How Hitler Could Have Won World War II (9 page)

With the newly arrived paratroops and their own men, Group West finally cleared the airfield. In the late afternoon, the first 5th Mountain Division troops landed in transports. Even so, they suffered losses, because British guns continued to fire onto the field. By that evening (May 21) eighty destroyed or severely damaged aircraft lay on the airfield.

The Germans around the airport tried to move east in hopes of joining their other units. But the 5th New Zealand Brigade stopped them at Pirgos, a few hundred yards away.

General Freyberg had made a grave tactical error in the first two days. He thought the main German attack was going to come by sea, and refused to move his forces out of their coastal positions at Khania and Suda Bay to shift over and wipe out the Germans around Maleme.

The Germans had in fact planned to send in heavy weapons, equipment, and a few 5th Mountain Division soldiers on May 21 in twenty-five Greek caiques, or small motorized sailing vessels, escorted by an Italian destroyer. But British warships caught the flotilla north of Crete, sank most of the caiques with nearly all the weapons and equipment, along with 300 mountain troops, and sent the remaining vessels flying for the island of Milos to the north.

An even larger group of caiques tried to reach the island on May 22, but Royal Navy ships met them twenty miles south of Milos. This flotilla escaped the fate of the other because an Italian warship bravely shielded the vessels, while Richthofen's aircraft attacked so hard that the British ships had to turn southwest into the Kithera Strait.

Now commenced the first great air-sea battle of the Second World War. Richthofen's Stukas were the major killers, giving the first strong lesson in the effectiveness of dive-bombers against naval vessels. In the battles around Crete, the British lost three cruisers and six destroyers, while thirteen other ships were badly damaged, including two battleships and the only aircraft carrier then in the Mediterranean fleet.

The fleet commander, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, pulled most of his ships back to Alexandria on May 23, and began sending fast supply ships to Crete at night to avoid Luftwaffe attacks.

General Freyberg meanwhile had realized his error, and ordered the 5th New Zealand Brigade to win back the Maleme airfield. The attack got under way early on May 22. The New Zealanders almost reached the Tavronitis River on the south, advancing to the eastern edge of the airfield along the coast. At daylight, however, the Luftwaffe moved in to attack and forced them back east of Pirgos. A day later, threatened by a German encircling movement, the New Zealanders withdrew to Galatas. This permitted General Julius Ringel, new commander of Group West, to join forces with isolated parachutists southwest of Khania. Now the Maleme airfield no longer was in range of British artillery. The remainder of the 5th Mountain Division troops arrived, while supply craft came in steadily, transforming the tactical situation.

General Löhr directed Ringel to capture Suda Bay and break the British line of supply, and after that to relieve the parachute units still isolated and pinned down at Rethimnon and Iraklion. Ringel ordered his airborne troops to drive straight eastward on the main road, where they ran up against a solid New Zealand defense at Galatas. It took unrelenting Luftwaffe attacks to break the line and permit the Germans to reach Khania on May 27.

Freyberg informed Wavell that his troops had reached the end of their endurance. On May 27, Churchill and Wavell gave permission and he began to withdraw his force southward twenty-three miles to Khora Sfakion on the south coast and evacuate from there.

On May 28 the Germans broke through bitterly defended rear-guard positions east of Khania and occupied Suda Bay. Meanwhile Freyberg's main body was moving over a poor track to the south coast. It entirely escaped General Ringel that most of the enemy were heading south, and he sent only a small regiment down the Khora Sfakion road. He directed his main body eastward, which relieved the decimated German units holding out around Rethimnon on May 29 and forced the surrender of an Australian battalion east of the town the next day. The Aussies had not received orders to evacuate until too late. However, entirely unnoticed by the Germans, the British brigade and some Greeks, about 3,500 men, got out on British warships at Iraklion on the night of May 28–29.

The Royal Navy rescued 13,000 soldiers at Khora Sfakion over four nights. The evacuation was a hard, difficult, and dangerous job for the sailors, under constant attack by Luftwaffe aircraft. One of Admiral Cunningham's staff officers pointed out that the navy had already suffered heavily and wondered whether it should risk more losses.

Cunningham replied: “It takes the navy three years to build a ship, but three hundred years to build a tradition; we must not let the army down.”

General Wavell ended the evacuation on June 1 when he learned that the remaining soldiers no longer had the strength to hold off the German mountain troops who were pressing hard against the port. The 9,000 British soldiers and 1,000 Greeks left behind surrendered.

Looked at objectively, the Cretan operation was a disaster all around. The British lost about 12,000 soldiers on Crete, while navy dead exceeded 2,000. Material losses were enormous. Only about 2,000 Greeks got off the island, and many of the survivors who remained died in guerrilla operations, massacred wherever found, along with numbers of Cretan civilians.

More than half the Germans who landed on Crete died or were wounded. Altogether 11th Air Corps lost 6,000 men, two-thirds dead, the rest wounded. The highest losses were in the most battle-tested, best-trained outfits. Student said after the war that “the Fuehrer was very upset by the heavy losses suffered by the parachute units, and came to the conclusion that their surprise value had passed. After that he often said to me, ‘The day of parachute troops is over.' ”

General Halder's glib hope that the capture of Crete would lead to easier supply for North Africa remained the mirage it had always been. The main Axis supply line ran as before past Malta.

7 ROMMEL'S UNAPPRECIATED GIFT

ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 11, 1941, GENERAL ERWIN ROMMEL, COMMANDER of the as yet nonexistent Africa Corps, along with Adolf Hitler's adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, flew in a Heinkel 111 bomber from Catania, Sicily, to Tripoli. Rommel wanted to check out the situation in Libya before the leading elements of his corps arrived.

At Catania he had asked the commander of the German 10th Air Corps, General Hans Geisler, to bomb Benghazi and British columns reported nearby. Geisler protested that he couldn't do that, because many Italian officers and officials owned homes at Benghazi and Italian authorities didn't want the place hit. Exasperated, Rommel queried Hitler's headquarters and got quick approval for the Luftwaffe to strike.

At Tripoli, the Italian officers were packing their bags for imminent departure, and saw little hope of holding Sirte, some 230 miles east of Tripoli, where Rommel wanted to set up a defensive line. Rommel decided to take command himself at the front, and that afternoon flew off with Schmundt in the Heinkel to Sirte.

Rommel's first view of Africa was sobering. The terrain alternated between sandy wastes and featureless hills. Through it all, he wrote, the only paved road in Libya, “the Via Balbia, stretched away like a black thread through the desolate landscape, in which neither tree nor bush could be seen as far as the eye could reach.”

At Sirte only a single Italian regiment was on guard. The closest British troops were at El Agheila, 180 miles farther east. They were stopped there, not by the Italians, but because they were at the end of an extremely long supply line (630 miles back to Mersa Matruh and the British railhead), and because the Middle East command was transferring many British troops to Greece.

The remaining Italian troops in Libya were 200 miles west of Sirte around Tripoli. At Rommel's insistence, leading elements of three Italian divisions there began moving toward Sirte on February 14.

On the same day the first German troops—the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion and the antitank battalion of 5th Light Division—arrived at Tripoli on a transport. Rommel insisted, despite danger of air attack, on unloading the ship by searchlight throughout the night. The next morning the two German outfits, in their new tropical uniforms, paraded through Tripoli, then moved off to Sirte, arriving twenty-six hours later.

Rommel had already grasped the essence of the war in Libya and Egypt: everything depended upon mobility.

“In the North African desert,” he wrote, “nonmotorized troops are of practically no value against a motorized enemy, since the enemy has the chance, in almost every position, of making the action fluid by a turning movement around the south.”

This was why the Italians had been beaten almost without a fight—they had moved largely on foot; the British were in vehicles. Nonmotorized forces could be used only in defensive positions, Rommel saw. Yet such positions were of little consequence, because enemy motorized units could surround them and force them to surrender, or bypass them. In other words, foot soldiers in the desert had no impact beyond the reach of their guns.

Rommel discerned that desert warfare was strangely similar to war at sea. Motorized equipment could move at will over it and usually in any direction, much as ships could move over oceans. Rommel described the similarity thus: “Whoever has the weapons with the greatest range has the longest arm, exactly as at sea. Whoever has the greater mobility . . . can by swift action compel his opponent to act according to his wishes.”

The Italians were discouraged, and little interested in challenging the British, while Rommel had only two battalions of 5th Light Division. The whole division couldn't get there until mid-April, and Rommel's main striking force, 15th Panzer Division, would take till the end of May to assemble.

Rommel knew that Hitler's interest in North Africa was limited to helping the Italians hold Libya. Otherwise, he would have provided more adequate forces. However, Rommel, who had won Germany's highest decoration for valor in World War I (the Pour le Mérite, or “Blue Max”), was a resourceful and determined officer, not deterred by obstacles. No one knew it at the moment, but Erwin Rommel was one of the greatest generals of modern times. Moreover, he possessed a burning ambition to succeed.

Rommel decided to use the modest tools on hand to strike a surprise blow at the British, who were somewhat complacently sitting between El Agheila and Agedabia, sixty miles farther northeast. General O'Connor had gone back to Egypt, succeeded by Lieutenant General Sir Philip Neame, who had little experience in desert warfare. General Wavell had replaced the experienced 7th Armored Division (the “Desert Rats”) with half of the raw 2nd Armored Division, just arrived from England, while the other half had been sent to Greece. He had also replaced the seasoned 6th Australian Division with the 9th Australian Division, but, because of supply difficulties, part of the division had been retained at Tobruk, 280 air miles northeast.

Wavell thought the few Italians still in Tripolitania could be disregarded. And though he'd received intelligence reports that the Germans were sending “one armored brigade,” Wavell concluded, on March 2, 1941, “I do not think that with this force the enemy will attempt to recover Benghazi.”

That was a reasonable conclusion. No ordinary general would attack with such a small force. But Rommel was not an ordinary general.

Since none of his tanks had arrived, Rommel got a workshop near Tripoli to produce large numbers of dummy tanks, which he mounted on Volkswagens. These small vehicles served as the jeeps of the German army. They looked deceptively like tanks—at least to RAF reconnaissance pilots—and gave the British command pause.

Meantime Rommel moved up the two German battalions and his dummy tanks to Mugtaa, twenty miles west of El Agheila. Elements of two Italian divisions, the Brescia and Pavia, followed, along with the Ariete, Italy's only armored division in Africa, which had just eighty tanks, most of them obsolete light models.

General Neame, suspicious of the buildup at Mugtaa, modest as it was, moved the main British body back to Agedabia, seventy miles northeast, leaving only a small holding force at El Agheila.

On March 11, the 5th Panzer Regiment of 5th Light Division—the “armored brigade” Wavell had heard about—arrived at Tripoli. This regiment, the only armored force that Africa Corps was to get until the 15th Panzer Division arrived, had 120 tanks, half of them medium Mark IIIs and IVs, the rest light tanks with only a limited combat role. Although 5th Light was not a panzer division, it had the normal complement of tanks of a panzer division in 1941. This total, however, was only a little more than half the number Rommel had commanded in his 7th Panzer Division in the 1940 campaign. After the French campaign, Hitler doubled the number of panzer divisions, but gave each division fewer tanks.

On March 19, Rommel flew to Hitler's headquarters to get fresh instructions. Walther von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the army, and Franz Halder, chief of staff, told Rommel there was no intention of striking a decisive blow in Africa, and he could expect no reinforcements.

Rommel tried to convince them that the weakness of the British in North Africa should be exploited. But his pleas fell on deaf ears. Brauchitsch and Halder were preoccupied with preparations for Barbarossa and distracted by the campaign against Greece about to commence. To them, Libya was a sideshow to a sideshow.

Rommel wanted two additional panzer divisions to complete conquest of Egypt. It was obvious that transporting them to Tripoli was the key problem, and to solve it Malta had to be neutralized by severe bombing attacks or seized in an air-sea operation. But Halder chose to ignore this unmistakable fact and asked Rommel how two additional divisions could be maintained and supplied. Rommel, exasperated, replied: “I don't give a damn. That's your affair!”

Back in Africa, Rommel sent his reconnaissance battalion to seize El Agheila on March 24. The small British force put up little fight, and withdrew to Mersa el Brega, twenty miles east. This was a potentially formidable position. Mersa el Brega was on a commanding height near the sea, while to the south was the Bir es Suera salt marsh, and south of the marsh was the extensive, sandy Wadi Faregh. Both were almost impassable for vehicles.

Rommel could wait for the rest of his troops to arrive at the end of May, or attack with the small force he had in place. For him the decision was easy: attack. If he waited, the British would have time to build a powerful defensive line.

When elements of 5th Light Division struck on March 31, the British hurled them back. In the afternoon Rommel found a way around the British between the Via Balbia and the sea. That night 8th Machine Gun Battalion's vehicles crashed through the gap in a headlong rolling attack, flanked the British, and caused them to beat a hasty retreat, leaving behind fifty Bren gun-carriers and thirty lorries.

Luftwaffe reports showed that the British were pulling back from Agedabia. It was an opportunity Rommel couldn't resist. He at once ordered his forces to advance on Agedabia, gaining it on April 2.

Neame, with Wavell's permission, decided to evacuate Benghazi and retreat eastward. The abrupt withdrawal was a bonanza for Rommel, and he rushed to exploit it.

“I decided to stay on the heels of the retreating enemy, and make a bid to seize the whole of Cyrenaica at one stroke,” Rommel wrote.

Now commenced one of the most dramatic running battles in world history, in which an inferior force attacked and completely routed a superior enemy. Rommel ordered the reconnaissance battalion to drive straight toward Benghazi on the Via Balbia behind the retreating British, while Ariete Division's reconnaissance battalion was to rush across the chord of the Cyrenaican bulge to get to the sea and cut off retreat before the British arrived.

Rommel made the decision to cut through the Cyrenaican interior despite warnings from Italian generals that the route was a death trap. Rommel examined the country by air, found it good for driving, and the Italians' fears baseless.

Rommel learned that the British had already abandoned Benghazi, and at once ordered the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion to drive into the town. It arrived on the night of April 3.

On the morning of April 4, Rommel directed the main body of 5th Light Division to move through Ben Gania and on to the sea at Derna, while Ariete Division following the same route turned north to seize El Mechili, south of Jebel el Akdar, the mountain range along the coast. Speed was now everything. Rommel wanted to bring at least part of the British army to battle before it withdrew from Cyrenaica and escaped danger.

During the night, Rommel learned that British forces were still holding Msus, about seventy miles southeast of Benghazi and fifty miles northwest of Ben Gania. He also learned that the best route for his supply trucks was through Msus.

On the morning of April 5, Rommel ordered most of his armor—5th Panzer Regiment and forty Italian tanks—to head straight for Msus, destroy the enemy there, and press on to Mechili. Though held up by sandstorms, the tanks took Msus on the evening of April 6, but got lost on the way to Mechili, moved far to the north, and were only discovered by Rommel flying in his light Storch reconnaissance plane on the evening of April 7.