Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

by Unknown

  “It all turned on the 150th Brigade box at Got-el-Ualeb,” said General Bayerlein. “We never knew that it was there. Our first attacks on it failed. If we had not taken it on June 1st, you would have captured the whole of the Afrika Korps. By the evening of the third day we were surrounded and almost out of petrol. As it was, it was a miracle that we managed to get our supplies through the minefield in time.” The Gazala position consisted primarily of minefields, stretching from Gazala on the coast to Bir Hacheim, forty miles to the south in the open desert. Minefields alone will not stop tanks; lanes through them can quickly be cleared. There must be something behind them. It was impossible to dig and man a continuous trench system, as in the 1914-18 war.

  Moreover, such a system would have been useless, for, however far it stretched, its left flank must always be in the air. General Auchinleck and General Ritchie therefore devised a series of “boxes” or strongholds, the first at Gazala, the last at Bir Hacheim. Wired and mined in and prepared for all-around defence, they were, in effect, castles. Their garrisons were supplied to stand a. siege and had their own complement of artillery inside the boxes.

  These boxes had a double function. In the first place, they were to guard the minefields and prevent the enemy cutting lanes through them at leisure. In the second place, like castles in the Middle Ages, they were points of resistance which a prudent enemy must try to reduce. Otherwise, the garrisons could sally out and take him in the rear or harass his communications. While he was involved with them, our armour, kept well away outside the boxes, would fall upon him.

  Having thus forced him to give battle on ground of our own choosing, we could, when the right moment came, take the offensive ourselves. A solid defensive system from which to launch it and on which to fall back if necessary, the Gazala position would be a sort of Scapa Flow for the Eighth Army. Rommel's first objective, as General Auchinleck rightly assumed, must again be Tobruk. He dare not advance into Egypt until he had captured it.

  To attack Tobruk, he had only two choices. He could smash his way through the minefields and boxes and make direct for it or he could skirt the whole Gazala position, come round by Sir Hacheim and then strike north. Rommel chose the second course. The Italian armoured division, the Ariete, was to capture Bir Hacheim the first night if possible. In any case the Afrika Korps was to make straight for the sea. It was, in fact, to take Tobruk on the third day, having meanwhile defeated the British armour!

  The Italian divisions were to hold the front and prevent us breaking out westwards from the Gazala position. One of them, Trieste, was to cut a gap through the minefield where it was crossed by the Trigh-el-Abd track. This was a precaution, to shorten the supply line in case Bir Hacheim did not fall at once. It was behind this minefield that the 150th Brigade box was situated.

  “I never liked this plan,” said General Bayerlein, "and, as Chief of Staff of the Afrika Korps, I told Rommel so continually. It seemed to me altogether too risky to go on without first knocking out Bir Hacheim. Six weeks before he asked me 'What would you do with your armour if you were General Ritchie?' I told him that I would keep it well away to the eastward, somewhere about El Adem, refuse battle at first and then strike at our flank when we were inside the Gazala position. 'You're crazy,' he said, 'they'll never do that!' though it was just what he would have done himself. As a matter of fact, I think General Ritchie's dispositions were excellent. The American 'General Grant' tanks, too, with their 75 mm. gun, came as a great surprise to us and 15th Panzer Division lost 100 tanks the first day.

  “General Cruwell, commanding the Afrika Korps, was shot down and made a forced landing in the 150th Brigade box, where he was taken prisoner. General Gausi, Chief of Staff to Rommel, was wounded. General Nehring took over the Afrika Korps and I took over from Gausi. When we had failed to capture Bir Hacheim and failed to get a passage through the minefield, both of us begged Rommel to break off the battle but he wouldn't hear of it. That was, I think, on the evening of May 31st. We were in a really desperate position, our backs against the minefield, no food, no water, no petrol, very little ammunition, no way through the mines for our convoys, Bir Hacheim still holding out and preventing our getting supplies from the south. We were being attacked all the time from the air. In another twenty-four hours we should have had to surrender.”

  That bore out exactly a story which I first heard in Barce prison camp only a few days after these events. On the first day of the attack the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade was overrun.

  An officer of the 10th Hussars, an old friend of mine, had his tank destroyed soon afterwards and found himself amongst the Indian prisoners, near Rommel's headquarters east of the minefields. Ringed round by 88 mm. guns to keep off our armour, Rommel was making desperate attempts to capture 150th Brigade box and get his supplies through. The Indian prisoners were dying of thirst and fighting for the few drops of water that were served out to the wounded. Major Archer-Shee, an officer of imposing presence, demanded to see Rommel and, to his surprise, was taken to him. He spoke enough German to make his protest. If the prisoners could not be given food and water, then the Germans had no right to keep them and should send them back to the British lines. Rommel was reasonable and even sympathetic. “You are getting exactly the same ration of water as the Afrika Korps and myself,” he said: “half a cup. But I quite agree that we cannot go on like this. If we don't get a convoy through to-night I shall have to ask General Ritchie for terms. You can take a letter to him for me....”

  It was, it seems, as near as that, though one cannot quite picture Rommel going meekly off into captivity. But General Auchinleck, back in Cairo, saw before General Ritchie that the capture of 150th Brigade box changed everything. “I am glad that you think the situation is still favourable to us and is improving,” he wrote on June 3rd. “All the same, I view the destruction of 150th Brigade and the consolidation by the enemy of a broad and deep wedge in the middle of your position with some misgiving. I feel that if he is allowed to consolidate himself... our Gazala position, including Bir Hacheim, will become untenable eventually, even if he does not renew his offensive.... Situated as he is, he is rapidly becoming able to regain the initiative which you have wrested from him in the last week's fighting....”

  What went wrong? It is easy to be wise after the event. In this case I am on record as having been right at the time. InA Year of Battle , Alan Moorehead recalls my telling him on June 2nd or 3rd, that I was afraid we had already missed the boat by not launching an attack with 5th Indian Division, under General Briggs, when Rommel was pinned against the minefield. Such an attack had, indeed, already been discussed. At intervals on June 2nd, I saw General Briggs, a deceptively mild officer with two bars to his D.S.O. Together we deplored the delay. At one moment we were going to attack: at another the whole division was going to go south round Bir Hacheim and start on a non-stop drive to Derna. In the end we hung about and did nothing. When the attack was at last put in on June 5th, it was three days too late. One hundred and fiftieth Brigade box had fallen: a lane through the minefield had been cleared. The Afrika Korps was itself again, with petrol, food, water and ammunition, with plenty of 88 mm. guns in position and with tanks behind them in the salient. In the belated attack, 10th Brigade of 5th Division had some initial success but our armour failed to exploit it.

  In the evening the German tanks and lorried infantry slipped round behind the brigade, Germans in British carriers overran the single battalion protecting the flank before they were recognized. The tanks and lorried infantry followed. Brigade headquarters and the tactical headquarters of the division went up in the smoke of burning tents and trucks. General Briggs and General Messervy of 7th Armoured Division, returning from a “recce,” managed to slip, through. Brigadier Boucher, the brigade commander, making his way back to his headquarters, and I, wait- ing for him there, were less lucky.

  That night, sitting amongst the German tanks in the open, it was easy to see that Rommel was on the move again. He had, indeed, recov
ered the initiative which General Ritchie had wrested from him and had no intention of giving it up. June 5th was the turning-point of the battle, though the chance of winning it outright went three days earlier. Rommel now did what he ought to have done at the start. He sent General Bayerlein off to put Bir Hacheim finally out of business. It took a week of unceasing artillery bombardment and Stuka attacks. Even then the gallant Free French were still holding out. But they could not hold out much longer and General Ritchie told General Koenig to abandon Bir Hacheim on the night of June 10th and try to break through. He got away with a large part of his force, driven out by a British girl driver.

  With Bir Hacheim off his back, Rommel at once reverted to his original plan of taking Tobruk. By midnight on the 11th, 90th Light Division was a few miles south of El Adem. The armoured divisions were echeloned on its left. There followed two days of great and decisive tank battles. Rommel threw in all his armour. But he threw it in behind a screen of anti-tank guns, of which he now produced more than it was ever suspected that he had.

  The British armoured brigades, weakened by the loss of most of the Grants, had to try to break through the screen to get at the German tanks. The guns took heavy toll of them. The tanks fell upon the remainder. By nightfall on June 13th most of our armoured strength was gone.

  Moreover, the enemy had possession of the battlefield and could recover his damaged tanks: ours were lost to us.

  It was now clear that the Gazala position would have to be abandoned. But both General Auchinleck and General Ritchie were reluctant to believe that the Eighth Army was beaten. It had lost its armour but much of its infantry was intact. The New Zealand Division had been ordered from Syria. A new armoured division, the 10th, was on its way out from England. There were about 150 tanks under repair in the workshops. We should soon again have more tanks than Rommel. We were still superior in the air, as we had been throughout. The decision was taken to give up Gazala but to hold a line from the western perimeter of Tobruk to El Adem and Belhamed. At the same time a mobile force was to be maintained to the eastward and a new striking force built up near the frontier. This meant that Tobruk, or part of it, would again be invested, which was contrary to plan, since the Navy had said that it could not be supplied. However, a temporary and partial investment was different from a sustained siege.

  In General Bayerlein's opinion, this decision was fatal. “To my mind,” he said, “General Ritchie ought to have gone straight back to the frontier after we captured Bir Hacheim and were astride the Gazala position. In any case he should never have tried to hold Tobruk with the defences in the state they were and with an improvised garrison. If he was going to hold it, as we assumed he was, then he should have prepared to do so from the start, laid new minefields, got his guns into position and so on. Above all, he should have put an experienced general in charge. If someone like General Morshead or General Gott or General Freyberg had been there, things might have been different. As it was, a few units fought well. I remember a Scottish battalion (the Cameron Highlanders) which went on fighting long after General Klopper had surrendered. But there seemed to be no proper defence plan at all.”

  Fatal the decision certainly proved. Having captured Sidi Rezegh on June 17th and heavily defeated our armour on the same day, Rommel attacked Tobruk from El Duda on June 20th, exactly as he had proposed to attack it on November 23rd of the previous year. Using his Stukas to dive-bomb the minefields and clear a passage, he quickly broke into the fortress from the south-east. Inside, all was soon confusion.

  General Klopper, bombed out of his headquarters, his signal communications gone, had lost all touch and all control. As the German tanks fanned out from the gap in the perimeter and drove straight to the harbour, some troops fought on.

  Some broke out to the eastward, a battalion of the Coldstream Guards naturally in good order. The South Africans, holding the western and south-western side of the perimeter, hardly knew what was happening until 90th Light Division took them in the rear. Suddenly at dawn next morning they obeyed General Klopper's order to surrender. In prison camps for many months afterwards they were bitterly resentful and ashamed. The fortress which had held out for nine months in 1941 had been taken in a day. Inevitably they would be blamed. Inevitably they blamed General Klopper.

  During the last hours and for long afterwards, Tobruk was covered with a funereal pall of black smoke from the dumps fired just before the capitulation. Millions of pounds of petrol and stores were burnt. Nevertheless, there was enough left to enable Rommel to drive on to Egypt.

  It was now too late to stand on the frontier. General Ritchie sought permission to retire to Mersa Matruh. Reluctantly General Auchinleck agreed, though with misgivings. For without armour, Mersa Matruh was no more easily defensible than the frontier. By the evening of June 23rd, Rommel was again on the frontier wire.

  Should he have gone on? General von Thoma says that he disobeyed a specific order from Mussolini, conveyed through Marshal Badoglio, to stop on the frontier after the capture of Tobruk. General Bayerlein denies this. A conference was held west of Bardia on June 22nd, he says. He himself only came in when it was nearing the end, but Rommel told him afterwards that General Bastico, his immediate superior, had been of the opinion that an advance into Egypt should not be attempted. There was, however, no order to that effect either from the Italian or the German High Command and General Bastico gave way when Rommel told him that he had been assured by Marshal Kesselring that he would get all the supplies he wanted. The point is clarified, if that is the word, by two extracts from Ciano's Diaries. On June 22nd he says that “a restraining telegram has already been sent from Rome advising Rommel that he should not venture beyond the line Fort Capuzzo-Sollum.” Next day he writes, “From some intercepted telegrams from the American observer in Cairo, Fellers, we learn that the British have been beaten and that if Rommel continues his action he has a good chance of getting as far as the Canal Zone.Naturally Mussolini is pressing for prosecution of the attack.... ”

  The decision was, then, Rommel's, the indecision was not. To a man of his temperament it was inevitable. He had the Eighth Army on the run. Was he to stop and let it re-form and then start the whole business over again from the line where he had halted fourteen months before? With the glittering prize of Egypt and the Suez Canal almost within his grasp, both the German and the Italian High Command must realise what was at stake and give him the extra support and supplies he needed. “No one could have guessed,” says General Bayerlein, “that the British would so quickly regain control of the Mediterranean and be so successful in stopping our shipping.” Still less could any one have guessed that Hitler, with his famous intuition, and Keitel, Jodl and Halder, with their trained staff minds, would not even see the opportunity that lay open before them. Of course he must go on. The Afrika Korps was, indeed, exhausted. But to Rommel, with his tremendous vitality, no soldier was ever too exhausted to fight the last round of a winning battle-or, for that matter, of a losing one.

  Go on they did, and at speed. By the evening of June 24th (four days from the fall of Tobruk), Rommel was up to Sidi Barrani. Next day his columns were within forty miles of Mersa Matruh. That evening General Auchinleck personally took over command of the Eighth Army. At once he resolved that no part of it should be shut up in the Mersa Matruh defences, which he had not enough troops to man. The Tobruk mistake was not to be repeated. Rommel must be stopped, if possible, in the area between Matruh and El Alamein. But 30th Corps was to occupy the El Alamein position as a precaution. On the evening of June 26th, the German tanks broke through the minefields south of Charing Cross. Next day they bumped the New Zealand Division, fresh and, as always, full of fight. They lost heavily but pressed forward along the coast and succeeded in cutting the road twenty miles east of Matruh. Fiftieth Division and the newly-arrived 10th Indian Division had to fight their way out at night, leaving much of their ammunition and equipment behind. There was now nothing for it but to withdraw to the position whic
h General Auchinleck had long before prepared. On June 30th Rommel came up to the El Alamein line. Alexandria was 65 miles away.

  He had, General Bayerlein assures me, just twelve German tanks left.

  Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

  CHAPTER 8

  The Enemy in Africa

  I. “DESERT WORTHY”

  On the morning of June 21st, Rommel was able to report that Tobruk was in his hands. Next day he learnt by wireless from Hitler's headquarters that he was a Field-Marshal, at forty-nine the youngest in the German Army. That evening he celebrated his promotion-on tinned pineapple and one small glass of whisky from a bottle which his staff had procured from the Tobruk Service stores. After dinner he wrote to his wife: “Hitler has made me a Field-Marshal. I would much rather he had given me one more division.” Still, he was in unusually high spirits, as well he might be when he looked back on his fourteen lean years as a captain and reflected where the next ten had brought him.

  This was the peak of his professional career and of his success in North Africa. He had reached it in sixteen months from landing in Tripoli, with the modest mission of preventing the British capturing Tripolitania. He had had to adapt himself, not only to a new type of warfare but to the strange and exacting life of the desert. It would be infelicitous to say that he took to it like a duck to water, but he quickly became as “desert-worthy”* as a Bedouin.

  [* “Desert-worthy” was a term first used for vehicles fit for the desert. It came to be more widely applied, to formations, to units and even to individuals.]