The Moscow Option (16 page)

The ship seems to be heading inevitably for the rocks.
General Brooke, 31 March 1942

I

As the last pockets of Maltese resistance were systematically extinguished by the Axis invaders, General Erwin Rommel sat in his captured British command vehicle, cursed the flies, and pored over maps of the Western Desert and Lower Egypt. With Malta occupied Axis control of the central Mediterranean was assured, and the free passage of supplies to
Panzerarmee Afrika
was at last an enduring reality. Now Rommel could afford to look east and only east, towards Egypt and the glittering prize of plentiful oil in the deserts beyond.

Soon the Luftwaffe formations that had doomed the British forces on Malta would be joining the army in North Africa, and Rommel would have parity in the air with the enemy. The three divisions of 39th Panzer Corps - now redesignated II Afrika Korps - had arrived in Cyrenaica late in February; by now they were reasonably accustomed to the climate and the terrain. The peculiarities of desert battle could of course only be learned in combat, but Rommel was confident that the divisions’ level of experience and training would see them through.

He had great hopes of the new commanders. General Rudolf Schmidt, commanding II Afrika Korps, was a solid leader with a wealth of panzer experience. He was also, as luck would have it, an old friend of General Cruewell, commander of the original Afrika Korps (now I Afrika Korps). The two panzer division commanders had both been regimental commanders in France, and their swift rise to divisional command testified to their excellent records. General Balck had commanded Guderian’s spearhead regiment in the drive to the English Channel and a panzer regiment in Kleist’s Panzer Group I in the Ukraine. He had recently succeeded General Stumpff as commander of 20th Panzer Division. General Manteuffel had led 7th Panzer Division’s panzer regiment in the drive on Moscow, and had taken over command of the division when General Steiner was killed outside Volokamsk. Rommel, of course, knew many of 7th Panzer’s officers and men, having himself led the division in France. So
Panzerarmee Afrika
, even with its growing size, remained something of an old boy’s club, and the wealth of shared experience and common thought-patterns would serve it well in the often disjointed desert fighting of the coming weeks.

Rommel himself was certainly confident. His letters to his wife Lucie brimmed with breathless anticipation of the struggle ahead. To take but one example:

“Dearest Lu

I’m fine in every way. Things are working out as I hoped. Now that Malta has fallen our supply difficulties are over. And that seems to have cured my stomach troubles! Soon you will be hearing big news in the Wehrmacht communiques. The troops are in good fettle, and I’m more than ready to go! We’re all hoping to strike the blow that ends this war.”

II

Rommel’s good cheer was Churchill’s gloom. The enthusiasm engendered by the American entry into the war had faded as the immediate dangers to the British position became steadily more apparent. America would take time to gird its collective loins, maybe too much time. The Japanese had already swallowed up the Far East, and were now at the gates of India and the Indian Ocean. In Russia the situation, though obscure, was clearly critical. Only in North Africa was the line holding. But for how long?

As recently as February Churchill had seen no reason why it should not hold indefinitely. There were, as he never tired of exclaiming, over 600,000 British, Dominion and Imperial troops in North Africa and the Middle East. This surely was enough to stem any German onslaught, whether from the west or the north or both. It was possible that General Auchinleck was correct in asserting that no offensive action could be launched until the summer. Churchill, mindful of his own role in pushing ‘Crusader’ to its premature demise, was reluctant to press his Middle East C-in-C on this point. But there could be no question of a further retreat; the Egyptian frontier would have to be held until such time as an offensive could be launched.

This uncharacteristic realism on the Prime Minister’s part had suffered not a little strain as the Axis designs on Malta became evident through the month of March. Churchill had been understandably unwilling to see the island fall while Eighth Army watched impotently from the sidelines. Less understandably he urged an offensive in the Western Desert, ‘regardless of the risks’, as a means of averting the threatened calamity.

Auchinleck, who possessed an occasionally debilitating surfeit of realism, had considered this ‘senseless’. And had said so, as diplomatically as possible. He and his staff in the Middle East had argued that a desert offensive, with Eighth Army palpably unready, would do nothing to save Malta and would probably result in the loss of Egypt.

“We feel that to launch an offensive with inadequate armoured forces may very well result in the almost complete destruction of those troops, in view of our experience in the last Cyrenaican campaign. We cannot hope to hold the defensive positions we have prepared covering Egypt, however strong we may be in infantry, against a serious enemy offensive unless we can dispose of a reasonably strong armoured force in reserve, which we should not then have . . . We still feel that the risk to Egypt incurred by the piecemeal destruction of our armoured forces which may result from a premature offensive may be more serious and more immediate than that involved in the loss of Malta, serious though this would be.”

The Chiefs of Staff in London, after much heart-searching, had reluctantly agreed. Brooke had seen ‘no possibility of holding on to Malta unless the Italians make a complete hash of the enterprise. Unfortunately the strong German involvement makes this extremely unlikely.’ Britain’s resources were too few and too precious to expend on causes already lost.

And so Malta fell, with Eighth Army still intact on the Egyptian frontier. It would need to be, for despite Churchill’s habitual optimism it was virtually all that stood between Germany and the oil that both sides needed to continue the war. Ninth Army in Syria and Tenth Army in Iraq and Iran were both of little more than corps strength; the former would most likely join Eighth Army in the defence of Egypt, leaving the latter’s three half-trained and ill-equipped Indian divisions to stem a German surge across the Soviet-Iranian border.

The weakness of this northern flank, and Rommel’s increased panzer strength, worried General Brooke more than it apparently worried Churchill. Brooke began to wonder whether Eighth Army’s deployment on the Egyptian frontier was either tactically or strategically wise. In its present position Eighth Army could always be bypassed and encircled by panzer forces moving round the open desert flank. Tactically it might make more sense to pull the Army back to the El Alamein position, where its left flank could be anchored to the northern cliffs of the Qattara Depression. Strategically even this might prove insufficient. Eighth Army would still be a long way from the ultimate zone of decision, the oilfields of southern Persia. These were threatened from the north as well as from the west. Perhaps it would be wiser to give up Egypt altogether, to pull Eighth Army back behind the Suez Canal, or even the Jordan.

But such notions, however sensible from the military point of view, were political anathema to the British leadership. Only five months before they had been advertising ‘Crusader’ as the offensive that would drive the Axis out of North Africa; now they could hardly surrender the same area to the enemy without a fight. Or even conduct tactical withdrawals. Auchinleck was promised another two infantry divisions for the northern front, but for better or worse Eighth Army was to wait for Rommel on the Egyptian frontier.

III

The fate of Egypt was of interest not only to Germans, Italians and British but also, surprisingly enough, to the Egyptians, many of whom were hopefully awaiting an Axis victory. They were not looking for new rulers, but for the independence which they naively, if understandably, expected from the all-conquering Rommel.

British rule was unpopular. It was not so much tyrannical as possessed of that huge unconscious arrogance which only centuries of empire-building can produce. Britain was fighting for the world, and the world, including the Egyptians, would have to make the necessary sacrifices. If this meant being bombed, invaded and forced to suffer basic shortages then that was just too bad. The British Empire had no time to consult with the people it was saving from dictatorship.

This attitude - and British policy in Palestine vis-a-vis Jewish immigration - generated a marked lack of loyalty to the Allied cause among the Arab populations of the Middle East, Egypt included. Nascent rebellions in Syria and Iran and a real rebellion in Iraq had already been crushed in 1941. Egypt was occupied by a rather larger army, and armed rebellion was, for the moment, out of the question. But help, in the form of
Panzerarmee Afrika
, was on the way. If the British were too busy to consult the Egyptians the Axis powers were not.

King Farouk had come to the throne in 1937, and had soon installed the pro-Axis Ali Maher-pasha as his Prime Minister. Maher had no desire to bring Egypt into the war, and refused to declare war on Italy merely because Italy had declared war on Britain. This was naturally unacceptable to the British, who removed him as inconspicuously as possible.

But Ali Maher would not go away. He maintained close contact with the King, and the two of them remained the Axis’s chief supporters in Egypt. They also kept in surreptitious touch with the Axis powers, particularly Germany. The King’s father-in-law and Ambassador to Tehran, Zulficar-pasha, told his German counterpart in April 1941 that Farouk and his nation would ‘like to see Germany’s liberating troops in Egypt as soon as possible’. He further conveyed the King’s sympathy and respect for Hitler and Germany, and wished them every success in the war with England.

This was far from the only contact between the Axis and the Egyptians. General Aziz Ali el-Masri-pasha, who had been Egyptian Chief of Staff under the Ali Maher Government, had contacts with the Abwehr. In early 1941 Admiral Canaris’s organization tried to help him out of Egypt and into Axis-held territory, but the British caught him boarding his plane and sentenced him to a mild prison term.

Aziz Ali el-Masri also had links with the so-called Free Officers Group, which was made up of young and indignant lieutenants and majors like Gamel Abdul Nasser and Anwar as-Sadat. This group, whose contacts with the Italians in 1940 had borne little fruit, were now establishing new contacts with the more impressive Germans.

All this clandestine anti-imperialism might well have come to nothing had Egyptian popular opinion been better disposed towards the occupying power. But as the shortages of food and basic goods became more marked, and pro- Axis propaganda more intense, the popular mood swung in the opposite direction. In January 1942 the students of Al Azhar University rampaged through Cairo calling for Rommel and the return of Ali Maher. Farouk, attempting to ride this tide of nationalist fervour, sought a showdown with the British. He demanded the resignation of his Foreign Minister, who had just broken off relations with Vichy France at British insistence. This caused the entire Egyptian Government to resign. The British, fearing that Farouk would fill the new vacuum with Ali Maher, surrounded the King’s Abdin Palace with armoured cars and presented him with two alternatives. He could appoint the pro-British Nahas-pasha or he could abdicate.

Farouk chose the latter and the British, content with such sensible behaviour, promptly forgot the matter. They would have done better to keep it in mind. Farouk’s humiliation was Egypt’s humiliation, and anti-British feeling deepened and spread. Major Nasser, one of the Free Officers later hanged by the British for collaborating with the Axis, wrote in his diary:

“As for us, as for the army, this event has been a deep shock; hitherto the officers talked only of enjoyment and pleasure. Now they talk of sacrifices and defending dignity at the cost of their lives . . . You see them repenting of not having intervened in spite of their obvious weakness to restore the country’s dignity . . .”

Nasser and his fellow Free Officers did more than repent; they began to plan for the not-too-distant future when, they hoped, Rommel would burst through the western gates of Egypt.

IV

Oblivious to this plotting behind them in Egypt, but only too aware of Malta’s fate and the new panzer units in front of them, the men of Eighth Army waited through the last two weeks for Rommel’s blow to fall. General Cunningham was still their commander; Auchinleck, though not entirely satisfied with his performance in ‘Crusader’, had been loath to dismiss him for what he saw as Churchill’s mistake. Cunningham’s naive handling of the British armour had been at best overlooked, at worst misunderstood. Auchinleck, who made few mistakes of his own, was very good at persevering with others who did.

Eighth Army, despite the battering of the previous November and the calls of the embattled Far East, was a stronger force than it had been six months before. It was still divided into two corps, the 30th under Norrie and the 13th under Godwin-Austen. The former now comprised two armoured divisions, boasting 650 tanks, of which 165 were the powerful new American Grants. The latter comprised two infantry divisions, both almost completely motorised, and the 32nd Army Tank Brigade. The 1st Armoured Brigade was in reserve, the 2nd New Zealand Division en route from Syria. There was also 70th Division and 1st Army Tank Brigade ensconced, none too comfortably, in Tobruk.

The British had conserved their Middle Eastern strength well during the months of Japan’s Far Eastern onslaught but their deployment of it left much to be desired. The force in Tobruk was an heroic lamb laid on the altar of Imperial prestige. Should the Germans attack the fortress in strength - as they were virtually certain to do - there was little chance of successful resistance and none at all of escaping to fight another day. Auchinleck wanted to abandon Tobruk, the Navy was fed up with the losses involved in supplying it, but Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff had convinced themselves that its port facilities should be denied to the Germans for as long as possible.