Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  On 20 November a running battle continued and the British were led astray somewhat by the RAF’s reporting of columns of vehicles heading west. These were almost certainly resupply columns going back to replenish, but it was reported to Cunningham as the Germans and Italians in retreat. On 21 November the garrison in Tobruk was ordered to break out and link up with 7 Armoured Division’s lead elements at El Duda. Led by thirty-two Crusaders and sixty-nine Matilda infantry tanks, they attempted to do so, but, instead of Italians holding the perimeter as they had thought, they ran into Germans, some of the tanks strayed off the axis and ended up in minefields, and their Matildas were unable to keep up with the lead infantry battalion, Second Black Watch, who decided not to wait for their support but to do it by themselves. The battalion did get part way to El Duda, fifteen miles south-east of Tobruk, but lost sixty-five dead in so doing. The British tanks were unable to join with the Black Watch because the Germans were able to sit back and with their superior range knock out the Crusaders long before they could fire back. Even when they could reply, the two-pounder shell fired by the British tanks would simply bounce off unless it could hit at exactly the right angle, which it rarely did. Seventh Hussars lost all their tanks, and, although only twenty all ranks were killed, the large number of wounded, mostly from burns, and the loss of almost all its vehicles meant that the regiment was effectively wiped out and it was not seen in North Africa again.*

  Confusion and misunderstanding were not confined to the British, and on the night of 21/22 November the DAK pulled back, as Lieutenant-General Ludwig Crüwell was concerned that the British had many more reserves than they actually had. On 22 November the German armour attacked Sidi Rezegh, and by last light they had the ridge back again – the British tanks simply could not stand up to the German machines – but could not recapture the airfield as they ran out of ammunition and had to withdraw into defence on the ridge. The Germans did, however, manage to capture 4 Armoured Brigade’s headquarters, a loss compensated for by the British capture of DAK headquarters, although again the corps commander and his chief of staff were away. Such incidents were typical of war in the Western Desert: it was not uncommon for units to laager up at last light and then wake up in the morning to find an enemy camped right beside them.

  Next day was the last Sunday before Advent to the British and Totensonntag to the Germans, when they pray for the souls of their dead. It was a critical day for both sides: German armour followed up by infantry in troop carriers attacked the South African division and wiped out one of its brigades, but at heavy losses to themselves. Totensonntag was also the day when Cunningham began to lose his nerve. Initial euphoria as he and his staff thought a great victory was in the offing turned to dismay when it started to become apparent that it was not. He transmitted his worries to his two corps commanders and asked them whether they should not break off Operation Crusader. Both demurred: XXX Corps had taken considerable casualties in tanks, but Norrie was convinced that he could carry on, and Godwin-Austen’s XIII Corps had hardly been used at all. Cunningham decided to refer the matter to C-in-C Middle East, Auchinleck, who flew up to consult, his chief of staff having been warned by Cunningham’s own chief of staff, Brigadier ‘Sandy’ Galloway, a fiery-tempered Cameronian who was rather more robust than his master, that a visit by the C-in-C would be helpful. Auchinleck had great inner strength and limitless resource; he was a strong-minded man who had the ability to allay fears and instil confidence and calm reflection by his mere presence. By this time Cunningham knew about the disaster that had befallen 5 South African Brigade and was even more depressed by it all. Auchinleck arrived that evening and, having listened to Cunningham’s concerns and his advice that the operation should be called off and Eighth Army withdrawn to Egypt to defend the Canal, he pointed out that, while things certainly looked bad at present, the enemy had their problems too and were in no state to push into Egypt. He insisted that the offensive should continue, and he does seem to have restored the army commander’s nerve somewhat. Cunningham now instructed Godwin-Austen to push the New Zealand Division westwards, that Norrie’s armour should protect the flanks and that the attempt to link up with the breakout from Tobruk should continue.

  Rommel had now come to the conclusion that the British were definitely a nuisance and decided to do something about it. He concluded that the Eighth Army were spread out over a wide area and that they had taken considerable losses. A thrust by the DAK towards the frontier would alarm and confuse the British and would cut them off from their supply lines. Unable to wait for the corps commander, he took command of 21 Panzer Division himself and led them on a headlong dash for the Egyptian border with 15 Panzer following. It was certainly a shock for the British administrative units through which the panzers burst: there was much panic as kit was thrown on to vehicles, or simply abandoned, as drivers, signallers, storemen, clerks and staff officers tried to escape the armoured torrent. Cunningham himself was nearly snaffled: he was in 7 Armoured’s headquarters when it was suddenly shelled, and had to be rushed away by the Corps Commander Royal Engineers to an airstrip and flown back to army headquarters, the experience doing little for his morale. By 1600 hours on 24 November, Rommel was at the wire defences of the frontier, but his troops were spread out over fifty miles behind him, and had many broken-down vehicles, unable to keep up with their commander’s mad rush. Rommel had been able to witness the chaos and confusion in his wake, but he had not seen that the initially disorganized British had re-formed behind him rather more quickly than anyone thought they could.

  On returning to his headquarters, Cunningham found written instructions from Auchinleck laying out the options: calling off the offensive and going on the defensive to hold the ground already gained, or carrying on. Auchinleck dismissed the first course as it would be seen as an Axis triumph and it would do nothing to relieve Tobruk, and concluded that Norrie must continue to press the attack relentlessly ‘to the last tank’. He was to recapture Sidi Rezegh and link up with the Tobruk garrison, keeping as his immediate objective the destruction of the enemy armour. Cunningham now had to implement a policy with which he fundamentally disagreed. That same day, the movement of 15 Panzer Division, which was actually looking for a breach in the frontier wire, was taken as being an attack on Eighth Army headquarters and Auchinleck was unceremoniously whisked away to the airstrip and flown out of the battle area. On the flight back to Cairo he had much time for reflection. It was clear to him that Cunningham had indeed lost his nerve and in any case it was unfair to expect him to pursue vigorously a policy in which he had no faith. Auchinleck decided that there was no option but to replace Cunningham as Commander Eighth Army. The difficulty was with whom? He himself could fight the battle better than anyone, but his bailiwick was not just North Africa but the whole of the Middle East, from Persia in the north to Eritrea in the south.

  Normally the vacancy created by an army commander being replaced or rendered hors de combat would be filled by the senior corps commander, but in this case both corps commanders were in the middle of a series of battles and to move one of them now could cause delay in pressing on. It is, however, unusual, almost unheard of, to remove an army commander in the middle of a battle, and Auchinleck’s choice to replace him was equally unusual. Major-General Neil Ritchie was originally commissioned into the Black Watch and as a colonel had been Brooke’s Chief of Staff in II Corps in the Battle of France, where he did well. He commanded the reconstituted 51 Highland Division after the original had surrendered at St Valery on 12 June 1940 and was now Deputy Chief of the General Staff in Cairo. To put a man who had never commanded a corps, and a division only briefly, in command of an army was taking a huge punt, and that the two corps commanders were not only senior to him in rank but four years (Norrie) and eight years (Godwin-Austen) older than him was not going to help. That said, he would, of course, only be there as a temporary army commander with the local rank of lieutenant-general until someone better qualified could be brought out from
the UK, and Auchinleck would keep a close eye on him.

  As it happened, Ritchie was not the man for the job, but perhaps there was no one else immediately available at the time. On 26 November, Cunningham was relieved and admitted to hospital in Cairo under an assumed name, although there cannot have been many working there who did not know who he was. While this author has been unable to trace Cunningham’s medical documents (which may well no longer exist), it is clear that he must have been very tired, under almost intolerable strain, and had suffered what the layman would now term a nervous breakdown. Generals spend their whole adult lives training for and preparing for war, and, while they are not subject to formal psychiatric examination on their upward path, mental robustness and performance under pressure are certainly scrutinized in a process of continuous evaluation which will decide promotion prospects (or lack of them). That said, Cunningham’s learning curve had been very steep indeed and commanding in East Africa was very different from commanding the armour-heavy Eighth Army. Surrounded as he was by men of strong personality and equally strong opinions, it would seem that he was put into a job that was just too big for him. Amongst the many accusations subsequently levelled at Auchinleck by lesser men was that Auchinleck was a bad judge of men, but it did not seem so at the time and Cunningham came to him with a high reputation. In any case, Cunningham was not exactly plucked from a cast of thousands.*

  On 27 November Rommel, having spent an uncomfortable night lost near the wire and having to be rescued by Crüwell’s command vehicle, decided that hanging about around the frontier was achieving little and pulled the DAK back towards Tobruk, capturing 5 New Zealand Brigade’s commander and his staff on the way. On the morning of the same day, the New Zealand Division recaptured the ridge of Sidi Rezegh and pushed on towards El Duda. The breakout force from Tobruk launched itself across the four miles separating them from El Duda and by midday the Tobruk corridor was joined. There was not very much that could be done through it, and it only lasted a day before the Germans attacked the New Zealand Division and cut the corridor on 28 November, but it gave a short-lived boost to morale at the time. The British had almost scored a major success on the 27th when they caught 15 Panzer Division strung out on the line of march heading west, but they then followed their normal procedure of breaking off at last light and pulling back well into the desert for the night.

  Up to now, the Germans and Italians had won all the tactical encounters and had inflicted many more losses in vehicles, and marginally more in men, than they had suffered, but their supply line was a tenuous one running back to Tripoli and then across the Mediterranean to Italy. The Royal Navy and the RAF between them meant that Rommel could never rely on getting such reinforcements and supplies that Berlin could send – and North Africa was very far down OKW’s list of priorities. He was now short of fuel and ammunition and many of his tanks were off the road, more as a result of mechanical breakdown than British anti-tank rounds. The British, on the other hand, might have fielded inferior tanks, and 7 Armoured Brigade had been withdrawn to Egypt and would not appear again, but they were able to replace them, and very quickly the tank delivery organization had provided over 100 cruiser and Stuart light tanks to XXX Corps. Before Ritchie could continue the offensive and restore the Tobruk corridor prior to relieving the port, Rommel, well aware that he was over-extended and needing to shorten his lines of communication, withdrew at his own pace back to Gazala, twenty-five miles west of Tobruk on 6 December, which coincidentally was the day that the United Kingdom reluctantly and under pressure from the USSR declared war on Finland, Hungary and Romania. Ritchie now planned to attack the Gazala position with D-Day being 19 December, but Rommel outsmarted him again and on the night of 16/17 December slipped away 270 miles to El Agheila, thus giving up most of Cyrenaica. The few feeble attempts the British made to cut him off failed with more tank losses. On Christmas Eve the British occupied Benghazi, to encounter a grumpy population which had not appreciated being bombed by the RAF for the past two months.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, in London, Churchill was once again sacking or trying to sack those who would not conform to his fantasies. He had already tried and failed to dismiss Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Air Officer Commanding in Chief Middle East, who had the complete confidence of Wavell and then Auchinleck. Churchill, who considered most RAF officers to be oily mechanics, could never be made to understand that it took more than the pilot to look after an aircraft. Highly complex machines need to be maintained, repaired, refuelled and rearmed, and there were inevitably far more ground crew than aircrew. When Tedder refused to slash RAF numbers to the extent that Churchill wished, on the very sound grounds that if he did the pilots would starve and the planes crash, the prime minister tried to do with him what he had already done with General Wavell. Very quickly, senior RAF officers made it known that they would refuse the post if offered, and the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, left the prime minister in no doubt that, if Tedder went, then so would he. Churchill backed down.

  The prime minister next turned his ire on the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir John Dill. Dill was the son of an Ulster bank manager from Lurgan in Northern Ireland. Educated at Cheltenham and Sandhurst, where he only just scraped in, he was originally commissioned into the Leinster Regiment, which as a southern Irish and Roman Catholic regiment was an odd choice for a northern Protestant. His military career was almost all spent on the staff, and he was clearly what is tactfully known as a late developer since, having been only just up to the required academic standard at school and at Sandhurst, he found his metier in staff work. A student at the Staff College in 1913, brigade major (chief of staff) of 25 Infantry Brigade in 1914 and a temporary brigadier-general in the operations branch of Field Marshal Haig’s General Headquarters in 1918, he was regarded as a ferociously hard worker and began to acquire the description ‘intellectual’. After the war he was an instructor at both the Army Staff College and the tri-service Imperial Defence College, then successively Commandant of the Army Staff College, Director of Military Operations in the War Office, GOC British Troops Palestine and from 1937 General Officer Commanding in Chief Aldershot Command. He was certainly intelligent, although perhaps not really intellectual, and his ability to see the essentials of a problem and to explain it succinctly left a lasting impression on those who knew him. Surprisingly for someone who had risen so high, he had no military enemies that we know of. Both Auchinleck and Brooke were students under him at the Staff College and thought him a man of genius, of modesty, of boundless enthusiasm. Now, and to a large extent then too, officers being considered for higher positions in the service would be expected to have followed a career balanced between command and staff appointments. Dill obviously had the staff experience, but he had not commanded a battalion or a division, and only for a very short time a Territorial brigade (in 1923), when he was appointed to command I Corps of the BEF on the outbreak of war in 1939. Most of his contemporaries thought that he would none the less be made Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1937, and in army circles he was considered the man most fitting for that post when, in a disgraceful piece of political chicanery, Field Marshal Sir Cyril Deverall was removed suddenly from office in 1937.*

  The appointment of CIGS, as with the most senior posts in the other two services, is a matter for the royal prerogative, but in practice is a governmental decision. In deciding whom to appoint, the Secretary for War would normally have consulted the outgoing holder of the office as well as senior serving and retired officers. Whether the process was followed in this case is doubtful, but in any event the job went to Viscount Gort, who had risen from being an acting lieutenant-general in September 1937 to substantive general by Christmas, and who at fifty-one was the youngest ever incumbent of the army’s most senior post. Gort then fell out with the Secretary for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, and in order to get him out of the War Office he was made Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, instead of General Ir
onside, who became CIGS instead. Dill went to France as one of the two corps commanders (the other being Brooke). It was an extraordinary way to manage the senior command level of an army about to go to war. When Ironside began to fall out with the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill, largely because he was equally confrontational, Dill was brought home to fill the newly created post of vice-CIGS in April 1940 and then became CIGS when Ironside found he could not work with Churchill as incoming prime minister.

  Dill and Churchill were temperamental opposites. Churchill wanted derring-do, finest hours, glorious adventures and swashbuckling offensive action. Dill well knew that the British Army was in no state to buckle a swash and refused to be browbeaten by the prime minister’s flights of strategic fancy. In hindsight, Dill’s advice was sound in every respect. It was clear, unambiguous and backed up by impeccably marshalled facts, none of which the prime minister wanted to hear. What particularly incensed Churchill was that every scheme which Churchill insisted upon, but which Dill advised against, turned out to be a shambles, the Greek involvement being the obvious example. Politicians accept personal abuse as being a normal adjunct to discussion: army officers do not, and Churchill’s unkindness and rudeness – he nicknamed Dill ‘Dilly-Dally’ – and his constant rejection of the CIGS’s advice, coupled with personal difficulties – Dill’s then wife was probably bonkers and he should never have married her in the first place – took their toll. At last, in November 1941, just as Crusader was getting under way in North Africa, Churchill saw his chance to get rid of a man who had the confidence of the whole army but who would not compromise his integrity by agreeing to policies that he knew to be wrong. The prime minister, who was also the minister of defence, introduced a new rule that said that the CIGS must retire at the age of sixty, and Dill would reach that age on Christmas Day 1941. This was arrant cheek of the highest order as Churchill would be sixty-seven by Christmas, and he had abused his body to a far greater degree than had the relatively abstemious Dill, but in the United Kingdom the political, however unfair, stupid or unnecessary, has primacy over the military and Dill had to go, being replaced by General Sir Alan Brooke, a dour Ulsterman who had commanded II Corps in the Battle of France. Brooke claimed to have felt deeply for Dill, whom he admired, but obviously not deeply enough to refuse the offer of replacing him. When commanding II Corps, Brooke had had as one of his divisional commanders Major-General Bernard Law Montgomery. Brooke consistently looked after his own, and this would soon have a major impact on the future conduct of the Mediterranean War.