By the morning of 23 January 1943, the 1st Battalion The Royal Irish Fusiliers (1st Faughs) had relieved the 6th Battalion The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers on Grandstand Hill, a long and exposed feature east of the Bou-Arada – Goubellat road. So far, during the advance on Tunis, they had experienced limited action. Brigadier Nelson Russell, then Commander of 38 (Irish) Infantry Brigade, was to write later of the 1st Faughs:

‘I had often wondered how the ‘Faughs’ would fare. In Scotland their Mess was always full of dogs and Officers, both apparently determined to do nothing in the simplest manner … I thought privately – being perhaps a little over-critical of my own Regiment – that they were a slack lot of coots. But they weren’t slack at the real thing – the Officers were good Officers and the ‘Faughs’’ teething troubles were practically non-existent’.