The Second World War (52 page)

The Italian army, which ought to have operated as an amphibious extension of the Italian fleet in Libya, was thereby reduced, like the British army in Egypt, to the status of an expeditionary force capable of mounting offensive operations only in so far as it was supplied and reinforced from Sicily, through its main base of Tripoli. Its advance into Egypt in September 1940 had overextended its line of communications and when on 9 December the Western Desert Force, under General Richard O’Connor, launched a surprise counter-offensive against it in its ill-constructed outposts at Sidi Barrani its defences crumbled and it was sent tumbling backward along the coast towards Tripoli in a retreat that did not stop until it reached Beda Fomm, 400 miles to the west, in early February.

‘Wavell’s offensive’, as the counter-thrust was called, set the pattern for the fighting that was to typify the war in the Western Desert for the next two years. It was unusual in the haul of prisoners it yielded – over 130,000, a total which went far to equalise the odds between Graziani’s army (200,000) and Wavell’s (63,000). It was characteristic in that it took the form of a pell-mell retreat along the single coast road by the defeated party, hotly pursued by the main body of the victor, who meanwhile mounted a series of ‘hooks’ inland through the desert, designed to unseat the enemy from his defended positions at one port after another (from east to west, Sollum, Bardia, Tobruk, Gazala, Derna, Benghazi, El Agheila, Tripoli) and, if possible, to pincer him between the desert ‘hook’ and the coastal thrust.

At Beda Fomm on 7 February the Western Desert Force achieved that result. Its 7th Armoured Division had got ahead of the Italians by a breakneck march across the desert neck of the bulge of Cyrenaica, to block the retreat of the Italian Tenth Army, whose rearguards were being pressed by the 6th Australian Division on the coast road. When it recognised that it was caught between two fires it surrendered – an outcome that crowned the daring of ‘Wavell’s offensive’ with a crushing success.

It was, however, to be short-lived, for two reasons. One was that Churchill’s decision to intervene in Greece robbed Wavell of the strength necessary to sustain his advance as far as Tripoli; the second was that Hitler sent a German general and a small armoured force to rescue Graziani’s army from its misfortunes. While British, New Zealand and Australian divisions were leaving for Athens, Rommel and the Afrikakorps, consisting initially of the 5th Light and 15th Panzer Divisions, were arriving in Tripoli. Though wholly new to desert warfare, Rommel and his troops were prepared to embark on an offensive by 24 March, only forty days after the advance guard arrived at Tripoli. Its opening stages tossed the British out of their weakly defended positions at Beda Fomm, by 3 April Rommel had captured Benghazi and by 11 April he was near the line from which O’Connor (who had been captured during the course of the fighting) had launched ‘Wavell’s offensive’ four months earlier; Tobruk, held as a fortress by the 9th Australian Division, was surrounded inside the German-Italian rear.

On this sudden and brilliant reversal of advantages, however, Rommel could not improve. For all his dynamism, he was a prisoner of the geographical and territorial determinants of the desert campaign: the desert yielded nothing, and over long stretches the landward edge of the coastal plain was bounded by high ground or a steep depression, effectively confining the movement of the armies to a strip forty or fewer miles wide. In that strip, which extended for 1200 miles between Tripoli in the west and Alexandria in the east, the chain of small ports were the only, but essential, points of military value. Campaigning necessarily took the form, therefore, of a dash from one point of maritime resupply to the next, in the hope that its impetus would topple the enemy off balance and allow his destruction when he was bereft of water, fuel, ammunition, food and reinforcements – the essentials, in that order, of desert warfare.

Rommel’s advance had dangerously attenuated his line of supply from Tripoli; that port’s connections with Sicily were themselves harried by British surface, submarine and air attack. During April he tried but failed to capture Tobruk, to shorten his resupply route; meanwhile the Royal Navy had successfully run a convoy (codenamed Tiger) past Malta, its vital mid-Mediterranean stronghold, from Gibraltar to Alexandria, bringing a strong reinforcement of tanks to the Western Desert Force. With this accretion of strength, Wavell went over to the counter-offensive and in an operation codenamed Battleaxe tried to unseat Rommel from his advanced position.

Battleaxe was a costly failure, largely because the British threw tanks against carefully positioned screens of German anti-tank guns – the superlative 88-mm gun came into its own over the long clear fields of fire which desert terrain offered – until their armoured formations were sufficiently weakened for the German Panzer units to counter-attack. The failure of Battleaxe undermined Wavell’s position; he was dispatched to India and replaced by the Indian army’s leading soldier, Claude Auchinleck, on 5 July.

A period of stalemate now descended on the desert war. Britain, not yet the full beneficiary of American Lend-Lease, could not find the means to reinforce its desert army to a decisively battle-winning level; Germany, committed since June to the conquest of Russia, could spare nothing to the Afrikakorps. The only clear-cut shift of advantage in the African war during the summer of 1941 occurred far away from the focus of the fighting, in Iran, where Germany’s attempts to repeat the success it had nearly achieved in Iraq in April were checked by an Anglo-Russian ultimatum to the Shah’s government, issued on 17 August; it demanded the granting of rights to move men but particularly supplies, including vital Lend-Lease shipments, into and through Iran’s Gulf ports to southern Russia and the Middle East. When the Shah’s army showed resistance to the British troops that arrived on 25 August to lend force to the ultimatum, it was overcome and he was exiled to South Africa; Soviet troops, who had entered northern Iran, met the British in Tehran on 17 September, after which the country was effectively divided and administered by the two governments until 1946.

While Iran was being firmly incorporated within the anti-Axis sphere of influence, Auchinleck had been preparing his own offensive riposte to Rommel on the borders of Egypt. Tobruk, garrisoned by the 9th Australian Division, still held out; so too, despite unrelenting Axis air attacks, did Malta, which was resupplied by offensive convoy action three times during 1941 – Excess in January, Substance in July and Halberd in September. Auchinleck’s aim was now to relieve Tobruk and recapture the bulge of Cyrenaica, as a preliminary to driving Rommel and his Italian satellites – who supplied the bulk of his troops if not fighting power – out of Libya. Crusader, as his winter offensive was codenamed, began on 18 November with nearly 700 tanks against 400 German-Italian. A first attempt to raise the siege of Tobruk failed, but on 10 December, after Auchinleck had relieved General Alan Cunningham of his command of the Eighth Army (as Western Desert Force had been retitled on 18 September), the Eighth Army linked arms with the British-Polish force which had replaced the Australian garrison; among the Australians’ triumphs during the eight months of siege was their repayment in kind to the Germans’ technique of drawing attacking tanks down into a destructive anti-tank screen.

Their defeat at Tobruk forced the Germans to retire as far as El Agheila, from which Rommel had commenced his offensive the previous March; but the factors of ‘overstretch’ which had left him so exposed in November now worked against the British – as did their need to transfer troops to the Far East – and when he counter-attacked on 21 January 1942 they in their turn were obliged to surrender much of the coastal strip so recently won and retire halfway back along the Cyrenaica bulge to the Gazala-Bir Hacheim position, which they reached on 28 January 1942 and then fortified.

Both sides were now tired and paused to recuperate; during Crusader the British had lost some 18,000 men killed and wounded and 440 tanks, the German-Italian army 38,000 men and 340 tanks; aircraft losses were about equal, some 300 on each side. During the spring these losses were gradually made good and by May Auchinleck came under pressure from Churchill to resume the offensive; while he prepared to do so, Rommel anticipated him and attacked on 27 May. The battle which followed, known as Gazala, was among the most reckless and costly fought during the desert war. At one stage Rommel personally led a strong tank raid into the British lines, trusting to the enemy’s own minefields to secure his flanks and rear. While he sat defiantly inside the British position, repelling all assaults made upon him at heavy tank loss to the British, his 90th Light and the Italian Ariete Divisions were overcoming the gallant resistance of the force to which Auchinleck had entrusted the security of his desert flank, Koenig’s Free French Brigade at Bir Hacheim. On 10 June Koenig’s survivors were forced to surrender, their attackers turned north to assist Rommel in his ‘cauldron’ battle, and on 14 June Auchinleck decided to withdraw from Gazala to a stronger position further east, at Alam Halfa, near Alamein, where the impassable Qattara Depression most closely approaches the sea. Tobruk was left garrisoned in his rear as a fortress, and he expected it to hold out as a thorn in the enemy’s side.

On 21 June, however, after only a week of siege, the 2nd South African Division surrendered Tobruk to the enemy; the capitulation came as a grievous blow above all to Churchill, then in Washington to confer with Roosevelt on plans for a Second Front. ‘I did not attempt to hide from the President the shock I received,’ he wrote. ‘It was a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.’ Although the surrender reawoke Churchill’s doubt of the fighting spirit of his soldiers which was first aroused by the collapse at Singapore four months earlier, it instantly drew from the Americans the generous offer to divert supplies of their new Sherman tank (the first produced by the Allies in the war that matched the Panzer Mark IV in gunpower) from their own armoured divisions, then in process of formation, to the Western Desert. Accordingly, 300 Shermans and 100 self-propelled guns were shipped by sea around the Cape and arrived in Egypt in September. The strength of the Axis air forces in Sicily still precluded the use of the Mediterranean as a supply route to the desert army – as was demonstrated by the devastation of the Pedestal convoy running supplies to Malta in August. In order to bring bare necessities of fuel and food to the island’s garrison and population (who had been collectively awarded the George Cross for their stoicism under relentless air attack), the Royal Navy lost one aircraft carrier and two cruisers sunk, and eleven out of sixteen convoyed merchant ships. By way of reaction, however, the British Desert Air Force was currently interrupting three out of four convoys sailing from Italy to Tripoli, and inflicting losses which threatened almost totally to deprive Rommel of tank and aviation fuel.

The desert war would not, however, be decided by balance of logistic advantage. After the humiliation of Tobruk, Churchill was determined on a victory in the field, which was now urgently required to boost Britain’s standing as an ally of the United States – flushed with the triumph of Midway – and the Soviet Union – still tenaciously contesting the Wehrmacht’s advance into southern Russia. Between 4 and 10 August Churchill visited the British Middle East headquarters in Cairo to confer with Smuts, the South African premier, Wavell, the commander-in-chief India, Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Auchinleck. The Prime Minister had decided it was time for a purge. On 15 August he replaced Auchinleck with General Harold Alexander as commander-in-chief Middle East; General Bernard Montgomery was simultaneously appointed to command the Eighth Army.

Dismissing Auchinleck, Churchill reflected, was like ‘shooting a noble stag’. With a magnificent physical presence, Auchinleck had every soldierly quality except the killer instinct. Churchill, however, was currently as close to desperation as he reached during the war; on 1 July he had to defend himself against a motion of censure in the House of Commons and he feared that any protraction of stalemate in the desert war would undermine his domestic and international leadership still further. Montgomery, though he lacked Auchinleck’s stature and reputation, had a name for ruthless efficiency, and Churchill counted on him to pit his undoubted killer instinct against Rommel’s in a decisive contest for victory in the desert.

Numbers – of men, tanks and aircraft – were for the first time turning conclusively in Britain’s favour. In August Rommel still had an advantage in numbers of divisions, ten to seven, and with these he launched a local offensive on 31 August against the position Montgomery had inherited from Auchinleck at Alam Halfa. In his first weeks of command, however, Montgomery had done much to strengthen it and had also fiercely impressed upon his subordinate commanders that he would tolerate no retreat. Nor was there any in this bitter but brief battle of Alam Halfa. By 2 September Rommel accepted that he could not break through and, having lost fifty tanks, many in the dense British minefields, withdrew to his original position. A lull now descended during which Montgomery retrained his veteran divisions for offensive action and integrated his new divisions, including the 51st Highland, into the Eighth Army’s structure. By October he deployed eleven altogether, with four armoured divisions, the 1st, 7th, 8th and 10th, which between them operated 1030 tanks (including 250 Shermans) supported by 900 guns and 530 aircraft. Panzer Army Africa was supported by 500 guns and 350 aircraft but of its ten divisions only four (two armoured) were German. The Italian divisions, of which two also were armoured, did not command Rommel’s confidence. They were dispirited by heavy losses and earlier defeats, shaken in their commitment to the Axis cause by America’s entry into the war, badly equipped, intermittently supplied and conscious that their lack of mechanised transport condemned them to the role of Rommel’s cannon fodder. Their readiness to stand in the fore of what Rommel now recognised would be a major British offensive was so questionable that he decided to ‘corset’ them with German units, so that no long section of his line was held by Italians alone.