alike. He jumped to conclusions that were not always wellfounded. He rarely left his command post for personal visits and reconnaissance. Yet, he was impatient with subordinates, who knew the terrain and conditions better than he did.
To put this in context, you have to understand what was at stake in Tunisia. In early 1943, Operation Torch had landed American and British forces across French North Africa the previous November. The strategic goal was to squeeze Raml’s Africa Corps and the German forces in Tunisia between Eisenhower’s forces pushing east from Algeria and Montgomery’s eighth army pushing west from Libya.
If the Allies could destroy the Axis forces in North Africa, they would control the entire southern Mediterranean, opening the door for an invasion of Sicily and Italy. If they failed, a successful German counteroffensive could push the Allies back to the Algerian coast and delay the entire Mediterranean strategy by months.
The American troops, Fredendall commanded, were green. Most had never been under fire. Their equipment was a mixed bag. The M3 Stewart light tanks that made up much of the First Armored Division’s strength carried a 37mm gun that could not penetrate German medium tank armor at combat range. Even the newer M4 Shermans were outgunned by the German MarkV Special with its longbarreled 75mm weapon.
American tank destroyer doctrine, which called for specialized anti-tank units rather than tank-on-tank engagements, had never been tested in combat. Training had been conducted in the deserts of California and the plains of Louisiana, but nothing prepared these men for the Tunisian Jebels, the Rocky Hills, and narrow passes where the fighting would take place.
All of which made competent leadership more important, not less. Green troops with unproven equipment and untested doctrine needed a commander who would be at the front, who would see the terrain, who would understand the enemy, and who would position his forces for mutual support. They got the opposite. Fredendall’s angophobia compounded the dysfunction.
He commanded an American corps operating under British First Army led by Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson. This was a coalition war. Coordination between American, British, and French forces was essential. Fredendall turned his headquarters into what Atkinson described as a hotbed of anti-British sentiment where staff officers openly mocked English accents.
Fredendall reportedly spread the calumny that Eisenhower was the best commander the British had. He and Anderson rarely communicated. Anderson considered Fredendall incompetent well before Casserine. Fredendall was equally hostile toward French allies on his flanks, an angophobe and a franophobe commanding in a coalition war.
And then it got worse because Fredendall’s relationships with American officers under him were equally poisonous. His feud with Major General Orlando Ward, commanding the first armored division, developed with what Atkinson called remarkable speed. Ward’s diary from February 5th, 1943, is blunt. He called Fredendall a spherical s and wrote that the man had no loyalty in him for his subordinates.
Fredendall routinely bypassed Ward’s headquarters to issue orders directly to combat command commanders, sometimes reaching down to company level. He treated Ward with open contempt. The tactical result was catastrophic. Fredendall violated fundamental armored doctrine by scattering the first armored division across roughly a 100 miles of front.
He split the division into combat commands A, B, C, and eventually D, placing them in disconnected sectors under separate control. Combat command B was detached entirely and sent north to the French 19th core sector at Fonduk Pass, 40 mi away. Ward begged for concentration of his armor.
He pleaded for the chance to fight as a division. Fredendall brushed him aside in favor of what Ward bitterly called a dribbling commitment of his forces. Infantry battalions were positioned on isolated hilltops. The second battalion of the 168th regiment held Jebel Lassuda with about 900 troops. The third battalion held Jebel Casyra with roughly a thousand men 10 mi to the south, too far apart for mutual support.
Artillery was placed too far back for effective fires. No minefields protected the approaches. Anti-tank guns were positioned without clear fields of fire. The absurdity of these dispositions was apparent to anyone who looked at a map. Ward saw it. His subordinate commander saw it. Brigadier General Paul Robinette, commanding combat command B before it was detached and sent north, filed formal objections to the dispersal of his forces.
But Fredendall overruled every protest. He was convinced from his underground bunker 70 mi away that he understood the tactical situation better than the commanders on the ground. The official army history records that both General Ryder of the 34th Division and General Ward lacked confidence in Fredendall’s leadership, which they felt was responsible for assigning tasks and then prescribing methods poorly adapted to their accomplishment.
That assessment was written with the careful restraint of a official military historians. The reality was raw. I believe this was the single most consequential decision of the entire battle. Not the German attack plan, not Raml’s tactical brilliance, Fredendall’s deliberate fragmentation of his strongest formation.
Because when the panzers came through the passes, those scattered units could not support each other, could not concentrate, could not fight as a division. They were destroyed in isolation exactly as armored warfare doctrine predicted they would be. The catastrophe began not at Cassarine Pass itself, but 30 mi to the east at city Bozid on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 1943.
At 0400 hours, approximately 140 German tanks from the 10th and 21st Panzer divisions attacked through Fi and Misilla passes in an operation called Fueling Wind, Spring Breeze. Remarkably, Eisenhower himself had inspected the American positions at Fi just 3 hours before the assault began. He saw the dispositions Fredendall had ordered.
He did not override them. The Germans executed a textbook double envelopment. By 1000 hours, both hilltop positions were encircled. The roughly 2,000 men of the 168th Regimental Combat Team under Colonel Thomas Drake were cut off on their isolated hills. Among those trapped was Lieutenant Colonel John K. Waters, George Patton’s own son-in-law, who was captured and spent the rest of the war in a German prisoner of war camp.
Drake requested permission to withdraw his men while escape was still possible. Fredendall denied the request from his bunker 70 mi away. He ordered them to hold and wait for reinforcements. Those reinforcements never arrived. Think about what that meant for the men on those hilltop. They could see German tanks circling below them, cutting off every route of escape.
They had limited ammunition, limited water, and no prospect of resupply. Radio communications were intermittent, and their core commander sitting in an underground bunker a day’s drive to the rear was telling them to sit tight. Some of these men were National Guard soldiers from Iowa, members of the 34th Division, who had left their farms and small towns to fight a war they believed in.
Now they were trapped on rocky hilltops in North Africa, watching panzers seal them in, waiting for help that their own general had no intention of sending. Over the next two days, small groups attempted to break out through German lines under cover of darkness. Of the approximately 2,000 men of the 168th, only about 300 managed to infiltrate to safety.
The rest were killed, wounded, or captured. The regiment was effectively destroyed as a fighting force. Among the prisoners was Lieutenant Colonel John K. Waters, George Patton’s own son-in-law, who spent the remainder of the war in a German camp. Here is where the decision becomes indefensible. Because instead of pulling back to consolidate after this disaster, instead of concentrating his remaining armor behind defensible terrain, Fredendall ordered a counterattack.
On February 15th, Combat Command C under Lieutenant Colonel James Alger advanced with 52 M4 Sherman tanks across flat exposed terrain towards City Bozid. The ground was open and gently rolling. Perfect tank country for the defender, lethal for an attacker advancing without infantry support or air cover. The intelligence estimate provided to Alger said he would face approximately 40 German tanks.
The actual number exceeded 100, including MarkV specials and a company of Tiger tanks supported by imp placed 88mm anti-tank guns in concealed positions on the flanking hills. No terrain maps were provided to the attacking force. No aerial reconnaissance was conducted. No infantry accompanied the tanks. The Germans let combat command C advance until the Shermans were well within the kill zone.
Then they opened fire from three sides simultaneously. It was a classic combined arms ambush, the kind of engagement that experienced troops would have recognized as a trap before they drove into it. But these were not experienced troops. Many of the tank crews had been in North Africa for less than 3 months.
Combat Command C lost 46 of its 52 tanks in a single afternoon along with 130 vehicles and nine self-propelled guns. Entire platoon were wiped out in minutes. Burning Shermans dotted the plane like torches. Alger was captured. Personnel losses reached 15 officers and nearly 300 enlisted men killed or missing in one engagement. It was the single worst afternoon for American armor in the entire North African campaign.
Total American losses at City Busid from February 14th through the 17th reached approximately 2500 men, 103 tanks, 280 vehicles, and 18 field guns. And all of this happened before the Battle of Karine Pass even began. This is the part the popular histories rarely emphasize. Casserine was not the beginning.
It was the second act of a disaster that started at CD Buid. Following the debacle, Fredendall ordered withdrawal from Spitela and Farana, pulling back toward the passes of the western Dorsal. On February 19th, field marshal Raml received authorization from the Italian Commando Supreo for a two-pronged advance through Kazarine Pass toward Thala and through Spa Pass to the north.
The defense of Kazarine Pass fell to a patchwork force under Colonel Alexander Stark of the 26th Regimental Combat Team. It included the 19th combat engineer regiment. The same troops who had spent three weeks building Fredendall’s tunnels instead of training for infantry combat. They were joined by an infantry battalion, field artillery batteries, tank destroyer units, French 75mm guns, and elements of Darby’s rangers.
It was a collection of fragments thrown into a gap, not a coherent defensive force. The pass itself was a two-m wide valley between Jebel Samama to the north and Jebel Chambi to the south. Highway 13 ran through it, following the Hatab River. The terrain was rocky and broken with steep slopes rising on either side. Properly defended with minefields, prepared positions, and concentrated forces.
It could have been a killing ground for any attacker, but the positions had been organized hastily. Mines were sparse. Fields of fire were not properly cleared. The defenders were under strength and many were exhausted from the retreat. On the morning of February 19th, German reconnaissance probed the defenses. Panzer grenaders and tanks of the eighth Panzer Regiment committed at noon, but met stubborn resistance from soldiers who fought hard despite their inadequate preparation.
The engineers, who had been building tunnels a month earlier, held their positions through the day. February 20th proved decisive. German forces infiltrated the high ground overnight. The Italian fifth Berseri regiment launched a frontal assault on Jebel Chambi, losing their commander, Colonel Bonfati, in the attack, but cracking open the Allied defensive line.
The Italian 131st Armored Division Centauro attacked along Highway 13, overrunning the 19th combat engineers. By day’s end, Casarine Pass had fallen. A British delaying force called Gore Force, fielding 11 tanks, fought a leaprog withdrawal and lost every vehicle. On February 21st, German and Italian forces poured through the pass in two directions.
The 10th Panzer Division drove north toward Thala, while Africa corses, Elements, and Centuro pushed west toward Tbessa and the massive Allied supply dumps there. The stakes were enormous. If Tbessa fell, the entire Allied position in Tunisia could collapse. But this is where I want to give credit where it is due. Because while Fredendall was preparing to abandon his headquarters and flee further west, the men under him fought brilliantly.
Brigadier General Paul Robinette’s combat command B of the First Armored Division, joined by elements of Major General Terry Allen’s First Infantry Division, assembled a powerful combined arms defense. Infantry dug in with anti-tank guns. Tanks were positioned in defilade behind Ridgelines. Massed artillery registered on the approaches.
These soldiers, despite the chaos of their core commander failures, stopped the German advance toward Tbessa cold. February 22nd was the turning point. At Spiba, the 21st Panzer Division stalled completely against a mixed Allied force of British, French, and American troops. Near Thala, the 10th Panzer pushed the British 26th Armored Brigade to within just a few miles of the town.
But during the night, approximately 48 guns of the British 9th Corps artillery arrived after a forced march and deployed in a long firing line. Their shells began falling on German positions at dawn near Tbessa. The American combined arms defense held firm. Raml overextended with dwindling fuel and ammunition with the British Eighth Army threatening from the east at the Marath line concluded the offensive had reached its limit.
He noted in his journal that American defensive conduct was first class. By February 24th and 25th, Allied forces had reoccupied Casarine Pass, Ferana, and City Bozid. American forces had been pushed back over 50 miles from their original positions. The human cost of the February 14th through 25th operations was staggering for a force fighting its first major engagement against the Vermacht.
Approximately 300 Americans killed, 3,000 wounded, 3 to 4,000 captured or missing. That totals roughly 6,500 American casualties in 11 days. 83 tanks destroyed or captured. 104 halftracks lost. 208 artillery pieces gone. 512 trucks and other motor vehicles destroyed. The army estimated 7,000 replacements were needed to reconstitute the mauled units.
Total Allied casualties, including British and French forces, reached approximately 10,000. German and Italian losses were a fraction of that. About 200 killed, 536 wounded, 252 missing. Roughly 989 total, with about 20 tanks permanently lost. The casualty ratio ran roughly 5:1 in the Axis favor.
The tank loss ratio approached 9:1. Omar Bradley later called Casserine one of the worst performances of American troops in their entire proud history. What happened next should have ended Fred and Doll’s career permanently. Instead, it became one of the most revealing episodes of institutional self-p protection in American military history.
As the battle unfolded, Fredendall appeared to collapse. Witnesses at Speedy Valley reported him chain smoking, pacing, muttering to subordinates that the Germans had broken through and that nothing could stop them. Eisenhower dispatched Major General Ernest Harmon of the Second Armored Division to serve as Fredendall’s deputy.
When Harmon arrived at 0300 hours, he found Fredendall at his command post. According to Atkinson, Fredendall handed Harmon a note authorizing him to take full charge of the battle. Then he went to bed. As Raml’s panzers approached Tbessa, Fredendall packed up and prepared to abandon Speedy Valley for a schoolhouse further to the rear.
Harmon stabilized the front, aided significantly by Raml’s own decision to withdraw, then returned to Eisenhower’s headquarters at Alge with a devastating assessment. He called Fredendall no damn good and recommended immediate relief. In his written afteraction report, Harmon went further. He called Fredendall both a moral and physical coward.
Patton recorded the identical assessment in his diary on March 2nd, 1943, writing that according to Harmon, Fredendall was a physical and moral coward. Eisenhower also sent Brigadier General Omar Bradley to the second corps as his personal observer. Bradley spent days interviewing division commanders across the core.
Every one of them had lost confidence in Fredendall. British General Sir Herald Alexander, newly appointed as 18 Army Group commander over all Allied ground forces in Tunisia, conducted his own 3-day inspection and told Eisenhower he would welcome a replacement. He added with characteristic British understatement that he was sure Eisenhower must have better men than that.
On March 5th, 1943, Eisenhower flew to Debbessa and asked Bradley directly for his assessment. Bradley’s reply left no room for ambiguity. He said it was pretty bad and that every division commander had lost confidence in Fredendall as the core commander. Eisenhower first offered the second core to Harmon, who declined on principle.
He reasoned it would be unethical to personally benefit from his own negative assessment of a fellow general. Eisenhower then summoned George Patton from Morocco. Patton arrived at Second Corps headquarters on March 6th, 1943. Fredendall was at breakfast. After a brief conference, the change of command was made. Patton’s initial reaction was charitable.
He wrote to his wife Beatatric that Fredend Doll was a great sport and that he was largely a victim of circumstances beyond his control. One week of inspecting the actual condition of the Second Corps demolished that view entirely. What Patton found was an army in disorder. Soldiers were not wearing helmets. Officers were not wearing neckties.
Discipline had collapsed. Units were still scattered. Defensive positions were poorly sighted. The supply system was chaotic. Patton wrote in his diary that he could not see what Fredendall did to justify his existence, that he had never seen such poor order or discipline in an American formation. Patton’s response was immediate and dramatic.
He imposed a rigid dress code, helmets, leggings, neckties, fines for violations. Officers who were found without their insignia were sent to the rear. He personally visited every unit in the core, often arriving unannounced. He moved the core command post forward within range of enemy artillery. The message was unmistakable.
The days of commanding from a bunker 70 mi behind the lines were over. The contrast with Fredendall could not have been sharper. Where Fredendall hid, Patton was visible. Where Fredendall issued incomprehensible coded orders, Patton spoke in plain language that every soldier understood. Where Fredendall scattered his forces, Patton concentrated them.
Within 3 weeks, the second core that Fredendall had broken fought a successful engagement at Elgatar, defeating a counterattack by the 10th Panzer Division. It was the first American victory over a major German armored formation. The same soldiers, the same equipment, different leadership. I think that fact alone is the most damning indictment of Lloyd Fredendall.
Now, here is the part of this story that I find most troubling. Not the battle itself. Battles go badly. Commanders fail. That is the nature of war. What happened next reveals something about the institution itself. Eisenhower deliberately framed the relief as a routine reassignment. No formal reprimand was filed in Fredendall’s record.
His aid reported to President Roosevelt that Fredendall should receive a training command without elaboration. Without a reprimand on file, Fredendall remained eligible for advancement. And because Eisenhower’s November 1942 recommendation for Fred and Doll’s promotion to Lieutenant General had never been formally withdrawn, the promotion machinery simply processed it.
On April 25th, 1943, Fredendall assumed command of the Second United States Army, headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, responsible for training troops across the eastern and central United States. In June 1943, his promotion to lieutenant general, three stars, became effective. He returned to the United States as a hero.
He gave press interviews until a sarcastic comment in Time magazine about his generalship prompted him to stop. I want to be clear about why this promotion matters. This was not a borderline case. Multiple senior officers, including Harmon, Bradley, Alexander, and eventually Patton, independently concluded that Fredendall was unfit for combat command.
Harmon used the word coward to Eisenhower’s face. The evidence was overwhelming, consistent, and damning, and the army gave him a third star. The reasoning reveals the institutional calculus of wartime. Homefront morale was fragile. In early 1943, the war was not going well. Guadal Canal had been a grinding, bloody affair.
The Yubot campaign in the Atlantic was at its peak. A high-profile firing of an American core commander for incompetence would have invited congressional investigations, newspaper headlines, and public alarm about the quality of American military leadership. It was easier and politically safer to pretend it was a routine rotation. Marshall’s personal reputation was at stake.
The chief of staff had personally championed Fredendall as one of the best. He had pushed Eisenhower to give him the central task force, publicly acknowledging that his handpicked core commander had presided over the worst American defeat of the war would have damaged Marshall’s credibility at the worst possible moment. Just as the army was gearing up for the massive expansions needed for the invasion of Europe, the military’s old boy network closed ranks.
As military reform advocate Don Vandergri has argued, the Fredendall case exemplified a toxic personnel culture built around seniority, patronage, and institutional loyalty rather than combat performance. The system prioritized protecting the hierarchy and avoiding scrutiny while soldiers pay the price in blood. Fredendall had been building political capital for three decades from Senator Warren’s appointments through Marshall’s patronage.
That capital shielded him from consequences that would have destroyed a less connected officer. And without a formal paper trail of reprimand, the bureaucracy simply did what bureaucracies do. It processed the paperwork. The promotion recommendation from November 1942 sat in the system. Nobody rescended it. Nobody flagged it. The machine ground forward.
I think this is the real lesson of the Fredendall story. Not that one bad general can cause a disaster. That has always been true and always will be. The lesson is that institutions will protect themselves before they protect the soldiers they exist to serve. that when the choice is between accountability and embarrassment, large organizations will choose to avoid embarrassment almost every time.
And that the cost of that choice is always paid by the people at the bottom, the privates and sergeants and lieutenants who cannot refuse an order from a general 70 mi behind the lines. Meanwhile, Orlando Ward, the subordinate Fredendall had feuded with and tried to blame for the disaster, was also eventually relieved from the first armored division.
Ward bore significant professional stigma and received another combat command only late in the war when he was given the 20th armored division in the final months of fighting in Europe. In my view, the Fredendall affair is not primarily a story about one incompetent general. Every army produces those. The real story is about a system that elevated a man who twice failed out of West Point to three star rank on the strength of peaceime networking and powerful patrons from Senator Warren to George Marshall.
a system that rewarded him after he presided over the deaths and capture of thousands of American soldiers and a system that concealed the scale of the failure from the public it served. I believe Eisenhower understood this later. His grandson David wrote that Eisenhower repented of what he called his weakness in sending Fredendall home without a reduction in grade recognizing that should have been a clear signal the man was leaving in disgrace.
Atkinson’s conclusion in an army at dawn cuts to the heart of it. He wrote that the failings of Fredendall and other deficient commanders taught Eisenhower to be tougher, even ruthless, with subordinates, and that he learned the hardest lesson of all, that for an army to win a war, young men had to die. But I also think it is important to acknowledge that Fredendall was not solely responsible for what happened at Cassine.
Atkinson himself cautions that it is dead wrong to blame Fredendall exclusively. The problems were systemic. American armor doctrine was flawed. Training was inadequate. Intelligence was poor. The command structure under British First Army was confused. Eisenhower himself saw the dispositions at FID and did not intervene. Fredendall did not create all of these problems, but he made every single one of them worse.
Fredendall never received another combat command. He supervised training at Second Army until he retired on March 31st, 1946 with 39 years of service. He died on October 4th, 1963 in San Diego, California, and is buried at Fort Rose National Cemetery. The numbers remain. Roughly 6,500 American casualties, 183 tanks, 104 halftracks, 208 guns, an entire infantry regiment destroyed, an armored division shattered.
America’s costliest ground defeat against Germany in the entire war, and the general who presided over it received a promotion rather than a court marshal. The battlefield lesson proved productive. Within weeks, Patton had transformed the second core into a fighting force that defeated a German counterattack at Elgatar.
Within two years, that same army conducted multi-core operations across France in Germany with devastating effectiveness.