On 9 December the British Cyrenaica Force[2] of 30,000 men, composed mainly of the 7th Armoured Division and the 4th Indian Division, under Lieutenant-General R. N. O’Connor, after a long, difficult and daring indirect approach march by night, descended into their midst and utterly routed them, capturing 38,000 prisoners, 73 tanks and 237 guns. It was an almost incredible and totally unexpected victory.
Exploiting with great audacity this sparkling success, which had been intended as a mere raid, the little general harried the demoralised enemy right across Cyrenaica, with further enormous hauls of prisoners, tanks and guns, and finally, after a breathless forced march across the desert with the scantiest of forces, he cut off what remained of the Italian army at Beda Fomm, south of Benghazi, on 5 February, and forced their surrender. In the two months of an entirely extempore campaign he had captured 130,000 prisoners, 400 tanks and more than 1,200 guns; the cost to the British had been 1,744 killed, wounded and missing.
To the people at home, gripped in a hard winter, peppered by bombs, living on short rations and groping at night through the pall of the black-out, these sensational victories came as a tremendous tonic. O’Connor’s campaign had been a brilliant example of blitzkreig tactics, pressed forward with great resourcefulness in the face of severe supply difficulties and shortages of equipment. But it had been waged against an enemy who from the outset had shown his inferiority alike in morale, equipment and training and it was to be the end of the easy successes.
O’Connor’s small army paused with its van at Agheila, on the Tripolitanian border, and there seemed nothing to prevent them from marching victoriously upon distant Tripoli itself — a consummation which, if it could have been achieved before the arrival of the Germans, would have saved two years of further fighting in the desert, and completely altered the strategic situation in the Mediterranean. But political considerations put an end to such hopes.
Greece was now being threatened and we had promised in 1939 to go to her aid if called upon. We did so now, scraping together all the land, air and sea forces that we could, and O’Connor’s advance, with all its dazzling prospects, was halted. Those who have since criticised Mr Churchill for this decision should bear in mind that it was not adopted by the War Cabinet until encouraging reports from Greece and from the Middle East had been received from Mr Eden, Field-Marshal Sir John Dill, Field-Marshal Smuts and Wavell himself, though the Chiefs of Staff at home were firmly opposed to it. Thus another Dunkirk, another Norway was the lot of our troops.
The obligations of honour led not only to a minor disaster in Greece but also to a severe trial in Africa. O’Connor himself went on leave, 7th Armoured Division was sent back to the Delta and 6th Australian Division (newly arrived) to Greece. Their places were taken by a new commander and new, inexperienced divisions who had had no collective training in the desert; the solitary armoured brigade was a scratch force, equipped mainly with captured Italian tanks. Our air strength was also greatly reduced. Cyrenaica became a static command with the forces widely dispersed.
It happened that the moment when O’Connor’s advance was allowed to fizzle out was just the moment chosen by Hitler to send a German armoured force to succour the desert Italians in their despair. To command them he sent Lieutenant-General Erwin Rommel. A new, dynamic and totally unexpected force burst upon the arid desert scene.
Rommel, who had made his name in the ‘blitz’ campaign against France as commander of an armoured division, was, whatever his defects, a leader and opportunist of great thrust and initiative. He caught the attenuated British forces near the frontier off their guard and inadequately supported in the air, and sent them hurrying back to the Egyptian frontier in April 1941. Virtually all the ground that O’Connor had won in the winter was lost and he himself, hurrying back from Cairo, was taken prisoner in one of these dramatic minor incidents that characterised the fluid desert war. Tobruk, which Rommel failed to capture, now began its epic siege.
The Germans, with two armoured and one infantry division, brought into the desert war two vital new factors: they brought troops who were vastly superior to most of the Italians then in the field — brave, highly trained, aggressive, resourceful and tremendously quick off the mark — and they brought a quantity of war equipment that was superior to anything that we ourselves had. This superiority was to become especially noticeable in the later models of their Messerschmitt fighter aircraft, their tanks, their anti-tank guns and their tracked and semi-tracked vehicles, and this superiority in equipment they enjoyed for the next eighteen months.
Outstanding in this array of fighting equipment were the tanks of 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions, formidable and efficient engines of war which, in the fighting that swayed backwards and forwards across Cyrenaica in this period, became factors of dominant tactical importance. They will be described later.
In all these eighteen months of ebb and flow our own armoured regiments, with their little 2-pdr popguns, their less resistant armour and sometimes (as with the Crusaders) their mechanically unreliable tanks, fought with dash, gallantry and often self-immolation against a heavier enemy and against highly penetrating antitank guns. But it was not only by this technical disadvantage that they were handicapped; for, no less damaging to their prospects in battle, was the deterioration that began to ensue in the tactical methods of superior commanders, who, in the handling of armour, forsook the fundamental rule of concentration of force.
Shortly after withdrawal to the Egyptian frontier, General Sir Claude Auchinleck succeeded Wavell as C-in-C Middle East, and on 26 September he reorganised the Western Desert Force under a new command which was designated Eighth Army, under General Sir Alan Cunningham. Very soon afterwards (9 October), as one result of extensive reorganisation of the Middle East air forces by Air Marshal Tedder, No. 204 Group, RAF, was reconstituted for the air support of the Army in the field, first as Air Headquarters Western Desert and then as the Western Desert Air Force, to become famous under the brilliant leadership of Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham, known to all as ‘Mary’, because he was a New Zealander, though not a Maori. Both the British and the German-Italian armies and air forces became considerably augmented.
In November the new Army, supported by its comrades of the WDAF, began its first offensive, known as Operation ‘Crusader’. In a long, confused and gruelling battle of tanks, infantry and air forces, marked by inferior generalship on both sides but resolved by the tenacity of the regimental officer and man, and by the personal intervention of Auchinleck, Tobruk was relieved, and Rommel, completely outfought and barely escaping complete destruction, was forced back to Agheila again, whence he had started. The credit for this half-forgotten victory is aptly expressed by General de Guingand’s tribute to ‘this gallant army who, although equipped with inferior tools, by sheer courage, dogged determination and spirit, defeated some of the finest and most experienced troops in the German Army.’[3]
Once again our forces, greatly extended, were reduced also in strength by the dispatch of troops to the Far East. The Axis air forces were heavily reinforced and air superiority changed hands.
Resilient and resourceful, Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’, very quickly resumed the offensive and in January 1942 once more surprised the strung-out British with swift and penetrating strokes. This time, however, instead of going right back to the Egyptian frontier, Eighth Army formed a good defensive front halfway, with its northern flank near Gazala. Lieutenant-General Neil Ritchie was now in command.
This position Rommel attacked on 26 May with great vigour, with formidable new tanks and with air forces considerably outnumbering our own, and there was another long, bitter and critical battle in which Rommel once again escaped destruction by a hair’s breadth; but by brilliant opportunism, profiting from the lamentable generalship of his opponents, he turned an impending defeat into a remarkable victory.
The British, not routed, nor even dispirited, but convincingly defeated in a tactical sense, were obliged by the speed of the
German advance to abandon one defensive position after another, often fighting their way out after encirclement, as 50th Division and the New Zealanders did until, finally, on 1 July they stood at bay in the last defensive position of all short of the Nile and only sixty miles from Alexandria — El Alamein. They were saved from any greater disaster and kept as ‘an army in being’ by Auchinleck, who, while still bearing his large responsibilities as C-in-C for the whole of Middle East, personally assumed command of Eighth Army in the field for the second time.
The Battle of Gazala was a sharp tactical reverse for the British, due wholly to its mismanagement by the Army and Corps commanders. To the good people at home it was hard news to bear. To Mr Churchill, closeted with President Roosevelt far away in Washington, the surrender of Tobruk by the commander of 2nd South African Division was a grievous blow, for the little maritime fortress, though its military importance was small, had in its first siege become a symbol of heroic resistance.
Egypt now seemed to be at the feet of the enemy and the whole Middle East seemed imperilled. The Navy vacated Alexandria and in Cairo precautionary steps were taken for the move of GHQ. Mussolini himself flew over to Cyrenaica (in a Red Cross aircraft, heavily escorted by fighters), ready for a triumphal entry into the streets of Cairo.
EBB AND FLOW
Thus, until the occupation of the Alamein position, the war in the desert had been swaying to and fro between Agheila on the west and Solium on the east, with a great deal of severe fighting and with tactical successes won by both sides but with no decisive victory by either. There had been many audacious little raids and other minor operations by land and sea, chiefly by British forces, but they had no appreciable effect on the main course of events. Most of these sideshows were wasted effort. Far away in the south, however, the Long Range Desert Group, best of them all, living a hardy life in the lonely and waterless wastes of the deep desert, did very valuable scouting work and some useful raids.
In the air mastery had not yet been won by either side and the British and their enemies alike were bombed and machine-gunned from the air, requiring tanks and vehicles to be well dispersed on the ground, but otherwise having little influence on the battle as a whole. The effective integration of battlefield operations by ground and air forces had not yet been properly worked out. In contrast to the passive attitude towards hostile aircraft of troops in training at home, the desert soldier stood up to them and fired at them with whatever weapon he had.
The RAF’s bombing of enemy ports and shipping was quite another matter and, together with the unceasing attention by the Royal Navy to the enemy’s supply ships and transports, was in due time to have a very considerable effect indeed on the course of operations.
THE GENERAL STRATEGIC POSITION
After this cursory review of the desert operations before Alamein, it is time that, in order to assess the value of the forthcoming operations, we looked briefly at the general strategic position in 1942 and took stock more exactly of those forces that were destined to play so decisive a part in the shaping of it.
Until the autumn, the year 1942 had marked the blackest possible days for the friends of freedom in their fight against the Axis forces throughout the world. Everywhere we were suffering heavy defeats, heartbreaking losses and even humiliations. Nearly all Europe was dominated by Hitler, the German forces were biting deep into the heart of Russia, the American fleet had been crippled at Pearl Harbour, Singapore had surrendered, the Japanese had swept victoriously over the lands and seas of the Far East, and the Americans and British were suffering enormous losses from the German submarines in the Atlantic. The skies of all the world looked black, relieved only by the small gleams of a few minor successes and the one larger success of the American naval victory over the Japanese at Midway Island in the Pacific. To the long list of calamities had now been added the loss of Greece and the tactical defeat of the British at Gazala.
In the Mediterranean an unceasing struggle was being waged by land, sea and air. The German-Italian forces held most of the northern shores. All the German land and air forces in the Mediterranean sphere were under the command of Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, who was both Commander-in-Chief South and Air C-in-C, Rommel’s Army, however, being expressly excluded. The British and their allies held Egypt and the Levant.
Between the two lay Malta, the little island heroically defying assault from the air and close blockade from the sea. Garrison and civilians were living stoically on semi-starvation rations. The Governor, General Lord Gort, VC, was pedalling about the bomb wreckage on a bicycle, to conserve the precious and precarious supplies of petrol brought to the island at fearful risk by our merchant ships and their escorts. We shall lay special emphasis on Malta, because its vital relationship to the desert campaign has not been generally understood. Strategically, not the least reason for requiring Rommel to be thrown back as quickly as possible was the need to save Malta — a requirement that was emphatically and repeatedly urged upon the military command in Egypt.
A thorn in the side of the enemy, Malta was of very great strategic importance to the whole war effort. Had it fallen to the enemy, virtually the whole of the Mediterranean would have been closed to us and we could no longer have fought our way through that sea, as we often did, thus saving forty-five days and 15,000 miles on the passage round the Cape. The island was also a vital staging post for aircraft reinforcements on their long flight from Britain.
What is of most interest to us, however, was Malta’s close relationship with Egypt and the Western Desert and their mutual interdependence. From Malta there sallied out the submarines, light naval craft and aircraft that preyed unceasingly upon the enemy ships carrying supplies and reinforcements from Europe to the Axis forces in the desert. Correspondingly, the airfields and ports of the African coast, if in our hands, provided bases from which our air and sea forces could powerfully help the defence of the island. Of great importance among these were the airfields of Cyrenaica, particularly the Martuba group, from which the approaches to Malta were within the range of the RAF. These airfields were now, since Rommel’s last advance, in the hands of the enemy, and the case of the little island was daily becoming more desperate.
That position was, of course, seen by the Germans and Italians as clearly as by the Allies. It was the agreed Axis policy that, after Rommel’s success at the Battle of Gazala, he should halt on the Egyptian frontier, while Kesselring and the Italians mounted an attack on Malta with all the force at their command. With the removal of the main barrier to Rommel’s reinforcement and supply, his army could be rapidly built up in sufficient strength to overcome Eighth Army and he could then sweep forward into Egypt. The British would be obliged to abandon the Mediterranean and the way would be open to a still more glittering prospect in the field of grand strategy; for the shape of Rommel’s thrust into Egypt bore a significant relationship to the deeper thrust that the German armies were making through Russia towards the Caucasus. If both these thrusts continued and converged, all the vast oil fields of Persia, Iraq and the Persian Gulf would be lost to the Allies, the Suez Canal would pass to the control of the Axis and the alarming prospect arise of the Axis joining hands with the Japanese.
The capture of Malta, if it could have been achieved, was, therefore, of capital importance both to Rommel’s forces and to Axis strategy, and would have been calamitous to the Allies. Fortunately, Kesselring’s intention was frustrated by Rommel himself who, having reached the Egyptian border, believed that he had Eighth Army on the run and that only one more effort was needed to overcome it decisively and to place all Egypt within his grasp. Hitler, promoting him to field-marshal, approved his proposals for pushing on and Mussolini consented. The assault on Malta was postponed and, indeed, never took place. It was one of Rommel’s many errors of judgement. His strategic faculty was inferior to his tactical, which itself, though he had been an infantryman, was of high quality only in the handling of the moving armoured battle. As an American military critic
, Brigadier-General S. L. A. Marshall, has said, Alamein, like Stalingrad and the Marne, was a ‘monument of the supreme folly of over-extension’. All three, be it noted, were German follies.
Such in broad outline was the strategic outlook on the last day of June 1942 when Eighth Army hastened back into the Alamein position, only just ahead of the Germans, and as the Desert Air Force leap-frogged back to rear airfields.
THE SHAPE OF THE ARMY
For the benefit of readers not familiar with these matters, it will be helpful to our understanding of the events to follow to give a brief explanation at this stage of the structure and composition of the armies that temporarily peopled the desert at the time of Alamein. We shall look first at the British forces.
The basic formation of an army in the field was the division. Commanded by a major-general, it consisted at that time of from 13,500 troops in an armoured division to 17,000 in an infantry division, when at full strength, which was rarely the case. A division was in itself a balanced and complete army of all arms on a small scale, except for the absence or presence of the tank element.
The infantry division, at full complement, consisted of three brigades, each brigade being composed of three battalions. The assault strength of the battalion lay mainly in its four all-too-small ‘rifle companies’, supported by platoons equipped with anti-tank guns, small trench-mortars and the light, tracked bren gun carrier. Thus the infantry had a variety of weapons but never enough bayonets in the assault.
Even at full strength, a battalion could put only about 450 men into an assault (half that number in the first wave). It was the rifle companies that usually took the brunt of casualties and after two major assaults the battalion was usually too weak for another. Each division had also a heavy machine-gun battalion, equipped with forty-eight Vickers guns.
Alamein (Major Battles of World War Two) Page 3