History of the Second World War (68 page)

In the forty outward Arctic convoys from 1941 on, 811 ships sailed, of which fifty-eight were sunk and thirty-three turned back for one reason or another, while 720 came safely through — and delivered about four million tons of cargo to Russia. The deliveries included 5,000 tanks and over 7,000 aircraft. In delivering that large-scale aid the Allies had lost eighteen warships and ninety-eight merchant ships, including those on the homeward convoys, while the Germans had lost the battlecruiser
Scharnhorst
, three destroyers, and thirty-eight U-boats in trying to stop it.

THE LAST PHASE

During the early months of 1945 the size of the U-boat fleet was still increasing — through new production and reduced losses, thanks to the Schnorkel device as well as to the suspension of long-range operations in the Atlantic. In January, thirty new boats were put into service, compared with the recent monthly average of eighteen. Some of them were of the new and improved models with longer cruising range and higher speed when submerged — the ocean-going Type XXI of 1,600 tons, and the coastal Type XXIII of 230 tons (of which about two-thirds were of the larger type). In March, the U-boat fleet reached its peak strength, a total of 463.

It was not until March that the bombing campaign began to have a serious effect on production. Fortunately for the Allies the air minelaying in the Baltic, although it did little material damage compared with the effort, had an important effect — more than was realised by their naval chiefs — in hindering U-boat trials and training, and thus the operational advent of the new submarine types in large numbers. If the new types had ever got to sea in strength they might have revived the U-boat menace as dangerously as in 1943.

But once the Allied armies crossed the Rhine in March, closing on Berlin in conjunction with the Russian advance from the east, all forms of pressure could be, and were, intensified — with crippling effect.

During the last few weeks of the war, the U-boats’ activity was mainly off the east and north-east coasts of Britain. Although they achieved little, it is significant that none of the new types was ever sunk in these waters.

After Germany’s capitulation in May, 159 U-boats surrendered, but a further 203 were scuttled by their crews. That was characteristic of the U-boat crews’ stubborn pride and unshaken morale.

During the 5½ years of war, the Germans had built and commissioned 1,157 U-boats and fifteen ex-foreign submarines were taken over by them: 789 (including 3 ex-foreign) had been lost. They had also commissioned some 700 midget submarines. By far the largest proportion of those sunk
at sea
— 500 out of 632 — were destroyed by British or British-controlled forces. On the other side, submarines — German, Italian, and Japanese — sank 2,828 ships, totalling nearly 15 million tons. Much the greatest proportion of that huge total was sunk by the Germans — whose U-boats also sank 175 Allied warships, most of them British. Of the Allied losses to U-boats, 61 per cent of the total was made up of ships sailing independently of convoys, 9 per cent was of stragglers from convoys, and only 30 per cent came from ships in convoy — and very few were lost in convoy when air-cover was available.

The Germans’ possession of the French naval bases on the Bay of Biscay, for four years, and Eire’s refusal to allow the Allies use of her western and southern coastlines, even though she herself depended largely upon the supplies the convoys brought her, contributed immensely to the Allied losses in the Atlantic. And it was largely the Allies’ hold on Northern Ireland and Iceland that kept open the one remaining route to Britain.

PART VI - THE EBB 1943

CHAPTER 25 - THE CLEARANCE OF AFRICA

The first consequence of the Allied failure to capture Tunis in December 1942 was the abandonment of the original idea of trapping Rommel between the pursuing British Eighth Army and the new First Army in Tunisia pushing eastward to meet it.* The two armies would now for a time have to deal separately with the respective forces of Rommel in Tripolitania and Arnim in Tunisia, while these, as Rommel’s drew nearer to Arnim’s, would enjoy the strategic advantage of a central position — enabling them to switch their combined weight against one or other of their assailants.

* For map, see p. 280.

When checked before Tunis at Christmas, and faced with the prospect of continued mud there until the rainy season ended, Eisenhower sought to develop a more southerly thrust to reach the coast near Sfax, thus blocking Rommel’s line of supply and retreat. For this ‘Operation Satin’ he planned to use mainly American troops, concentrating them around Tebessa to form what was entitled the U.S. 2nd Corps (Major-General Fredendall). But when he reported his intention to the Combined Chiefs of Staff — who came along with Roosevelt and Churchill to Africa in mid-January for a fresh Allied Conference at Casablanca, to settle future aims — the riskiness of such a thrust by raw troops into an area where Rommel’s veterans might soon be arriving was emphasised in discussion of Eisenhower’s new plan — particularly by General Alan Brooke — and he was moved to cancel it.

That decision left the next move to Montgomery, who had paused near Nofilia in mid-December to build up his strength before attacking the Buerat position, 140 miles west, to which Rommel had withdrawn the remnant of his army in the previous stage of his long retreat from Egypt.

Montgomery launched his fresh offensive in mid-January. It was planned on the same pattern as before — a pinning attack on the enemy’s front combined with an outflanking manoeuvre through the desert interior to close the way of retreat. This time, however, he eschewed any preliminary probing that would show his intention and ‘scare the enemy off his present line’. Moreover, only an armoured-car screen was used to watch the enemy’s position, and the main bodies of Montgomery’s force were held far back until the day before the attack, and then started on a long approach march from which they went straight into action, on the morning of the 15th. The 51st Division with armoured support attacked along the coast-road, while the 7th Armoured and the New Zealand Divisions carried out the planned manoeuvre. But no opposition was encountered at first, and when it was met west of Buerat it came only from rearguards. Rommel had slipped away from the Buerat position and, once again, out of the intended trap. That proved the easier because, as Alexander’s Despatch remarked in gentle rebuke, ‘the New Zealanders and the 7th Armoured Division felt with some caution round the southern end of the enemy’s anti-tank screen’.

Rommel’s main battle had also, once more, been with the Axis Supreme Command. Back in safely remote Rome, Mussolini had again lost touch with realities, and the week before Christmas had sent an order to ‘resist to the utmost’ on the Buerat position. Thereupon Rommel enquired by radio of Marshal Cavallero, the Chief of the Comando Supremo, what he was to do if the British were to ignore that position, which was easy to by-pass, and drive on westward. Cavallero did not answer the question, but emphasised that the Italian troops must not be left in the bag again as at Alamein.

Rommel pointed out to Bastico the obvious contradiction between Mussolini’s order and Cavallero’s stipulation. Like most servants of an authoritarian regime, Bastico sought to avoid making a choice and taking responsibility for a course that would not correspond to the hopes and dreams of his leader. But by persistence Rommel had got him to agree to, and give an order for, the withdrawal of the non-motorised Italian troops to the Tarhuna-Homs line, 130 miles farther back nearer Tripoli. Then, in the second week of January, Cavallero asked that a German division should be sent back to the Gabes defile to guard against the threatened American thrust there — which, as already related, did not mature. Rommel, naturally, was not unwilling to respond to a request that fitted in well with the plan he had conceived, and sent the 21st Panzer Division. That left him with only the thirty-six tanks of the 15th Panzer Division, and the fifty-seven obsolete Italian tanks of the Centauro Division, to meet the 450 that Montgomery had brought up for his fresh thrust. Rommel had no intention of fighting a hopeless battle against such overwhelming strength, so withdrew from the Buerat position as soon as he heard — through his wireless interception service — that the British would be ready to strike on January 15.

After imposing checks on them in the first two days — during which they were made cautious not only by widely strewn mines but by losing some fifty tanks in efforts to pierce his screen — Rommel withdrew his motorised forces to the Tarhuna-Homs line on the 17th, and immediately told the Italian infantry already there to go back to Tripoli. The Tarhuna-Homs line was more defensible than the Buerat position, but the weight of armour that Montgomery brought against its inland flank convinced Rommel by the 19th that a prolonged stand there would be hopeless, and imperil his line of retreat. So he began to withdraw his remaining forces during the night, while the port installations at Tripoli were blown up.

Early in the morning a signal came from Cavallero conveying Mussolini’s sharp disapproval of the withdrawal and insistent demand that the line must be held for at least three weeks. That afternoon Cavallero arrived on the scene to reinforce the message. Rommel caustically pointed out that any such time-limit was dependent on the enemy’s action in the absence of adequate reinforcements to counter it. He ended by putting the crux of the matter to Cavallero in the same way as he had done to Bastico in November over the demand to hold on to the Mersa Brega line: ‘You can either hold on to Tripoli a few more days and lose the army, or lose Tripoli a few days earlier and save the army for Tunis. Make up your mind.’ Cavallero avoided giving a definite decision, but provided it indirectly by telling Rommel that the army must be preserved although Tripoli must be held as long as possible. Rommel promptly started to withdraw the non-motorised Italian troops, and also most of the movable stores. Then on the night of the 22nd he withdrew the rest of the troops from the Tarhuna-Homs line, going right back to the Tunisian frontier, a hundred miles west of Tripoli, and then to the Mareth Line, eighty miles beyond.

The British follow-up from beyond the Buerat line had been ‘sticky’, as Montgomery himself described it. That was due not only to mines and road-demolitions but also to extreme caution in tackling the enemy’s rear-guard screens. Montgomery, in his memoirs, emphasises that the advance on the coast-road ‘generally displayed a lack of initiative and ginger’, reinforcing this comment by quoting a note in his diary on the 20th: ‘Sent for the G.O.C. 51st (Highland) Division, and gave him an imperial “rocket”; this had an immediate effect.’ But, in fact, Rommel had already pulled back to the Tarhuna-Homs line, and it was not the stronger push on the coast-road but the weight of armour building up against his inland flank which had expedited his order, on the 22nd, to give up that line and withdraw to the Tunisian frontier. When the 51st Division advanced by moonlight, with the leading infantry riding on the tops of the tanks, they found that the enemy had vanished. By daybreak on January 23 the speartips of the converging British columns had driven into Tripoli unopposed.

The attainment of that objective, which had been the goal of successive British offensives since 1941, crowned the 1,400-mile advance from Alamein in pursuit of Rommel. It was reached exactly three months, to the day, after the launching of the offensive. For Montgomery and his troops it was an exhilarating achievement, but in him it also produced a sigh of relief — for, as he wrote: ‘I was experiencing the first real anxiety I had suffered since assuming the command of the Eighth Army.’ A gale in the first week of January had played havoc in the harbour at Benghazi, reducing the intake of stores from three thousand tons a day to less than a thousand, and compelling him to fall back on the use of Tobruk, nearly eight hundred miles from Tripoli, which meant considerably lengthening the already very long line of supply by road. To provide the extra lift he had ‘grounded’ the 10th Corps and used its transport, but feared that he would have to suspend the advance unless he could reach Tripoli within ten days of the start of his new push.

The enemy, fortunately for him, were not aware of his time and supply problem, whereas it was clear to them that he was advancing on them with an overwhelming superiority in tanks — 14 to 1 against those of the 15th Panzer Division, the only really effective tanks they had. If the 21st Panzer Division had not been called away to meet the threatened American thrust towards the Gabes bottleneck — a thrust that was cancelled two days after the despatch of this division, on the 13th — a stand on the Tarhuna-Homs line would have been more possible. In that case Montgomery, on his own evidence, might have had to break off the advance and withdraw to Buerat, for when he entered Tripoli he was within two days of the expiry of his ten-day time limit.

At Tripoli he paused for several weeks to build up and clear the demolition-blocked harbour. It was not until February 3 that the first ship was able to enter, and it was the 9th before the first convoy came in. Only light troops had followed up the enemy’s withdrawal, and Montgomery’s leading division did not advance across the Tunisian frontier until the 16th — Rommel’s rear-guard having withdrawn on the previous night into the forefield of the Mareth Line, which the French had originally built to check an Italian invasion of Tunisia from Tripolitania. It consisted merely of a chain of antiquated block-houses, and Rommel thought it better to rely on field entrenchments newly dug in the spaces between them. Indeed, after inspecting the Mareth Line, he urged that it would be wiser to base the defence of this approach route to Tunis on the line of the Wadi Akarit — forty miles back, and fifteen miles west of Gabes — which could not be out-flanked, as its inland flank rested on the saltmarsh area of the Chott el Jerid. But his proposal was not acceptable to distant dictators who were still hopefully erecting ‘castles in the air’, and his own stock was at its lowest point.