Barr: Pendulum of War: War in the desert

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1 On the evening of 10 June 1940, Benito Mussolini, the Italian Duce, stood on the central balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome before a massed crowd. He announced that, from midnight that evening, Italy would be at war with the 'sterile and declining' nations of Britain and France.' Allied planning staffs had assumed in the summer of 1939 that Italy would make common cause with Nazi Germany if war came, the Allies had felt a certain sense of relief when Mussolini had announced Italian non-belligerent status on September 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland.' There is no doubt that the Italian Armed Forces were unprepared for war in 1940, let alone 1939, and all of Mussolini's military advisers continued to urge caution. However, by 10 June 1940, the strategic situation seemed to have swung decisively in favour of Hitler's Germany. The Low Countries had succumbed to the German Wehrmacht's lightning-fast offensive and it was clear that France could not remain in the war for long. Mussolini had long entertained visions of breaking out of the 'politico-military' encirclement of the British Empire in the Mediterranean and Middle East. 4 With France on the verge of collapse, Mussolini believed that the time was ripe to strike a blow at the fatally weakened British Empire and gather the spoils. Mussolini's main strategic concept was for Italy to conduct a war 'parallel to that of Germany" but to achieve Italian or his own strategic objectives. He had already decided on 29 May 1940 that, in the case of war, 'Our forces will concentrate on England viz. on her positions and her naval forces in port and in the Mediterranean!' While the British government faced the prospect of a German invasion of the home island, the Italian Fleet would clear the Mediterranean of the Royal Navy and the large Italian forces present in the colony of Libya would mount an invasion of Egypt to seize control of Alexandria, Cairo and, most importantly, the Suez Canal. By taking advantage of Britain's weakness, Mussolini hoped that the shortcomings of the Italian Armed Forces and their unpreparedness for war would not be exposed. The Italian stance of non-belligerency had ensured that the British authorities in Egypt had attempted to placate Mussolini for as long as possible but this did not obscure the fact that the defence of the Mediterranean and Middle East lay at the heart of Britain's strategic interests.' Only through control of Gibraltar in the west and the port of Alexandria in the east could the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet hope to exert some control over the inland sea. The British island base of Malta, which lay only 6o miles off the coast of Sicily, could be used to interdict Italian supply routes to her North African colony. The defence of Egypt against an Italian invasion from Libya 2

2 protected Britain's vast interests which ran throughout the Middle East region. On the Italian declaration of war, the Suez Canal ceased to be a great artery for British merchant shipping. Nonetheless, the canal enabled the Royal Navy to switch assets from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and Far East..Its retention was still a vital strategic consideration. Britain now found itself engaged in a high-intensity industrialised and mechanised war and the oilfields around the northern Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Mosul were of immense strategic importance for the oil-fired Royal Navy and highly mechanised army. surprisingly, domination of the Mediterranean and control of the Middle East were central to British interests and were considered 'second only to the United Kingdom itself'' Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the Chief of the Italian Commando Supremo, had advised Mussolini against war. However, the Italian dictator rode roughshod over the objections of all of his Service Chiefs; Italian strategy For the 'parallel war' was never anything more than opportunism. The British Committee of Imperial Defence provided much surer foundations for British strategy in the Mediterranean and Middle East. In June 1939 it had been decided that the Commanders-in- Chief of the three services should coordinate the British defence policy in the Middle East. Thus, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, and Air Marshal Sir William Mitchell, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, formed the High Command for all British forces in the Middle East. This triumvirate had to reach their decisions through discussion and through consultation with their chiefs of staff.' Right from the start, British strategy in the theatre, while far from perfect, was at least based on rational calculation and an awareness of the needs of the three services. As far as was possible, British air, land and naval strategy was coordinated and complimentary from the start of the war in the desert. This cooperation between the three services at the strategic level was of essential importance given the nature of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern theatres. The activities of the three services simply could not be considered in isolation and the complex interaction between the land, air and sea made the Mediterranean one of the most complicated theatres of operation during the Second World War. The dilemmas and complications of the Mediterranean theatre inevitably led to tensions and arguments but the tri-service nature of the British High Command meant that the British did at least attempt to plan and coordinate their strategic 'thinking in three dimensions. Few soldiers in history have had to shoulder the awesome burdens and responsibilities which faced the. British Commander-in-Chief Middle East. Lieutenant-General Archibald Wavell took up this new post in August

3 and immediately had to wrestle with the task of overall command of all British army units over an enormous theatre of operations which stretched over z,000 square miles and included Egypt, the Sudan, Palestine, Transjordan, Cyprus, British Somaliland, Aden, Iraq and the shores of the Persian Gulf When Italy declared war, Wavell was faced with an immediate crisis. The defence of Egypt rested on the 36,000 men of Lieutenant-General Richard O'Connor's Western Desert Force which, although highly trained, was still short of equipment. Across the frontier in Libya, Marshal Rudolfo Graziani, at Mussolini's insistence, was gathering the Italian Tenth Army of 140,000 men for an invasion." In Italian East Africa, 130,000 Italian troops were confronted by 9,000 men in the Sudan and 8500 men in Kenya. In numerical terms at least, the British seemed to be in serious trouble. With the fall of France, the Royal Navy's position in the Mediterranean also seemed perilous. The combined Anglo-French naval forces had been powerful enough to deter any Italian aggression, but with the French naval units removed from the equation the balance shifted in favour of the Italians. The British Mediterranean Fleet was far smaller than the Italian Fleet, and composed of older and slower ships. The act of destroying the major French Fleet units at Mers el Kebir on z6 June 1940 poisoned Anglo-French relations and simply seemed to emphasise Britain's desperate position in the Mediterranean. The Naval Staffs even considered the abandonment of the island of Malta and the rebasing of the Mediterranean Fleet in Gibraltar. This would effectively have surrendered control of the central and eastern Mediterranean to the Italians and it is fortunate that, in the event, the British did not take complete counsel of their fears. It was decided to fight for control of the eastern, if not the central, Mediterranean. Yet the action fought off Calabria, known to the Italians as Punto Stilo,'2 on 9 July 1940 demonstrated that the Royal Navy could operate in the central Mediterranean in the face of Italian opposition and Admiral Cunningham was determined to continue an aggressive policy to bring the naval war to the Italians in the central Mediterranean at every opportunity.13 Marshal Graziani was finally forced to invade Egypt on 9 September 1940 and the large Italian forces, which were still largely composed of marching infantry, sweated their way forwards sixty miles to Sidi Barrani where they established a series of fortified camps more suitable for colonial war than against a modern mechanised opponent. The men of the Western Desert Force, who had been preparing to make a decisive stand at the small port of Mersa Matruh, were vaguely disappointed by this turn of events but soon set about achieving complete moral dominance over the Italians by a series of daring raids and fighting patrols. Frustrated with the lack of action and success, Mussolini once again ignored his military advisers and declared war 4

4 on Greece in October Unable to cope with one major military campaign in Egypt, the Italian Army was completely unprepared to fight another and the '-campaign in Greece quickly became an embarrassing debacle. Mussolini's 'parallel' war was already in ruins. He had allowed his strategic ambitions to cloud- what little military judgement he possessed. Meanwhile, Wavell had begun to plan an ambitious 'five-day raid' to strike at the Italian encampments but it was not until December 1940 that he finally unleashed the Western Desert Force in Operation Compass. The _British 7th Armoured and 4th Indian Division executed a daring and unconventional attack which completely unhinged the Italian defence. Within two days, the Italian camps, along with the vast majority of their 6o,000 defenders, fell into British hands. Graziani began a strategic withdrawal into Libya.based on the defence of the fortresses of Bardia and Tobruk but these fell in.quick succession to the Western Desert Force in January 194o. The campaign culminated in the climactic battle of Beda Fomm on 5 February 1941 where, after a dramatic chase across unreconnoitred desert, the lead elements of the Western Desert Force caught and trapped the Italian Tenth Army. More than 140,000 Italian soldiers were captured and it seemed that the road to Tripoli was wide open. O'Connor wanted to continue the pursuit all the way to Tripoli but Wavell now had to find troops for an expeditionary force to Greece and refused to sanction any advance further than El Agheila. After his capture in April 1941, O'Connor would spend the next two years in Italian prisoner-of-war camps agonising about the orders which had halted his advance towards Tripoli.'* O'Connor always believed that he could have pushed a small force the last 500 miles to Tripoli and prevented the rest of the desert fighting from ever taking place. In reality, such an advance simply could not have been sustained. In advancing the goo miles to El Agheila, the Western Desert Force had stretched its supply chain well beyond its breaking point and was experiencing, to its cost, the diminishing power of the offensive. Carl von Clausewitz had explored the changing balance between offence and defence in his great work of military theory, On War. In his concept of the 'culminating point of victory', Clausewitz argued that while the advantages which accrued to the defence were permanent, the advantages which aided an attacker, such as surprise, morale and initiative would gradually bleed away in continued. movement and exhaustion. A lengthy advance would eventually place a burden on an advancing army with every step it takes; so unless it started with exceptional superiority; it will find its freedom of action dwindling and its offensive power progressively reduced. In the end, it will feel unsure of itself and nervous about its situation. 15 Clausewitz also recognised: 5

5 the distance from the sources that must send continual replacements for this steadily weakening army, will increase proportionately with the advance. In this respect a conquering army is like the light of a lamp; as the oil that feeds it sinks and draws away from the focus, the light diminishes until at last it goes out altogether:6 This was the phenomenon which Clausewitz called the 'culminating point of victory'. After this point, the balance of advantage would swing to the defender who could then mount a successful counterattack. Clausewitz's theory was complicated yet further by the nature of the desert environment. The ability to sustain high-intensity operations in the middle of an arid desert for months, indeed years, on end, was only possible due to the mechanisation of warfare. While armies in the past had, with preparation, been able to cross deserts at the cost of great human suffering they had never been able to live, work and fight there for long periods. Not surprisingly, all of the major operations of the desert war were fought within fifty miles of the sea. Only the 'private armies' such as the British Long Range Desert Group were able to operate in the great sand sea of the Libyan Desert for sustained periods. The barren and hostile nature of the desert meant that both sides had to transport all their supplies into the theatre to sustain their armies. While some water could be found by drilling wells, or accumulated in the ancient birs along the coast, all of the other supplies, equipment, ammunition and fuel had to be brought into the desert. This placed an enormous burden on the armies' administrative services which made any sustained advance difficult. Both armies relied on motor transport; without the internal combustion engine the high tempo and speed of the desert campaigns simply could not have been sustained. Given the necessity of bringing all supplies into the theatre, Clausewitz's ideas of the 'culminating point of victory' operated starkly in the desert campaigns. Known to the participants as the desert `seesaw' or 'pendulum', the 'culminating point of victory' also mitigated against a successful offensive against the enemies' main base. Desert veterans of Eighth Army wryly dubbed these rapidly swaying fortunes as the `Benghazi Stakes'. The distances involved in mounting an advance towards Tripoli - or Alexandria-were also unprecedented. Tripoli, the main Axis port and supply base, was 1,415 miles away from the Egyptian city of Alexandria, the home of the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet. The further an army advanced from its main base, the greater the distance - and the consumption of fuel - that its motor transport had to travel to sustain the spearhead units. This law of diminishing returns made a continuous sustained advance of 1,415 miles virtually impossible. The problem of the `desert pendulum' was given an added layer of 6

6 complexity by the external lines of communication which brought supplies - into the theatre. The British forces in Egypt and the Middle East had to be, sustained by supplies despatched from the United Kingdom, the United ;States or India. British merchant shipping was denied the regular use of the route through the Mediterranean by Italian air and naval power. This meant that only vitally important supply convoys comprised of fast ships were ever pushed through the Mediterranean in the face of opposition and the vast majority of British convoys from the United Kingdom had to take the alternative route around the Cape of Good Hope in a journey covering a distance of miles, which took between ten and 13 weeks. The supplies were then landed at the small and congested port of Suez on the Red Sea. The British Middle East Command was thus sustained by the longest umbilical cord in the history of military logistics. Other convoys plied the route from India, a mere 3,000 miles away, and others sailed from the United States and Canada, which were 12,200 miles away. Thus, from the perspective of the quartermasters in Cairo, North America was little further than the United Kingdom. The sheer length of these supply lines placed enormous strains upon Allied shipping capacity and made forward planning in the Middle East an inexact science: If you cabled for something, it might and usually did, take two to three months to manufacture and collect at an English port, a week to load (if bombing did not interfere), ten weeks at the lowest at sea, another two weeks perhaps to.unload at a small and most congested port, a day or so to a Base Depot, and from there four or five hundred miles by rail or road to the fighting troops in the desert. The length of these sea lines of communication, combined with the inherent delays in scheduling dozens of convoys involving hundreds of ships, meant that any build-up of supplies for an offensive in the desert could take -months rather than weeks to organise. However, there were some significant advantages to the British lines of communication. Although the British supply lines were interminably long, they were also relatively secure once the menace of Italian submarines operating in the Red Sea was finally eliminated in April Since the German U- boat command concentrated its - attentions upon the North Atlantic, convoys bound for Suez were relatively unmolested once they passed Gibraltar. Although there were some inevitable accidents and losses, once a convoy had been despatched, British planners _could be reasonably sure that it would arrive at Suez. The same could not be said for Italian lines of communication. The route for Italian merchant shipping across the Mediterranean from ports such as Naples, Brindisi or Taranto was a short crossing to the main Libyan ports of Tripoli or Benghazi. However, Italian convoys were vulnerable to attack 7

7 by British submarines, aircraft and surface ships based in Malta and Egypt. The British ability to interdict the Italian lines of communication meant that the Italian air and naval units faced a constant battle to protect convoys bound for North Africa. Nonetheless, if conditions were favourable, Italian convoys could reinforce the army in Libya far more quickly than the British could support their forces in Egypt. The peculiarly complex logistic demands of the armies in the desert also placed strict limitations upon their size.. It was certainly possible to deploy and sustain large numbers of foot-bound infantry in the theatre but, as the Italian Army had found to its cost during Operation Compass, large quantities of such troops were of little value against a smaller number of highly mobile armoured and mechanised formations. Yet even relatively small mechanised forces required large quantities of motor transport, maintenance services and fuel to keep them operational in the desert. In turn, these demands required increased shipping capacity to the extent that, even though the forces deployed in the desert were comparatively small (and indeed dwarfed in comparison to the forces deployed on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1945), they required a logistic effort out of all proportion to their size. The complex interaction between logistic demands, lines of communication and the race to build up supplies for offensives played a critical part in the outcome of the fighting in the desert for the next two years. The wholesale destruction of the Italian Tenth Army in Libya created a real crisis for Italy. Mussolini had entered the war to achieve his own strategic vision for a renewed Italian Empire but the failure of Italian arms in Libya, Greece and East Africa meant that he had become increasingly dependent upon Hitler's Germany. 18 In effect, Italy became little more than a German satellite and Mussolini's 'parallel' war in the Mediterranean was subsumed into a much wider German dominated conflict.19 Adolf Hitler, the German Führer and the dominating will of Germany's strategic ambitions, had not shown much interest in the Mediterranean theatre since the war began. Negotiations with General Francisco Franco, for a joint German Spanish attack upon Gibraltar came to nothing in October 1940,20 and German intervention in the theatre was finally forced by Italian failure. With the British threatening to conquer the entire Italian possession of Libya, Hitler felt forced to act. Fliegerkorps X of the Luftwaffe was ordered to bases in Sicily with the main objective of attacking British naval forces. Under Operation Sunflower, a small 'special military blocking' force, consisting initially of only the 5th Light Division, was sent over to Tripoli in February Its purpose was purely defensive, although General major Hans von Funck, who visited Libya in early February, doubted whether German intervention could prevent disaster.' 8

8 However, the advent of the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean theatre was felt almost immediately. Advance units of Fliegerkorps X attacked and seriously damaged the aircraft carrier, HMS Illustrious on 10 January 1941, serving notice that operations in the central Mediterranean had just become a much more dangerous proposition for the Royal Navy. Meanwhile, Hitler had appointed a commander of considerable drive and energy to command what became known as the Deutsches Afrika Korps. Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel" had not followed the conventional career path of a German officer. He had started his military career as an infantry lieutenant and first experienced combat on the Western Front in However, his greatest military exploits in the First World War were fought against the Italians where he led a stormtroop battalion in the battle of Caporetto (24 October so November 1917). He managed to find a place in the strong Reichswehr Army in the inter-war years and spent much time at infantry training schools. However, Rommel's career would have been permanently stunted under normal circumstances as he never attended the German Staff College which opened the path to higher command. However, his book Infantry Attacks 24 caught the eye of Hitler and he became the commander of Hitler's bodyguard battalion in At the end of the Polish campaign, Hitler gave Rommel command of the 7th Panzer Division. The spectacular performance of his 'Ghost' Division caught the attention of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, and Rommel soon became Hitler's version of the 'Darling Child of Victory'. 25 Although Rommel owed his promotion and his post as the German commander in Africa to Hitler's influence, he was a very talented tactical commander who understood innately the opportunities inherent in armoured warfare. Rommel was a daring and bold commander who, although he was far from infallible, never hesitated to punish mistakes made by his opponents. Rommel arrived in Tripoli on 12 February 1941 and possessed a much more radical view of his task than to act merely as the commander of a passive blocking force. Instead, he wanted to drive the British out of Egypt and establish German control over the Middle East and in the process gain for himself imperishable military glory. The Italian forces in Libya had suffered humiliation and the arrival of German forces to support them did nothing for morale; Rommel was never noted for his tact in his relations with Italian superiors and subordinates. He began his habit of ignoring orders from General Gariboldi, the new Italian Commander-in-Chief Libya, and indeed his German superiors at Oberkommando des Heeres. 26 by launching an attack on the British 2nd Armoured Division at El Agheila on 31 March The British commanders on the ground responded with confusion and soon the British forces were in full retreat. The Afrika Korps bundled the Western Desert Force out of Cyrenaica in a matter of days and, by 11 April, German and Italian forces had already surrounded the 9

9 port of Tobruk. Perhaps the worst loss suffered by the British during the debacle was the capture of Lieutenant-General Richard O'Connor and Brigadier Combe on 7 April, two of the most experienced and skilled of Britain's desert commanders, when they were travelling up to the front to restore the situation. The British loss of.cyrenaica was due primarily to Rommel's audacity in mounting an attack with inadequate forces. Wavell had quite consciously stripped bare the Western Desert Force in order to provide troops for the Greek expeditionary force. The 2nd Armoured Division which held El Agheila was inexperienced and new to the desert but, perhaps most importantly, Wavell had based his calculations on excellent intelligence of German troop movements and intentions which had shown clearly that the Afrika Korps would not be ready to mount an attack before May. All important radio traffic of the German Armed Forces was encrypted before transmission through the use of an 'Enigma' machine. Due to the sophistication of this electro-mechanical device, the Germans believed that their radio traffic, while it might be intercepted, was undecipherable. However, British code-breakers at Bletchley Park in Hertfordshire, working on the leads given to them by Polish intelligence, had managed to break some Enigma traffic in Intelligence gained from the 'Enigma' decrypts was known as 'Ultra' and remained highly secret throughout the war and for many years afterwards. Although the use of Ultra intelligence was still in its infancy in 1941, from 28 February Brigadier Shearer, Wavell's chief intelligence officer, was receiving intelligence based on the radio messages of Fliegerkorps X and the Fliegerfiihrer Afrika. The disaster in Cyrenaica was an early demonstration that, although Ultra intelligence was of great value, its correct application could be fraught with difficulties. Even possessing direct intelligence of German orders and intentions could still be misleading.'' Rommel had ignored orthodox military planning and achieved an astonishing success precisely because of his boldness. Rommel's first offensive in Libya had certainly been full of sound and fury but although German and Italian forces made repeated attacks, the 9th Australian Division put up a tenacious defence of the fortress of Tobruk - throughout the summer and autumn of Rommel's forces remained stalled in front of the fortress and in defensive positions on the Egyptian frontier. Rommel could not advance into Egypt with a British bastion in his rear and, without the port capacity that Tobruk represented, any such attempt would have been doomed to failure. The transfer of Fliegerkorps X to Greece in May 1941 meant that, while the Royal Navy suffered terrible punishment from its attentions during the evacuation from Crete, pressure was slowly lifted from Malta and it was possible to restore its offensive capability. The source of Rommel's frustration was wider than he realised. The complex interaction of air, land and sea combined with competing strategies 10

10 and operations had so far foiled his desire to reach Alexandria and the Suez canal. Rommel's surprise offensive in March 1941 had coincided with a period of great weakness in the Middle East for Britain. Wavell had to deal almost simultaneously with Rommel's attack and the evacuation of Greece, followed by the German airborne attack on the island of Crete. Yet the single most dangerous problem was Raschid Ali's rising in Iraq which saw the Iraqi Army mount a siege of the RAF's No. 44 Training Squadron at the Habbaniya airfield. Had this succeeded, the small German squadron which -flew to Iraq would probably have been sufficient to bolster the Iraqis against British attempts to restore the situation. 28 Britain came dangerously close to losing its control of the Middle Eastern oil supplies. Immediately after the situation was restored in Iraq, Wavell had to mount an offensive into French-controlled Syria to prevent the German use of its airbases. Meanwhile, the war in Ethiopia and East Africa was still being waged. The period March to June 1941 saw numerous challenges to Britain's position in the Middle East, but none of the threats was individually sufficiently dangerous to overwhelm the British. Wavell came under intense pressure from Churchill to relieve Tobruk but the two ill-considered and ill-prepared attempts of Operations Brevity, in May, and Battleaxe, in June, simply saw the Western Desert Force break its head against Rommel's frontier defences. Even though Wavell had achieved the remarkable feat of holding the British position in the Middle. East together when threatened with complete disaster, Churchill had lost patience with his taciturn commander. Wavell left the Middle East Command in June 1941 and was replaced by General Claude Auchinleck, who had impressed Churchill while in charge of Southern Command in England during 1940 and as Commander-in-Chief India in Auchinleck began to organise the forces of the Western Desert Force for a more deliberate offensive to relieve Tobruk. General Alan Cunningham, who had just completed the successful campaign in Italian East Africa which saw the liberation of Ethiopia, was given command of the newly created Eighth Army. The build-up of men and materiel took a number of months and it was not until 18 November that Operation Crusader was finally launched. Rommel was taken by surprise: he had been about to launch his own effort to take the fortress. Operation Crusader saw a series of confusing, swirling and bloody armoured battles around Sidi Rezegh which wore both sides down to the point of near collapse. In an attempt to break the deadlock, Rommel drove with the Afrika Korps towards the Egyptian frontier in what became known as the 'dash to the wire', but this daring move failed to stampede Eighth Army. It was no accident that the basing of Force 'K', composed of two Royal Navy light cruisers and two destroyers, at Malta in October saw Rommel's supply situation deteriorate to the point of collapse at the same moment as Auchinleck launched Operation Crusader in 11

11 November 1941 to relieve Tobruk. On 9 November, the actions of Malta-based aircraft and submarines in combination with the surface ships of Force 'K' had forced the Italians to halt all convoys to Tripoli. With his supply line strangled, Rommel had no prospect for resupply and he had little choice but to withdraw to El Agheila to save his force from destruction. However, as the depleted British forces cautiously followed up the Axis withdrawal, the desert pendulum swung once again. The loss of Force 'K.' in an uncharted minefield off Tripoli on r8 December and the deployment of Fliegerkorps II, under the command of Albert Kesselring, to Sicily the same month broke the British stranglehold over the Axis line of communication. Kesselring had explicit orders to 'neutralise' Malta and the British capacity to interfere with Italian convoys withered. This enabled Rommel to rebuild his strength far faster than Eighth Army which now had to wrestle with the problems of supplying its forward troops over a distance of goo miles. The surprise Japanese attack on the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 widened the war into a truly global conflict. Hitler's declaration of war upon the United States, combined with Roosevelt's policy of 'Germany First', meant that Britain would soon have the direct military support of a powerful ally. However, the Japanese threat to British possessions in the Far East also robbed Auchinleck of the fruits of victory in Cyrenaica. At the very moment when the injection of reserve forces could have stabilised the front at El Agheila in preparation for a further British offensive, Auchinleck was forced to send troops and resources to the Far East. This left the forward units of Eighth Army weakened and ripe for a counterstroke. In January 1942, Rommel's newly renamed Panzerarmee Afrika drove the Eighth Army back to Ain el Gazala, just west of Tobruk. The loss of the Cyrenaican airfields made the Royal Navy's task in running convoys through to Malta yet more difficult. Churchill began to harass Auchinleck with demands for an immediate offensive to recapture Cyrenaica and thus relieve the pressure on Malta which, under Fliegerkorps II bombardment, had become the most bombed place on earth. Meanwhile, the Axis commanders began to plan their own offensive to take Tobruk. The plans for Operation Venezia had been thrashed out between Marshal Count Ugo Cavallero, the Chief of the Italian General Staff, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German Commander-in- Chief South, and Rommel, the commander of the Panzerarmee Afrika. Official Axis policy was that, once the Panzerarmee had defeated the Eighth Army and seized Tobruk, its advance would be halted on the Egyptian border. This operational pause would enable the Panzerarmee to be resupplied for a sustained advance into Egypt. Meanwhile, air and naval assets would be redeployed for Operation Herkules, the long-planned conquest of Malta. Once the island fortress was 12

12 in. Axis lands, the supply routes to Africa would be considerably safer and convoy timings much more reliable. The Panzerarmee would then be unleashed in an invasion of Egypt with the Suez Canal as its ultimate objective The agreed Axis strategy was ambitious but, for once, coordinated. The Eighth Army stood on the Gazala line with 100,000 men, 849 tanks and 604 aircraft. The Panzerarmee Africa attacked with 90,000 men and only 561 tanks (228 of which were inferior Italian designs) and 542 aircraft. Although Eighth Army's position was defensive it remained poised to seize the initiative. It had in fact been planning its own offensive, code named Acrobat, to defeat the Panzerarmee and finally destroy the Axis presence in North Africa. It was a strong force in apparently formidable positions. Enormous 'mine marshes' had been laid to channel any advance by the Axis forces. Its fighting units were fresh and rested, the ranks filled with Many desert veterans well used to tangling with Rommel's Panzerarmee Afrika. Some of its armoured units had just been re-equipped with the powerful new American Grant tank which easily outclassed all of the German and Italian models. Meanwhile, the new British six-pounder antitank gun - a match for the German 50mm Pak 38 - was just reaching the Royal Artillery's anti-tank batteries. 29 Rommel's men would no longer have quite the qualitative advantage in weaponry which they had enjoyed during the previous year. Eighth Army also held what it believed was a major advantage in intelligence. It was well aware of Rommel's plans for an early offensive. Using Ultra intelligence sourced from the decryption of German Enigma radio transmissions, the code-breakers at Bletchley Park were able to give the intelligence staff of General Headquarters Middle East and the Eighth Army clear warning of Rommel's intention to launch an offensive against the Gazala line late in May However, Enigma intelligence could not help the Eighth Army intelligence officers, nor Lieutenant-General Neil Ritchie, the commander of Eighth Army, to divine Rommel's plan of battle. On the afternoon of z6 May, the main units of the Panzerarmee Afrika began their long drive into the desert. By dusk, British patrols had observed she long columns of tanks, trucks and guns heading towards Bir. Hacheim. -Yet; even though Eighth Army had thus been well warned not only of the German attack but now of its probable direction, little was done to capitalise on the intelligence. The next day; the concentrated power of the Afrika Korps descended on the-strung-out elements of the 7th Armoured Division and scattered them. At 1000 hours, German armoured cars overran 7th Armoured Division Headquarters. Such a lapse in security was inexcusable and, although Major-General Messervy escaped, 7th Armoured Division had ceased to function as a unit." The 4th Armoured Brigade, after inflicting considerable loss on the advancing 13

13 15th Panzer Division, retired north to El Adem having lost much of its strength, and that afternoon and 22nd Armoured Brigades also engaged in a fierce action with the panzer divisions. But the British armoured brigades were coming into action individually and without their supporting motor infantry and anti-tank guns. This meant that they simply did not have the stamina or strength to sustain the fight. Yet, by the end of 27 May, the Panzerarmee was beginning to run into serious difficulties. The panzer divisions had lost a third of their strength in the heavy fighting, and their forces were now scattered over a wide area on the British side of the minefields. This meant that the Axis supply columns were completely out of touch and unable to reach the fighting units.31 By the end of 28 May, General Ritchie was confident that the tide of battle was flowing in his favour. The units of the Afrika Korps remained separated and were still having to fight off the attentions of the British armoured brigades. By 29 May, Rommel's forces were in a critical situation. Eighth Army seemed to have trapped the Afrika Korps against its minefields and it appeared that the main striking force of the Panzerarmee would wither and die over the next few days. Hemmed in by the minefields to the south and the British armoured brigades to the north and east, Rommel concentrated his forces in an area that became known as the 'Cauldron'. The Axis forces deployed a heavy anti-tank gun screen to hold off the British armoured forces and began to cut a gap in the minefields to the east to restore communication with the rest of the Panzerarmee Afrika." It was only on 30 May that Rommel realised his route to the west was barred by the r5oth Brigade, well dug in and supported by 3o tanks from the 1st Army Tank Brigade. Now desperate to cut a gap in the minefields, Rommel- shifted forces from the north and east and threw them against the beleaguered 150th Brigade. Meanwhile, the British armoured brigades had put in numerous piecemeal attacks but met with the concentrated fire of the Axis anti-tank gun screen and made no progress. None of them had succeeded in preventing Rommel from switching troops to launch against the150th Brigade.33 The slow reactions of Eighth Army Headquarters meant that the eventual recognition of the plight of150th Brigade came too late for any effective action to be taken. Ritchie seemed to be making decisions in slow motion; it was not until the night of 1-2 June that he finally decided to attack the Axis forces holding the Cauldron. The hastily organised sortie achieved nothing but loss. This failure, and the belated realisation that 150th Brigade had been destroyed, led Ritchie to make fresh plans for an attack on the Cauldron but in '48 to 72 hours'. Ritchie had lost the initiative and his best chance for defeating Rommel.34 Rommel wasn't willing to wait patiently for Ritchie to develop his attack. Having secured his supply lines, he sent the 90th Light and the Trieste 14

14 Divisions south to deal with Bir Hacheim. He knew that, once this outpost had-fallen, little could prevent his onward rush to Tobruk and the encirclement of the British forces holding the weakened Gazala line. Stuka dive bombers hammered the Free French defenders of Bir Hacheim in swirling sandstorms while the soldiers of the 90th Light and Trieste Divisions probed the defences. General Koenig's Free French put up fierce resistance but while battle raged at Bir Hacheim little pressure was exerted against the Axis defenders of the Cauldron. Although small British columns continued to raid and harass the Axis supply lines, this could not dislodge the really dangerous Axis forces or save Bir Hacheim. Both sides were reorganising and preparing for the next blow." However, Ritchie's passivity doomed Bir Hacheim to slow strangulation and capture. One by one, piece by piece, Rommel's army was destroying the units of the Eighth Army. When, finally, the Eighth Army acted to crush the German forces in the Cauldron, it was far too late. Operation Aberdeen, which began at hours on 5 June, was an unmitigated disaster. The armour of 7th Armoured Division and the infantry of 10th Indian Division were tasked with mounting the attack, but with the armour under the control of 13 Corps, and the infantry under the control of 3o Corps, there was no coordination of their movement. Eighth Army yet again dissipated its strength in piecemeal attacks which dissolved against a tough Axis defence. The attacks made by 7th Armoured and 5th Indian Divisions in fact reached their objectives under cover of a heavy artillery barrage relatively easily. It was only at dawn that they realised their mistake: the German defences lay further to the west and the heavy bombardment had fallen on empty desert. The attack had been a blow into the air. The German reaction was fierce and caused heavy losses amongst both the armour and infantry. The Indian infantry battalions that had advanced deep into the German positions were all overrun and captured. The artillery batteries which had been brought forward and concentrated for the barrage were caught without armoured support and destroyed by the advancing German panzers. The gunners fought and died by their guns, but by the end of the day more than 100 anti-tank guns and field guns four complete artillery regiments had been destroyed at little cost. 36 By the end of this fiasco, Eighth Army had not only lost the initiative but had lost its ability to control Rommel. After days of aerial bombardment and fierce fighting, Bir Hacheim was finally evacuated by the Free French on 10 June, who managed to escape with most of their force intact. With his southern flank secure, Rommel could now return to his planned northward thrust. Fatal disaster struck Eighth Army on 12 and 13 June, when both sides' armour met in action once more around the 'Knightsbridge' area. Again, the British armoured units suffered from fatal lapses in command. Confusion descended upon 15

15 the commanders of the British divisions at the very moment that the Germans attacked. General Messervy lost touch with his headquarters and General Norrie, which meant that the strung-out British armoured brigades were left uncertain of their orders. In the swirling fight that developed, the Germans gained the upper hand and capitalised upon it; the panzers encircled the British armour and attacked from three sides. Confused and fierce fighting in the middle of a severe dust storm continued during 13 June which saw the Knightsbridge position captured and the British armoured brigades reduced to mere shadows. By the end of 13 June, Eighth Army could muster only 50 cruiser and 20 infantry tanks, and, what was worse, because the armoured brigades had been forced to withdraw, could not recover the hundreds of wrecked and damaged tanks which littered the battlefield.37 This disaster sealed the fate of Eighth Army. Without the power to halt, let alone defeat the Panzerarmee, Eighth Army fell back to the Egyptian frontier. This exposed the fortress of Tobruk, which had been held against Rommel for much of 1941, to a full-scale attack. In January 1942, a conference of the three Commanders-in-Chief Middle East Admiral Andrew Cunningham, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, and General Sir Claude Auchinleck 38 had come to the 'firm and unanimous decision that Tobruk should not again be held'. 39 Churchill had insisted that the port must be held. Now, that the prospect of the Axis capture of Tobruk actually loomed, an unhappy series of misunderstandings between Churchill, Auchinleck and Ritchie resulted in muddle: Eighth Army was withdrawn, against Auchinleck's wishes, to the Egyptian frontier where it could rest, reorganise and, most importantly, rebuild its armoured formations, while the 2nd South African Division and supporting troops were left in Tobruk to accept a `temporary' siege. While the staff of Eighth Army were calculating in terms of a one- or two-month siege which would enable them to rebuild their armour quietly on the frontier, Rommel was planning a lightning-fast attack to seize the prize which had been denied him the previous year_ On zo June, wave after wave of German and Italian bombers attacked Tobruk with impunity. At dawn, Rommel's tired men moved into the attack against the fortress. The defences were not what they had been. Many of the mines had been lifted and placed in the ineffectual Gazala line, while some of the troops were inexperienced and stunned by the ferocity of the attack. By midday, the vital crossroads of King's Cross was in Axis hands and it was only a matter of time before the fortress fell. Major-General H. B. Klopper, commander of the 2nd South African Division, vacillated between fighting on, breaking out and surrender. The decision was made for him when German panzers broke through to the port. Almost 35,000 men 40 were taken prisoner and vast quantities of supplies and stores were either captured or destroyed. The port which had held out for over nine months against Rommel the year 16

16 before and in which Churchill had invested a good deal of political capital fell after just two days.'" And with the capture of Tobruk, Rommel's forces were now free to mount an invasion of Egypt. Colonel Bonner L. Fellers, the American military attaché at the US Embassy in Cairo, had paid close attention to the fighting at Gazala and lost faith in the abilities of the British Eighth Army. On 20 June, Fellers reported to Washington: With numerically superior forces, with tanks, planes, artillery, means of transport, and reserves of every kind, the British army has twice failed to defeat the Axis forces in Libya. Under the present command and with the measures taken in a hit or miss fashion the granting of Lend- Lease alone cannot ensure a victory. The Eighth Army has failed to maintain the morale of its troops; its tactical conceptions were always wrong, it neglected completely cooperation between the various arms; its reactions to the lightning changes of the battlefield were always slow.'' This was a damning but accurate analysis of the Eighth Army at Gazala. The United States had become the 'arsenal of democracy' in 1940 and under the Lend-Lease programme had supplied Britain with vast quantities of 'equipment and supplies. Yet it appeared that the British were wasting this largesse and incapable of organising for victory. Churchill was in Washington taking part in a series of high-level meetings to finalise British and American strategic plans for 1942 and 1943 when he heard the news of the fall of Tobruk. The discussions would dictate the shape and course of the rest of the war and set the tone for the alliance. Suffering military disaster in the middle of these negotiations was a grievous blow for Churchill. It called into question British military capacity and thus her value as an ally to the United States. Yet the American response was "remarkably generous. General Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the US Army, immediately suggested sending the US 1st Armored Division to Egypt to bolster the British position. This was an offer made in good faith yet to Churchill it may well have suggested a bitter parallel with Hitler's original dispatch of Rommel's Afrika Korps to Libya to prop up his failing Italian :in February While de Churchill grappled with this strategic humiliation, a certain Complacency still persisted within, the headquarters of Eighth Army, now.based at Sollum on the Libyan Egyptian border. Ritchie and his staff had long since lost their grip on the military realities of the situation. There was a general feeling both at Eighth Army and at General Headquarters Middle East that Rommel's offensive power must have been dulled after fighting such a fierce battle and that it would be days or even weeks before the Panzerarmee could seriously threaten the frontier. The Combined Staffs 17

17 working in Cairo decided that the best course of action, given the lack of armoured forces, was to: delay the enemy on the frontier with forces which are kept fully mobile while withdrawing main body of 8th Army to the Matruh defences. This coupled with delaying action by our air forces, gives us the best chance of gaining time in which to reorganise and build up a striking force with which to resume the offensive. 43 Such planning could only be predicated on the belief that Rommel would be unable to mount an immediate threat to Egypt. Major-General Eric Dorman-Smith, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff Middle East, briefed worried war correspondents in Cairo on 21 June in an hour-long press conference. Although much of his confidence was feigned, Dorman-Smith's soothing words also reflected some of the remnants of optimism left in the British command. The Times paraphrased Dorman-Smith's words: The disappointment may be tempered by the consideration that in the seesaw of desert warfare... the most mobile and hard-hitting force wins... Our Commanders... are not despondent... They are convinced that the next time the pendulum swings it will go in our favour, and the swing will be deeper.44 Educating the British public in the 'diminishing power of the offensive' could not disguise the humiliation that Eighth Army had suffered, or the deep crisis that faced the British in the Middle East. Ritchie's plan of rebuilding his shattered force behind the Egyptian frontier might have worked had the Axis powers held to their original strategy but Rommel had no intention of waiting for the reduction of Malta before invading Egypt. Kesselring met with Rommel on the afternoon of 21 June to discuss future plans and reminded Rommel that the agreed strategy called for Operation Herkules to follow as soon as Tobruk was taken. He also warned Rommel that his supplies during the offensive had only been assured because Malta had been neutralised in preparation for the assault. Kesselring had already ordered his air units back to Sicily for Herkules. The next day, Rommel met with General Count Barbasetti, the Chief of the Italian Liaison Staff, who informed him that General Bastico, the Italian Commander-in-Chief North Africa, had ordered Rommel to halt. Rommel, who had just heard of his promotion to field marshal that day, told Barbasetti that he would not accept this 'advice'. 45 Faced with opposition from both his German and Italian superiors, Rommel simply short-circuited the Axis command chain. He made a direct appeal to 18