Churchill’s only consolation from his visit to the United States was that he had managed to persuade Roosevelt to agree to the invasion of French North Africa. Operation Gymnast, which later became Operation Torch, had been fiercely opposed by General Marshall and the other American chiefs of staff. Marshall’s fears of Churchill getting at Roosevelt when none of the President’s military advisers were present had been vindicated. They suspected, with a degree of justification, that Britain wanted to preserve its position in the Middle East. But Churchill was afraid that if Britain lost Egypt, and the Germans managed to link up an invasion through the Caucasus with Rommel’s advance, then not just the Suez Canal but the oilfields of the region could be lost. It might also encourage the Japanese to extend their operations into the western Indian Ocean.
Churchill had another reason which chimed well with Roosevelt’s thinking. Since an early invasion of northern France was out of the question because of a lack of air superiority and a shortage of shipping and landing craft, there was no other area in which American troops could be deployed against Germany. And the prime minister knew that Admiral King, as well as the American public, wanted to drop the ‘Germany first’ strategy, and concentrate on the Pacific. Even Brooke was highly dubious about the North Africa landings, but Churchill was proved right, albeit for very different reasons to the ones he had put forward. The US Army needed battle experience before it could take on the Wehrmacht in major battles on the mainland of Europe. And the Allies needed to learn the dangers of amphibious operations before they attempted a cross-Channel invasion.
Kesselring still wanted to conquer Malta first, but Rommel was adamant. He had to have the Luftwaffe supporting him so that he could destroy the Eighth Army before it had a chance to recover. Hitler supported Rommel, with the argument that the capture of Egypt would make Malta irrelevant. But they both overlooked the fact that while the Luftwaffe was being diverted to support Rommel during the Gazala battles, Malta had been reinforced. Yet again, supply lines across the Mediterranean were at risk, and the seizure of Tobruk with its port had not solved the logistic conundrum of the desert war as Rommel had hoped. In what was referred to as the ‘rubber-band’ effect of these campaigns, the over-extended supply line led to disaster, hauling back the attacker.
Even before the fall of Tobruk, Rommel had ordered the 90th Light Division to push on towards Egypt along the coast road. And on 23 June the two panzer divisions were also sent in pursuit of the Eighth Army. Auchinleck meanwhile sacked Ritchie and took command himself. He wisely cancelled orders to make a stand at Mersa Matruh and instructed all formations to withdraw rapidly to El Alamein, a small railway halt near the sea. Between Alamein and the Qattara Depression to the south, with its salt marshes and quicksands, he intended to establish his defensive line, secure in the knowledge that Rommel would not be able to outflank it as easily as he had at Gazala.
Morale in the Eighth Army could not have been worse. Despite Auchinleck’s determination to pull back to El Alamein, Ritchie’s earlier order had left the 10th Indian Division defending Mersa Matruh. It was caught by the speed of Rommel’s advance units, which encircled the town, cutting the coast road. Part of X Corps managed to break out, but lost over 7,000 men taken prisoner in the process. Further south, the New Zealand Division broke through the 21st Panzer Division in a vicious night attack, killing wounded, medics and combatants alike, an action which the Germans considered a war crime.
Rommel was still convinced that he had the Eighth Army on the run and could strike through to the Middle East. Mussolini was so certain of success that he arrived in the port city of Derna followed by a magnificent grey stallion, on which he would take the victory parade in the Egyptian capital. In Cairo itself, panic and confusion reigned in all the offices of GHQ Middle East and the British embassy, to the amusement or alarm of most Egyptians. Long queues formed outside banks. On 1 July, columns of smoke rose into the air from documents burned in the gardens of official buildings. They created a snowstorm of partly charred secret papers around the city. Street vendors snatched them up to make cones for their peanuts, and the day became known as ‘Ash Wednesday’. Members of the European community began to leave by car, with mattresses strapped to the roof in scenes reminiscent of Paris two years before.
The ‘flap’, as it was called, had started in Alexandria, when Vice Admiral Sir Henry Harwood, who had just taken over from Cunningham, ordered the dispersal of the British fleet to other ports in the Levant. Rumours spread that the Germans would arrive in twenty-four hours and that an airborne invasion was expected at any moment. Egyptian shopkeepers prepared portraits of Hitler and Mussolini ready to hang in their establishments. Others went much further. Nationalist officers, hoping that the Germans would give them independence from the British, began to prepare for an uprising. One officer named Anwar Sadat, later president of the country, bought up 10,000 empty bottles for making Molotov cocktails.
For the Jewish community the prospect was terrifying, but although the British authorities in Cairo offered them priority on the trains to Palestine, the Palestine administration refused them visas. Jewish fears were not misplaced. An SS Einsatzkommando unit was waiting in Athens to begin work in Egypt, and then in Palestine if Rommel’s string of victories continued.
Desertions in the British Army of the Nile, as Churchill called it, rose dramatically, bringing the estimated total in the city and the Delta to 25,000 men. British officers felt a characteristic urge to make jokes in the face of disaster. Having always complained about the slowness of the service in Shepheard’s Hotel, they said: ‘Just wait till Rommel gets to Shepheard’s. That’ll slow him up.’ A rumour went round that Rommel had already telephoned to book a room. Certainly German radio had broadcast a message to the women of Alexandria: ‘Get out your party frocks, we’re on the way!’ But Axis triumphalism was premature.
Although the Germans had been intercepting British signals traffic on a tactical level, Auchinleck was well aware of Rommel’s plans through Ultra. In the early hours of 1 July, the Afrika Korps with the two panzer divisions set off to make a feint attack towards the south of the Alamein Line. Rommel’s real target lay further north, but in his impatience to catch the Eighth Army off balance he had dispensed with reconnaissance. This proved a bad mistake, made worse by a sandstorm. The 90th Light Division tried to attack the Alamein box but was repulsed by unexpectedly heavy artillery fire. Soon afterwards the 21st Panzer Division advanced on one of the central boxes held by the 18th Indian Brigade. Although it took the position, it lost a third of its tanks, many of them to RAF fighter-bombers.
Coningham’s Desert Air Force continued its relentless attacks. His pilots were maintaining an even greater rhythm of sorties than during the Battle of Britain. With pilots from many nations, the air force included the Free French Groupe de Chasse Alsace, armed with a mixed complement of aircraft. Coningham badly needed Spitfires to take on the Messerschmitts, but the air ministry in London was reluctant to release them from home defence. His Desert Air Force was now helped by an American bombing group of B-24 Liberators attacking Axis ships and the ports of Benghazi, Tobruk and Mersa Matruh. The US Middle East Army Air Force was assembling under the command of Major General Lewis H. Brereton, with both fighter and bombardment groups. British and American forces were for the first time in action alongside each other.
German expectations of an easy victory began to falter. Auchinleck counter-attacked with mobile groups and concentrated his artillery to great effect. And the New Zealand Division again excelled itself by seizing the perfect moment for a sudden counter-attack on the Ariete Division, sending it back in disorder. On the night of 3 July, Rommel ordered the Panzerarmee Afrika on to the defensive. It had less than fifty tanks in a battleworthy state. His men were totally exhausted and short of ammunition and fuel. He simply could not afford a battle of unremittant hard pounding.
The rock, scree and sand of the Alamein Line did not offer a hospitable environment for the men of
the Eighth Army either. They were tormented by ubiquitous swarms of aggressive flies and by sandstorms whipped up by the winds, as well as by the enervating heat of the desert. Tanks were literally like ovens under the blazing sun. At night, soldiers wrapped themselves tightly in a groundsheet to keep out scorpions. They suffered from dysentery spread by the flies, as well as from desert sores which also attracted these voracious insects. And whenever they tried to eat their corned-beef hash or hardtack biscuits ground up to make a porridge with the consistency of plaster of Paris, it was hard not to swallow a few flies in the process. A brew-up of tea was the only consolation, even if the water used to make it tasted pretty foul. Not surprisingly, the soldiers’ thoughts tended to focus on home cooking and home comforts. A rifleman declared to his comrades that ‘when he made it home he was going to spend his time eating chocolate ice creams while sitting on the toilet and enjoying the luxury of pulling the chain’.
The Eighth Army was also too exhausted to seize the opportunity to counter-attack. Instead it concentrated on strengthening its position along the line, with a fresh Australian brigade brought up to the Ruweisat Ridge. Rommel attacked again on 10 July. But in the north the 9th Australian Division, supported by an armoured brigade, broke through the Italians near El Alamein and put them to flight. Their most important prize was to capture Rommel’s own signals intelligence unit, a coup which made him effectively blind now that the Germans were no longer able to break the American code. The American military attaché, Bonner Fellers, who had unwittingly provided the Germans with their most reliable intelligence source, had left at the end of June.
Throughout most of July, the two sides attacked and counter-attacked in a military version of scissors, paper, stone. Rommel was incensed by the performance of most Italian formations, which produced bitter arguments between the Axis allies. He felt forced to split up some of his formations to insert ‘corset stiffeners’ among some of the Italian divisions. And his outraged protests about the lack of resupply again proved futile, for the RAF and the Royal Navy were once more inflicting heavy losses on Axis convoys and port installations. His dream that the capture of Tobruk and Mersa Matruh would solve his problems at a stroke were rudely shattered. On the night of 26 July, the recently formed Special Air Service in Jeeps attacked an airfield near Fuka and destroyed thirty-seven aircraft on the ground, many of them Junkers 52 transports. It brought their total for the month to eighty-six aircraft destroyed.
Auchinleck’s achievement should not be underestimated. He had at the very least saved a heavily battered Eighth Army from disaster and stabilized the line, while inflicting heavy losses on the Germans. Churchill viewed things in a very different light. He saw only missed opportunities, and refused to acknowledge the exhaustion of the troops and the scandalous inferiority of British armoured vehicles.
The prime minister, accompanied by General Sir Alan Brooke, arrived in Cairo on 3 August on his way to Moscow to warn Stalin about the postponement of the Second Front. The British thought that they had finally stonewalled the Americans into abandoning Operation Sledgehammer, the cross-Channel attack to invade the Cotentin Peninsula so rashly promised to Molotov. But in the second week of July, there were signs of rebellion among the American chiefs of staff and the secretary of war Henry L. Stimson. In the belief that the British were secretly against any invasion of northern France, they argued for an abandonment of the ‘Germany first’ policy and a switch of focus to the Pacific.
Roosevelt, invoking his role as commander-in-chief, stopped them in their tracks on 14 July. Sending troops to capture odd islands in the Pacific was just what Germany hoped they would do, he wrote to Marshall, and would ‘not affect the world situation this year or next’. And it certainly would not help Russia or the Middle East. Whether or not this was largely a bluff on Marshall’s part aimed at forcing the British to commit themselves to a cross-Channel invasion is still unclear. But Marshall and Admiral King returned to the charge later in the month when they visited Churchill at Chequers and tried to revive Sledgehammer. The British remained resolutely opposed. It would be a disaster, and could do nothing to help the Red Army.
Harry Hopkins, who was also in London, privately encouraged the British in the knowledge that Roosevelt wanted to see American troops in action in North Africa. Marshall, finally obliged to make the best of what he considered a bad job of fighting Britain’s war, sent one of his best staff officers, Major General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to begin planning the North African landings in London, with a view to taking overall command.
Before continuing his journey on to the Soviet Union, Churchill was determined to sort out the command structure in the Middle East. Auchinleck told him that it would not be wise to launch another attack before mid-September, so Churchill decided to replace him with General Sir Harold Alexander as commander-in-chief. He also chose Lieutenant General ‘Strafer’ Gott, the commander of XIII Corps, to take over the Eighth Army. Gott, although he had been one of the better desert commanders, was tired out and demoralized by this stage. Brooke wanted Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery instead, but Churchill was adamant. The situation was resolved when Gott was killed, after his plane was shot down by a Messer-schmitt. Montgomery would take command after all.
Montgomery took a pride in being different from the usual senior officer of the British army. And the short, wiry little general with a beaky nose could hardly have been more of a contrast to the unassuming, aristocratic and immaculate Alexander. Monty dressed differently too, preferring a shapeless pullover and corduroys, topped later by a black Royal Tank Regiment beret as his hallmark. Yet he was a military conservative, believing in detailed staffwork and the deployment of divisions, not the informal battle-groups which had evolved in the desert campaign. He played shamelessly to the crowd, whether soldiers or journalists, despite his rather shrill voice and inability to pronounce his Rs. A non-smoker and teetotaller, he was egotistic, ambitious and ruthless, possessing a boundless self-confidence which occasionally bordered on the fatuous. But this self-belief, which he was able to convey to all he met, lay at the heart of his mission to turn the badly bruised Eighth Army into one confident of victory. Commanders had to ‘get a grip’ and there was to be no more ‘bellyaching’ or querying of orders.
The situation that Montgomery inherited in August 1942 was by no means as dire as his own myth-making later pretended. Rommel’s German and Italian divisions had suffered a considerable battering during the July battles. But Montgomery was rightly appalled by the defeatist attitude of many senior officers on the staff, although he was wrong to imply that Auchinleck shared their views. Auchinleck’s failing had been his ignorance of this mood among the ‘Gaberdine Swine’, as fighting officers called the inhabitants of Headquarters Middle East in Cairo. Montgomery announced to the Eighth Army that he had ordered the burning of all contingency plans for withdrawal. And with considerable theatrical effect, he managed to rebuild its morale and confidence through visits and training programmes. An impression of dramatic change worked wonders, even if Montgomery was claiming for himself a number of innovations which had begun under Auchinleck.
Montgomery had no intention of launching a premature offensive, even though such caution had been the main reason behind Auchinleck’s dismissal. But he was much cleverer in the way he handled the prime minister. In fact, Montgomery planned to take longer than Auchinleck’s date of mid-September. He was determined to build up his army to such an overwhelming strength that victory could be virtually guaranteed. In this he was almost certainly correct, because Britain could not have faced another fiasco.
Rommel had been reinforced with the 164th Division and a brigade of paratroopers, but he knew his position was now worse than precarious. His forces were too weak to continue a battle of attrition against the Alamein Line. Instead, he wanted to withdraw so as to bring the British out of their positions, and to impose on them a battle of movement in which his panzer troops would have the advantage. He was still short of transpor
t and fuel as the RAF and Royal Navy sank one supply ship after another. Suffering from stress and furious frustration, he criticized in bitter and sweeping terms the performance of Italian troops, even though some formations, especially the Folgore Division, were fighting well.
In the second half of August roles were reversed, with Mussolini and Kesselring urging Rommel to launch an offensive as soon as possible, while he had become reluctant and pessimistic. On 30 August, sensing that he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, Rommel launched his right hook against the southern part of the Eighth Army line, to swing round behind and attack the Alam Halfa Ridge. He knew that the greatest risk lay in running out of fuel, but Kesselring had promised that tankers were due to dock and that the supplies would be rushed forward.
Montgomery, aware of Rommel’s plan through Ultra decrypts, placed his armoured formations ready to parry the thrust, more or less as Auchinleck had planned. Rommel’s reconnaissance and intelligence was poor. His staff had underestimated the extent of the minefields they had to cross in the south, and failed to appreciate the effect of the Desert Air Force in the coming battle. As his two panzer divisions struggled in the minefields, Coningham’s squadrons of bombers and fighter-bombers attacked them relentlessly through a night illuminated by flares. The panzers, bunched together in the narrow corridors, made comparatively easy targets. The Afrika Korps and the Littorio Armoured Division did not get through until the following morning, and only then did the advance north towards the Alam Halfa Ridge accelerate. Rommel was encouraged to continue, and Kesselring sent in his Stukas to batter the defensive positions ahead. But the slow and vulnerable Stukas were badly mauled by the squadrons of the Desert Air Force.
The Second World War Page 45