Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Aged fifty-six in 1941, Auchinleck was seen as the rising star of the Indian Army – although, to be absolutely accurate, as Commander-in-Chief in 1941 he had already risen. Called to the UK in 1940 when the British Army was desperately short of competent corps commanders, he was resented by officers of the home army over whose heads he was promoted, and he particularly infuriated them when, sent as a mountain warfare expert to Norway, he recommended withdrawal and described British troops there as ‘callow and effeminate’ (as indeed they were). As General Officer Commanding Southern Command in June 1940, Auchinleck had the misfortune to have the thoroughly disloyal acting Lieutenant-General Bernard Law Montgomery as a corps commander under him, and his promotion to general and return to India as Commander-in-Chief in January 1941 must have come as a considerable relief. He was succeeded at Southern Command by Montgomery, who immediately, quite unnecessarily and deliberately, reversed almost all of Auchinleck’s perfectly sound policies.

  In the twenty-two months since Britain declared war on Germany, the British Army had not shone. Whereas the Royal Navy had rescued it from Norway and from France in 1940, and the RAF had made the Dunkirk evacuation possible and had then won the Battle of Britain, the army had been roundly defeated in Norway, in France, in Greece, in Crete and now in North Africa. The only victories it had won had been against second-class foes – the Italians and, with some difficulty, the Vichy French – but, as soon as Germans appeared, the army could not stand against them. This was not entirely the fault of the army or of its generals. Sailors have to know how to sail and maintain a ship, and pilots have to know how to fly, so there is a minimum standard beneath which the navy and the air force cannot be allowed to fall before the whole edifice comes apart, and does so very visibly. The army, on the other hand, can trundle along in peacetime without anyone noticing very much what it can or cannot do, and politicians can get away with repeated cuts in funding, delays or cancellations in procurement programmes and the rundown of reserve stocks. The British Army between the wars was very much the neglected child of the defence family, and, when it had to expand massively, it simply could not instantly produce officers and NCOs of the right calibre or experience, provide up-to-date vehicles and equipment, and develop the tactical doctrine that would allow it to take on the Germans – the best soldiers in Europe since the time of the Great Elector – on equal terms. Within the army there was, by 1941, an expectation of failure, not helped by the resurrecting of old saws about the British always losing every battle but the last (not true: in previous wars they had started to win pretty quickly) and about Germans being automatons only able to react to orders (arrant nonsense: the Germans had proved themselves to be far more flexible than the British). The generals knew the weaknesses: they wanted time to develop the tactics, build up the supplies, train the units in all-arms cooperation, go very steadily and carefully, taking on only limited objectives until they had honed an army that could go on the offensive and know that it was going to win.

  Churchill did not understand this. He was under pressure in the House of Commons and he needed a victory, and he would get rid of anyone who told him that one was not possible just yet. Auchinleck knew all this and was under no illusions that if he did not toe the Churchill line he too would be for the chop, but he was not prepared to compromise his professional integrity, and, when Churchill, in a characteristic display of his style of micro-management, tried to dictate the composition of the garrison of Cyprus, Auchinleck told him firmly to wind his neck in. As for an immediate attack in the Western Desert, he replied by signal to the prime minister’s urgings: ‘I must repeat that to launch an offensive with the inadequate means at our disposal is not, in my opinion, a justifiable operation of war.’47 He was subsequently summoned to London to explain why he considered an immediate attack on the Germans and Italians in North Africa was not a good idea. His grasp of statistics and his sound common sense convinced the Chiefs of Staff but not Churchill, and Auchinleck was sent back to Egypt under orders to mount an attack in October 1941.

  Certainly, in terms of men and equipment Auchinleck would start from a better baseline than did Wavell. Tanks and artillery pieces arrived in relative plenty and, with Iraq and Syria pacified, more troops would be available in Egypt. The Western Desert Force, also known as XIII Corps, was now to be named Eighth Army and Auchinleck, as overall Commander Middle East, selected Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Cunningham to command it. Cunningham, fifty-four years old in 1941, had made his name in East Africa, where he had shown an aptitude for mobile operations with forces of mixed nationalities and had taken the surrender of the Duke of Aosta in May. The plan for the offensive, codenamed Operation Crusader, was selected by Cunningham from a number of options suggested by Auchinleck and saw the infantry pinning the Germans and Italians in their own defences on the Libyan frontier, while the armour would make a wide sweep from the south, destroy the Axis armour, relieve Tobruk and occupy Tripolitania. After that advance of 1,000 miles, the army would exploit westwards depending on the situation at the time. On the surface, it looked as if at last the British might make an impression: they had more tanks, about the same number of aircraft and for once a reasonable stockpile of ammunition, fuel and rations. There were, however, snags. Auchinleck himself did not know and was not known by many officers of the British Army, and there was still resentment about someone from the Indian Army being appointed to a plum command. He had not won the favour of his staff when he ordered the move of Headquarters Middle East Command from the fleshpots of Cairo into the desert, and then, when it became apparent that only Cairo could provide the communications required, moving the headquarters back into the city but setting up his own tactical command post in the desert, with consequent liaison and communications difficulties between the two HQs. He did not establish a comfortable relationship with the Australian General Sir Thomas Blamey, who held the non-job of Deputy Commander Middle East. The problem was partly Blamey’s touchiness on the matter of command of Australian troops, and his readiness to appeal to the Australian government over Auchinleck’s head, and Blamey’s somewhat colourful private and business life, but, as he was one of the few senior Australian officers with regular army, as opposed to militia, experience, he could not be dismissed.

  Cunningham should have been just the man to command the Eighth Army but he had no experience of the desert, which was quite different from the terrain in Somaliland and Eritrea whence he had come less than three months before Crusader (reluctantly allowed by Churchill to be delayed by a month) was to begin. He had no experience of armoured warfare and, not unnaturally, deferred to those of his subordinates who had. At this time the British armoured doctrine still held that cruiser tanks could operate on their own, and Cunningham organized Eighth Army accordingly. Lieutenant-General Norrie’s XXX Corps would be armour-heavy with 7 Armoured Division and 1 South African Infantry Division and 22 Guards Brigade, while XIII Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Godwin-Austen, another general whom Churchill disliked, would have the bulk of the infantry with the New Zealand 2 Division and Indian 4 Division, supported by 1 Army Tank Brigade with Matilda and Valentine infantry tanks. Norrie was a cavalryman but without any of the supposed aversion to mechanization of that arm. He had served with the Tank Corps in the first war, had overseen the process of mechanization when commanding what began as 1 Cavalry Brigade in 1937 and became 1 Armoured Brigade in 1938, and was then briefly Inspector Royal Armoured Corps before being sent to Egypt in November. Apart from having hardly any time to get to know his new command, he was clearly the most competent armoured officer available to command the corps, and at only forty-eight he had the vigour of youth to add to his considerable experience. Commanding 7 Armoured Division was Major-General William ‘Strafer’ Gott, who was not an armoured officer but an infantryman and none the worse for that. Much has been made of the fact that Cunningham was a gunner and so did not understand armour, and that Auchinleck, who came from an Indian Army which in 1941 had no tanks, was
equally ignorant. This is, of course, nonsense. While up to the rank of lieutenant-colonel officers command troops of their own arm, the syllabus at the Staff College is and was the same for all, and from the rank of colonel and above officers were required to understand the handling of all arms of the service, and this was emphasized at the Imperial Defence College.For Auchinleck and Cunningham to listen to the advice of officers with more experience of armour than they had was sensible, but to claim that they did not understand its handling is not. Auchinleck, Cunningham and Gott were every bit as knowledgeable about armour as the vast majority of British generals, and they, like the vast majority and including the armoured experts, were trapped in a doctrine – armour could act independently – that turned out to be faulty.

  During the planning stage it became evident that the allocation of all the armour save the infantry tanks to XXX Corps was not greeted with universal approval, particularly the deployment of 4 Armoured Brigade Group. This was an armoured brigade but with its own integral motorized infantry and artillery and was commanded by Brigadier ‘Alec’ Gatehouse. Commissioned into the Northumberland Fusiliers in 1915 and transferring to the Tank Corps in 1916, Gatehouse had commanded a battalion of tanks in the last great British offensive of 1918, and was still commanding a battalion of tanks in 1939, having followed the normal career path of regimental and staff appointments in between. Regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of armoured warfare, he commanded his brigade seated comfortably in an armchair strapped to the top of his command tank. Gatehouse’s brigade had originally been allocated to XIII Corps, but was then transferred to XXX Corps. Its task in Crusader was to protect the southern (left) flank of the infantry while keeping in touch with the right flank of XXX Corps. When the infantry divisional commanders expressed unhappiness about being asked to advance blindly into the wide sand-coloured yonder, where there were known to be German and Italian tanks, without any armoured support other than the slow-moving infantry tanks, they were told not to worry as 4 Armoured Brigade would be on their flanks. What would happen, asked Major-General Freyberg, commanding the New Zealand Division, if 4 Armoured were to be called away for another task by XXX Corps? It was a question that was never answered.

  The Eighth Army was the best-equipped army that the British had yet fielded in this war, and with 708 tanks had more than twice as many as the Axis with 320 (and half of those were Italian light tanks that were no better than the worst of the British vehicles), and there were another 120 tanks inside Tobruk. By itself 7 Armoured Division had 453 tanks and it was this very number which posed a problem that the Germans had already solved but the British had not. Received wisdom says that the German army’s reorganization of the armoured composition of the panzer divisions from 280 tanks in four battalions to 140 tanks in two battalions after the Battle of France was done to increase the number of armoured divisions overall, and standard German practice was indeed to create new formations by splitting one existing division into two and then making up the shortfall with recruits, but that was far from the whole story. There is a limit to the number of men that one man can control, and to the number of units that can properly be commanded by one headquarters. Four armoured battalions with 280 tanks were just too many to handle. Gott now had to control even more than the number of tanks that the Germans, with their vastly superior training in armour, had found unwieldy. Gott’s infantry, 1 South African Division, had done well in Abyssinia, but as soon as they arrived in Egypt they were employed in refurbishing the frontier defences, which had been allowed to fall into disrepair after O’Connor’s great thrust into Libya earlier in the year. Humping sand bags and coils of barbed wire is excellent physical exercise but it is no substitute for training for desert warfare, of which the South Africans had no experience. Their casualties in Abyssinia had been only partially replaced, and those who had come were only just out of recruit training. Reconstituting his division into two brigades instead of three, the South African commander, Major-General George Brink, told Cunningham that he was not happy about the manning or the state of training of his division. He was told to get on with it.

  The troops moved out into their concentration areas in complete secrecy, thanks to the RAF and the South African Air Force, which had not only spent the previous days plastering any German or Italian position they could find, but kept the skies over the concentration areas clear of enemy aircraft. It was as well that they did, for in most units the move was a shambles. There had been insufficient driver training and many wheeled vehicles snapped axles and smashed differentials trying to negotiate the rocky surface in the dark, not helped by appalling weather which flooded stream beds, washed away what few tracks there were and reduced visibility to a few yards. Thanks to a deception plan by Auchinleck’s intelligence staff, Rommel was convinced that the British were intending to invade Persia, to give some help to the Russians and safeguard the Persian oil fields, and that anything that they might do in the Western Desert would be no more than a feint to distract the Axis. Rommel was in any case intending to launch a major attack to capture Tobruk, which he had been besieging since the British retreat in April.

  Operation Crusader was launched on 18 November 1941. Berlin’s eyes were very much on Moscow, where it began to look as if Barbarossa might stall, and there were no reinforcements for Panzer Group Africa, as the combination of the DAK and the Italian forces was now named, and whose commander, Rommel, now General of Panzer Troops, had been ordered to remain on the defensive. At first the British achieved complete surprise: the infantry of 4 Indian Division took on the German and Italian frontier defences and the armour hooked round the southern flank deep into Libya. By last light on Day One, 7 Armoured Division was a third of the way to Tobruk and the three armoured brigades were at the points of a triangle around Gabr Saleh, where Cunningham had expected a ‘clash of armour’. Then it began to go wrong. The panzer divisions had no intention of clashing where the British wanted them to clash, and next day, instead of the three armoured brigades keeping in touch with each other, they were allowed to operate independently, searching for Axis armour to destroy. But Rommel’s armour did not sit around waiting to be found and all the British armour could see were reconnaissance vehicles withdrawing. When 22 Armoured Brigade, on the left of the division and heading for Tobruk, discovered the Italian Ariete Armoured Division at Bir El Gubi, off to the left of the advance, instead of fixing them in position – which could have been done by detaching two squadrons – and carrying on with their main task, they decided that it would be rather jolly to destroy the Italians. They duly lined up their relatively speedy but thinly armoured Valentines and, in a manner that would have been perfectly acceptable had they been on horses at Waterloo, they charged the Ariete and, just like the French cavalry in 1815, they were slaughtered. What they thought were Italian tanks lined up, waiting to be blown away, was actually an outpost line which withdrew, drawing the British on to well-dug-in and concealed tanks, which proceeded to take out the Valentines. By dusk 22 Armoured had lost half their tanks and the Italians still held Bir El Gubi. The excuse, then and since, is that the three regiments of the brigade, 3 and 4 County of London Yeomanry and the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, were Territorials who knew no better. That may wash for the Other Ranks but cannot excuse the commanding officers of the regiments, who should have known better, the brigade commander, who assuredly did know better, or Gott, who allowed them to do it. The County of London Yeomanry seemed to have learned little from the debacle as, combined into one regiment and under a commander who had been a squadron commander at Bir El Gubi, they behaved equally stupidly at Villers Bocage in Normandy three years later.

  Things went a little better the following day. The armour had been told to capture the two airfields of Sidi Rezegh* and El Adem, which were twenty-five and twenty miles respectively from Tobruk, and situated on the escarpment above the port. When 7 Armoured Brigade got there it found aircraft lined up on the ground. It attacked, and took the airfield, and,
although three aircraft took off and attacked the tanks at low level, the British captured nineteen and rendered them unusable by slashing the tyres, holing the fuel tanks and smashing up the instruments. It was at this point that Rommel decided the British offensive might be more than a diversionary feint, but, as his troops had been positioned to attack Tobruk, they were equally well placed to defend it. On 19 November he sent Colonel Stephan with a battle group of eighty-five tanks, a mixture of Mk IIs, IIIs and IVs, two batteries of 105mm field guns and four 88mm anti-aircraft guns in the anti-tank role to see what was going on. Stephan ran into Brigadier Gatehouse’s 4th Armoured Brigade Group at Gabr Saleh and in the first tank-versus-tank battle of the campaign, fought in a dust storm of its own making and confusing to both sides, 4 Armoured ended the day with eleven tanks that were not repairable compared to Stephan’s three. Many more on each side were knocked out, but on the German side their superb recovery system could repair damaged tanks in situ on the battlefield, whereas the British had to recover theirs to the rear first.