Erwin
Rommel, who was appointed to command the Deutsches Afrika Korps on 12 February
1941: "In the evening the Fuhrer showed me a number of British and
American illustrated papers describing General Wavell's advance through
Cyrenaica. Of particular interest was
the masterly co-ordination these showed between armoured land forces, air force
and navy."
Events
moved quickly. A British intelligence summary dated March 1941 said:
"Detachments of a German expeditionary force under an obscure general,
Rommel, have landed in North Africa."
Stripped
of much equipment and transport (which had been sent to Greece), tired,
depleted and untested units made up much of the British army facing Rommel in
North Africa. Wavell and his staff in
Cairo were not unduly worried. They comforted themselves with the belief that
the Italians in Tripolitania could be disregarded and that German
reinforcements would not be sufficient for any attack to be started in the near
future.
The
code crackers at Bletchley Park were keeping tabs on Rommel. When Churchill
asked what was happening, he was supplied with German OKW, High Command of the
Armed Forces, signals showing the approximate arrival dates of components of
the Afrika Korps. Although Cairo
frequently complained of Bletchley Park's slowness, this time there was no
delay in passing on these figures to Wavell.
By
early March Wavell's director of intelligence was telling him the Afrika Korps
might attack very soon. He showed Wavell
the sort of plan he thought might be on Rommel's desk. Wavell dismissed it.
Without disputing the figures from London, his
staff- guided by the way the British army did such things calculated that
Rommel could not be ready before May.
His supply line was long and he would need considerable time to prepare
reserves and dumps before going into action.
In
Berlin the German army's C-in-C, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, came to the
same conclusion as Wavell. He told
Rommel that there could be no question of staging an offensive in Africa in the
near future. The Italian high command
took the same view. But Rommel was
aggressive and ambitious. He saw that
Berlin was hoping that the Western Desert fighting might lull into a stalemate,
and he had no intention of letting his command become a backwater. He was determined to make war, and he was in
a hurry. When his ships arrived he kept
the dockside lights on, and worked all night unloading despite the danger of
air raids. The armoured cars that were swinging from the cranes in Tripoli in
mid-February were in action ten days later.
The
remarkable General O'Connor had been sent away to rest and the fighting army
was now commanded by General Philip Neame, a man of outstanding valour, as his
VC indicated, but lacking experience of mechanized desert fighting. Rommel knew from intelligence and air photos
that British units were short of transport, which meant uncertain supply lines
all the way back to their depots in Egypt.
He saw them building de fences and that proved they had no intention of
attacking him. In fact Rommel was in a situation exactly like that of General
O'Connor when he had faced the Italians a short while before.
Still
unconcerned, on 30 March Wavell told Neame that the enemy could not 'make any
big effort for at least another month'.
At 0944 hours the next day, armoured cars of the Stahnsdorf 3rd
Reconnaissance Unit having already advanced to El Agheila led the attack. Behind them were the tanks of the 5th Panzer
Regiment. The following day Stuka
dive-bombers and Rommel's 8.8-em dual-purpose guns were seen in action.
The use
of these Flak guns in an artillery role was a great surprise, just as it had
been at Arras, before Dunkirk, and in Spain during the civil war. The chronic
failure of British military intelligence to record that the 8.8-em gun was a
dual-purpose weapon is in sad accord with a signal Wavell sent to the CIGS in
London estimating that Rommel's armoured division was equipped with 400 tanks,
when its true strength was 168 tanks and 30 recon vehicles.
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