The final British casualty of Battleaxe was, in a manner of speaking, Archibald Wavell, who was relieved as Commander-in-Chief Middle East Command on July 1, 1941, and replaced by General Claude Auchinleck. The immediate cause of Wavell’s fall from grace was said to be his failure to successfully execute an operation which was thrust upon him against his better judgment, one which he believed had been ill-planned, and was to be carried out by troops he felt were ill-equipped and ill-prepared. More to the point, he was relieved because of Winston Churchill’s dislike for him. Churchill, for all his gifts as a politician and a national wartime leader, possessed glaring flaws as a military strategist, and often lost sight of the reality that an army which had the will to stand did not always likewise possess the strength to attack. Given his pugnacious nature, to Churchill the attack was the natural state of affairs in military operations, and any general perceived to be lacking the requisite degree of aggressiveness was suspect in his eyes, and hence expendable.
Wavell was politely “kicked upstairs,” taking over the post of the man who replaced him, Claude Auchinleck, as Commander-in-Chief, India, a position he would hold until July 1943, when he was named Viceroy of India. Illuminating the true nature of Wavell’s change of command, Auchinleck would later note: “In no sense do I wish to infer that I found an unsatisfactory situation on my arrival—far from it. Not only was I greatly impressed by the solid foundations laid by my predecessor, but I was also able the better to appreciate the vastness of the problems with which he had been confronted and the greatness of his achievements, in a command in which some 40 different languages are spoken by the British and Allied Forces.”132
Ironically, it was Wavell among all of the British commanders who faced him that Rommel held in the greatest esteem. During the whole of the North African campaign a copy of Generals and Generalship, a transcription of a lecture series Wavell had presented at Trinity College published before the war began in 1939, accompanied Rommel everywhere, a distinction not accorded to any work written by a German general. In Rommel’s opinion, Wavell, almost alone among the top echelon of British generals, fundamentally understood mechanized warfare and recognized the capabilities as well as the limitations of armored units.
For his part, Wavell’s successor, Claude Auchinleck, was no mental bantamweight. Born in 1884, six years before Rommel, and the son of a colonel in the Royal Artillery, Auchinleck was determined from a fairly young age to become an army officer, albeit in the infantry and not with the gunners. Intelligent and affable, he spent the first 30 years of his career with the Indian Army, that peculiar (and fearsome) offshoot of the British Army, where British officers commanded units manned entirely by native Indian rankers. Auchinleck spent the Great War in the Middle East, leading the 62nd Punjabis in some of the fiercest battles fought against the Ottoman Turks. Not one to lead from the rear, he was Mentioned in Despatches and awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his actions in the Mesopotamia campaign, and found himself a brevet lieutenant colonel at the end of the war.
Similar to Erwin Rommel’s postwar experience, after the “peace to end all peace” was imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, Auchinleck went through a succession of postings to staff postings, staff colleges, regimental command, and instructor positions with the Indian Army. He saw further combat while successfully leading two punitive expeditions along India’s Northwest Frontier, fighting Afghan and Paki rebels, being promoted to major general in the process, and somewhere along the line acquiring the nickname “The Auk.” His most outstanding achievement in India, however, didn’t come in the field: in 1938 Auchinleck was named chairman of the committee responsible for reorganizing, re-equipping, and modernizing the Indian Army. The quality of the work done by the committee was demonstrated beyond all doubt during the Second World War, when its recommendations allowed the Indian Army to expand from a strength of 183,000 officers and other ranks in autumn 1939 to over 2,250,000 men by the war’s end.
When war erupted in Europe in September 1939, Auchinleck initially remained in India, but in early 1940 was abruptly recalled to England, where, in the space of a few months, he was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of the Anglo-French ground forces defending Norway, which had been invaded by the Germans in early April. This posting was a thankless job, for while the strategic concept was sound, the operational execution was thoroughly bungled at the highest levels in London and Paris. A lack of coordinated planning, poor training, and inadequate equipment left Auchinleck and his men “holding the bag,” as it were: despite Auchinleck doing his best to stave off the inevitable, Norway was doomed. Evacuated when Norway fell in June 1940, he became General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Southern Command, where one of his immediate subordinates was Bernard Law Montgomery, then a major general in command of a corps. Not surprisingly, the prickly and self-centered Mongtomery was quick to find fault with the generally affable Auchinleck, Montgomery asserting in his memoirs that “In the 5th Corps I first served under Auchinleck. . . . I cannot recall that we ever agreed on anything.”133
Nineteen forty-one saw Auchinleck in India once again, this time as Commander-in-Chief, India. In April of that year, when the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani revolted against its British colonial overlords, it was Auchinleck who ordered a division of Indian infantry into Basra, nominally General Wavell’s area of command, to put down the rebellion. General Wavell had been too preoccupied with—and his forces spread too thin by—the rapidly deteriorating situations in the Western Desert and Greece to be able to spare any troops for Iraq, and was grateful for Auchinleck’s intervention. Predictably, Churchill had seen Wavell’s hesitation as timidity, and from that point forward was ready to sack Wavell as soon as the opportunity to do so presented itself.
As Wavell had before him, Auchinleck, as Commander-in-Chief Middle East, had his headquarters in Cairo; this was not a case of leading from the rear but was necessitated, as it had been for Wavell, by the fact that Auchinleck, in addition to North Africa, was responsible for Persia, Mesopotamia, the whole of the Levant and the Arabian peninsula. This would prove as much of a handicap to Auchinleck as it had been to his predecessor, compelling him to wear too many hats simultaneously, balefully diluting the time and energy he could focus on individual responsibilities. Churchill, though he would never acknowledge it, bore a share of the blame for this flawed command structure, as he would refuse to press for Egypt and the Mediterranean to be organized under a separate command until the summer of 1942. Be that as it may, whatever the realities and handicaps of his command structure might be, Auchinleck was given the unenviable task of effecting the relief of Tobruk while at the same time ejecting Rommel from Libya.
Auchinleck was starkly realistic about how and when that could be accomplished. Though casualties during Battleaxe had not been inordinately high, equipment losses were severe, and morale was approaching an all-time low. After-action reports and aerial reconnaissance showed that little more than a dozen German tanks had been destroyed during the battle, while four out of every five British tanks committed to action were either lost or were sitting in the Desert Force’s machine shops undergoing major repairs; fully half the British armor strength had to be written off. British cruiser tanks could not stand up to German antitank guns, and even the heavily armored Matilda was vulnerable to the Flak 88. The story goes (it is almost certainly apocryphal, but worth telling nonetheless) that a British officer taken prisoner during the course of Battleaxe complained to his captors that it was “unsporting” for the Germans to use AA guns against tanks. A German replied, “Ja! And we think it is unsporting of you to use tanks that only our 88s can stop!” With the Germans now receiving large numbers of a long-barreled 50mm antitank gun (PAK 38) which was nearly as effective as the Flak 88, the tactical advantage would remain decisively with the Germans unless British armor doctrine and tactics were radically revised. For now, the German antitank guns ruled the desert battlefield.
For
Auchinleck, the restoration of his soldiers’ morale was the first priority, and that would only come about when they were equipped with tanks and guns in which they could have confidence. Infantry weapons were pretty much a wash, although the British rifles and machine guns had a bit of an edge in reliability; the 25-pounder was probably the finest all-round artillery piece on either side, and apart from not being able to function as an antiaircraft gun, it could fulfill any role which the German Flak 88 could take on. That was a start. But the decisions in desert warfare were made by armor, and there was little that could be done at the moment about the under-gunned and under-armored Crusader I. On the other hand, deliveries of American-designed and built M3 light tanks, which the British officially christened the Stuart and were unofficially known as “Honeys” for their speed and reliability, began to arrive in Alexandria in mid-July. By the end of the month, the Desert Force had taken delivery of 84 Stuart tanks, 164 P-40 fighter aircraft, 10 bombers, and two dozen 3-inch antiaircraft guns, along with assorted pieces of field artillery, road-building tools and equipment, and almost 10,000 trucks. More tanks, vehicles, equipment and supplies were arriving weekly; the days when the Desert Force was compelled to tangle with the Afrika Korps in penny packets would soon be a thing of the past. Unruffled, carefully methodical, Auchinleck began drawing up plans for a new offensive that would relieve Tobruk and drive the Axis out of Libya; he expected that it would be ready to go in mid-November — it would be called Crusader.
No crystal ball was required for Rommel to understand that the British were far from done with him. Unless he could take Tobruk and then present Auchinleck with a defense in depth along the Egytian frontier that was sufficiently formidable to make the cost of cracking it prohibitive, the Afrika Korps and the Italians were vulnerable. The most pressing question was whether or not Rommel would have the strength to accomplish all this. In the wake of Brevity, Halder had dispatched yet another watchdog to Africa, this time in the form of Generalleutnant Alfred Gause. Initially sent with a large staff to act as a liaison officer with Comando Supremo, Gause’s mission was a Machiavellian scheme concocted by Halder to rein in Rommel by effectively separating Rommel from active command of the Italian troops, and placing all of the North African supply and support units—Italian and German—under Italian control. Counting on Rome’s lack of enthusiasm for any further expansion of the war in the Mediterranean, Halder was certain that would put an end to any more adventures on Rommel’s part. What this says about Halder is at once intriguing and disturbing: his personal hatred—the sentiment was now too strong to merely call it “dislike”—of Rommel had become so intense that he was prepared to undermine German operations and strategy for the sole purpose of embarrassing Rommel.
To accomplish this, Gause was specifically instructed not to place himself under Rommel’s command. But such was the force of Rommel’s personality and charm that when Rommel insisted—incorrectly—that command of all Axis troops in Africa had been vested in him, Gause accepted Rommel’s claim, despite knowing that it was not true. Gause was strongly influenced in this decision by watching Rommel in action: he arrived at Rommel’s headquarters on June 15, the day that Battleaxe opened, and was mightily impressed by Rommel’s composure and self-assurance in responding to the British attack. While Gause was not blind to Rommel’s flaws—in one of his first reports to Berlin, he opined that Rommel was “morbidly ambitious,” and he was fully aware of the man’s towering ego—at the same time he recognized that he was in the presence of a general with remarkable tactical skills and operational abilities, and that a unique bond of confidence was growing between Rommel and his German and Italian soldiers, one that had the potential to produce results out of all proportion to the forces involved. Also the idea cannot be dismissed that once Gause arrived in North Africa he realized that something other than purely military considerations had been Halder’s motive for creating his mission: while he was unquestionably intelligent, Gause by nature was simple, direct, and had no truck with intrigue. Whatever the totality of his reasoning may have been, he turned his entire staff over to Rommel, taking the role of chief of staff for himself. As for Rommel and Gause personally, the two men developed an excellent working relationship that would last for the next two and one half years.
The improvement in command and control which the arrival of Gause’s staff gave Rommel allowed him even greater tactical flexibility in his future operations. One thing it did not affect was his penchant for leading from the front: Rommel would always remain the quintessential combat commander who was convinced that his proper place was at the point of engagement; others, subordinates, could stay behind at headquarters, listening to wireless reports, pondering over maps, charts, and tables. Rommel would frequently dragoon Gause into accompanying him to the front, a direct contravention of standing Wehrmacht doctrine, which held that the Chief of Staff’s duty was to remain at headquarters in order to function as the commander’s deputy if needed. Rommel was fortunate in this case that Gause’s staff, now his staff, was already sufficiently experienced—and composed of swift learners who quickly acquired an understanding of their commanding officer’s ideas and methods—as to be able to make correct command decisions in Rommel’s absence.
One upshot of Gause’s unanticipated decision to place himself under Rommel was the immediate functional subordination of all of the Italian troops in North Africa to German command. In order to create a functional command structure, this necessitated the creation of Panzergruppe Afrika and the corresponding promotion for its commanding officer to the rank of general der panzertruppe (general of the armored corps), equivalent to American three-star (lieutenant general) or British lieutenant general rank. This was as much Hitler’s doing in order to cock a snook at Halder as it was a military necessity; Hitler putting Halder on notice that he was wise to Halder’s game. The professional relationship between the Führer and his Chief of Staff had never been particularly good, as can be expected when two fundamentally malevolent personalities are compelled to work together; in the summer of 1941, Hitler and Rommel were still mutually enamored of one another, and Hitler was unwilling to let Halder get away unscathed with his personal vendetta against Rommel.
Naturally, when told that his promotion was in the works, Rommel wrote exultantly to Lucie, telling her that Leutnant Berndt, who had gone to Berlin to confer with Göbbels on how, for propaganda purposes, to best exploit Rommel’s latest North African victory, had returned with the news.
As I have just found out from Lt. Berndt . . . I have only the Führer to thank for my promotion. . . . You can imagine how pleased I am—to earn his recognition for what I do and the way I do it is beyond my wildest dreams. . . . The first congratulations on being promoted to Panzergeneral are coming in. Of course, I’ve heard nothing official yet, but I understand it’s been announced on the wireless.134
Rommel’s panzergruppe included the Afrika Korps, General Crüwell commanding, with its two panzer divisions, the 15th and 21st, and two Italian corps—the XX Armored Corps (the Ariete and Trieste Divisions) and the XXI Corps, composed of four non-motorized infantry divisions. A third German unit, the motorized “Afrika” Division, had been cobbled together out of various odds and sods of smaller units; renamed the 90th Light Division in August, it was strong in firepower but possessed no tanks of its own.
Rommel briefly had hopes of even more forces being at his disposal: with Battleaxe so effectively blunted, the British position in North Africa seemed to totter, and the idea was entertained of sufficiently reinforcing Rommel to allow him to deliver a knock-out blow.
General Roatta . . . informed me that the Italian High Command realized the necessity of considerably reinforcing the Axis forces in North Africa. The German element was to be brought up to four mechanized divisions, and the Italian to an armored corps of three divisions, with a further two or three motorized divisions.
The logistical demands of Operation Barbarossa soon put paid to any such largesse in men, eq
uipment and materiel, however, Rommel remarking bitterly that Rome and Berlin’s “zeal unfortunately did not last long.” Rommel would have to make do with what he had.135
It was one of the pivotal decisions in the war and a major blunder, for while the Axis chose not to commit larger forces to North Africa, the British were now committed to making the whole of the Mediterranean a major theater of war. Churchill had taken the failure of Battleaxe as a personal affront, and was now determined to commit every available resource to North Africa in order to ensure the Axis defeat. It would take time, but before the year’s end, additional divisions from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India, along with a brigade of Polish infantry fighting in exile, would be brought to North Africa and committed to battle. Moreover, no one at the time had the slightest inkling that before 1941 was out the United States of America would have been brought into the war on the Allied side: when the Americans committed their first ground forces to combat in the European Theater, it would be in North Africa. What had begun as a simple rescue operation to save face for the Italians would evolve into a Frankenstein’s monster, malevolent and out of control, that would at first alter, then dictate, Axis strategy, fundamentally redirecting the course of the war.
Had Rommel been given men and equipment—and the logistical support to sustain them—sufficient to drive Auchinleck’s forces out of Egypt, taking the Suez Canal in the process, the strategic alternatives available to the British (and later the Americans, when they came into the war at the end of 1941) would have been considerably more complex and difficult. As long as the Royal Navy had access to both ends of “the Med” via Gibraltar and Suez, Great Britain could threaten any point on the entire southern coast of Europe. But should the Suez Canal fall to the Axis, the Mediterranean would suddenly once again become what it had been under the Roman Empire: Mare Nostrum—“Our sea,” an Axis lake. The whole of the Mediterranean coast would be in the hands of the Axis powers, their allies, or countries favorably disposed to them. Indeed, it might even be possible to persuade the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, to seize Gibraltar, something he was loathe to do for fear of antagonizing the British as long as the issue in North Africa remained in doubt. There would have been no need for the sort of fatal dispersion and dilution of Axis forces to protect southern France, Italy, and the Balkans that the rising Allied power in the Mediterranean would eventually demand, allowing an even greater concentration of land and air forces against the Red Army on the Eastern Front. Attempts by the British Empire to reintroduce itself into the Mediterranean via the Persian Gulf and the Levant would have been burdened with logistical and political problems on a nigh-impossible-to-resolve scale. On balance, it’s reasonable to conclude that forcing a quick decision in North Africa could well have been a war-winning strategy for the Axis.
Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel Page 35