Despite the long history of personal disagreements affecting virtually all those present the prevailing atmosphere was reportedly ‘workmanlike’. Halder noted in his diary, with characteristic acerbity, that ‘the mood of the conference was better attuned to the matters in hand than to the preposterous surroundings’. Halder of course was always something of a foreigner to the real Third Reich, which here at Karinhall reached a rare level of warped self- expression, blending feudalism, nouveau riche vulgarity and technical expertise. Outside the Hall, Goering’s newly- inherited SS guards stood watch among the extensive lily-ponds.
Inside the conference room Brauchitsch opened the proceedings with a report, written by Halder, on the current situation of Fall Barbarossa. It was as thorough and detailed as any of Halder’s reports, but the gist was relatively simple. The Soviet Union had not admitted defeat, and was unlikely to do so while it commanded an army and an industrial base east of Moscow, but its offensive capacity was now virtually non-existent, and was likely to remain extremely limited throughout 1942. As things now stood Halder foresaw few difficulties in reaching the original objective of Barbarossa - a line from Archangel to Astrakhan - and in conquering the Caucasus during the spring and summer of 1942 with the forces presently available. It would be possible to withdraw limited air and armoured formations from the East for the duration of the winter months, perhaps even permanently.
Halder’s report did not suggest alternative employment for those forces no longer vital to the outcome of the war in the East, but their possible deployment in the Mediterranean theatre had been discussed even before the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Directive 32, issued on 11 June 1941, the Führer had stated that ‘after the destruction of the Soviet armed forces ... the struggle against British positions in the Mediterranean and Western Asia will be continued by converging attacks launched from Libya through Egypt, from Bulgaria through Turkey, and in certain circumstances also from Transcaucasia through Iran.’ These attacks were to be launched in November 1941.
This had been an over-optimistic forecast, as the report on Fall Barbarossa’s progress amply demonstrated. The way to the Caucasus was not yet clear, the forces necessary for operations against the still-uncommitted Turks were not yet available. The war against the British would have to be continued, for the time being, by the Axis forces in North Africa.
Here, however, there were problems. Raeder, with Weichold’s report in his briefcase, proceeded to outline them. The situation as described (by Weichold) is untenable. Italian naval and air forces are incapable of providing adequate cover for the convoys . . . The Naval Staff considers radical changes and immediate measures to remedy the situation imperative.’
Having thus struck a necessary note of urgency, the Grand- Admiral treated the assembled company to an abridged history of the German presence in the Mediterranean. He recalled how he and the Reich Marshal - a nice diplomatic touch - had urged a greater concentration of strength in this theatre during the previous autumn, but had been unable to convince the Führer that such a course was the correct one. Hitler had wished, ‘quite rightly’, to deal with the Eastern threat first. Once the Russian colossus had been struck down, then, and only then, would the time have arrived for a decisive reckoning with the obstinate British. This he had told Raeder in May. Now, the Grand- Admiral argued, that time had arrived.
Raeder had done his homework. His bulging briefcase also contained a copy of the report submitted by General von Thoma in October 1940 on the situation in North Africa. Four panzer divisions, von Thoma had concluded, would suffice for a successful invasion of Egypt. General Rommel already had two at his disposal; he should be given a further panzer corps from the Eastern front. With such a force, Raeder submitted, Rommel could drive the British out of the Middle East.
Of course, the transportation and supply of these new units could not be undertaken in those prevailing circumstances described by Weichold. The island fortress of Malta must first be neutralised by air assault and then captured. This, he added, with a deferential glance in Goering’s direction, was a task for the Luftwaffe. Here was a chance for its bomber squadrons and elite airborne units to write another page in their glorious history. The Navy, alas, could offer little assistance, but those U-boats which could be spared would be sent to the Mediterranean and the experience gained during the planning of ‘Sea Lion’ would be made available to those planning the invasion of Malta.
Raeder concluded with a review of the glittering prizes such a strategy would win. Malta’s fall would lead to the capture of Egypt; the oil of the Middle East would then be there for the taking. The Mediterranean would become an Axis lake; the southern flank of the Reich would be forever secure. India would be within reach, particularly if satisfactory arrangements could be made with the Japanese at some future date. Britain, deprived of oil and empire, would be finished. America, without British help, would be unable to bring its resources to bear across the wide Atlantic. The war would be won.
None of this was particularly new, or welcome, to the OKH leaders, whose mental boundaries rarely stretched beyond the confines of continental Europe. All through 1941 they had been receiving complaints from Rommel about his supply problems, but as Halder in particular both distrusted these extra-continental activities and lacked confidence in the reckless Rommel the complaints had been happily shoved into the business-continually-pending tray. Now that the campaign in the East was all but over Halder was reluctant to admit that the pending was over, and that this ‘general gone stark mad’ should be given new forces to ‘fritter away’.
Still, the Chief of the General Staff had no positive alternatives to offer, and it was obviously inadvisable, as Raeder ironically interjected, to ‘fritter away’ the months of grace granted the Wehrmacht by its success in Russia. Halder retreated into negatives, acidly noting that he doubted the capability of the Luftwaffe and the Italians to wrest Malta from the British.
This was a psychological error in the grand General Staff tradition. Goering might not have risen to the bait of Raeder’s flattery, but the Army’s scarcely concealed derision was another matter. The Reich Marshal noted OKH’s lack of ideas, quoted Führer Directive 32, and agreed with Raeder that he had all along been a strong supporter of a greater German commitment in the Mediterranean area. Malta would present no problem to the Luftwaffe, even with Italian assistance.
Jodl, who seems during these months to have transferred his dog-like devotion from the Führer to his deputy, concurred. Brauchitsch, as usual, went with the majority. The basic outline of Raeder’s plan was accepted by the Conference.
Concrete decisions were then taken. The Navy would deploy an extra twenty U-boats in the Mediterranean; the Luftwaffe would bring Air Fleet 2 from Russia to support Air Fleet 10 in Sicily, Crete and Cyrenaica. OKH agreed to transfer a panzer corps from the Eastern front to North Africa, beginning at the end of November. General Student, who had commanded the airborne invasion of Crete, would travel with Goering and Jodl to Rome, to discuss the assault on Malta with Mussolini and his Chief of Staff General Cavallero. Strenuous efforts would be made to ensure that the island received no fresh supplies, and as the success or failure of British attempts to run in convoys from the east would largely depend on who held the Cyrenaican airfields, Rommel was to be given explicit instructions to take no offensive action that might result in their capture by the enemy. General Paulus was detailed to carry these instructions to Rommel in person.
The conference broke up, the leaders went for a walk around the lily-ponds. Raeder, aided and abetted by his habitual adversary Goering, had carried the day. The OKH leaders, though somewhat disgruntled, could find comfort in the fact that no one had challenged their handling of the war in the East. Only Admiral Doenitz, C-in-C U-boats, who was not invited to the meeting, found nothing to applaud in the Karinhall decisions. He considered the decision to move U-boats from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean the height of folly. And time would prove him right.
II
As the German service chiefs sat in comfort beneath Goering’s chandeliers, Erwin Rommel was gazing down from his Storch reconnaissance plane at the vast expanse of the Western Desert. He had been in Africa for nine months, and in that time he had first pushed the British back four hundred miles to the Egyptian frontier and then repulsed Wavell’s attempt to regain the lost ground by means of Operation ‘Battleaxe’. The only blemish on this excellent record was the continuing presence of a British garrison in Tobruk, some seventy miles behind the front line.
Since June there had been a lull in the desert fighting, as each side sought to build up its strength; the British in order to succeed where ‘Battleaxe’ had failed, Rommel in order to capture Tobruk. In the meantime the Germans were laying a formidable minefield on the Sollum-Sidi Omar front line.
Rommel, though, had other preoccupations during this period. August seems to have been principally taken up with a campaign against the insect pests frequenting his headquarters. First mosquitoes, and then flies, took to pestering the panzer group commander. Fleas preferred the other officers, but the bed bugs were less particular. ‘My bed is now standing in tins filled with water,’ he wrote to his wife Lucie on 27 August. Three days later a more permanent solution was discovered, I’ve been free of the bugs ever since I had petrol poured over my iron bedstead, and had it set aflame. They must have been in the framework,’ he triumphantly reported.
These may have been the General’s most pressing problems, but they were not the only ones. A caravan en route from Germany for his use was sunk crossing the Mediterranean, along with some forty per cent of the other goods sent across from Italy in the months June to September. The plan for the attack on Tobruk gathered dust in Rommel’s command vehicle as he waited for the arrival of the supplies necessary for its implementation.
Meanwhile, as Rommel well knew, supplies for the army facing his own were flowing into Egypt at a prodigious rate. An enemy attack could be expected sometime before the end of the year, and Rommel did not want the Tobruk garrison at his back when it came. He continued to prepare for its reduction, pestered OKH with complaints, and held on to his hopes that the British would not move first.
On 4 October General von Paulus arrived at Afrika Korps HQ with General Bastico, Rommel’s nominal superior in North Africa. He brought news of the Karinhall Conference, of the decision to commit greater forces in North Africa and to attempt the capture of Malta. Rommel was pleased; he had been advocating as much for several months. He doubtless also understood Paulus’s strict instructions not to risk Axis control of Cyrenaica, but was characteristically loth to abandon his intention of attacking Tobruk. Paulus did not specifically forbid him to do so, but in view of later events it seems certain that he reached the conclusion, during his two-day stay in the desert, that such an attack would constitute an unnecessary gamble. At any rate, three days after his visitors’ departure Rommel received a direct order from Halder not to attack Tobruk. He was to remain on the defensive. Halder, hitherto deeply involved with events in Russia, seems to have taken this opportunity to re-establish his authority over the errant Rommel, a general whom he neither liked nor respected. But whatever his motives the decision was a sound one, as was soon to become apparent.
III
For over a century Great Britain had been staking a claim to at least a shared control of the Mediterranean Sea. The interests at stake had changed as the years passed by, but whichever they were - the overland route to India, the Suez Canal, Middle Eastern oil - they were always deemed vital to the well-being of the Empire at peace or the Empire at war.
There was of course an element of the self-fulfilling prophecy in Britain’s Mediterranean obsession, the forces deployed there invited counter-concentration and hence needed reinforcement. But for all that there was little doubt in most British minds in the summer of 1941 that the defence of the Mediterranean/Middle East area came second only to the defence of the British Isles in the list of priorities. Perhaps the war could not be lost there, but it could hardly be won if the area fell to the enemy.
Whatever happened, it was likely to prove cumulative. In the worst instance the fall of Malta would herald the fall of Egypt, which in turn would lead to the loss of the Middle East oilfields. The strain on shipping resources, already heavy, would be stretched to breaking-point by the need to bring oil across the Atlantic from America. Only in Europe would the British be able to confront the Germans, and the ships which were to bring the wherewithal for a cross-Channel invasion across the Atlantic would be carrying oil instead. There would be little chance of victory.
In the best instance the capture of Cyrenaica would ensure Malta’s safety; the island fortress would continue to take a heavy toll of Axis shipping, prevent supplies reaching Rommel, and hence make possible the conquest of Tripolitania and Tunisia. Then Sicily could be attacked, and the Mediterranean opened to merchant shipping. The high number of ships employed on the long route round the Cape would no longer be necessary, and a good number could be transferred to the Atlantic for ferrying across the requisites of a Second Front in Europe. Victory would be assured.
Winston Churchill was fully alive to the possibilities inherent in these two scenarios, and was naturally determined to pursue the second, more amenable one, with all the considerable vigour at his disposal. He had been much cheered by O’Connor’s dazzling victory over the Italians in December 1940, and equally chagrined by the string of disasters that had followed on its tail. The Germany entry into Africa had seen all of O’Connor’s gains reversed, Greece had fallen with a whimper and Crete, if with more of a bang, had tumbled after it. Then the much-heralded ‘Battleaxe’ offensive had clattered to a pathetic halt after a mere two days. It was more than the Prime Minister could comfortably stomach. The heads of those responsible had to roll. Heads other than his own. In mid-June Wavell received the axe he had failed to administer to the Germans. He was ordered to exchange posts with the Commander-in- Chief India, General Auchinleck.
The day alter Churchill had dispatched the relevant telegrams Hitler’s armies had rolled across the Soviet frontier and created a new long-term threat to the British position in the Middle East. The military seers in London had little faith in the Red Army’s capabilities; rather they saw the German progress through Russia as a long approach-march aimed on the oilfields of the Caucasus, Iran and Iraq. The distances involved promised a few months grace, but not much more. The newly-named Eighth Army would have to defeat Rommel in the Western Desert, secure North Africa, and be available for redeployment in northern Iraq before the first panzers came rumbling across the Caucasus mountains. Churchill made this very clear to the newly-appointed Auchinleck in a telegram of 19 July:
“If we do not use the lull accorded to us by the German entanglement in Russia to restore the situation in Cyrenaica the opportunity may never recur. A month has passed since the failure at Sollum (‘Battleaxe’), and presumably another month may have to pass before a renewed effort is possible. This interval should certainly give plenty of time for training. It would seem justifiable to fight a hard and decisive battle in the Western Desert before the situation changes to our detriment, and to run those major risks without which victory has rarely been gained.”
But, much to the Prime Minister’s dismay, it soon became apparent that Auchinleck had some ideas of his own. If both wished for a swift victory over Rommel, Auchinleck doubted whether the swiftness Churchill had in mind would produce victory at all. When the Prime Minister pointed to the unprecedented level of forces now flowing into Egypt, his resident C-in-C stressed the need for more, and the time it would take to absorb and condition the ones already arriving. This Churchill saw as excessive caution. He also criticised, on political grounds - there were not enough British troops fighting in the ‘British’ desert army - Auchinleck’s deployment of British troops in Cyprus. This Auchinleck saw as excessive meddling, ‘I hope you will leave me complete discretion concerning dispositions of this kind,’ he
tartly replied, presumably more in hope than expectation.
Auchinleck was called to London at the end of July, and subjected to the military grilling of the Chiefs of Staff and the personal magnetism of Britain’s War Lord. He came out of both intact, though firmly resolved not to go through the latter again if it could possibly be avoided. He also secured sanction for delaying the long-awaited offensive against Rommel until November 1. Churchill had reluctantly concurred in the face of united military opposition.
Once back in Egypt Auchinleck got down to the more agreeable business of preparing ‘Crusader’, the offensive his superiors expected would drive Rommel out of Cyrenaica and perhaps Africa as a whole. They were living in a dream. Certainly Eighth Army’s strength in men and arms was growing, but men and arms do not an army make. It is the relationship between them which wins or loses battles, and in Eighth Army it was a far from satisfactory one.
Tanks were being hoisted out of ships’ hulls in Suez harbour, but the savoir faire necessary for their effective use was harder to come by. Few British generals had grasped the principles of tank warfare, most of those that had were either dead or in POW camps. Auchinleck ignored the few that were still available. To command Eighth Army, against the wishes of Whitehall, he chose General Cunningham, recent victor in the Abyssinian campaign, who knew as much about tanks as Rommel knew about prudence.
Some of Cunningham’s corps and divisional commanders thought they understood tank warfare, but unfortunately they were under the sway of ideas propagated by the British tank enthusiasts of the ‘30s. This group, led by Hobart, had received so little support or understanding from other branches of the service that they had decided, in effect, ‘to hell with the rest of you’, and developed a theory of armoured warfare whereby tanks would operate, and win, completely on their own. The German notion of the armoured division as an all-arms formation centred around the mobility of the tank was not understood at all.
The Moscow Option Page 5
