The Second World War (72 page)

On 19 October, the Desert Air Force and the Americans began to launch a series of bombing and strafing raids against Luftwaffe airfields. Four days later, at 20.40 hours on 23 October, Montgomery’s artillery opened a massive bombardment of Axis positions. The ground trembled from the shockwaves, and the muzzle flashes illuminated the entire night-time horizon. From a distance it looked like sheet lightning. Allied bombers
attacked the reserve positions and rear areas. General Stumme, afraid of using up his ammunition, ordered his own artillery not to respond.

Since dusk, sappers had been moving slowly forward as the moon rose, prodding the sand with bayonets and lifting mines to create corridors marked by white tape and oil lamps. At 22.00 hours, XXX Corps started to advance through them with four divisions–the 51st Highland, 9th Australian, 1st South African and 2nd New Zealand–each supported by at least one armoured regiment. The newly arrived Highlanders went in with pipes skirling and bayonets fixed, having heard that the Italian troops seemed to fear cold steel more than almost anything else. Infantry casualties were comparatively light, but, to Montgomery’s irritation, the tanks of Lumsden’s X Corps became mixed up in the minefields. The delays meant that they were hit hard once dawn came.

General Stumme wanted to see the situation at the front for himself, but when his vehicle came under fire the driver drove away, not realizing that Stumme had got out. Stumme died from a heart attack and his body was not found until the following day. When General von Thoma heard the news and took command, he was reluctant to launch a major counterattack, because he did not dare use up fuel before his forces were resupplied. But on 25 October both the 15th Panzer Division in the north and 21st Panzer in the south put in successful local responses.

Montgomery’s master plan was not going well. The Germans had not swallowed his feint, and no forces had been sent to the south to face the diversionary attack by XIII Corps. Meanwhile in the north, the German minefields and Axis resistance had proved much stronger than expected. Montgomery unfairly blamed the 10th Armoured Division, even accusing it of cowardice, when in fact it was being misused. Montgomery’s anti-cavalry prejudice did not help him learn how best to use his armour.

On hearing of the British offensive and Stumme’s death, Rommel ordered a plane to fly him to Africa via Rome. He reached his headquarters at dusk on 25 October, having heard in Rome that the fuel situation was worse than ever due to the Royal Navy and the Allied air forces.

The British attack was then helped when the Australians captured two German officers carrying detailed maps of their minefields. The Australians seized a key hill during the night, which they held against heavy counter-attacks the next day. With the build up of XXX Corps and X Corps, the pressure in the north on the Panzerarmee Afrika was becoming irresistible. Rommel then heard that the tanker on which they had been counting had also been sunk. He warned OKW that with little fuel and a lack of ammunition he would find it hard to continue the battle. By now it was clear that Montgomery was concentrating the bulk of his forces in the north, so Rommel moved the 21st Panzer Division up to help. Without the
necessary fuel for his panzers to withdraw and fight a battle of movement in the open, he was now tied down to a slogging match which he could not win. Over half his panzers had been destroyed, falling victim either to the six-pounder anti-tank gun or to air attacks. The new 40mm gun on the American P-39 Airacobras proved a most effective tank-busting weapon.

Montgomery, forced to change his plan in the face of such a determined defence, prepared a new offensive while the Australians bore the brunt of the continuing counter-attacks. On 2 November, Operation Supercharge began in the early hours, with another heavy bombardment accompanied by air attacks. Montgomery sent in the 9th Armoured Brigade in a charge against dug-in anti-tank guns. He was warned that it would be suicidal, but replied that it had to be done. The attack proved another Balaklava, and the brigade was virtually wiped out. Freyberg’s New Zealand Division advanced well north of Kidney Ridge, but German counter-attacks with both panzer divisions prevented a breakthrough. Containing the bridgehead, however, represented the Panzerarmee’s last effort. Montgomery was finally winning the battle of attrition.

Rommel gave orders to withdraw towards Fuka, even though he knew that the unmotorized troops, mostly Italian, would be rapidly overrun. Many German troops seized Italian trucks for themselves at gunpoint, producing ugly scenes. That evening Rommel sent a message to the OKW, outlining the situation and giving reasons for his retreat. Due to a misunderstanding on the part of a staff officer, Hitler did not receive the signal until the next morning. Suspecting a conspiracy to prevent him from countermanding Rommel’s retreat, Hitler became incoherent with rage, and hysterical scenes ensued at Führer headquarters. The shock of Rommel’s defeat was totally unexpected because Hitler’s attention had been focused on Stalingrad and the Caucasus. His belief in Rommel as a commander had made him incapable of imagining such a setback.

Shortly after midday on 3 November, he sent Rommel an order: ‘
In the position in which
you find yourself, there can be no other thought than to stand fast, not to take even one step back, and to throw every available weapon and soldier into the battle.’ He promised Luftwaffe support and supplies and finished: ‘This is not the first time in history that resolute determination will prevail over the stronger battalions of the enemy. There is only one choice you can offer your troops: victory or death.’

Rommel was shaken and bewildered by the insanity of this command. Yet Hitler’s self-deluding lies that enabled him to reject the reality of defeat would be repeated very soon afterwards, to General Paulus in the Don steppe west of Stalingrad. Rommel, despite all his military instincts, felt he had to obey. He issued orders to halt the withdrawal. Only the Italian divisions in the south were told to move north-westwards. This allowed
Horrocks’s XIII Corps to advance unopposed on 4 November. Further north, X Corps broke through, capturing the Afrika Korps headquarters and General von Thoma, who surrendered to the 10th Hussars.

Assured of Kesselring’s support, Rommel ordered a general retreat. He told Hitler that it would only be to the Fuka Line, but it carried on all the way across Libya. That the remnants of the Panzerarmee got away at all was due to Montgomery’s slow reactions and excessive caution. Having achieved his victory, he did not want to risk any reverse. It has been argued that his failure to trap Rommel in his retreat prompted Hitler’s disastrous decision to send more troops to North Africa, all of whom would eventually be captured. But this is hardly a testimonial to Montgomery’s generalship, since that was never part of any master plan.

The victory of Alamein had certainly not been won by strategic or tactic al genius. Montgomery’s decision to attack the strongest part of the German line was questionable, to say the least. His infantry and armoured troops had certainly fought bravely, greatly helped by his success in turning around the Eighth Army’s mood. But in most respects the battle had been won by the formidable contribution of the Royal Artillery and by the Desert Air Force in its relentless destruction of the Luftwaffe, panzers and supply lines, as well as by the Royal Navy and the Allied air forces cutting the Axis lifeline in the Mediterranean.

On 7 November, when Hitler was
travelling to Munich
to make his speech to the Nazi Party old guard, his special train was halted in Thuringia. A message from the Wilhelmstrasse warned that an Allied landing in North Africa was imminent. He promptly gave orders that Tunisia was to be defended. But when informed that the Luftwaffe would be able to do little at such a range from its bases, he became furious with Göring. All the conflicting rumours over the past few months about Allied intentions, and his obsession with the final capture of Stalingrad, had meant that the OKW was completely unprepared for a new front. The big question was how the Vichy regime would react to an Allied invasion of its North African colonies.

Ribbentrop joined the train at Bamberg, and urged Hitler to let him make overtures to Stalin through the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm. Hitler rejected the suggestion out of hand. The idea of negotiating at a moment of weakness was unthinkable. He continued to work on the speech which claimed that the German capture of Stalingrad was imminent, and emphasized his resolve to fight on until final victory. His pride prevented him from considering any other option. He passed over Rommel’s defeat and never mentioned the Allied landings in North Africa, preferring to hark back to his prediction that the Jews would be annihilated.
Yet even Goebbels recognized that they were ‘
standing at a turning point
of the war’. Apart from fanatically loyal Nazis, most Germans now felt that victory was further away than ever, as reports on civilian morale by the Sicherheitsdienst showed only too clearly. Few shared Göring’s notion that the Americans were capable of manufacturing only razor blades. The mounting Allied bombing offensive against their cities demonstrated a growing material superiority.

For Eisenhower and his planners, the reaction of Vichy France and Franco’s regime in Spain had also been a key question. The politically naive Eisenhower soon found that he had entered a minefield of French politics. Roosevelt did not want to have anything to do with General de Gaulle, and he put pressure on Churchill not to tell the Frenchman what was afoot. Churchill’s relationship with de Gaulle had been even more strained by French suspicions that the British coveted Syria and Lebanon, and Churchill knew that he would be furious at being kept in the dark. De Gaulle would also never accept that in order to avoid heavy fighting the Allies had to come to some arrangement with the Vichy authorities in North Africa. But Churchill had one offering in the hope of pacifying the proud general.

The Royal Navy, unable to forget that Japanese aircraft flying from Vichy airfields in Indochina had sunk the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
, continued to be concerned by the French colony of Madagascar, which lay parallel to their convoy routes off the south-east African coast. Within a few weeks of the disaster off Malaya, a landing force was allocated to Operation Ironclad–the seizure of the main port Diego Suarez, at the northern tip of Madagascar. At first, both General Brooke in London and Wavell in the Far East had opposed the plan when so much else was threatened. Then, at the beginning of March 1942, American intercepts of Japanese naval codes had revealed that Berlin was urging Tokyo to intervene in the western Indian Ocean to attack British supply ships going round southern Africa to Egypt. On 12 March, the War Cabinet finally approved Operation Ironclad.

At the beginning of May the British force, sailing from South Africa, stormed the port of Diego Suarez with marines landed at night in fine Nelsonian style. That was as far as the plan went, for it was assumed that a modus vivendi would be established with the Vichy authorities in the capital of Tananarive. But on 30 May a Japanese midget submarine torpedoed the battleship HMS
Ramillies
in the harbour of Diego Suarez. The Japanese submarine flotilla went on to sink twenty-three ships with supplies for the Eighth Army, marking the only direct assistance which the Japanese gave their German ally during the war.

A reluctant Churchill, persuaded by Field Marshal Smuts that the
Japanese might establish bases in other Vichy ports on Madagascar, agreed to the conquest of the whole island. He also thought it might be a way of pacifying de Gaulle, who had wanted to take the island with Free French forces and then been furious to discover that the British planned to deal with the Vichy authorities there. Once the whole island was captured, it could be handed over to de Gaulle. This was finally achieved on 5 November, after a fruitless guerrilla
campaign
waged by the Vichy governor, Armand Annet. A week before Annet’s surrender, Churchill had been able to enquire graciously of General de Gaulle whom he would like to appoint as governor of Madagascar. De Gaulle suspected that the Allies were planning to land in North Africa, but if he had known of all the American dealings with Vichy generals that had been going on to prepare for Operation Torch, he would probably have stormed out of the room.

Robert Murphy, who had been the American chargé d’affaires in Vichy and was now Roosevelt’s emissary in French North Africa, was also convinced that de Gaulle should be kept out of the picture entirely. For most officers of the French colonial army, de Gaulle was still seen as little better than a traitor in the pay of the English. They needed to be reassured with a figurehead to their liking. General Henri Giraud was a tall and brave officer with a magnificent moustache, but not famed for his intelligence. De Gaulle called him the ‘tin soldier’. Giraud, who had been captured at the head of the French Seventh Army in 1940, had escaped from Königstein, a fortress prison in Saxony. He had made his way to Vichy where Pierre Laval, Pétain’s prime minister, had wanted to hand him back to the Germans, but the Maréchal refused.

Murphy felt that Giraud could best serve Allied interests, but Giraud had his own ideas. He insisted that he should be the commander-in-chief of Operation Torch and he demanded that the Allies should land in France as well as North Africa. He also did not want the British involved, since the Royal Navy attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir had not been forgotten or forgiven. Giraud was also a close friend of General Charles Mast, a key commander of French forces in North Africa. Murphy, who had developed a network of contacts among senior officers and officials, arranged a secret meeting between General Mast and his fellow conspirators with Eisenhower’s deputy, Lieutenant General Mark Clark.

On the night of 21 October, Clark had been landed near Algiers from the British submarine HMS
Seraph
, accompanied by commando bodyguards. His main task was to convince Mast that the American forces would be so overwhelming that the French should not attempt to oppose them. Clark claimed that half a million men would be landed, when the forces consisted of only 112,000. Mast warned him that, although the army and air force could be won over, the French navy would resist with
determination. Other French officers provided Clark with valuable intelligence on the disposition of their troops and defences. Fear of discovery by the local gendarmerie, who had been told that smugglers had landed, led to Clark’s undignified return to the submarine the following night without his trousers. Despite this minor humiliation, his dangerous mission had proved largely successful.