The Second World War (61 page)

At the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, Hitler’s attention was not on North Africa. His Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, returned from a visit to Rommel to find a ‘
very unpleasant situation
’. On 27 May, Reinhard Heydrich had been attacked in Prague by young Czechs, equipped by the British Special Operations Executive. Heydrich was still just alive, but would succumb to infections from his wounds within a week. And on the night of 30 May the RAF had launched its first thousand-bomber raid against Cologne. Hitler was beside himself with rage, mainly directed against Göring.

From 31 May, during the scrappy battle which the British called the ‘Cauldron’ and the Germans ‘the sausage pot’, Rommel then threw his forces against 150th Brigade’s position. The onslaught, with tanks, artillery and Stukas, was massive. The brigade fought to the end with great courage, winning the admiration of the Germans. But the continuing failure of British commanders to counter-attack in force from the west was one of the least impressive examples of generalship in the war. Rommel then ordered the 90th Light Division and the Trieste Division to destroy the French at Bir Hakeim, so that he could start to break up the Gazala Line from the south.

On 3 June, Koenig’s men fought off the overwhelming force attacking them. The British sent a relief force, but it ran into the 21st Panzer Division and pulled back. No other attempt was made to relieve the French garrison, partly because the counter-attack further north on 5 June collapsed due to the incompetence and timidity of formation commanders reluctant to risk their tanks against the Germans’ 88mm guns. Some supplies got through. The RAF provided as much support as possible, helping to break
up attacks and fight off the Stukas and Heinkels. French colonial troops made short work of any Stuka pilots who parachuted down. Koenig’s men, suffering in the intense heat and dust from thirst and hunger, dug their foxholes deeper, waiting for a greater onslaught. By holding on, they knew that they could greatly aid the withdrawal of the Eighth Army.

Exasperated by the tenacity of the French defence, Rommel took command himself. On 8 June, German artillery and Stukas began to pound the position again. One bomb killed seventeen wounded in the dressing station. The determination of the defenders never slackened. One officer saw the sole survivor of a guncrew, a legionnaire with a hand blown off, reload the 75mm by ramming home the shell with his bloody stump. On 10 June the French defences were breached. The
defenders of Bir Hakeim
had no more ammunition.

That night the British 7th Armoured Division, the only formation which might have saved them, withdrew. Koenig was ordered to pull back. He led most of his remaining men out through the German encirclement in the dark, at first undetected and then under heavy fire. He was accompanied by his courageous English driver and mistress Susan Travers, who was later made a warrant officer in the French Foreign Legion. Rommel received an order from Hitler to execute any captured legionnaires, whether Frenchmen who should be treated as insurgents, or anti-fascist Germans, or citizens of other Nazi-occupied countries. To his credit, he ensured that they were treated as ordinary prisoners of war.

When General de Gaulle heard from General Sir Alan Brooke, the chief of the imperial general staff, that Koenig and most of his men had escaped back to British lines, his sentiments were so intense that he had to shut himself alone in a room. ‘
Oh, the heart beating with emotion
, sobs of pride, tears of joy,’ he wrote later in his memoirs. This moment, he knew, marked ‘the start of the resurrection of France’.

Further north, the battle of the Cauldron continued, with the British and Indian brigades fighting stubbornly in defence, but the Eighth Army still remained incapable of launching an effective counter-attack. On 11 June, just after the fall of Bir Hakeim, Rommel ordered his three German divisions to destroy the remaining British positions, including the ‘Knightsbridge’ box held by the 201st Guards Brigade and 4th Armoured Brigade. They were then to seize the Via Balbia. This prompted a sudden withdrawal on 14 June, when the South Africans and the 50th Division near the coast were ordered to pull back to the Egyptian frontier to avoid being cut off. An undignified general retreat ensued, which became known as the ‘Gazala gallop’.

Tobruk was left exposed, and the Italian infantry advanced to encircle it from the east. Rommel brought up his German divisions, although 21st
Panzer was severely mauled in the process by RAF Hurricane and P-40 Kittyhawk fighter-bombers. Air Vice Marshal Arthur Coningham’s Desert Air Force was improving its techniques all the time, and without its support the fate of the Eighth Army might have been catastrophic.

Churchill sent orders to Auchinleck that Tobruk had to be held at all costs. But Tobruk lacked sufficient troops and guns, and many of the mines from its defences had been taken to strengthen the Gazala Line. On 17 June, Rommel began his assault with a feint against one corner of the perimeter, while secretly preparing to attack elsewhere.

Unlike the Australians who had defended Tobruk so doggedly the year before, the 2nd South African Division commanded by Major General Hendrik Klopper was inexperienced. In any case, Admiral Cunningham was well aware that he did not have the ships to supply Tobruk through another siege. The 33,000-strong garrison included another two infantry brigades and a weak armoured brigade with obsolete tanks.

At dawn on 20 June, Kesselring sent in all the Stuka and bomber groups available in the Mediterranean supported by squadrons of the Italian air force, the Regia Aeronautica. This was accompanied by a concentrated artillery bombardment, while German pioneer battalions cleared a route through the minefields. The 11th Indian Brigade was shocked by the unprecedented onslaught, and by 08.30 hours the first panzers were through the outer defences. In the course of a single day, as columns of smoke rose into the sky from the battered town, the Germans advanced all the way to the port, cutting the twenty-kilometre-long fortress position in two. It was a bewilderingly swift victory.

General Klopper surrendered the following morning, before the port and many of the supply dumps had been destroyed. Four thousand tons of oil fell into Rommel’s hands, the best gift he could have hoped for. His hungry soldiers, whose clothes were almost in rags, became ecstatic at the booty. ‘
We’ve got chocolate
, tinned milk, canned vegetables and biscuits by the crate,’ an Unteroffizier wrote home. ‘We’ve got English vehicles and weapons in vast quantities. What a feeling to put on English shirts and stockings!’ Italian soldiers did not get to share in the rich pickings. The same Unteroffizier acknowledged that ‘they have it harder than us, with less water, less food, less pay and not the same equipment as we have’.

Mussolini tried to pretend that the capture of Tobruk was an Italian victory, so to emphasize the truth Hitler immediately promoted the forty-nine-year-old Rommel to the rank of
Generalfeldmarschall
. This promotion produced a good deal of jealousy and resentment in the highest levels of the Wehrmacht, which Hitler no doubt enjoyed. On this, the first anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the German dictator was overjoyed in his certainty that the British Empire had now begun to disintegrate as he
had claimed. And in a week’s time Operation Blue was to be launched in southern Russia to seize the Caucasus. The Third Reich once more appeared invincible.

On that June day, Churchill was in the White House with Roosevelt when an aide came in and passed a slip of paper to the President. He read it and then passed it to the prime minister. Churchill felt sick with disbelief. He asked General Ismay to check with London whether Tobruk really had fallen. Ismay returned to confirm that it was true. The humiliation at such a moment could not have been greater. Churchill later wrote: ‘
Defeat is one thing
; disgrace is another.’

Roosevelt, showing his most generous instincts, immediately asked what he could do to help. Churchill requested as many of the new Sherman tanks as the Americans could spare. Four days later, the American chiefs of staff agreed to the despatch of 300 Shermans as well as a hundred 105mm self-propelled guns. It was an act of great selflessness, especially since the Shermans had to be snatched back from US Army formations, which had been longing to replace their obsolete vehicles.

Deeply depressed and shocked, Churchill returned to face a motion of no confidence in the House of Commons. He put most of the blame on Auchinleck, which was hardly fair. The Auk’s main mistake was to have appointed Ritchie. The acute shortage of competent and decisive commanders at the most senior levels in the British army clearly had a terrible influence on its performance. Brooke ascribed this to the deaths of the best young officers in the First World War.

An equally crippling handicap was the long-standing disaster of the arms procurement system. Unlike the RAF, which had attracted the most talented designers and engineers in an age when aviation was exciting, the army accepted armaments which were already obsolete and then continued to mass-produce them, rather than go back to the drawing-board. This cycle had begun with the loss of so much equipment at Dunkirk and the need to replace weapons rapidly, but had not been broken.

Some of the new six-pounder anti-tank guns had been used with good effect in the Gazala battles, but to send badly designed tanks with two-pounder guns into action against the Panzer IV, and especially the 88mm gun, was like sending up Gloster Gladiator biplanes against Messerschmitt 109s. One can only admire the bravery of crews going into the attack well aware that their own tanks were virtually useless, except against infantry. The British did not produce a truly battleworthy tank, the Comet, until the very last days of the war.

Churchill’s only consolation from his visit to the United States was that he had managed to persuade Roosevelt to agree to the invasion of French
North Africa. Operation Gymnast, which later became Operation Torch, had been fiercely opposed by General Marshall and the other American chiefs of staff. Marshall’s fears of Churchill getting at Roosevelt when none of the President’s military advisers were present had been vindicated. They suspected, with a degree of justification, that Britain wanted to preserve its position in the Middle East. But Churchill was afraid that if Britain lost Egypt, and the Germans managed to link up an invasion through the Caucasus with Rommel’s advance, then not just the Suez Canal but the oilfields of the region could be lost. It might also encourage the Japanese to extend their operations into the western Indian Ocean.

Churchill had another reason which chimed well with Roosevelt’s thinking. Since an early invasion of northern France was out of the question because of a lack of air superiority and a shortage of shipping and landing craft, there was no other area in which American troops could be deployed against Germany. And the prime minister knew that Admiral King, as well as the American public, wanted to drop the ‘Germany first’ strategy, and concentrate on the Pacific. Even Brooke was highly dubious about the North Africa landings, but Churchill was proved right, albeit for very different reasons to the ones he had put forward. The US Army needed battle experience before it could take on the Wehrmacht in major battles on the mainland of Europe. And the Allies needed to learn the dangers of amphibious operations before they attempted a cross-Channel invasion.

Kesselring still wanted to conquer Malta first, but Rommel was adamant. He had to have the Luftwaffe supporting him so that he could destroy the Eighth Army before it had a chance to recover. Hitler supported Rommel, with the argument that the capture of Egypt would make Malta irrelevant. But they both overlooked the fact that while the Luftwaffe was being diverted to support Rommel during the Gazala battles, Malta had been reinforced. Yet again, supply lines across the Mediterranean were at risk, and the seizure of Tobruk with its port had not solved the logistic conundrum of the desert war as Rommel had hoped. In what was referred to as the ‘rubber-band’ effect of these campaigns, the over-extended supply line led to disaster, hauling back the attacker.

Even before the fall of Tobruk, Rommel had ordered the 90th Light Division to push on towards Egypt along the coast road. And on 23 June the two panzer divisions were also sent in pursuit of the Eighth Army. Auchinleck meanwhile sacked Ritchie and took command himself. He wisely cancelled orders to make a stand at Mersa Matruh and instructed all formations to withdraw rapidly to El Alamein, a small railway halt near the sea. Between Alamein and the Qattara Depression to the south, with its salt marshes and quicksands, he intended to establish his defensive
line, secure in the knowledge that Rommel would not be able to outflank it as easily as he had at Gazala.

Morale in the Eighth Army could not have been worse. Despite Auchinleck’s determination to pull back to El Alamein, Ritchie’s earlier order had left the 10th Indian Division defending Mersa Matruh. It was caught by the speed of Rommel’s advance units, which encircled the town, cutting the coast road. Part of X Corps managed to break out, but lost over 7,000 men taken prisoner in the process. Further south, the New Zealand Division broke through the 21st Panzer Division in a vicious night attack, killing wounded, medics and combatants alike, an action which the Germans considered a war crime.

Rommel was still convinced that he had the Eighth Army on the run and could strike through to the Middle East. Mussolini was so certain of success that he arrived in the port city of Derna followed by a magnificent grey stallion, on which he would take the victory parade in the Egyptian capital. In Cairo itself, panic and confusion reigned in all the offices of GHQ Middle East and the British embassy, to the amusement or alarm of most Egyptians. Long queues formed outside banks. On 1 July, columns of smoke rose into the air from documents burned in the gardens of official buildings. They created a snowstorm of partly charred secret papers around the city. Street vendors snatched them up to make cones for their peanuts, and the day became known as ‘Ash Wednesday’. Members of the European community began to leave by car, with mattresses strapped to the roof in scenes reminiscent of Paris two years before.