The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Hitler, having changed his mind several times about the importance of Libya and the need to send troops to North Africa, now felt it essential to prevent the collapse of Mussolini’s regime. He also feared that the British might link up with French North Africa and that the Vichy army, influenced by General Maxime Weygand, might rejoin the British. Even after the disastrous Dakar expedition the previous September, when the Free French and a British naval squadron were repulsed by Vichy loyalists, Hitler greatly overestimated the influence of General Charles de Gaulle at this stage.

  When Rommel landed in Tripoli on 12 February 1941, he was accompanied by Oberst Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler’s chief military adjutant. This greatly increased his authority both with the Italians and with senior German officers. The day before, the two men had been amazed when the commander of X Fliegerkorps on Sicily told them that Italian generals had beseeched him not to bomb Benghazi, as many of them owned property there. Rommel asked Schmundt to telephone Hitler immediately. A few hours later, German bombers were on their way.

  Rommel was briefed on the situation in Tripolitania by a German liaison officer. Most of the retreating Italians had thrown away their weapons and seized trucks to escape. General Italo Gariboldi, Graziani’s replacement, refused to hold a forward line against the British, by then at El Agheila. Rommel took matters in hand. Two Italian divisions were sent forward, and on 15 February he ordered the first German detachments to land, a reconnaissance unit and a battalion of assault guns, to follow. Kübelwagen cross-country vehicles, the much heavier German equivalent of the Jeep were disguised as tanks in an attempt to deter the British from advancing further.

  By the end of the month, the arrival of more units from the 5th Light Division encouraged Rommel to start engaging the British in skirmishes. Only at the end of March, when Rommel had 25,000 German troops on African soil, did he feel ready to advance. Over the next six weeks, he would receive the rest of the 5th Light and also the 15th Panzer Division, but the front was 700 kilometres east of Tripoli. Rommel was faced with a huge logistical problem, which he tried to ignore. When things became difficult, he instinctively blamed jealousy within the Wehrmacht for depriving him of supplies. In fact, the crises usually came when transports were sunk in the Libyan Sea by the RAF and Royal Navy.

  Rommel also failed to realize that preparations for Barbarossa made the North African campaign even more of a sideshow. Other problems arose due to reliance on the Italians. The Italian army was chronically short of motor transport. Its fuel was of such low quality that it often proved unsuitable for German engines, and Italian army rations were notoriously bad. They usually consisted of tins of meat, stamped AM for Administrazione Militar. Italians soldiers said the initials stood for ‘Arabo Morte’ or ‘Dead Arab’, while their German counterparts nicknamed it ‘Alter Mann’ (‘Old Man’) or ‘Mussolini’s ass’.

  Rommel was lucky that the Allies’ Western Desert Force was so weak at this point. The 7th Armoured Division had been withdrawn to Cairo for refitting and was replaced by a very reduced and unprepared 2nd Armoured Division, while the newly arrived 9th Australian Division had taken the place of the 6th Australian Division sent to Greece. Yet Rommel’s demands for reinforcements to advance into Egypt were rejected. He was told that a panzer corps would be sent that winter as soon as the Soviet Union had been defeated. He should not attempt a full-scale offensive until then.

  To the horror of General Gariboldi, Rommel soon ignored his orders and began to push the 5th Light Division into Cyrenaica, exploiting the weakness of the Allied forces. One of Wavell’s greatest mistakes was to replace O’Connor with the inexperienced Lieutenant General Philip Neame. Wavell also underestimated Rommel’s determination to advance straight away. He assumed he would not attack until the beginning of May. The midday temperature out in the desert had already reached 50 degrees Centigrade. Soldiers in steel helmets suffered from splitting headaches, largely brought on through dehydration.

  On 3 April, Rommel decided to push the Allied forces from the bulge of Cyrenaica. While the Italian Brescia Division was sent on to take Benghazi, which Neame evacuated in a hurry, Rommel ordered the 5th Light Division to cut the coastal road short of Tobruk. Disaster rapidly overtook the Allied force, and Tobruk itself was cut off. The weak 2nd Armoured Division lost all its tanks in the withdrawal because of breakdowns and lack of fuel. On 8 April, its commander, Major General Gambier Parry, and his headquarters staff were taken prisoner at Mechili along with most of the 3rd Indian Motorized Brigade. The same day, General Neame, accompanied by General O’Connor who had come forward to advise him, were both captured when their driver took the wrong road.

  The Germans rejoiced at the quantity of stores they found at Mechili. Rommel selected a pair of British tank goggles, which he wore up on his cap as a sort of trademark. He decided to seize Tobruk, having convinced himself that the British were preparing to abandon it, but he soon discovered that the 9th Australian Division was not about to give up the fight. Tobruk was reinforced by sea, giving its commander, Major General Leslie Morshead, a total of four brigades, with strong artillery and anti-tank gun units. Morshead, a forceful character, known to his men as ‘Ming the Merciless’, hastily strengthened Tobruk’s defences. The 9th Australian, although inexperienced and ill disciplined to a point which left British officers almost speechless with rage, proved to be a collection of formidable fighters.

  On the night of 13 April, Rommel began his main assault on Tobruk. He had no idea quite how strongly it was defended. Despite heavy losses and a repulse, he tried again several times to the dismay of his officers, who soon came to regard him as a brutal commander. This was the perfect moment for an Allied counter-attack, but the British and Australians were persuaded by clever deception that Rommel’s forces were far larger than they really were.

  Rommel’s calls for reinforcements and increased air support exasperated General Halder and the OKH, especially since he had ignored their warnings not to overreach himself. Even now, Rommel sent ahead some of his exhausted units to the Egyptian frontier, which Wavell defended with the 22nd Guards Brigade until other units arrived from Cairo. Rommel sacked Generalmajor Johannes Streich, the commander of the 5th Light Division for being too concerned with preserving the lives of his troops. Generalmajor Heinrich Kirchheim who replaced him was equally disen-chanted with Rommel’s style of command. He wrote to General Halder later in the month: ‘All day long he races about between his widely scattered forces, ordering raids and dissipating his troops.’

  General Halder, having heard such conflicting reports on what was going on in North Africa, decided to send out Generalleutnant Friedrich Paulus, who had served in the same infantry regiment as Rommel in the First World War. Halder felt that Paulus was ‘perhaps the only man with enough personal influence to head off this soldier gone stark mad’. Paulus, a punctilious staff officer, could hardly have been more different from Rommel, the aggressive field commander. Their sole similarity lay in their comparatively humble birth. Paulus’s task was to convince Rommel that he could not count on massive reinforcements and to find out what he intended to do.

  The answer was that Rommel refused to pull back his forward units on the Egyptian frontier, and with the newly arrived 15th Panzer Division he intended to attack Tobruk again. This took place on 30 April and was again repulsed with heavy losses, especially in tanks. Rommel’s forces were also very low on ammunition. Paulus, using his authority from the OKH, gave Rommel a written order on 2 May that the attacks could not be renewed unless the enemy was seen to withdraw. On his return, he reported to Halder that ‘the crux of the problem in North Africa’ was not Tobruk, but resupplying the Afrika Korps and Rommel’s character. Rommel simply refused to acknowledge the immense problem of transporting his supplies across the Mediterranean and unloading them in Tripoli.

  Wavell was concerned after the losses in Greece and Cyrenaica about his lack of tanks to face the 15th Panzer Division. Churchill mounted Operation Tiger, the transpor
t in early May of nearly 300 Crusader tanks and over fifty Hurricanes by convoy through the Mediterranean. With part of X Fliegerkorps still on Sicily it represented a serious risk, but thanks to bad visibility only one transport was sunk on the way.

  An impatient Churchill pushed Wavell into an offensive on the frontier even before the new tanks arrived. But although Operation Brevity commanded by Brigadier ‘Strafer’ Gott began well on 15 May, it provoked a rapid flanking counter-attack by Rommel. The Indian and British troops were forced back and the Germans eventually recaptured the Halfaya Pass. Once the new Crusader tanks arrived, Churchill again demanded action, in this case another offensive codenamed Operation Battleaxe. He did not want to hear that many of the unloaded tanks required work on them, nor that the 7th Armoured Division needed time for crews to familiarize themselves with the new equipment.

  Wavell again found himself weighed down by conflicting demands from London. At the beginning of April, a pro-German faction, encouraged by British weakness in the Middle East, had taken power in Iraq. The chiefs of staff in London recommended that Britain should intervene. Churchill immediately agreed and troops from India landed at Basra. Rashid Ali al-Gailani, the leader of the new Iraqi government, sought help from Germany, but received no reply because of confusion in Berlin. On 2 May, fighting broke out after the Iraqi army besieged the British air base at Habbaniyah near Fallujah. Four days later the OKW decided to send Messerschmitt 110s and Heinkel 111 bombers via Syria to Mosul and Kirkuk in northern Iraq, but they were soon unserviceable mainly due to engines damaged by dust. Meanwhile, British imperial troops from India and Jordan advanced on Baghdad. Gailani’s government had no option but to accept the British demand on 31 May for the continued passage of troops across Iraqi territory.

  Although the Iraq crisis did not deplete Wavell’s forces, he was ordered by Churchill to invade Lebanon and Syria, where the French Vichy forces had aided the Germans in the Luftwaffe’s ill-fated deployment to Mosul and Kirkuk. Churchill wrongly feared that the Germans would use Syria as a base for attacks on Palestine and Egypt. Admiral Darlan, Pétain’s deputy and Vichy’s minister of defence, asked the Germans to desist from provocative operations in the region while he sent French reinforcements to their colony to resist the British. On 21 May, the day after the invasion of Crete, a Vichy French fighter group landed in Greece on its way to Syria. ‘The war is becoming ever more bizarre,’ Richthofen noted in his diary. ‘We are supposed to supply them and entertain them.’

  Operation Exporter, the Allied invasion of Vichy Lebanon and Syria, which included Free French troops, began on 8 June with an advance north from Palestine across the Litani River. The Vichy commander, General Henri Dentz, asked for Luftwaffe assistance as well as for reinforcements from other Vichy forces in North Africa and France. The Germans decided that they could not offer air cover, but allowed French troops with anti-tank guns to travel by train through the occupied Balkans to Salonika, and then by ship to Syria. But the British naval presence was too strong, and Turkey, not wanting to get involved, refused transit rights. The French Army of the Levant soon knew that it was doomed, but remained determined to put up a strong resistance. Fighting continued until 12 July. After an armistice was signed at Acre, Syria was declared to be under the control of the Free French.

  Wavell’s lack of enthusiasm for the Syrian campaign and his pessimism over the prospects of Operation Battleaxe put him on a collision course with the prime minister. Churchill’s impatience and his complete lack of appreciation of the problems in mounting two offensives at the same time brought Wavell close to despair. The prime minister, over-confident after the delivery of tanks in Operation Tiger, brushed aside Wavell’s warning about the effectiveness of German anti-tank guns. They, rather than the German panzers, were destroying the bulk of his armoured vehicles. The British army was unforgivably slow in developing a weapon comparable to the feared German 88mm gun. Its own two-pounder ‘pea-shooter’ was useless. And the conservatism of the British army prevented the adaptation of the 3.7 inch anti-aircraft gun as an anti-tank weapon.

  On 15 June, Battleaxe began in a similar way to Brevity. Although the British retook the Halfaya Pass and had some other local successes, they were soon pushed back when Rommel brought forward all his panzers from the Tobruk encirclement. In three days of heavy fighting, the British were outflanked once more and again had to withdraw to the coastal plain, just managing to avoid encirclement. The Afrika Korps suffered higher casualties, but the British lost ninety-one tanks, mainly to anti-tank gunfire, while the Germans lost only a dozen. The RAF also lost many more aircraft than the Luftwaffe during the battle. German soldiers, with considerable exaggeration, claimed that they had destroyed 200 British tanks and won the ‘greatest tank battle of all time’.

  On 21 June, Churchill replaced Wavell with General Sir Claude Auchinleck, universally known as ‘the Auk’. Wavell took over Auchinleck’s position of commander-in-chief India. Soon afterwards Hitler promoted Rommel to General der Panzertruppe, and to Halder’s dismay and disgust ensured that he would have even greater independence.

  Churchill’s irritation with Wavell and the dejected leadership of the British army was fired by two imperatives. One was the need for aggressive action to keep up morale at home and prevent the country from slipping into a gloomy inertia. The other was to impress the United States and President Roosevelt. Above all, he needed to counter the partly justified impression that the British were waiting for the United States to enter the war and save the situation.

  Roosevelt, to Churchill’s great relief, had been been re-elected president in November 1940. The British prime minister was further encouraged when he heard of the strategic review prepared that month by the US Navy’s chief of operations. ‘Plan Dog’, as it was known, led to American–British staff talks at the end of January 1941. These discussions which took place in Washington under the codeword ABC-1 carried on until March. They formed the basis of Allied strategy when the United States entered the war. The policy of ‘Germany first’ was agreed as the basic principle. This accepted that, even with a war in the Pacific against Japan, the United States would first concentrate on the defeat of Nazi Germany, because without a major commitment of American forces to the European theatre the British were clearly incapable of winning on their own. If they lost, then the United States and its world trade would be in danger.

  Roosevelt had recognized the threat posed by Nazi Germany even before the Munich agreement of 1938. Foreseeing the importance of air power in the coming war, he had rapidly inaugurated a programme to build 15,000 aircraft a year for the United States Army Air Force. The assistant chief of staff of the US Army, General George C. Marshall, was present at the meeting to discuss this. Marshall, while agreeing with the plan, took the President to task for overlooking the need to increase their pitifully small ground forces. With little more than 200,000 men, the United States Army had only nine under-strength divisions, a mere tenth of the German army’s order of battle. Roosevelt was impressed. Less than a year later, he backed Marshall’s appointment as chief of staff, which took place on the day Germany invaded Poland.

  Marshall was a formal man of great integrity and a superb organizer. Under his direction, the US Army was to grow from 200,000 men to eight million in the course of the war. He always told Roosevelt exactly what he thought and remained impervious to the President’s charm. His greatest problem was Roosevelt’s frequent failure to keep him informed of discussions and decisions made with others, particularly those with Winston Churchill.

  For Churchill, his relationship with Roosevelt was by far the most important element in British foreign policy. He devoted enormous energy, imagination and sometimes shameless flattery to win over Roosevelt and obtain what his virtually bankrupt country needed to survive. In a very long and detailed letter dated 8 December 1940, Churchill called for ‘a decisive act of constructive non-belligerency’ to prolong British resistance. This would include the use of US Navy warships to p
rotect against the U-boat threat and three million tons of merchant shipping to maintain Britain’s Atlantic lifeline after the devastating losses–over two million gross tons–suffered so far. He also asked for 2,000 aircraft a month. ‘Last of all I come to the question of Finance,’ Churchill wrote. Britain’s dollar credits would soon be exhausted; in fact the orders already placed or under negotiation ‘many times exceed the total exchange resources remaining at the disposal of Great Britain’. Never had such an important or dignified begging letter been written. It was almost exactly a year from the day when the United States would find itself at war.

  Roosevelt received the letter when aboard the USS Tuscaloosa in the Caribbean. He pondered over the contents and the day after he returned he called a press conference. On 17 December, he made his famous but simplistic parable of a man whose house is on fire asking his neighbour for the loan of his hose. This was Roosevelt’s preparation of public opinion before the Lend–Lease Bill was presented to Congress. In the House of Commons, Churchill hailed it as ‘the most unsordid act in the history of any nation’. But privately the British government was shaken by the harsh conditions attached to Lend–Lease. The Americans had demanded an audit of all British assets, and insisted that there could be no subsidy until all foreign exchange and gold reserves had been used up. A US Navy warship was sent to Cape Town to take the last British gold stockpiled there. British-owned companies in the United States, most notably Courtaulds, Shell and Lever, had to be sold off at knock-down prices, and were then resold at a large profit. Churchill magnanimously attributed all this to Roosevelt’s need to wrongfoot the anti-British critics of Lend–Lease, many of whom harked back to the British and French default on debts from the First World War. The British as a whole underestimated how many Americans disliked them as imperialists, snobs and experts in the art of getting others to fight their wars for them.