The Second World War (53 page)

Rommel was troubled by much else – militarily by his over-extension at the extreme end of his line of communications, 1200 miles from Tripoli, personally by his health. For all his force of character, Rommel was not robust. He suffered from a recurrent stomach ailment, perhaps psychosomatic, and on 22 September was invalided to Germany. He was replaced by a Panzer general from Russia, Georg Stumme, and was told that when fit he would be given an army group in the Ukraine; but on 24 October he was telephoned in hospital by Hitler with the words: ‘There is bad news from Africa. The situation looks very black. . . . Do you feel well enough to go back?’ He was not, but left the following day and arrived at the headquarters of the Panzer Army Africa that evening, 25 October, to find a battle furiously raging at Alamein and the German-Italian front already creaking under the strain of the Eighth Army’s assault.

Montgomery had conceived his offensive in a style altogether different from that of his predecessors, who had been consistently tempted by the freedom of manoeuvre the desert terrain offered into using their tanks as the principal tactical instrument, in the hope of achieving a Panzer-style
Blitzkrieg.
Montgomery rightly judged that the British armoured divisions lacked the flair to out-German the Germans, and in any case he was not prepared to settle for a mere advantage of manoeuvre. Rather than chase the Panzer Army out of its position back towards Tripoli, as had happened three times before, he wished to inflict on it a crushing defeat in a set-piece battle so as to destroy its offensive power for good.

Accordingly he had laid his plan for the Battle of Alamein as a deliberate infantry-artillery assault, supported by some heavy tanks, which would destroy the enemy’s fixed defences and their garrisons. Only after what he grimly forecast would be a ‘dogfight’ did he intend to launch the main body of his armour into and through the position. The battle began at midnight on 23 October with a bombardment by 456 guns, concentrated to support an infantry drive down the coast road but supported by a diversionary thrust in the desert further south. The diversionary thrust failed to draw enemy forces away from the crucial sector and on 26 October, Rommel’s first day back in command, Montgomery reinforced the main assault with armour. In a week of bitter fighting, which reduced German tank strength to thirty-five, he succeeded in carving two ‘corridors’ through the Panzer Army’s coastal position and on 2 November stood poised to break through. Rommel was now prepared to retreat but was refused permission to do so by Hitler and committed the last of his strength to hold the northernmost of the two corridors on the coast. Montgomery, who was being kept informed by Enigma of the fluctuations in German intentions, accordingly decided on 4 November to commit the bulk of his armour into the southern corridor. By mid-afternoon the 7th and 10th Armoured Divisions had destroyed the unfortunate Italian Ariete Division, whose obsolete tanks were completely outclassed, and were streaming into the Panzer Army’s rear. Rommel, unable to implement Hitler’s ‘stand fast’ order even had he so wished, knew that the battle was lost and directed all the units that could still move to retreat post-haste along the coast road to the west. It was the start of a harrowing 2000-mile retreat.

Montgomery has been reproved by post-war critics for an alleged failure to harry Panzer Army Africa to its destruction in the days and weeks after Alamein. It is true that his immediate pursuit was cautious; but he attempted a pursuit none the less, and at Fuka, late on 5 November, the 2nd New Zealand Division nearly succeeded in outflanking the retreating enemy and establishing a roadblock in his rear. Thereafter, however, heavy rain made off-road movement difficult and Rommel’s beaten army succeeded in keeping ahead of its pursuers. In any case, it is doubtful whether an attempt at annihilation would have been possible or even wise. Certainly none of Montgomery’s predecessors, with the exception of O’Connor in February 1941, had ever succeeded in getting ahead of an enemy retreating along the single coast road. O’Connor’s success, moreover, had been won against only a portion of the thoroughly demoralised army – and Rommel’s Afrikakorps at least was not demoralised. More important, the rationale of the battle Montgomery had fought precluded a sudden transformation of effort from dogged assault to headlong chase. ‘This battle’, he had warned in his orders before its inception, ‘will involve hard and prolonged fighting. Our troops must not think that, because we have a good tank and very powerful artillery support, the enemy will all surrender. The enemy will NOT surrender and there will be bitter fighting. The infantry must be prepared to fight and kill, and to continue doing so over a prolonged period.’ There had been bitter fighting and much killing: the number of British soldiers killed or wounded was 13,500 (a figure almost exactly predicted by Montgomery), by far the highest toll suffered by a British army in the war thus far; it amounted to 5 per cent of the Eighth Army but about a quarter of its infantry. Such losses could be justified only by a clear-cut victory. If Montgomery had mounted a confused and costly battle of pursuit, Rommel and the Afrikakorps might have profited by their cunning in mobile operations to muddy the outcome of Alamein, and Montgomery would have incurred criticism far more severe than he has suffered retrospectively at the pens of literary strategists.

His strategy after Alamein – correctly, it may be judged – was the eighteenth-century one of leaving his beaten enemy ‘a golden bridge’, the coast road to Tripoli. Along it Rommel beat a passage, under constant attack by the Desert Air Force, to reach Benghazi on 20 November and Tripoli on 23 January 1943, having made a stand at Wadi Zem Zem from 26 December to 16 January. He received no reinforcements and few supplies en route, had left 40,000 of his 100,000 men (mostly Italians) as prisoners in British hands and had only eighty tanks still running. The Panzer Army Africa, by every token of military failure or success, had been beaten at Alamein. Montgomery’s début on the battlefield had been one of the most brilliant in the history of generalship.

What now saved the Panzer Army Africa from immediate extinction was a development which should have ensured its destruction. The appearance in its rear of the Anglo-American army committed to the Torch landings was to initiate the Allies’ third war in Africa. Torch had been agreed upon by the Americans and British in London in July as a second best to the cross-Channel invasion they were then persuaded could not be risked in 1942. Until a Second Front was launched in 1943, as the Americans hoped, Torch provided employment for the American army which had begun to gather in the United Kingdom that spring. It also provided employment for part of Britain’s home reserve, surplus to strategic need now that the danger of a German invasion had receded, and for the first of the ninety divisions which were being mobilised in the United States. When complete, the Torch army consisted of three task forces, Western, Central and Eastern, destined to land respectively at Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco and at Oran and Algiers inside the Mediterranean. Western Task Force, commanded by General George Patton, consisted of the 2nd Armoured, 3rd and 9th Divisions, transported direct from the United States; Central Task Force comprised the American 1st Armoured Division and part of the future 82nd Airborne Division from Britain; and Eastern Task Force was composed of the British 78th and American 34th Divisions. The whole was embarked in an inter-Allied armada of American and British ships. Sailing at high speed under strong air cover, the convoys reached their pre-assault positions without interception by U-boats. Until Central and Eastern Task Forces passed the Straits of Gibraltar during 5-6 November, German naval intelligence assured Hitler that the fleet was another Pedestal-style convoy assembling to rush to Malta; then it switched to the view that the fleet would land troops at Tripoli. On 7 November fresh indications suggested that it would land in North Africa, until then the least likely destination because Hitler clung to the belief that the Americans would do nothing to drive Vichy more deeply into his arms. Here was a double misapprehension. It was certainly true that the Americans accepted the reality of Vichy’s hostility to Britain, but they had persuaded themselves nevertheless that they were regarded by many of Pétain’s supporters in a different light. It was equally the case that many in Vichy France clung to the terms of the armistice only as long as Hitler remained clearly the master of Europe; at the merest appearance of any diminution of his power they held themselves ready to defend the long-term interests of France by a change of allegiance.

The North African landings forced such a change of allegiance. The Americans had arranged contact with local anti-Pétainists through General Mark Clark, who landed from a British submarine at Cherchell, ninety miles from Algiers, on 21 October. However, American over-caution in preserving the security of their plans prompted their supporters to premature action, which resulted in Vichy adherents resecuring control of Algiers and Casablanca, where the task forces began to land on 8 November (at Oran a British naval assault was botched). A fortuitous event then worked to reverse the Allied setback. Admiral Darlan, Pétain’s commander-in-chief, happened to be in Algiers on a private visit; when it became clear that the Frenchman chosen by the Americans to assume local control, General Henri Giraud, lacked the authority to establish it, the Americans opened direct negotiation with Darlan, who was persuaded by the evidence of Allied strength to change sides, and declared an armistice on the evening of 8 November. This enabled the British and Americans swiftly to take possession of coastal Morocco and Algeria. Pétain immediately disowned Darlan. The Vichy Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, visited Hitler at his headquarters on 10 November and assured him that Darlan was acting illegitimately, but his protestations availed the Vichy regime not at all. Hitler demanded rights of free access to Tunisia for his forces, proceeded to take it of his own accord and simultaneously ordered his troops to enter the French metropolitan ‘unoccupied’ zone the next morning (Operation Attila). By the evening of 11 November, the whole of France was under German military occupation and Pétain’s government at Vichy had been reduced to a cipher. The marshal would linger on in the office of head of state until driven into exile in Germany in September 1944; but after November 1942 his two-year pretence of sustaining French autonomy stood revealed as a sham.

The balance of military advantage between the Axis and the Allies in North Africa ought now to have swung decisively in the latter’s favour. Two large Allied armies dominated most of the coastline, Montgomery’s Eighth Army in Libya, Eisenhower’s First Army in Algeria and Morocco; the
Armée d’Afrique
was meanwhile veering to the Allied side. As late as a week after the landing, the only Axis force still operational in Africa was Rommel’s battered Panzer Army, hastening northward from Alamein and as yet a thousand miles from the Tunisian border. Hitler now acted with dispatch to deprive the Allies of their advantage. On 12 November Pétain formally denounced the North African armistice, thus obliging the French commanders in Tunisia, the only sector of French North Africa not yet occupied by the Western Allies, to open its ports and airfields to Vichy’s Axis allies. The first German forces began to arrive on 16 November from France; they consisted of the 10th Panzer, Hermann Goering Panzer Parachute and 334th Divisions, together constituting the Fifth Panzer Army, and were at once deployed westward to hold the line of the eastern Atlas mountains against Eisenhower’s advancing troops.

The Atlas mountains in Tunisia form a doubly strong military position, since, a little way south of Tunis, the chain divides into the Western and Eastern Dorsals; seen on the map the Dorsals resemble an inverted Y with the tail at Tunis. The Fifth Panzer Army (commanded by Walther Nehring until 9 December, Jürgen von Arnim thereafter) at first lacked the force to hold the Western Dorsal, and British and American troops had advanced there in patrol strength by 17 November. It also had to fight hard to hold off a determined push by the British First Army, with French support, on Tunis and Bizerta, their ports of entry. The arrival of the American II Corps, with armour, allowed the Allies to fix their line on the Eastern Dorsal at the end of January 1943. They were also drawing larger reinforcements from the
Armée d’Afrique,
now under the command of Giraud; at the Casablanca conference in January he had made an uneasy accommodation with de Gaulle which was to last until April 1944.

However, the Germans had meanwhile been improving their position in Tunisia: more troops and aircraft had been transferred from Sicily, and Rommel was approaching the Mareth Line via Tripoli. The Mareth Line was a fortification system on the Libya-Tunisia border built by the French against the Italian army in Libya before 1939; its occupation by Rommel’s troops in early February secured the Germans’ back against Montgomery, while their holding of the Eastern Dorsal protected them from frontal attack by Eisenhower. Indeed, in the short term at least, the strategic situation in North Africa had been reversed. Rommel, instead of finding himself caught between the pincers of the First and Eighth Armies, had retired to join an army which could now strike at either or even both its enemies from a strong central position. It was about to do so.

The Fifth Panzer Army had used its mobility and armoured strength to keep the Allied forces off balance along the Eastern Dorsal, striking at the weak French XIX and inexperienced American II Corps in turn – at Fondouk on 2 January, at Bou Arada on 18 January and at Faid on 30 January. These attacks disorganised the French, essentially a colonial force quite unequipped to contest the issue with modern tanks, and forced the dispersion of the American armour. Arnim, in colloquy with Rommel, decided in early February that the enemy’s situation in southern Tunisia was ripe for a counter-stroke. A dispute between them over how it was to be launched was settled by their superior, Kesselring, Supreme Commander South, and in February one each of their Panzer divisions, 10th and 21st (refitted since Alamein), drove into the American II Corps at the Faid pass through the Eastern Dorsal and further south, panicked the defenders, and by 19 February were pressing at the Kasserine pass through the Western Dorsal. The Allied position in Tunisia was threatened by a ‘roll-up’ operation from south to north and the threat was only averted by the intervention of the British 6th Armoured Division, supported by the artillery of the American 9th Division. The terrain also favoured the defence, confining the German tanks to narrow valleys as they tried to force their way forward; on 22 January, when Rommel met Kesselring, he confessed that he had misjudged the situation, could not widen the attack swiftly enough to exploit his initial advantage and must now return to Mareth to meet Montgomery’s offensive which was being prepared in his rear.