History of the Second World War (53 page)

While Rommel had slipped out of Montgomery’s clutches, successfully evading each successive attempt to cut off his retreat, he was too weak to re-establish a new defence line on the frontier, or farther back in Cyrenaica. His fighting strength at the moment was about 5,000 Germans and 2,500 Italians, with eleven German and ten Italian tanks, thirty-five German anti-tank guns, sixty-five German field-guns, and a few Italian guns. For although some 15,000 German fighting troops had got away, safely, two-thirds of them had lost all their fighting equipment, and a still larger proportion of the Italians who had escaped had left theirs behind. The Eighth Army, besides killing several thousand, had captured some 10,000 Germans and over 20,000 Italians — including administrative personnel — together with some 450 tanks and over 1,000 guns. That was a very big compensation for its own 13,500 casualties, as well as for the disappointment of seeing Rommel slip away ‘to fight again another day’.

After a short pause to bring up supplies, the British advance was resumed. But it was a follow-up rather than a pursuit, and Rommel’s past counter-strokes had left so deep an impression that the advance proceeded cautiously along the coastal circuit instead of driving across the desert chord of the Benghazi arc. The leading armour did not reach Mersa Brega until November 26, more than two weeks after crossing the eastern frontier of Cyrenaica — and long after Rommel had regained the shelter of that bottleneck position. The only serious trouble and danger to his forces during the retreat through Cyrenaica had come from shortage of fuel. At Mersa Brega he was reinforced by a fresh Italian armoured division, the Centauro, and elements of three Italian infantry divisions — although these, being unmotorised, were more of a complication than an asset.

There was now a further fortnight’s pause while the British brought up reinforcements and supplies for an assault on the Mersa Brega position. Montgomery again prepared a plan ‘to annihilate the enemy in his defences’ — by pinning Rommel with a strong frontal assault, while sending another strong force on a wide outflanking manoeuvre to block his line of retreat. The frontal assault was to be launched on December 14, preceded by large-scale raids on the night of the 11th/12th to distract attention from the outflanking manoeuvre, which then started on its desert circuit. But Rommel slipped away during the night of the 12th — thus stultifying the British plan. He went back in a rapid bound to a position near Buerat, 250 miles west of Mersa Brega — and double that distance beyond the Eighth Army’s new advanced base at Benghazi.

Rommel was still holding the Buerat position when the year ended, for this time there was a month’s pause, for a move-up and build-up, before Montgomery was ready to resume his drive. But it was nonetheless clear that the tide of war in Africa had definitely turned. For there was little chance that Rommel’s army could be brought up again to a strength capable of matching the Eighth Army’s build-up capacity, while his rear areas, and possible rearward positions, were now imperilled by the Anglo-American First Army’s advance eastward from Algeria into Tunisia.

Yet Hitler’s illusions soon revived, while Mussolini desperately clung to his because he could not bear to see Italy’s African empire crumbling away. Indeed, their illusions had become uppermost again even while it was still uncertain whether Rommel would succeed in evading his pursuers and extricating the remnants of his battered army. On reaching Mersa Brega safely he had received orders to hold that line ‘at all costs’, and prevent the British from penetrating into Tripolitania. As a reinforcement to that dreamland demand he was also put under Marshal Bastico’s command again, as he had been before the advance into Egypt, When he saw Bastico on November 22 he had told him bluntly that the order ‘resist to the end’ on that desert frontier spelt the certain destruction of the remaining troops — ‘we either lose the position four days earlier and save the army, or lose both position and army four days later’.

Then Cavallero and Kesselring came to see Rommel on the 24th and he told them that, as barely 5,000 of his German troops had weapons, to hold the Mersa Brega position he would need the speedy delivery, before Montgomery attacked, of fifty Panzer IV tanks armed with the new long-barrelled 75-mm. guns, and fifty anti-tank guns of the same kind, besides an adequate supply of fuel and ammunition. It was a modest estimate of his need, but it was all too evident that there was no likelihood of its being met, as most of the available equipment and reinforcements was being diverted to Tunisia. Yet they still pressed the order to stand at Mersa Brega.

So, in the hope of getting Hitler to face the realities of the situation, Rommel flew to the Fuhrer’s headquarters near Rastenburg, in the East Prussian forests. He had a chilly reception, and when he suggested that the wisest course would be to evacuate North Africa, Hitler ‘flew into a fury’, and would not listen to any further argument. This explosion did more than anything before to shake Rommel’s faith in his Fuhrer. As he wrote in his journal: ‘I began to realise that Adolf Hitler simply did not want to see the situation as it was, and that he reacted emotionally against what his intelligence must have told him was right.’ Hitler insisted that ‘it was a political necessity to continue to hold a major bridgehead in Africa and there would, therefore, be no withdrawal from the Mersa el Brega line’.*

*
The Rommel Papers,
p. 366.

But when Rommel went to Rome on the way back he found Mussolini more open to reason, while more aware of the difficulties of shipping sufficient supplies to Tripoli and getting them forward to Mersa Brega. So he had managed to obtain Mussolini’s permission to prepare an intermediate position at Buerat, to move the non-motorised Italian infantry back there in good time and to withdraw the rest of his slender force if and when the British attacked. Rommel had been prompt to act on this permission and slip away in the darkness immediately the British showed signs of launching their attack. Moreover, he had made up his own mind that he was not going to stop at Buerat or in front of Tripoli, and provide Montgomery with a chance of trapping him. His plan, already formed, was to withdraw right back to the Tunisian frontier and the Gabes bottleneck, where he could not easily be outflanked and could deliver an effective counterstroke with the reinforcements that would be more closely at hand there.

CHAPTER 21 - ‘TORCH’ — THE NEW TIDE FROM THE ATLANTIC

The Allied landings in French North Africa took place on November 8, 1942.* This entry into north-west Africa came a fortnight after the launching of the British offensive on Rommel’s position at Alamein, in the extreme north-east of Africa, and four days after the collapse of that position.

*
For map, see p. 280.

At the ‘Arcadia Conference’ in Washington at Christmas 1941 — the first Allied conference following the Japanese stroke at Pearl Harbor which brought the United States into the war — Mr Churchill put forward the ‘North-west Africa Project’ as a step towards ‘closing and tightening the ring around Germany’. He told the Americans that there was already a plan, ‘Gymnast’, for a landing in Algeria if the Eighth Army gained a sufficiently decisive success in Cyrenaica for it to push westward to the Tunisian border. He went on to propose that at ‘the same time United States forces, assuming French agreement, should proceed to land on the Moroccan coast by invitation’. President Roosevelt favoured the project, being quick to see its political advantages in grand strategy, but his Service advisers were dubious about its practicability while anxious lest it should interfere with the prospects of an early and more direct attack against Hitler’s hold on Europe. The most they were willing to agree was that study of the operation, now re-christened ‘Super-Gymnast’, should continue.

During the next few months discussion concentrated on the project of a cross-Channel attack, to be launched in August or September, to meet Stalin’s demand for the opening of a ‘Second Front’. The Cotentin (Cherbourg) peninsula came to be the most favoured site, as urged by General Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, and by Major-General Eisenhower, whom he had chosen and sent to London as Commander of the American forces in the European theatre. The British emphasised the drawbacks of a premature landing in Europe with inadequate strength, pointing out the risks of such a bridgehead being bottled up, or overwhelmed, without bringing appreciable relief to the Russians. But President Roosevelt swung his weight in support of the project, and committed himself, when Molotov visited Washington at the end of May, to an assurance that he ‘hoped’ and ‘expected’ to create ‘a Second Front in Europe in 1942’.

A reversion to the project of a landing in north-west Africa was spurred on by the unexpected British collapse in north-east Africa which occurred in June, following Rommel’s forestalling attack on the Gazala Line.

The battle of Gazala had already taken a bad turn when Churchill flew to Washington on June 17, with his Chiefs of Staff, for a fresh conference. On arrival Churchill went on by air to Hyde Park, Roosevelt’s family home on the Hudson, for a private talk. Here he re-emphasised the drawbacks and dangers of a premature landing in France, while suggesting the revival of ‘Gymnast’ as a better alternative. The British and American Chiefs of Staff, meeting in Washington on June 21, had disagreed over the Cherbourg project but found themselves in complete agreement that the North Africa project was unsound.

Their combined negative conclusion about this project was soon reversed by the pressure of events, combined with Roosevelt’s pressing desire for some positive action in 1942 that would fulfil, even if not so directly as intended, his promise to the Russians. On June 21, news came that the fortress of Tobruk had fallen to Rommel’s assault and that the remains of the British Eighth Army were in retreat to Egypt.

During the weeks that followed, the British situation worsened, and the argument for direct or indirect American intervention in Africa was correspondingly strengthened. By the end of June, Rommel reached and started to attack the Alamein Line, following on the heels of the British retreat. On July 8 Churchill cabled to Roosevelt that ‘Sledgehammer’, the plan for a landing in France that year, must be discarded, and went on to urge, once again, the case for ‘Gymnast’. He followed it up with a message through Field-Marshal Sir John Dill, who was now head of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington: ‘Gymnast affords the sole means by which the U. S. can strike at Hitler in 1942,’ and that otherwise both the Western allies would have to remain ‘motionless in 1942’.

The American Chiefs of Staff reacted to this contention with renewed objections to ‘Gymnast’ — Marshall’s condemnation of it as ‘expensive and ineffectual’ was supported by Admiral King’s declaration that it was ‘impossible to fulfil naval commitments in other theatres and at the same time to provide the shipping and escorts which would be essential should that operation be undertaken’. They also agreed in viewing the British refusal to attempt a landing in France in 1942 as clear evidence that the British did not really want to risk it even in 1943. So Marshall, readily supported by King, proposed a radical change of strategy — that unless the British accepted the American plan for an early cross-Channel attack ‘we should turn to the Pacific and strike decisively against Japan; in other words assume a defensive attitude against Germany, except for air operations; and use all available means in the Pacific’.

But the President objected to the idea of delivering such an ultimatum to his British allies, expressed his disapproval of the proposed strategic switch, and told his Chiefs of Staff that unless they could persuade the British to undertake a cross-Channel operation in 1942 they must either launch one into French North Africa or send a strong reinforcement to the Middle East. He emphasised that it was politically imperative to take some striking action before the year ended.

Faced with the President’s decision, the Chiefs of Staff might have been expected to choose the course of temporarily reinforcing the British in the Middle East, rather than embarking on the ‘Gymnast’ plan which they had so strongly and persistently opposed. Moreover, after reviewing the two courses, Marshall’s planning staff reached the conclusion that the former was the lesser of two evils. But contrary to expectation, he and King swung round in favour of ‘Gymnast’. This became their preferred alternative when they flew to London in mid-July along with Harry Hopkins, as the President’s representatives, and found that the British Chiefs of Staff were firmly opposed to Eisenhower’s plan for an early landing near Cherbourg.

In choosing north-west Africa as the alternative, rather than a reinforcement to the Middle East, Marshall’s prime reason, according to Harry Hopkins, was ‘the difficulty of mixing our troops with the British in Egypt’. While a mixture would also occur in the case of a combined operation in north-west Africa, it was obvious that American reinforcements to the Middle East would have come under a British Commander-in-Chief.

The adoption of ‘Super-Gymnast’ was formulated at two further meetings of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, American and British, in London on July 24 and 25 — and promptly endorsed by Roosevelt. Moreover, he emphasised in his cable that the landing should be planned to take place ‘not later than October 30’ — a directive that Hopkins had suggested, in a personal message, as a means ‘to avoid procrastination and delays’. On Churchill’s initiative the operation was rechristened ‘Torch’, as a more inspiring name. It was also agreed that the supreme command should be given to an American — an ointment to the sore feelings of the American Service chiefs that Churchill was very ready to provide — and on the 26th Eisenhower was told, by Marshall, that he was to have the post.

While the decision for ‘Torch’ was now definite, it had been made before the questions of time and site were settled, or even fully examined. Thus fresh conflicts of view arose over both these problems.