Third Reich Victorious (23 page)
The new CinC ME was no less well aware than Rommel himself that the coming battle would be decisive for the whole theater, and in order to help him win it, Alexander was particularly anxious to restore morale both at the front and in the rear areas, where rumors were spreading that further withdrawals were already being planned. His personal experience in both France and Burma had been in the management of humiliating retreats, and he was determined not to preside over yet another one now. He therefore cancelled all movement toward the rear, as well as all building of defenses behind the front line, and issued a famously stark general order on the evening of June 30 that decreed that “Alamein will be defended to the last. There will be no further retreat.”
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For his part, Rommel instinctively, albeit recklessly, opted not to spend time in careful preparations or reconnaissance, but began his attack as soon as he could, at 0300 on Wednesday, July 1—perhaps the most ominous of all anniversaries for the British Army.
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He hoped to encircle the Alamein box with the 90th Light Division, while the main striking force, with fifty-five tanks, would advance level with it at first, but would then turn south to drive through the center and rear of the British positions. It was an essentially sound and typically aggressive plan, but it soon bogged down because of poor going and the unexpected discovery of the 18th Indian Brigade directly in the path of the advancing Deutsches Afrika Korps (DAK), whose commander, Gen. Walther Nehring, decided to make a frontal assault. This led to a fierce battle that continued throughout the day until the brave but inexperienced defense eventually succumbed before the Germans’ overwhelming force and incomparable familiarity with desert combat tactics. Meanwhile, the 90th Light Division, farther north, received a rude shock when it encountered the massed fire of the entire South African divisional artillery and was pinned down. Then, while the Axis forces were attempting to maintain and replenish their vehicles overnight, they and their supply echelons were illuminated by flares and subjected to almost continuous bombing.
On the credit side, however, Rommel noted that not only wasn’t the “Alamein line” a line at all, but that the British 1st Armored Division had remained apparently supine and inactive all day. He was also gratified to receive news that the Mediterranean fleet had shown prudence, not unmixed with indecent haste, by abruptly removing itself from Alexandria, which was now just ninety miles away from the most advanced Axis airstrips. Also on this day came news that the assault by the 2nd Panzer Army in the Ukraine had caused the Russian front to break “like glass under a hammer,”
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thereby posing a major long-term threat to the strategic rear of the British Middle East Command.
On his side, Gott might admire and be grateful for the gallant last stand of the 18th Indian Brigade, but he was seriously alarmed by the thirteen-mile gap that its fall had opened in his front line. His staff urged him to pull back the 6th New Zealand and 9th Indian Brigades from the exposed left flank before they could be picked off in turn, but mindful of Alexander’s firm determination to stand and fight, he refused permission for any withdrawal. Instead he urged the 1st Armored Division, which had again been made up to a total of almost 150 tanks, to smash the DAK—now reduced to just thirty-seven tanks—by a frontal assault designed to retake the area of Deir el Shein, after which it would turn north to cut the coast road that fed the Axis rear. In making these decisions, Gott demonstrated that he had not entirely lost his old opportunistic fighting instincts; yet by his apparently resigned and unquestioning acceptance of Alexander’s brutally simplistic “stand firm” order, he once again offered evidence to historians that he was tired. Very tired.
Map 7. El Alamein
If a sharper team had been available to tide the 8th Army through the battle of Alamein, the final result might well have been different, but both parts of Gott’s plan for July 2 turned out to be badly misjudged. In the first place, Rommel made the shrewd analysis that the plight of the 90th Light Division near the coast was not in fact the key issue that it at first seemed. He was prepared to leave it without fuel and unsupported (except by the Italian “Trento” Division) as a “gambit” to absorb the attention of the British artillery and reserves. Meanwhile, he correctly identified the more southerly allied boxes as the true
schwerpunkt
, so he sent most of the DAK and the remaining Italian forces against them. At the same time, in order to cover his center and the continuing mopping up at Deir el Shein, he left a strong force of infantry, artillery, and antitank guns to hold that position. This force successfully absorbed the eventual attack by Lumsden’s 1st Armored Division, while the DAK’s own armor completed the investment of the two infantry boxes at Bab el Quattara and Naqb Abu Dweis.
Lumsden committed the classic 8th Army error of sending the tanks of the 22nd Armored Brigade forward against unsuppressed antitank guns, while his preliminary artillery barrage fell in the wrong place. The tanks were badly mauled and made no progress against the enemy position. Meanwhile the 4th Armored Brigade suffered from all the usual problems of soft sand and poor radio communication, together with a certain unacknowledged “combat shyness,” with the result that it penetrated only a little way into the notional enemy “front line” and failed to find any significant enemy force to attack. By the end of the day, the 1st Armored Division had achieved practically nothing, but had seen its 150 tanks fall to a total of about ninety, of which only one squadron was still operating the famous American Grants.
Meanwhile, Nehring’s DAK, with Rommel motoring at its head, had failed to overrun the 6th New Zealand Brigade in its first attack on Bab el Quattara, but it succeeded in surrounding and masking it with what remained of the Brescia Division and the Italian XX Armored Corps. The German armor then pushed on relentlessly farther to the south, and by a felicitous mixture of speed, surprise, and shock action managed to pull off a brilliant coup de main against the 9th Indian Brigade at Naqb Abu Dweis, which was overrun in classic style. By nightfall the DAK was encamped on the lip of the Quattara Depression and had effectively turned the flank of the 8th Army’s supposedly “flankless” position. It had also destroyed or neutralized almost 40 percent of the effective allied fighting strength and—still more precious to the new German field marshal—it had captured a large convoy of fuel wagons intact.
On the morning of July 3, Rommel again had his men up and moving early, heading northeast directly toward the rear elements of the New Zealand Division and the remnants of the 7th Armored Division. He was relieved to note that ever since he had moved inland away from the distinctive coast road, he was able to enjoy the anonymity of the trackless desert and could therefore be located far less readily by allied airpower. As for the concentrated artillery that had stymied the 90th Light Division on the Alamein perimeter, it had remained stolidly in place, and only small mobile artillery columns remained in contact with the DAK itself; more a nuisance than a serious threat. The only stiff resistance the Germans encountered came from the New Zealand Division box at Deir el Munassib, which had to be surrounded, masked, and immobilized in the same manner that 6th New Zealand Brigade had been on the previous day. A significant part of its essential transport was cut off and destroyed, leaving its infantry stranded until it could be relieved by the main British armored striking force.
On the “fireworks day” of July 4, the Germans were poised and ready to beat off precisely such a relief attempt. They had reorganized themselves and set up an antitank ambush along the line of the prominent Alam Nayil ridge, which ran east to west on a line some four miles north of the beleaguered New Zealanders. With horrible predictability, Lumsden’s armor duly arrived from the north around noon, and attacked directly into the sun. The result was a turkey shoot in which the twenty remaining German tanks did not need to participate at all. The lurking 50mm and 88mm guns were sufficient to pick off over half the attackers before they retired back to the Ruweisat Ridge from which they had started, leaving only a few medical Dingoes and tracked carriers to pick up the wounded. At 1600, Rommel ordered the pursuit to start, but not due north into the heavily defended Ruweisat area. Instead, he would use his last fuel reserves to drive east-northeast to seize the crucial Alam el Haifa feature, which dominated the deep rear of the British and from which a shrewd artilleryman could even lob a 105mm shell straight onto Gott’s HQ caravan at El Imayid. By nightfall all this had indeed been achieved, and to all intents and purposes the decisive Battle of Alamein had been won.
While General Alexander was busy laying down his inflexible policy for fighting and dying in the front line—a doctrine that was, alas, all too literally obeyed—the news of Rommel’s advances was spreading far, wide, and fast throughout the Nile delta. Many Commonwealth civilians hastened to make their way out of the area: to Palestine, Khartoum, or, most popular of all, to find a ship to South Africa from Suez.
Equally, the military authorities took a hard look at their policy for demolitions and the preparation of the delta area for defense. In view of Alexander’s determination to fight only at Alamein, however, the official policy remained one of outward calm and business as usual. Nothing was done to build additional pontoon bridges to assist the army’s retreat, to fire demolitions, flood the salt pans around Alexandria to delay the enemy, or even to dig defensive trenches across the coast road in the area of Amiriya. Such measures were deemed to be bad for morale, and it was morale-building that Alexander still saw as his main task. He also ordered that an effort be made to halt the civilian evacuations, although that could never be applied in more than a halfhearted way, and little noticeable effect was observed. Nor could anything be done about the Egyptian government, which was technically neutral and apparently ready to make its own separate peace with the invader. Axis flags began to be seen in the streets; prices started to rise, and there was a marked increase in back-street attacks on Europeans.
In the port of Alexandria, the naval authorities had always demanded regular updates on the motoring time between Rommel and themselves.
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When he arrived in front of Alamein, it was set at twelve hours, rising to eighteen when he was thought to be bogged down inland, engaging the New Zealanders and the British armor. Toward the end of July 4, however, the news that he was on the Alam el Haifa ridge caused a sudden downward revision of the estimated time to just four hours. At that point Adm. Sir Henry Harwood, CinC Mediterranean Fleet, told Alexander bluntly that he could maintain the “business as usual” policy no longer, and that a program of demolitions to be activated, regardless of the effect on morale, in order to prevent the base facilities and dockyards from falling into enemy hands. They represented the most important naval installations in the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean, and could potentially be decisively valuable to both the powerful Italian fleet and its vital convoys supplying the Axis ground forces at the front. General Alexander was not yet ready to accept that the situation was desperate enough for the docks to be destroyed, and he pointed out that it would take many months to restore them to working order. But he discovered that his personal authority was insufficient to overrule the fixed will of the Royal Navy, which was, after all, the “senior service.”
Alexandria’s harbor was closed by block ships and its dockyards dynamited during the fire-filled night of July 4-5, which unfortunately coincided with the first flood of fugitives coming in from the desert battle. They represented the start of yet another 8th Army “flap,” or “gold rush,” which were the names given to a particular type of informal maneuver when all shapes and sizes of vehicles drove rapidly eastward without any order or organization. Such events had become depressingly common in recent weeks, although this was the first occasion when one of them had arrived as far east as the delta base area. It was no longer a private operation taking place in the open desert, witnessed only by other front-line troops, but a public display in a built-up area, of what to the uninitiated looked very much like blind panic.
The effect on the civilian population, and on the equally large population of rear echelon base personnel, was electric. Mechanics and fitters who had previously been repairing vehicles to send forward to Alamein now jumped into them and started to motor eastward to Port Said or south toward Cairo. Wherever they went, they spread rumors of chaos and defeat. Many subordinate officers took their own decisions to burn sensitive documents, initiate demolitions, or open sluices to create inundations as obstacles in the path of Panzerarmee Afrika. These measures also, of course, created obstacles to the retreating fugitives, and a series of gigantic traffic jams had built up by dawn. They could not possibly be missed by the routine Luftwaffe reconnaissance patrols, which duly called in successive waves of Stukas and Savoia-Marchettis, adding death and mayhem to the existing self-imposed destruction and panic.
