Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Eighth Army had been making its plodding way along the North African coast. Four times Montgomery attempted to cut Rommel off and four times when the trap closed there was nobody in it. Experienced desert hands recommended wide and deep flanking movements before then closing in to the coast, perhaps as far away as Tobruk, but Montgomery would have none of it. He had got his victory and he was not going to risk throwing it away. On 11 November, Eighth Army reached the Egyptian border and on the 13th entered Tobruk once more; on 15 November the advance units were pushing towards Derna and on the 20th they occupied Benghazi, last seen by the British when they were chased out of it in April 1941.On 23 November the British had got as far as El Agheila, but now they had outrun their supply lines and had to halt to allow the logistic units to catch up. Rommel was ordered by the Commando Supremo in Rome to hold this position, shown on Axis maps as the Marsa Al Borayquah line. Rommel was well aware that this was not a practical proposition. Of his original three Italian corps, X Corps of three divisions no longer existed, XXI Corps was down to one infantry and two artillery battalions, and, of XX Armoured Corps’s one motorized and one armoured division, one regiment with no tanks remained. Of the DAK, there was not much left. The armoured units could provide one weak regiment between them; 90 Light Division could muster but one and a half battalions; 146 Infantry Division had two battalions of infantry (out of an original nine) and two batteries of artillery, and the Luftwaffe Parachute Brigade had lost half its men and all its heavy weapons. Rommel was being told to defend the indefensible against 420 British tanks, when out of an original establishment of 371 he had but thirty-five left. On the night of 22/23 November he flew to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia and told the Führer bluntly – ‘too bluntly’ he later said – that the situation was untenable. He was subjected to a tongue-lashing, including the accusation that Panzerarmee Afrika had thrown away its weapons, and told that North Africa must be held,‘for political reasons’. Fortunately for Rommel, the British halt to allow supplies to catch up lasted a lot longer than Rommel would have allowed his own army, and when Montgomery was ready to move again, with preliminaries on 12 December and the main offensive beginning on the 14th, Rommel disposed of eighty-eight tanks, and had prepared a defence line at Buyarat further west to which he could withdraw. Once again, Rommel was bombarded with ‘resist to the last’ calls from the Duce in Rome, but, as these were usually combined with appeals not to risk the Italian infantry, Rommel was able to justify what he knew was his only option – to withdraw tactically causing as much delay to the British as possible. When the main British attack came in, it found only mines and barbed wire – Rommel had slipped away once again.

  By 18 December what was left of Panzerarmee Afrika was in the Buyarat line, which had been prepared by 164 Division and several hundred Italian labourers. Minefields and wire obstacles there were, but the number of men and armoured vehicles to cover the forty miles considered essential to avoid encirclement were pitifully few, and Rommel began to withdraw his Italian infantry, followed by his armour, back to the Tarhuna-Homs area once the British attack developed. When the British duly turned their attention to Tarhuna-Homs on 19 January, Rommel again delayed as long as he could and then withdrew to Tripoli. When on 23 January German reconnaissance confirmed that Eighth Army was embarking on a sweep to the south to encircle him, Rommel abandoned Tripoli that night and fell back towards the Mareth Line. The Mareth Line dated from the first war, and, although its defence works had been largely destroyed by the Italians, they were now being put back into a habitable condition. There, with the sea to his left and the mountains to his right, Rommel could realistically expect to fight a delaying action to stop Eighth Army from getting into Tunisia. As he had only 500 lorries, a mix of Italian, German and captured British vehicles, it took ten days to ferry the Italian infantry back, but he was helped by Montgomery ordering another halt and a victory parade after the occupation of Tripoli, which Churchill visited on 3 February. On 15 February, Panzerarmee Afrika was firm in the Mareth Line and the long retreat from Alamein was over.

  Churchill’s visit to Tripoli came as he returned from the Symbol Conference, which was held in a cordoned-off and depopulated suburb of Casablanca from 14 January 1943. There, Churchill and Roosevelt met to discuss Allied strategy after the fall of North Africa. Stalin was invited but declined owing to what was happening on the Volga as the Battle for Stalingrad rose to its climax. Present were the British and American Chiefs of Staff and Generals Eisenhower and Alexander, with Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten as a recent addition to the British team. Included in the British Chiefs of Staff, to the irritation of the other members, as Chief of Combined Operations at Churchill’s behest, Mountbatten was regarded with great suspicion, then and later. With tenuous royal connections of which he made much, and a tendency to drive any ship he commanded into a collision with something else afloat, Mountbatten had undoubted personal courage and this, combined with his tactical rashness and flair for publicity and self-aggrandizement, made him just the chap to appeal to Churchill, who arranged instant promotion from commander to commodore and then to vice-admiral, lieutenant-general and air marshal at the age of forty-two, giving him some clout in all three services and infuriating their more conservative senior officers.

  At Casablanca the arguments over priorities were once again thrashed out: Admiral King for the Pacific, General Marshall for France; General Brooke for Sicily,Admiral Mountbatten for Sardinia. In the teeth of American suspicion that British imperial interests were driving the discussions, as indeed they were, Churchill and Brooke got their way, and it was agreed that the next step would be an invasion of Sicily as a prelude to landing in Italy. Meanwhile, the buildup of American troops in the UK would continue with a view to a landing in France in, almost certainly now, 1944. Perhaps as a sop to the Americans for agreeing to Sicily, Churchill proposed an American overall commander for North Africa. As there were twelve British divisions in North Africa and only three American ones, the suggestion of Eisenhower as Allied commander-in-chief soothed any ruffled transatlantic feathers. Once Montgomery made contact with First Army in Tunisia, 18 Army Group containing both armies would come into being, commanded by Alexander, who would report to Eisenhower. The thorny problem of the French was also addressed: the intention had been for the conference to reconcile de Gaulle and Giraud, but de Gaulle initially refused to leave London, and was only persuaded by a fear of being sidelined by Giraud. The British found de Gaulle difficult to deal with: he spent more time scheming to ensure that he governed France after the war than helping to win it, and Giraud, who had won renown at home by escaping from a German POW camp, had always been the Americans’ preferred candidate. Giraud and de Gaulle were bitter rivals: de Gaulle had the better political antennae, while Giraud was even more arrogant. At Casablanca they agreed to work together, becoming joint chairmen of a French Committee for National Liberation, but there was never much doubt that de Gaulle would outmanoeuvre his rival and by the end of the year Giraud would resign and lapse into well-earned obscurity.

  The subject which raised most hackles publicly at the time, and has often been raised since, was a statement made at the closing press conference, when Roosevelt said that the Allied aim was unconditional surrender of both Germany and Japan. Unconditional surrender means exactly that: there are no conditions, no deals, no assurances; the defeated party places himself absolutely at the mercy of the victor. The objections to it came from those who believed that there was an anti-Hitler movement within the German armed forces and civil service that would depose Hitler and end the war if reasonable terms could be assured. Quite what these terms might have been is a matter for conjecture, but they might have included recognition of the Austro-German union, German ownership of the Polish Corridor and Danzig and retention of the Sudetenland, or everything Germany had obtained up to 1939 and a bit of what she had taken in the Polish campaign. A post-Hitler regime would presumably also have insisted on no occupation, no indemni
ty and no war crimes trials by outside parties. With the announcement that only unconditional surrender would be accepted, so the argument goes, the anti-Hitler movement had no incentive to act, and nothing with which to persuade the population, and particularly the Wehrmacht, to make peace: they might as well keep on fighting to the end as the terms they would get then would be no worse than if they sued for peace now – exactly the same argument as the British deployed for rejecting German overtures in 1940. There are several flaws in this argument. Firstly, whatever has been claimed in post-war Germany, there was no anti-Hitler movement of any significance, and, even if there had been, it is very doubtful whether the bulk of the army, whose soldiers and junior officers had been thoroughly indoctrinated with NSDAP ideology and belief in Hitler, would have followed it. Secondly, both British and American soldiers and statesmen remembered what had happened in 1918, when Germany had been granted a conditional armistice. The legend of the ‘stab in the back’ was fostered, extreme nationalism was allowed to continue to grow and twenty years later the Germans were at it again: this time there would be no armistice, no terms, no concessions, no understandings. No trace of fascism (or Japanese warmongering)would be allowed to survive.

  It has often been said that Roosevelt’s statement was a spur-of-the-moment throwaway line, and that Churchill was taken by surprise yet had to be seen to agree with his partner. In fact, Roosevelt had always intended to say it, and Churchill before the conference had put the question to the War Cabinet in London, whose only comment was that they thought unconditional surrender should be applied to Italy as well as to Germany and Japan. The conference over, and Allied strategy for the coming year agreed, Churchill took himself off to Turkey, to try to persuade her president to bring his country into the war on the Allied side. Having backed a loser in the last war, the Turks were in no hurry to get involved in Great Power politics again and declined, whereupon Churchill departed for Tripoli and Montgomery’s victory parade, then to Algiers for some relaxation and discussions with Eisenhower, somewhat to the latter’s horror, and finally back to London, where he promptly went down with pneumonia and, forbidden cigars and brandy, was his doctors’ most cantankerous patient while he recovered.

  The war went on. As First Army had failed to take Tunis in the early stages of the campaign, the aim now was to push through to the central Tunisian coastline in order to split the two Axis armies in North Africa. Rommel, withdrawing into the Mareth Line in Tunisia, and von Arnim were well aware of this, and, when von Arnim launched an attack on the French divisions holding the Tebessa mountains south-west of Pont du Fahs in mid-January, they broke and retreated in disarray. Allied views that tanks could not operate in the mountains were proved wrong, and by the end of the month von Arnim’s troops were holding the eastern ends of all the passes through the mountains. The Allies calculated that von Arnim would attack again, but a misreading, misunderstanding or mistranslation of Ultra transcripts led Anderson to think that the attack would come in the north, and that is where he placed the bulk of his reserves. To cover the pass through the mountains at Kasserine farther south was a small American force of one infantry battalion, an artillery battalion, a tank destroyer (anti-tank) battalion and some field engineers, with a French artillery battery attached. Rommel was settling into the Mareth Line and he calculated that he had time to strike a blow at First Army before Montgomery would be ready to attack him. On 14 February he and von Arnim cooperated to launch an attack, not on the north but on the Kasserine Pass. Two panzer divisions, 10 and 21, the latter late of Rommel’s DAK, from Fifth Panzer Army attacked through Sidi Bou Zid and Bir el Hafi, while a detachment of the DAK struck through Gafsa. During the night, the American battle group was reinforced by a tank battalion of the US 1 Armoured Division and the force, commanded by Colonel Robert Stark, managed to hold off the Germans on 19 February but thereafter his command degenerated into order, counter-order and disorder. Despite reinforcements of American armour and the British 16/5 Lancers, who were using the new Sherman tanks for the first time, Stark lost over 100 tanks and thirty artillery pieces. Rommel forced his way through the pass and pushed the Americans back forty miles. Now his intention was to crack on along the Tebessa road, a main supply route for the Americans, which not only would allow him to interrupt the supply line but also would split the US II Corps in the south from the rest of the Allied army to the north.

  Rommel could no longer enjoy the relatively free hand that he had in Libya, however, and, as Tunisia, too, was an Italian theatre, he had to obey orders from the Commando Supremo in Rome to disengage from the Tebessa road and strike towards Le Kef, to the north, where the British armour was. Rommel obeyed, but knew very well that he could not sustain an operation so far from his supply base, despite capturing large stocks of aviation fuel at Kasserine. By 22 February, Allied resistance had hardened, and Rommel withdrew back through the Kasserine Pass, unmolested, and returned to the Mareth Line. The debacle at Kasserine came as a severe shock to American morale in North Africa and at home, but the Americans were only learning the same lessons that the British had already been taught in 1941 and 1942. Eisenhower sacked the corps commander, Fredendall, replacing him with Patton, and the Americans took on board the lessons of the defeat. As even Montgomery admitted, ‘They learn faster than we do.’

  On 18 February, 18th Army Group came into being, despite there not yet being any physical contact between the two Allied armies. On 23 February the Axis too reorganized its command arrangements when Rommel’s Panzer Army Africa and Fifth Panzer Army were combined into Army Group Africa. Panzer Army Africa was renamed the Italian First Army, reflecting its composition of the DAK and two Italian corps, and was to be commanded by General Giovanni Messe, fresh from command of the Italian corps in Russia. Colonel-General von Arnim would continue in command of Fifth Army and Rommel would command the army group.

  Now that Tripoli was available to the Allies, the supply lines were considerably shortened and, despite the best efforts of the Luftwaffe, around 3,000 tons a day were being unloaded. More divisions were brought up from Egypt and the French Général de Brigade Philippe Leclerc*. appeared, having marched his largely Senegalese brigade overland from the French colony of Chad, west of the Sudan and south of Libya. Then, while Montgomery was preparing for his stately assault on the Mareth Line, refusing to be hurried by Alexander’s calls for him to take the pressure off the American corps of First Army, Messe carried out a spoiling attack on Eighth Army at Medenine on 6 March with nearly 100 tanks and half-tracks. Initially they made progress in an early-morning mist, but then ran up against a strong British anti-tank screen and were forced to withdraw. The first British anti-tank guns in the desert war had been two-pounders, incapable of doing much damage to German tanks and generally ignored by them. Now the two-pounders had gone, to be replaced by the much better six-pounders, and there were even some of the new seventeen-pounders, a truly formidable anti-tank gun capable of taking on even a Tiger, if the wind was in the right direction. In this battle too were a troop of captured German 88mm guns, operated by the New Zealanders, and even a few 3.7-inch heavy anti-aircraft guns used in the ground role.*.

  On 9 March, Rommel flew to Berlin to try to persuade OKW and Hitler that the Mareth Line, despite running for twelve miles from the coast westwards to the Matmata Hills, being well supplied with concrete bunkers, minefields and wire, and possessing a natural anti-tank ditch in the form of a dried-up riverbed running in front of it for most of its length, was not an ideal defensive position as it could be outflanked. Far better would be to withdraw back to the Wadi Akarit, where a reasonable defence could be maintained. Surprisingly, for a war leader who by now was increasingly opposed to withdrawals of any sort, Hitler agreed that the marching infantry could be moved back,leaving a screen of mobile troops at Mareth which could then be extricated when the British attacked. Permission was duly signalled to von Arnim, who issued the orders to the units of the army group, only to have them overruled by the Commando
Supremo, who would brook no withdrawal west of Mareth. Rommel was ordered not to return to Africa. He had been warned as early as February that he was to be relieved and now was an opportune time. OKW knew that defeat in Tunisia was unavoidable eventually, and a German field marshal must not be captured. Von Arnim would now command Army Group Africa and do the best he could to delay the inevitable.

  Montgomery planned to attack the Mareth Line on 20 March. Although the French insisted that the ground to the west of the Matmata Hills was impenetrable, the Long Range Desert Group, a battalion-sized unit raised for reconnaissance and raiding behind the lines, had found a navigable route, and the intention was to launch the main attack frontally along the coast with three Indian divisions, 50, 51 and 4, supported by most of the armour, which would break through and then roll up the Axis position from east to west. The New Zealand Division with an armoured brigade and Leclerc’s French would go left, flanking to the west of the hills in order to cut off a withdrawal. It was hardly an imaginative plan, a fact brought home on the night of 16/17 March when an attempt to straighten the intended jump-off line went badly wrong and the defending 90 Light Division inflicted 300 casualties on Sixth Battalion Grenadier Guards, among them its CO and thirteen other officers. Preceded by a massive artillery bombardment and air support, the attack still went in as planned on 20 March, the infantry with scaling ladders and the tanks carrying bundles of fascines to cross the anti-tank ditch. Fighting was fierce: by 23 March the British had still not broken through and the battle had stalled. Montgomery, having originally said that the Americans were to be ‘kept out of my way’, now appealed for an attack by Patton’s US III Corps but this was vetoed by Alexander as putting that corps at too much risk. A rethink was essential, and with much talk of reinforcing success, and claims that the original plan was working, Eighth Army reinforced the New Zealand Division on the left flank with 1 Armoured Division and there eventually began to make some progress. Messe, realizing what the British were trying to do, withdrew forty miles to the Wadi Akarit position and Eighth Army wearily followed, for what would be their last major battle in North Africa.