How Hitler Could Have Won World War II (15 page)

It was obvious to Auchinleck that Cunningham had to be replaced, and on November 26 he named Lieutenant General Sir Neil Ritchie, his deputy chief of staff, to command 8th Army. This guaranteed that, whatever the risks, the battle would continue.

Rommel's own vehicle got stranded on the opposite side of the frontier fence because of engine trouble. But Cruewell's command vehicle, a covered van captured from the British, came past, and picked him up. When night fell, the German commanders could not find their way through the frontier minefields, so they and their staffs spent the night with Indian dispatch riders going back and forth and British tanks and trucks moving past. At daybreak they slipped away unchallenged, and crossed back into Libya.

On his return Rommel found that 15th Panzer had still not reached the frontier, while Ariete and Trieste Divisions had halted well to the west upon encountering a brigade of 1st South African Division. Also, supply columns bringing fuel and ammunition had failed to arrive. Rommel now could not carry out his plan to send a battle group to seize Habata, the new British railhead thirty-five miles southeast of Halfaya Pass, or to block the British supply and escape route along the escarpment running southeast into Egypt from Halfaya. His bid to force the British to retreat had failed. Even so, Rommel stubbornly held on, hoping for an opportunity to strike a killing blow.

Meanwhile, 13th Corps, led by 2nd New Zealand Division and ninety “I” tanks, pushed on westward toward Tobruk. The scratch force that was left to defend the Sidi Rezegh area was soon under great pressure. On November 25, the New Zealanders seized Belhamed, only nine miles southeast of the Tobruk perimeter. The next night, the Tobruk garrison crashed through Axis besiegers and gained the top of the escarpment at Ed Duda, only a couple of miles from the New Zealanders.

Panzer Group headquarters sent frantic radio signals asking for return of the panzers, but Rommel was not willing to give up so readily. He ordered Cruewell to drive north and clear the Sollum front by thrusts of 15th Panzer on the west and 21st Panzer, already at Halfaya, on the east. However, 15th Panzer had gone back to Bardia, fifteen miles north of Sollum, to refuel. At the same time 21st Panzer also headed toward Bardia because of a misinterpreted order.

Rommel realized his hopes were gone and ordered 21st Panzer back to defend Tobruk, but kept 15th Panzer south of Bardia. Early on November 27 the division's tanks overran headquarters of 5th New Zealand Brigade at Sidi Azeis, ten miles southwest of Bardia, and captured the commander, 800 men, and several guns. With this success, Rommel ordered 15th Panzer to move back toward Tobruk as well.

On the frontier, Africa Corps had gained nothing decisive. Now it was down to only a fraction of its original strength, while the British, left in possession of the Sidi Rezegh battlefield, had been able to repair many tanks and receive replacements from Egypt. British tank strength was now 130 to 40 German, but Rommel continued to use his armor in concert, while the British kept theirs scattered.

Rommel hoped to keep the Tobruk garrison isolated, and to destroy the two New Zealand brigades (2nd and 4th) in the Belhamed area. On November 29, 15th Panzer detoured to the south and west around Sidi Rezegh and, in a bitter engagement, seized Ed Duda in an advance from the southwest. Ariete Division and 21st Panzer were to attack the New Zealanders from the east and south, but made little headway against British armor that drove against them on their southern flank.

The men of Panzer Group were exhausted, the weather was cold, the country without water, and the Axis supply line in tatters. Although the New Zealanders were nearly encircled, strong British armor threatened to push aside the light forces covering the Axis southern flank, and the 1st South African Division was coming forward to help.

But Rommel was still determined, and so were his men. On the morning of November 30, 15th Panzer with the help of battle groups from 90th Light attacked southward from the escarpment north of Sidi Rezegh. By evening they had gained some New Zealand positions, 600 prisoners, and twelve guns. During the same period, 21st Panzer and Ariete stopped a relieving attack by British armor from the south.

During the night most of the New Zealanders broke out, although the Germans captured more than 1,000 men and twenty-six guns. British armor and infantry moved south and east to regroup. Tobruk once more had been isolated.

Rommel appeared to have won. But the price had been too high. He had no offensive power left, while British tank strength was growing daily with shipments from the rear. If his army were to survive to fight another day, Rommel had to extricate it.

With the same boldness he had employed in the attack, Rommel pulled back his forces swiftly in a masterful series of engagements, preventing the British in every case from surrounding Axis units and forcing their surrender.

On January 6, 1942, Rommel reached Mersa el Brega, on the border of Tripolitania. Once more all of Cyrenaica had been evacuated. The Axis garrison marooned at Bardia surrendered on January 2, 1942, but a starving force at Halfaya Pass didn't give up until January 17. This so delayed British movements, especially of supplies, that the British could maintain only the 1st Armored Division, fresh from England, and the 201st Guards Brigade at Agedabia.

Meanwhile Rommel's supply situation had improved vastly because Hitler had transferred a Luftwaffe air corps to Sicily and Italy, and it beat down British air and sea domination over the sea route to Libya. On January 5, 1942, an Italian convoy reached Tripoli with fifty-five tanks and a number of antitank guns. Counting repaired armor, Rommel now had 111 German and 89 Italian tanks on January 20. The British 1st Armored Division had 150, all manned by inexperienced crews.

At once Rommel resolved on a counteroffensive. To preserve secrecy, he kept his plans from both the German and Italian high commands. He lulled the British into complacency by forbidding all air reconnaissance, camouflaging his tanks to look like trucks, and massing his forces by short night marches.

When he struck, therefore, on the night of January 20–21, 1942, he achieved absolute surprise. Rommel sent a battle group of 90th Light and some tanks northward along the Via Balbia, while Africa Corps advanced about forty miles inland, along the Wadi el Faregh. Rommel hoped to block the retreat of the British. But the going was so hard through the sand dunes that the enemy had time to escape, concentrating east of Agedabia. Africa Corps ran out of fuel, but Rommel took personal command of the 90th Light battle group and rushed into Agedabia, seized the town on January 22, and continued on northward on the Via Balbia, throwing British supply columns into confusion.

Rommel now tried to block the retreat of 1st Armored Division, but the bulk of it escaped, although Africa Corps was able to surround and destroy one combat group with seventy tanks near Saunnu, forty miles northeast of Agedabia. The remaining British tanks broke for Msus, forty miles north. In one of the most extraordinary chases of the war, the panzers pursued the British armor, and wrecked more than half of the remaining tanks.

Rommel now feinted with Africa Corps toward El Mechili, eighty miles northeast of Msus across the chord of the Cyrenaican bulge. Since Rommel had used this route in his first offensive in April 1941, Ritchie took the bait and concentrated all his armor to meet it. Instead, Rommel rushed 90th Light along the coast to Benghazi, where it captured mountains of supplies and 1,000 men from the 4th Indian Division. The victory brought promotion to colonel general from Hitler, but no additional troops.

The men of the Panzer Group were at the end of their strength. When Ritchie withdrew to Gazala, only forty miles west of Tobruk, and began building a new defensive line, all the Germans and Italians could do was to come up on the line on February 6, 1942.

Once more, Rommel had gained much with little. At Gazala, he was positioned to resume the attack as soon as he could rebuild his army.

12 NO CHANGE IN STRATEGY

WITH THE ENTRY OF THE UNITED STATES INTO THE WAR, A WHOLLY NEW STRATEGIC challenge faced Germany. The potential power of America was immense. But its application lay in the future. Hitler had to decide between two alternatives: Should he continue the attack on the Soviet Union, or should he go on the defensive there and concentrate on keeping American and British forces away from the continent of Europe?

For Admiral Erich Raeder, the choice was easy. On February 13, 1942, he proposed that Germany's primary military tasks should be for Rommel to drive through Egypt to the Middle East, while the army in Russia did only two things: capture Murmansk and close that ice-free port to Allied convoys, and drive into the Caucasus to seize Soviet oil wells. After that the way would be clear to cross into Iran, close off that supply line to Russia, and join up with Rommel. Meanwhile, German war production should be shifted over predominately to the navy and air force to build more submarines and other vessels and aircraft to interdict the flow of supplies from America.

Two days later, an airplane brought Rommel to Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Rommel pressed hard for more forces, three more divisions, to double the German troops he possessed in North Africa. With these, he said, he could smash the British, capture Egypt, drive the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean, and press to the oil fields of Iraq and Iran.

Rommel's proposals strengthened Raeder's argument for a sea change in German strategy—away from Russia and, at long last, aimed at the British and their new American allies. Despite the terrible losses suffered in the Russian campaign—more than a million men had been killed, wounded, or captured in eight months of fighting, one-third of the entire German army in the Soviet Union—Raeder's and Rommel's proposals still could have saved the war for Germany.

Much would be gained if North Africa and the Middle East were finally captured, the remaining strength of the German army largely preserved, and an all-out campaign undertaken to stop the flow of supplies across the Atlantic. Because of Japan's advances, it would be a year, at least, before the United States could exert any substantial strength beyond the Pacific, and more time would go by before it could build enough ships, landing craft, air fleets, and armies to invade western Europe. When the time came, Germany might be much stronger and much more able to resist.

But at this moment Adolf Hitler made the final decision that closed off any hope of reaching a negotiated settlement. He refused to consider Raeder's and Rommel's proposals. He made it clear that he wanted first to destroy the Red Army and eliminate its sources of strength. After that, other courses might be followed. But for now, the
Ostheer—
or army in the east—was to receive priority, and the German economy was to be directed at rearming this army, not at building a great U-boat fleet and air force, and not at reinforcing Rommel.

Consequently, as the year 1942 opened, Hitler continued to avert his strategic gaze from the west and maintained his fixation on destroying the Soviet Union. The British and the Americans didn't know it yet, but they had been granted a long reprieve and a great opportunity to build their power.

The defeat at Pearl Harbor had so shocked and angered the American people, however, that it was an open question whether they would turn on Germany before they had smashed the Land of the Rising Sun. Prime Minister Churchill, fearful they might choose Japan over Germany as the major enemy, traveled to Washington only days after the Japanese attack.

With Churchill on the battleship
Duke of York
was a large entourage to work out a joint strategy with the United States. These talks, code-named Arcadia, led to reaffirmation of the “Germany first” policy established in the British-American ABC-1 meetings in the winter past and to the formation of the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee (CCSC), a joint authority to direct the war made up of the heads of the armed services of both countries.

But agreement on a broad plan to defeat Germany before turning full American power on Japan did not mean that the British and the American leaders saw eye to eye. It quickly became clear that the Americans—led by General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff and principal military adviser to the president—wanted to strike directly at German power by crossing the English Channel, challenging the Germans in a stand-up fight on the beaches, then driving them back into Germany and destroying their army. The British, with far fewer men and much leaner resources, preferred an indirect approach through the Mediterranean, which Churchill characterized as “the soft underbelly of the Axis.”

There were arguments either way. A straight shot across the Channel would be a shorter route to the vitals of Germany. But the British believed that the long way around might be the shortest way home. Not only would a direct attack, being the most obvious, be the most heavily contested, and therefore the most expensive in men and materials, but it would also drive the Germans back on their reserves and supplies rather than cutting them off from their means to resist.

A Mediterranean strategy had the advantage of striking where the Germans were weak. No one had much concern for the Italians, whose weapons were so poor and desire for war so uncertain that they were likely to surrender at the first opportunity. On the other hand, a campaign up the boot of Italy would be extremely difficult, given the mountainous nature of the terrain, while an invasion of the Balkans would be far from the vitals of Germany, in a region laced with mountains and cursed with poor roads and insufficient rail lines.

The dispute over where to concentrate the blow was to consume a vast amount of time and cause much rancor between the British and the Americans.

At Arcadia, the British were able to get tentative agreement on an invasion of French North Africa (Operation Gymnast). This sort of diversion was precisely what General Marshall opposed. He and Henry L. Stimson, secretary of war, got Gymnast postponed in March 1942, but the victory was only temporary.

At the moment the Americans and British were most concerned with a new phase in the Battle of the Atlantic. German U-boats operating off the coast of the United States and in the St. Lawrence estuary in Canada sank 79 ships with 429,000 tons in March 1942, and two months later 123 ships and 569,000 tons.

For the first half of 1942 the threat of German submarines frightened American and British leaders badly. But it was only a passing phase. The Allies had two major assets of their own, and one given them by Hitler. Their assets were, first, the enormous productive capacity of the Allied, principally American, shipyards where seven million tons of shipping were being built, and, second, the slow but steady introduction of destroyers, destroyer escorts, corvettes, and escort carriers to shepherd Allied convoys and apply weapons like sonar and radar which located German U-boats in darkness and the worst of weather.

The gift of Hitler was to suppress the construction of U-boats. To counteract the launching of ships by the Allies, the Germans had to sink 600,000 tons of shipping a month. This required nineteen to twenty new U-boats a month to replace those lost. But Hitler's decision to concentrate on the army eliminated any hope of U-boat construction reaching the necessary level. Consequently, Allied sailors slowly gained the upper hand, and, by mid-1943, had won the Battle of the Atlantic.

For Adolf Hitler, the early months of 1942 closed off the last chance he possessed to change strategic direction. Even at this late date, he might have reversed the course of the war if he had gone over to the defensive in Russia, following the strategy the Germans adopted in World War I, and concentrated most of Germany's resources on the Battle of the Atlantic and on helping Rommel capture Suez and the Middle East.

Franz Halder, the army chief of staff, wanted to revert to the defensive in Russia, and even opposed Admiral Raeder's limited objectives for 1942—seizure of the Caucasus oil fields and Murmansk. But Halder and the Fuehrer's remaining close military advisers never could see the opportunities still beckoning to them from the southern shore of the Mediterranean.

As Erwin Rommel wrote with great vexation:

It was obvious that the high command's opinion had not changed from that which they had expressed in 1941, namely, that Africa was a “lost cause,” and any large-scale investment of material and troops in that theater would pay no dividends. A sadly shortsighted and misguided view! For, in fact, the supply difficulties which they were so anxious to describe as “insuperable” were far from being so. All that was wanted was a real personality in Rome, someone with the authority and drive to tackle and clear away the problems involved.

But no one could alter Hitler's fixation on destroying the Soviet Union. Admiral Raeder was not going to get his submarines. And General Rommel, Germany's unrecognized military genius, had to be satisfied with the three German and the three Italian armored or motorized divisions allotted to him if he was going to alter the course of history. In the campaign about to unroll, he very nearly did.