Northwest Europe was the most urbanized and industrialized
theater of war in the world. In 1940, it was simply impossible to conduct
mobile war there without collateral damage, but this did not make civilians
either active participants in the war or the deliberately selected targets of
the uniformed services. Peacetime armies, too, easily saw terrain as a space
for maneuver, where the landscape was strangely devoid of human occupation and
where the only obstacles were those set by nature, such as mountains and
rivers. The desert came closest to this ideal. In the North African campaign,
both sides could focus on each other, with the result that – in the German
title of The Rommel Papers – it was a “war without hate.” The British more
often expressed admiration than animosity for the Germans and particularly for
Rommel himself. Private J. M. Butler, an Australian at Tobruk in 1941, wrote,
“the German is a worthy opponent and in this campaign at least he is a clean
and fair fighter – I have yet to see a German who is afraid: I have yet to see
a German who resorts to low and mean subterfuge.” On the other side of the line
at about the same time, a German tank officer was “inclined to think of the
romantic idea of a knight’s tourney.” Chivalry was a word that both sides used
at least occasionally, and it found reflection in the humane treatment both of
the wounded and of prisoners of war.
It is easy to see the fighting in North Africa as peripheral
– a throwback to an anglocentric view of the war, where the key issues are
operational, where armies fought each other rather than partisans, where
political ideology was less important than military honor, and where genocide
and terror have been airbrushed out of the historical record. Although a major
theater for Italy, it was – after all – a minor one for Germany.
Thus, its evidence that fighting in the Second World War was
capable of being conducted along lines that accorded with convention can be
marginalized. But what is interesting is that Rommel himself did not see the
desert campaign in those terms. The talk of chivalry and its evocation of
antiquity should not obscure the fact that for him, “of all theatres of
operations, it was probably in North Africa that the war took on its most
advanced form. The protagonists on both sides were fully motorised formations,
for whose employment the flat and obstruction-free desert offered hitherto
undreamed-of possibilities. It was the only theatre where the principles of
motorised and tank warfare, as they had been taught theoretically before the
war, could be applied to the full – and further developed.”
Rommel regarded the campaigns in Poland and France as
inappropriate pointers to the future because in those theaters Germany’s
enemies had still “to take account of their non-motorised infantry divisions
and had thus to suffer the disastrous limitation in their freedom of tactical
decision which this imposes.” By contrast, the British in North Africa were
fully mobile, and “out of this pure motorised warfare, certain principles were
established . . . These principles will become the standard for the future, in
which the fully-motorised formation will be dominant.”
For Rommel, therefore, the most modern form of war was not
necessarily total war: the future of war was an operational matter, and its
means was the maintenance of high tempo. But Rommel’s analysis, even within his
circumscribed perspective, was deficient. His summary of the technical and
organizational aspects of desert warfare made no mention at all of air power
despite his recognition of the dependence of tempo on up-to-date intelligence
and on regular resupply. And, second, although he recognized that it was “the
flat and good-driving terrain” that had enabled operational success, he made
the mistake of assuming that methods evolved in one geographical environment
could be applicable to another. Terrain could determine totality in war.
When the war extended to northwestern Europe in 1944, the
principles governing the employment of armor were very different from those
advocated by Rommel or that had been applied in 1940. In both the earlier
campaigns, tanks were massed and were deployed where the going favored them.
They were creatures of the open countryside. By 1944, they were integrated with
infantry to provide direct fire support not only in the bocage of Normandy but
also in towns and cities. The destruction of Rouen and especially Caen
symbolized the value of a city as a defensive node, and its vulnerability to
the fire of tanks and artillery as well as to close air support and
interdiction bombing. Thus modern war proved to be all-arms war in a way that
Rommel had failed to grasp.
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