Rommel
was not one of the war's great generals.
Many Germans express surprise that the British and American public know
his name: they think of him as a product of Nazi propaganda. Rommel led from the front and his style
suited divisional command. He became a
hero for Allied front-line soldiers who seldom if ever saw their own top
commanders at the front. British generals preferred to have their HQs about 60
miles behind the fighting fronts. Besides, Rommel had for his Afrika Korps
exceptional leaders such as Cruewell, Nehring and Bayerlein. But all that said, few other men could have
inspired this mixed and demoralized German-Italian desert army in the way that
Rommel did. He revelled in popularity
and delighted in the sort of informality that the desert provided to both
sides. In his paper Modern Military
Leadership he wrote:
The
commander must try, above all, to establish personal and comradely contact with
his men, but without giving away an inch of his authority when an attack is
ordered the men must never be allowed to get the feeling that their casualties
have been calculated in advance according to the laws of probability.
The
deciding factor in Rommel's North African campaign was the shipping and the
ports. Even Tripoli was in no way equipped for the massive traffic that such
armies demanded. Had the Axis coaxed the
French for use of Tunisian facilities and used Tripoli and other less good
Libyan ports with impeccable efficiency, and given proper attention to their
road transport, they might have mustered the strength to capture Egypt.
Then,
having captured the port of Alexandria and got it working, they might have fed
through it reinforcements enough to occupy Egypt and the Canal Zone. Even then such a strategy would almost
certainly have faltered; German factories after the summer of 1941 were to be
hard pressed by the demands of the Russian front.
Such a
scenario was never a real possibility.
Rommel's fatal flaw was his inability to see the importance of
logistics. He liked to blame the Italian
navy for his shortages, and historians have too readily accepted this
judgement. In fact, Italian merchant
seamen were nothing less than heroic in their performance. John Ellis reckons that the Axis forces were
getting an average 800 tons per division
per day, and points out that 'voracious US armoured divisions in North West
Europe required only 600 tons of supplies per day, including fuel .
It was
Rommel's own land-supply movements that brought him down. In fact his troubles arose from a combination
of his own daring and improvisation and a disregard for the terrible problems
such impulsive decisions made for his supply staff. He is quoted as saying that he left logistics
to his staff officers. It is significant
that his supply officer in 1941 had the lowly rank of major.
As an
indication of this major's problems, the trucks taking 1,000 gallons of fuel
from the docks at Tobruk to Alamein consumed 120 gallons of fuel plus 9.6
gallons of other lubricants. Wastage and
spillage in the hot climate would account for at least 10 per cent.
Deduct
fuel needed for the return journey, and they will have brought no more than 636
gallons to the front. But still more
fuel was needed to bring up ammunition and food and all the other supplies. The map reveals that Tobruk, 300 miles from
the front, is the key to supplying the desert war. It spent much of the war in
British hands, and when in German hands it was a favourite target for the R.A.F
bombers. Tripoli Rommel's main port was
often 1,500 miles from his front! For
their supplies the British used whenever possible the coastal railway out of
Alexandria. It was economical and
efficient. When Rommel captured 300
miles of it (in 1942) he did little to keep it functioning.
There
can be no doubt that much of Rommel's reputation as a general was due to his
skilful use of intelligence. Many
tactical moves were based upon secrets picked up by his highly efficient
Fernmeldeaufklarung.
This
mobile radio monitoring service listened to everything it could pick up; casual
battlefield chat, tank to tank calls, headquarters messages and supply depot
reports. Rommel's traffic analysts reaped a rich harvest, for British units in
1941 had not learned of the dangers that poor radio discipline brought. In addition to this tactical intelligence,
Rommel was receiving something even better than the British Enigma intercepts:
the intercepted messages sent to Washington by the United States military attache
in Cairo.
At this
time the British were showing this American everything and anything that he
wanted to see. Not only did his messages
contain details of British armour strengths and positions, they also reported
forthcoming operations such as commando raids.
Instead of the spotty information from the Enigma intercepts, Rommel
was getting material about air, land and
sea operations and getting it with a speed and continuity that BP could never
equal. The most knowledgeable historian on this subject remarks:
And
what messages they were! They provided
Rommel with undoubtedly the broadest and clearest picture of enemy forces and
intentions available to any Axis commander throughout the war.
Determined
defence of Tobruk by Australian infantry and British artillery denied that port
to Rommel even when the remainder of the British army had retreated back to the
Egyptian border. Now Rommel came to a
stop and concentrated on Tobruk.
Rommel's
unexpected advance in April 1941 surprised Berlin and prompted the high command
to send a senior observer, Generalleutnant F. Paulus, to find out what this
upstart Rommel was doing. Tall and slim,
Paulus was one of the army's brightest staff officers and an expert on mobile
warfare.
His work as chief of staff for the 6th Army during its victorious
campaigns in Poland, Belgium and France had resulted in him being selected to
be deputy chief of the general staff and told to produce a strategic survey for
invading the Soviet Union. Paulus,
nicknamed 'the noble lord', was an oldfashioned but meticulous theoretician,
who bathed as often as possible and wore gloves to protect himself against
dirt. He had been Rommel's conmpany
commander in the 1920s and did not care for his cavalier way of waging war.
Arriving
on his inspection tour on 27 April, Paulus voiced great reservations about
Rommel's proposed attack on Tobruk, which had now become a fortress. His scepticism proved well founded after
concentrated bombing and shelling made no more than a dent in the Tobruk
perimeter and both sides settled into a state of siege punctuated by bloody
clashes at night. The Tobruk perimeter
consisted mostly of rock-hard ground, so digging trenches or foxholes was not
easy. Given the lack of cover, the
Australians had to endure baking heat where a careless movement brought accurate
sniper fire. On the night of 5-6 May,
the defenders were given new hope when for the first time a ship brought
supplies into the beleaguered port. From
now onwards destroyers would make regular nightly visits, and each week
reinforcements would be exchanged for wounded men.
The
caustic report resulting from Paulus's inspection tour said that Rommel's
supply lines were overstretched, his men exhausted and his reserves
inadequate. He was told to forget about
reducing Tobruk and withdraw to Gazala or
Mechili and operate within his resources.
The
Enigma experts at Bletchley Park sent the intercepted signal to Churchill, who
reasoned that if Rommel was weak and overextended this was the chance to knock
him reeling back to Cyrenaica. It was
especially urgent since Enigma signals also revealed that 15 Panzer Division
would soon be reinforcing Rommel.
Ignoring the warnings of everyone around him, Churchill took all the
fighter planes and tanks to be spared in Britain and loaded them onto a convoy
which, against more advice, he sent through the Axis-dominated
Mediterranean. Four of the five
freighters got through with 238 tanks and 43 Hawker Hurricane fighter planes
and docked in Alexandria in mid-May.
While
this newly arrived equipment was distributed and made ready, a limited
offensive, code named Brevity, was launched.
Its object was to capture key areas in preparation for a major offensive
to come.
One
account of the desert war, says: "Operation Brevity began at dawn on May
15, and it soon became evident that neither Rommel nor his local commander .. .
were either aware of or in agreement with the conclusions drawn by
Paulus." The British attack
captured one of its objectives, Halfaya Pass, but was otherwise a failure. Rommel's signals intelligence had given him
good warning of what was coming, and even a weak and over-extended Afrika Korps
was too much for the British as he staged a counter-attack that recovered the
Ilalfaya Pass.
And
when the British armour was unloaded from the convoy that had come through the
Mediterranean at such risk it proved to be a mixed collection. Eight out of
twenty tanks required a complete overhaul.
Many of
the others were already halfway through their effective life and some of the
Matildas were in need of major repairs.
All of them required 'tropicalization' and painting. Long before the armour was fit for battle,
Rommel's 15 Panzer Division reinforcements had arrived.
On 15
June, in the terrible desert heat of summer, the promised British offensive,
Operation Battleaxe, began. Repeatedly the Germans enticed the British tanks on
to their well concealed guns. Only
thirteen 8.8-em guns were in action but their role was decisive. The British stuck to their 'naval battle'
tactics, sending in tanks to fire broadsides at enemy tanks. Despite the consequences, some of the tank
units many of them smart cavalry regiments preferred this dashing style and didn't want support from
infantry and guns. There was no sign
that the British, at any level, were learning lessons from their chronic
losses. After only three days' fighting Wavell sent Churchill a cable: "I
regret to report the failure of Battleaxe."
Churchill
sacked him.
The
Germans were getting acclimatized to the desert. In the first few months they were given a
monotonous diet of black bread, tinned sardines, tinned meat and grated
cheese. This sort of diet led to medical
problems, particularly jaundice. It also
spurred them into action. British stores
were coveted if only for the change of menu they provided.
"Our
black bread in a carton was handy," said a German war correspondent, 'but
how we used to long to capture one of your field bakeries and eat fresh white
bread! And your jam!" When ally
ovens came, fresh bread remained scarce; the German quartermaster supplied the
Afrika Korps with the standard field bakeries fired by logs. In most of Europe logs were easy to find, but
they are not common in the desert. Fresh bread remained scarce.
Though
the desert war seemed to come to a stop, this was an illusion.
In fact
the whole war was changing. There were
changes of men, of methods and of machines.
On 22 June Germany invaded Russia.
It would be months before this took full effect, but from now on the
Eastern Front would always dwarf the North African fighting. Henceforth Rommel's calls for men, armour,
transport and fuel would be subordinated to other more urgent needs.
Wavell
was dispatched to India. The day-to-day
demands upon him had been greater than anyone could have imagined. He had been fighting too many battles
hundreds of miles apart with skinny resources.
Sir Claude Auchinleck came to Cairo as the new commander-in-chief for
the Middle East. The appointment of a
number of subsidiary commanders ensured that he would never have the power that
Wavell had wielded. New aircraft arrived
and Bostons, Marylands, Beaufighters, Tomahawks and tropical Hurricanes were to
be seen flying over the desert. There were
new Crusader tanks, new ideas and even a new name for the desert army: the
Eighth Army.
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