by Unknown
Meanwhile shouts for help were coming from 90th Light Division, battling desperately to hold off the New Zealanders at Sidi Rezegh. During the night of November 26th-27th Sidi Rezegh was captured. El Duda had been taken by 70th Division that afternoon and, for the first time, the Eighth Army and the garrison of Tobruk joined hands. (General Godwin-Austen moved the headquarters of 13th Corps into Tobruk, whence he is credited with having sent the signal “Tobruk and I both relieved.”) On November 27th a wireless intercept told General Ritchie, who had replaced General Cunningham, that the two panzer divisions were hurrying home.
Thus ended Rommel's eastward excursion. In the event, it had done little damage, beyond causing alarm and despondency in the back areas. (Some truck drivers are said never to have drawn rein-or taken their foot off the accelerator-until they reached Cairo. This may be an exaggeration but many were still full of running at Mersa Matrah.) Rommel had failed to recover the general initiative. As he had lost much of his armour, particularly to the artillery of 4th Indian Division at Sidi Omar, his last state was worse than his first. Nevertheless, General Auchinleck admits that his sudden drive “came as a rude shock.” Had it succeeded, military historians would have rated it a masterpiece.
For the Germans as well as for ourselves the break-through had moments which are more amusing in retrospect than they were at the time. In the evening of November 24th, Rommel with General Bayerlein and General Cruwell, commanding the Afrika Korps, crossed the frontier wire, Rommel driving “Mammut,” the Elephant, his British armoured command truck, a souvenir of an earlier battle, to which he was much attached. It was dark when they tried to turn back and they could not find the gap in the wire, which marked the gap in the mine belt that guarded it. (I remember giving up the attempt to find that gap myself and sleeping peacefully in my station-wagon, to discover next morning that my two front wheels were in the minefield.) Rommel and party slept, perhaps not so peacefully, in the middle of Indian troops and slipped out unchallenged at first light.
The previous afternoon Rommel had visited a field hospital, full of a mixed bag of German and British wounded. Walking between the beds, he observed that the hospital was still in British hands and that British soldiers were all about. It was, indeed, a British medical officer who was conducting him round, having mistaken him, or so he imagined, for a Polish general. The German wounded goggled at him and began to sit up in bed. “I think we'd better get out of this,” whispered Rommel. As he jumped into “Mammut,” he acknowledged a final salute.
General von Ravenstein also told me how Rommel tried to capture what he insisted was General Cunningham and his staff. “I had no time to take prisoners,” he said. “In fact, when I drove through some British units and numbers of men, seeing the tanks on top of them, tried to surrender, I had to call out, 'Go away! I'm not interested in you!' What could I have done with prisoners? Then Rommel joined me. On a piece of rising ground east of the wire we saw through our glasses a group of staff officers with their maps. 'General Cunningham!' said Rommel. 'Go and take him!' While I was collecting a tank or two he became impatient. 'Never mind, I'll go and take them myself!' Standing up in his car, his sun glasses pushed up on his forehead, waving and shouting, he dashed off with three unarmoured staff cars and about twenty motor-bicycles, in a cloud of dust. However, General Cunningham (if it was General Cunningham) saw them coming and, being unarmed, I suppose, and without an escort, he and his staff jumped into their cars and made off.”
(I still cannot find out what became of the “combat group” from 15th Panzer Division which was supposed to attack Maddalena. General Neumann-Silkow, son of a Scottish mother, then commanding the division, was killed ten days later and no one else seems to know. Had it turned up, it would have found Eighth Army Headquarters in a state of considerable “flap,” busy trying to organise a defence force of tanks with scratch crews and no ammunition. An essential part of the plan thus miscarried.)
The dog-fight round Sidi Rezegh was resumed. Everything turned on whether 1st Brigade of 1st South African Division could get up to the support of the New Zealanders in time. The division was new to desert war. Its 5th Brigade had been overrun and almost completely destroyed a week earlier in a well-conceived and brilliantly executed German attack. Major-General “Dan” Pienaar, a foxy last-war veteran, was understandably cautious about moving across country and perhaps being caught by enemy armour in the open. His advance was slow and hesitating. When 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions arrived, having fought an action against the concentrated tank strength of 7th Armoured Division on the way home, General Freyberg was unable to hold on. The New Zealanders were driven off Sidi Rezegh. By December 1st Tobruk was once again isolated. Nevertheless, General Ritchie and General Auchinleck, who had joined him at Maddalena, rightly guessed that Rommel's bolt was shot. They resolved to give him no rest. In fact, he made two more efforts. In an attempt to reach his frontier garrisons, he sent two strong armoured columns eastward, one along the coast road, the other along the Trigh Capuzzo. Both were defeated, the first by 5th New Zealand Brigade, the second by 5th Indian Brigade. Next morning, December 4th, he launched a heavy attack on the Tobruk salient. Backed by 88 mm. guns brought up to close range, it was very nearly successful. Had it been resumed next day, it might have been completely so, for deep penetrations had been made into our positions. But that night Rommel, knowing that the Eighth Army was about to attack him again, began to withdraw.
The withdrawal was never a rout. Aided by a surprisingly gallant defence of El Gubi by the Italians, it became a fighting retreat, conducted by easy stages. Behind a screen of anti-tank guns, the German armour was handled with great skill and resisted all attempts to outflank and roll up the main force. When an opportunity offered, it struck back. I still remember that grey December afternoon, the 15th, when I stood by a 5th Indian Brigade truck near Alam Haza and heard the last telephone message come through from the C.O. of The Buffs as his battalion was overrun by German tanks. For all that, Rommel was gradually forced out of every position in which he tried to stand. Now greatly outnumbered in tanks and short of petrol, thanks to the destruction by 4th South African Armoured Car Regiment of one of his main dumps near El Gubi, he could do no more than fight a series of delaying actions. By January 11th he had taken refuge in an immensely strong defensive position round Agheila where “a broad belt of salt-pans, sand dunes and innumerable small cliffs stretches southwards for fifty miles, its southern flank resting on the vast expanse of shifting sands of the Libyan Sand Sea.” The Eighth Army had nothing left with which to dig him out.
“To those who watched it anxiously from afar,” writes Lieutenant-Colonel Carver of 7th Armoured Division, “the changes and chances of the battle were inexplicable; they only knew the disappointment of hopes buoyed up, to be dashed again and again, so that when victory came at last and Rommel's hold on Cyrenaica collapsed, they failed to appreciate the lion-hearted determination and persistence which had won through at last. To those who took part, a bitter taste remained; those who fought in tanks cursed those who sent them into battle, inferior in armour and armament and in tanks which broke down endlessly. The infantry, with a sprinkling of useless anti-tank guns, looked to the tanks to protect them against enemy tanks and were bitter at their failure to do so. The armoured commanders, hurrying from one spot to another to protect infantry from the threat of enemy tanks, which did not always materialise, blamed the infantry for wearing out their tanks and crews by such a misuse of the decisive arm in desert warfare.”
To this I would add a footnote of my own. Though it is mentioned in General Auchinleck's despatch, no one who did not serve in the desert can realise to what extent the difference between complete and partial success rested on the simplest item of our equipment-and the worst. Whoever sent our troops into desert warfare with the 4-gallon petrol tin has much to answer for. General Auchinleck estimates that this “flimsy and ill-constructed container” led to the loss of thirty per cent of petrol between base and c
onsumer. Since the convoys bringing up the petrol reserves at one time themselves required 180,000 gallons a day, the overall loss was almost incalculable. To calculate the tanks destroyed, the number of men who were killed or went into captivity because of short- age of petrol at some crucial moment, the ships and merchant seamen lost in carrying it, would be quite impossible. Not only did the 4-gallon tin lead to “a most uneconomical use of transport,” as General Auchinleck mildly remarks; it also en- couraged the grossest extravagance. What to do with a leaking tin if your tank was full? “Chuck the b------over the side,” was the answer of the always improvident British soldier-and his practice.
Yet when I went back to India at the beginning of 1942, there was a factory outside Cairo still turning out these abominations. This at least partly disposed of the current rumour that someone in the Ministry of Supply had ordered x-millions of them and insisted that they be delivered. It did not dispose of the statement made to me by a very distinguished American engineer with whom I discussed the matter in New Delhi, that he had seen, in the railway workshop at Gwalior, stamps suited to the mass production of the admirable German “Jerrycan,” with which everyone in the desert who could lay hands on them had already equipped himself. When I asked him what they were being used for, he said that they were stamping out steel ovens for Italian prisoners of war! Meanwhile “the progress of our armour was first retarded by the enemy rear-guards and finally brought to a standstill by lack of petrol.” How many millions of gallons had gone into the sand?
Under such handicaps, with a bare numerical superiority of ill-armed, ill-armoured, unreliable tanks; with a far inferior system of tank recovery; compelled, for lack of anti-tank guns, to use 25-pounders to hold off the panzers; with one division untrained to the desert; with a total strength little more than that of the enemy, the Eighth Army had defeated Rommel and driven him out of Cyrenaica. With one hundred Sherman tanks it would have destroyed him and the war in North Africa would have been over. The survivors of this battle cannot wear an “8” on their Africa Star. For some reason it was assumed by the authorities responsible for such things that the Eighth Army sprang into being only on October 23rd, 1942, at the battle of El Alamein. They can, however, be proud that they fought with it through some of its greatest days.
Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox
CHAPTER 7
To the Gates of Alexandria
If Rommel had an outstanding quality, it was resilience. Like one of those weighted toy figures, no sooner was he knocked down than he was on his feet again. By January 11th, 1942, he was licking his wounds behind El Agheila. The same day, more than three hundred miles to the eastward, the South Africans captured Sollum. Bardia had fallen at the beginning of the month. On January 17th the garrison of Halfaya, cut off from their water-supply and exhausted from lack of food, at last surrendered. The frontier strongholds were reduced at leisure and at small cost. Their fate was certain from the moment that Rommel began his withdrawal.
Two-thirds of the Axis armies had been destroyed. Of the Afrika Korps, barely half had escaped death, capture or disablement. The morale of the remainder can hardly have been at its highest. As for the Italians, any fighting spirit that ever existed in the infantry divisions had sunk to zero during the long walk back from Tobruk. (The Germans, they complained, took all their transport.) The two German panzer divisions, or what was left of them, had been withdrawn to be re-equipped. Of Rommel's 412 tanks, 386 were lying, burnt out, blackened wrecks around the battlefields. Over 800 of his 1,000 aircraft had been shot down or destroyed on the ground. No new German formations could be expected for some time. It seemed that all he could hope for was to stand at Agheila until he was driven out by the Eighth Army or forced to withdraw by difficulties of supply. General Auchinleck estimated that not until the middle of February could he himself overcome his own administrative problems and concentrate enough troops to resume the offensive.
On January 21st, Rommel attacked. “The improbable oc- curred: without warning the Axis forces began to advance.” As on March 31st, 1941, Rommel may at first have intended no more than a large-scale reconnaissance. Yet it needed a man both morally and physically tough to think even of that at the moment. For Rommel, like our own commanders, had had two months of incessant fighting. Like them, he had slept in or beside his truck, never undisturbed for more than an hour or two. Like them, he had eaten what and when he could. Like them, he had faced bitter cold and rain and blinding dust-storms. Even more than they, he had spent most of his days and nights bumping at speed across the battlefield. During the long retreat he had had neither the thrill of pursuit nor the prospect of victory to make him forget fatigue. When he reached Agheila he was, in fact, exhausted. Yet, to the men of the Afrika Korps, he assigned no limited objective. They were to take three days' rations and to follow him as far and as fast as they could. Reinforced, but with no more than a hundred tanks, some of them light, and with virtually no fighter cover at all, he set out with three columns. The weak and widely dispersed covering forces were quickly brushed aside. “As usual,” says General Auchinleck, '“Rommel rapidly and skilfully made the most of his initial success.” The reconnaissance developed at once into an offensive. First Armoured Division, which had just replaced the veteran “desert rats” of 7th, was new to desert warfare. It lost 100 of its 150 tanks and many guns. The Eighth Army was caught off balance. By February 7th, at the cost of only about thirty of his own tanks, Rommel had hustled it back to the line Gazala-Bir Hacheim. It was bold and brilliant generalship, by any standard.
Not only in Cyrenaica was the barometer falling for the British. From the Far East a chill wind was blowing; the breath of impending calamity was in the air. The Japanese were sweeping at speed through the “impenetrable jungles” of Malaya. The “impregnable fortress” of Singapore was about to be attacked from the side whence no attack could come. In Burma, two weak divisions were faced with the prospect of withdrawing across country-if they could. Nearer home, the Axis High Command had at long last come to see the strategic importance of Malta and the Mediterranean. Incessant air attacks were launched against the island; as the result, Rommel lost not a single ton of his supplies in January. Aircraft and submarines closed the Central Mediterranean to our own convoys. Heavy losses were inflicted on our naval forces; Admiral Cunningham was left with only three cruisers and a few destroyers. His flagship sat on the bottom in Alexandria. These events started a series of chain reactions. Just as General Wavell had had to discard from weakness to assist the foredoomed campaign in Greece, so General Auchinleck was prevented from building up his strength by demands for reinforcements for the Far East. Already in December, before Rommel had been driven out of his Gazala position, the 18th Division had been diverted from the Middle East to Malaya. (It landed in Singapore just before the capitulation and two of its brigades, after a spirited but hopeless resistance, disappeared into Japanese prison camps.) Simultaneously, the dispatch of 17th (Indian) Division had been stopped. Tanks, fighter aircraft, guns had also to be sacrificed.
Yet, because it seemed certain that Malta must fall unless we could secure the airfields of Western Cyrenaica and give cover to the island and to the relieving convoys, the Cabinet was insistent that an offensive be staged at the earliest possible moment. What was the earliest possible moment? “Now, if not sooner,” was the view of the Prime Minister. “When there is some chance of it being a success,” said General Auchinleck. A premature offensive might result in the piecemeal destruction of the new armoured forces which he was trying to create. Then, in an attempt to save Malta, he might lose Egypt and the whole Middle East. The vicious circle was completed by the fact that every day that passed with Malta unable to interfere with Rommel's “build-up” reduced the chances of attacking him successfully. In February, a convoy carrying a large number of tanks had already reached Tripoli. Long-distance arguments, like long-distance telephone calls in India, leave the exasperated participants with the impression that there must
be a half-wit at the other end of the wire.
Especially is this the case when both, from their own angle, are right. Fortunately Sir Stafford Cripps and General Nye, Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, were persuaded to come out to Cairo, since General Auchinleck could not be persuaded to leave the Middle East and go to London. There the Commander-in-Chief was able to convince them that his strength both in tanks and in the air was altogether too small to offer even a reasonable prospect of an immediate offensive's being successful.
By agreement, the offensive was fixed for the middle of May. Rommel meanwhile received so many tanks that it was doubtful whether we would even then have numerical superiority. The War Cabinet, however, was determined that, to save Malta, the risk of losing Egypt must be accepted. General Auchinleck was ordered to launch his attack not later than the middle of June. In the event, Rommel attacked first, on May 27th, with tanks about equal in number and greatly superior in quality, even to the new American “General Grants.” The airfields of Western Cyrenaica were not captured; Malta did not fall, thanks to Hitler's folly in postponing the airborne assault on it, but we very nearly lost Egypt. The disasters of June, 1942, came as a staggering blow to the British public. Nothing shook them more than the fall of Tobruk which, in fact, it was not intended to hold if things went wrong. (The decision was altered at the eleventh hour for fear of the effect on public opinion at home. By then many of the mines had been lifted and Tobruk became a staging camp for retreating troops rather than a garrison fortress.) South Africa, because of the surrender of her troops there, and Australia, because of old associations, were equally appalled. Even the Eighth Army, which had sensed victory in the first few days, could not understand how it had slipped from its grasp. Thus it has never been generally realized how close was Rommel to defeat-and to capitulation.