He accepted the resignation of Brauchitsch. Though ostensibly based on a severe heart attack Brauchitsch had suffered, it actually resulted from his and Hitler’s long-disturbed relationship. Hitler made himself commander in chief of the army, and ordered “fanatical resistance.” He authorized withdrawals only with his personal approval. Despite his orders, German forces fell back in numerous places to avoid being surrounded and destroyed.
Barbarossa had failed. Hitler never saw that he made any mistake. He blamed the defeat on the “unexpectedly early onset of severe winter.” Losses rose to 775,000 dead, wounded, and missing—almost one-fourth of the entire strength of the field armies.
A leadership crisis followed. Hitler had relieved Rundstedt because he wanted to withdraw to the Mius River. He now removed both other army group commanders—Bock, ostensibly for sickness, Leeb because Hitler rejected his proposal to withdraw from exposed positions around Leningrad. Three army commanders also departed—Maximilian von Weichs (2nd), Adolf Strauss (9th), and Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel (17th)—along with thirty other general officers, including Hoepner, whom Hitler expelled from the army for an unauthorized retreat. Most significantly, he ousted Guderian. The best panzer leader in the German army went into the army officers reserve pool.
By January 1, 1942, Soviet forces had retaken Kalinin, a hundred miles northwest of Moscow, and Kaluga, a hundred miles southwest, and were besieging German strongholds that had been bypassed and surrounded. The threat to Moscow had ended.
At this point Hitler issued an order for all troops to stand fast. On January 7, Stalin launched a counteroffensive along the whole front, something the Red Army was too weak to accomplish. The Russians failed to eliminate the surrounded Germans, and made only limited advances elsewhere. The German army survived the winter of 1941–1942 because Stalin attempted too much. But Hitler thought the reason was his stand-fast order. For the rest of the war this encouraged him in his insistence to defend every inch of ground.
It was a pity for Germany that Adolf Hitler never heeded the advice of the Swiss military analyst Antoine-Henri Jomini, commenting on Napoleon’s 1812 invasion: “Russia is a country which is easy to get into, but very difficult to get out of.”
11 TO AND FRO IN THE DESERT
WITH THE FAILURE OF ROMMEL’S ATTACKS AGAINST TOBRUK AND THE REFUSAL of Hitler to reinforce Africa Corps, a stalemate descended over North Africa in the spring of 1941. Rommel didn’t have enough forces to advance beyond the Egyptian frontier, and the British didn’t have enough power to relieve Tobruk.
However, Winston Churchill, unlike the German high command, recognized the importance of the Suez Canal, and ran great risks to hold it. To improve the strength of the Middle East commander, General Sir Archibald Wavell, he directed that a five-ship convoy with 295 tanks and forty-three Hurricane fighter planes be run directly through the Mediterranean, instead of around the Cape of Good Hope. He wrote the British Chiefs of Staff on April 20, 1941, that the war in the Middle East and saving the Suez Canal “all may turn on a few hundred armored vehicles. They must if possible be carried there at all costs.” Aided by misty weather, the convoy got through to Alexandria on May 12 without Axis attacks, but lost one ship with fifty-seven tanks to a mine in the Sicilian Narrows.
Wavell didn’t wait for the tanks to get to the front. He launched his first effort to relieve Tobruk, Operation Brevity, on May 15, sending twenty-six Matilda tanks in support of the 22nd Guards Brigade in a direct assault against enemy forces guarding Sollum and Halfaya Pass along the coast. Sollum and Halfaya were the only places along the Libya-Egypt frontier where troops could cross the 600-foot escarpment that stretches from Sollum southeastward into Egypt. Meanwhile, twenty-nine cruiser tanks with a Support Group of motorized infantry and artillery moved around the desert flank to the south and tried to get on the Axis rear.
The British seized Halfaya Pass, losing seven Matildas in the process. However, threats of German counterattacks on the flank caused the British to withdraw, leaving a small garrison at the pass. Rommel launched a sudden converging attack on May 27 and recaptured the pass. He dug in four high-velocity 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns, which had emerged as Germany’s best tank-killers. The guns, their barrels horizontal with little visible above ground, were to be of great importance in the next British effort, Operation Battleaxe.
Wavell planned Battleaxe as two separate operations. In the first, an infantry force, supported by half the British armor, a brigade of Matildas, was to seize Halfaya, Sollum, and Fort Capuzzo, eight miles to the west. In the second, the remaining armor was to cover the desert flank to the south to guard against the panzer regiment Rommel had posted there. Rommel’s other panzer regiment was near Tobruk and could move as needed.
Wavell’s plan betrayed the ambivalence about armor that bedeviled the British in North Africa. He split his armor into two separate forces, neither of which could support the other. Yet Rommel could send his second panzer regiment quickly to reinforce his first.
Another mistake of the British was their misunderstanding of the role of the 88s at Halfaya. British doctrine was largely fixed on the idea of tank versus tank battles, whereas Rommel used antitank guns to the maximum degree possible, holding his tanks back for decisive strikes or movements.
When the Matildas attacked Halfaya—dubbed by British soldiers as “Hellfire Pass”—on June 15, 1941, the commander radioed back his last message: “They are tearing my tanks to bits.” Only one of thirteen Matildas survived the trap of the four 88s. The attack collapsed.
The Germans also mounted four 88s and 50-millimeter antitank guns on Hafid Ridge, a few miles southwest of Capuzzo. When the British cruiser tanks coming around the southern flank reached Hafid, the German gun trap stopped them cold. By now most of Rommel’s forward panzer regiment had arrived, and had threatened an attack on the flank of the armored brigade, inducing Wavell to pull it back into Egypt.
By nightfall, the British had lost more than half their tanks, mostly to fire from the 88s and antitank guns, while Rommel’s tank strength had been little affected.
Rommel had learned something the British had not grasped about desert warfare: that attrition or wearing down of an enemy force and destruction of the enemy’s organic cohesion had to be the tactical aims. In other environments where few units were mechanized, like Poland in 1939 and western Europe in 1940, the greatest danger a force could face was being surrounded. When encircled, and subjected to fire from all sides, a force tended to disintegrate, and could be destroyed or forced to surrender.
In the desert, surrounded motorized forces nearly always could mass at a single point and break out, thereby nullifying what elsewhere would be a devastating trap.
Rommel accordingly concentrated on winning battles of attrition and shattering the enemy’s organization. He came up with a five-point method of doing this. A commander, he wrote, must (1) concentrate his forces, while trying to split the enemy forces and destroy them at different times; (2) protect his supply lines, while cutting the enemy’s; (3) attack enemy armor with antitank guns, reserving his own tanks for the final blow; (4) operate near the front so as to make immediate decisions when tactical conditions change; (5) achieve surprise, maintain great speed of movement, and overrun disorganized enemy formations without delay. Speed is everything, Rommel wrote. And, after dislocating the enemy, he must be pursued at once and never be allowed to reorganize.
Rommel had only one “secret” weapon, the 88-millimeter antiaircraft (AA) gun that he and other German generals discovered in the 1940 campaign could blast through 83 millimeters of armor at 2,000 yards. This made the 88 the most formidable antitank weapon on either side. The British had a comparable high-velocity AA gun of about the same caliber (3.7 inches), which could have been as effective, but they did not use it against tanks.
Rommel also had the 50-millimeter antitank (AT) gun, which slowly replaced the poor 37-millimeter gun developed before the war. The 50-millimeter gun could penetrate
50 millimeters of armor at 1,000 yards. Although the Matilda with its heavy frontal armor was largely invulnerable to this gun, the more lightly armored cruisers could often be stopped, especially at close range. Both the 88 and the 50-millimeter AT gun could fire solid shot, to cut through armor, or high explosive, which could destroy or neutralize British AT weapons or crews.
By comparison, the British two-pounder (40-millimeter) AT gun was ineffective. It fired only solid shot, requiring a direct hit to destroy enemy AT weapons, and could penetrate merely the thinner side plates of armor at ranges below 200 yards. The British 25-pounder (87-millimeter) gun-howitzer, a superb field artillery piece, had to be pressed into service as an antitank weapon, though often at the expense of protecting infantry. Only in the spring of 1942 did the British begin to receive the six-pounder (57-millimeter) AT gun, which fired high-explosive as well as solid shot and had 30 percent greater penetration than the German 50-millimeter gun.
The British took a long time recognizing that Rommel was sending antitank guns against their tanks. In offensive or attack situations, Rommel leapfrogged the comparatively nimble 50-millimeter AT guns from one shielded vantage point to another, while keeping his tanks stationary and below the horizon. Once the AT guns were established, they protected the tanks as they swept forward.
In defensive situations, Rommel tried to bait or lure the British. He sent light tanks forward to contact the enemy, then retire. The typical British response was to mount a “cavalry” charge. But since visibility was obscured by stirred up dust and sand, British tankers usually did not see the 50-millimeter AT guns waiting in ambush in hollows and draws, nor the “gun line” of 88s drawn up at the rear. The 50s picked off British tanks that got within range, while the 88s took on the advancing enemy armor at distances far beyond the capacity of the tanks’ two-pounder (40-millimeter) guns to respond. The British added to the success of Rommel’s tactics by usually committing their armor piecemeal, mostly single units, instead of full brigades, and never massed brigades.
In addition to halving their armor by dividing their tanks between cruisers and infantry or “I” tanks, the British made two additional mistakes: they persisted in forming “support groups” and they dispersed their armor widely.
A support group of combined infantry and artillery units had successfully blocked the retreat of the Italians at Beda Fomm in February 1941. Its success led to repetition. The British saw no need to include tanks, as the Germans did with their Kampfgruppen or battle groups, which could take on any enemy force. As a result support groups had to depend upon a few 25-pounder howitzers and two-pounder AT guns, which were not always sufficient against strong German or German-backed Italian forces.
The British dispersed their tanks because it was impossible to conceal armor in the desert from the air. Rommel tried to practice the opposite policy, drawing together every possible tank and gun to work against a single objective—which, because of British dispersion, was often a fragment of total British armored strength.
Finally, the British failed to copy the Stuka dive-bomber, which was in effect mobile artillery that could deliver fire on the point a forward force wished to destroy, or through which it wished to advance. The dive-bomber offered the vanguard of an attacking force a way to eliminate an enemy strongpoint shortly after its discovery without having to bring up more weapons. If tanks could not knock out such a point, the only other way to break it was to advance field artillery, a time-consuming job that often gave the enemy the chance to strengthen his position or move.
Since the start of World War II and the unveiling of blitzkrieg with tanks and dive-bombers, the offensive had dominated the defensive. This period was now coming to a close. The inherent superiority of the defense over the offense was being reasserted. It had marked World War I and had been brought on by the great power of defensive weapons like field fortifications, artillery, and the machine gun.
The enormous offensive battles that burst upon the world in Russia in the summer and fall of 1941 obscured this point for a time. But the Tobruk battles and Operation Brevity foreshadowed what Battleaxe now demonstrated: when resolute troops held strong defensive positions, and possessed weapons that could immobilize tanks, they could prevail. This lesson, learned in the trenches of the western front 1914–1918, was going to be relearned on the battlefields of the Second World War.
As the giant caldron battles of Barbarossa slowly played out in the Soviet Union in the fall of 1941, the British prepared for their first major offensive against Rommel in North Africa.
Winston Churchill had been agitating for such an attack for months, and poured as many troops and as much equipment as he could find into Egypt. Four days after the end of Battleaxe, he relieved General Wavell and replaced him with General Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander in India, and immediately began pressing him to mount a major effort to wrest Libya from the Axis.
The campaign that opened on November 18, 1941, code-named Operation Crusader, developed into the most spectacular tank battle in history, a battle fought at extreme speed over a desert that allowed almost complete freedom of movement.
However, Crusader is notable because Auchinleck started with a false concept—he sought to destroy the enemy’s forces—and also dispersed his armor so widely that he never achieved decisive strength at any point. The result was that Rommel, though vastly outnumbered in tanks and other weapons, was able to block the British and turn what appeared to be certain defeat into almost a victory.
Armored forces are so fluid they are unsuited to be an objective. They usually can be destroyed only by indirect means. The British could have done this by throwing a strategic barrage or barrier across the Axis line of supply, requiring Rommel to commit his panzers to reopen the line under conditions favorable to the British.
Such a choke point existed: Acroma, on the Axis supply route twenty miles west of Tobruk. A concentrated attack on Acroma would have relieved the siege of Tobruk without a fight and forced Rommel to attack the barrier frontally or retreat for lack of fuel and supplies. Yet the British never aimed at Acroma or any other strategic point astride the Axis supply line. Instead, they crashed against Rommel’s gun-lined traps in direct, costly assaults that, moreover, were delivered by numerous individual units, and never by massed armor.
Consequently Rommel repeatedly caught British armor dispersed. As he remarked to a captured British officer after the battle: “What difference does it make if you have two tanks to my one, when you spread them out and let me smash them in detail?”
The British desert force had been renamed 8th Army, placed under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham, and divided into two corps: the 13th under Lieutenant General A. R. Godwin-Austen with the 2nd New Zealand and 4th Indian Divisions and a force of infantry or “I” tanks; and the 30th under Lieutenant General C. W. M. Norrie with the “Desert Rats” of the 7th Armored Division (7th and 22nd Armored Brigades, plus an infantry and artillery Support Group), 4th Armored Brigade, 22nd Guards Brigade, and 1st South African Division. In reserve was the 2nd South African Division.
The British plan was for 13th Corps to pin down Axis troops holding the frontier from Sollum and Halfaya Pass to Sidi Omar, twenty-five miles inland, while the 30th Corps swept around south of Sidi Omar, destroyed Rommel’s armor, then linked up with the Tobruk garrison, seventy miles beyond the frontier.
British perversity in splitting armor is shown in the fact that the three armored brigades of 30th Corps aimed from the outset at divergent objectives—although Auchinleck and Cunningham had identified the Sidi Rezegh airfield, atop an escarpment only twelve miles southeast of the Tobruk defensive perimeter, as their principal target. If the airfield could be seized, tanks there and tanks from Tobruk could open a link, relieve the siege, and endanger the Axis position.
On the night of November 18, 1941, 30th Corps swept around Rommel’s desert flank, without encountering any resistance. The next day Cunningham sent two of three regiments of the 7th
Armored Brigade to capture Sidi Rezegh airfield. The third regiment and the division’s Support Group did not come up until the following morning, November 20. By then Rommel had rushed up part of 90th Light Division and a large number of antitank guns to block the advance.
Meanwhile, the other two British armored brigades drove off to widely separated places, and promptly ran into trouble. The 22nd, newly arrived from England, encountered the dug-in guns of Trieste Armored Division at Bir el Gubi, twenty-two miles south of Sidi Rezegh. Without waiting to call for assistance, the brigade launched a “charge of the Light Brigade” against the Italian guns, losing forty of 160 tanks within minutes, and completely bogging down.
The 4th Armored Brigade stopped at Gabr Selah, thirty miles southeast of Sidi Rezegh. The reason was to keep in touch with the left or southern flank of 13th Corps, although this could have been done by radio. One of the brigade’s three regiments rushed off twenty-five miles in pursuit of a German reconnaissance unit and was lost for the day. Rommel sent 21st Panzer Division’s tank regiment, plus twelve field guns and four 88s, against the two remaining regiments of 4th Brigade, and destroyed twenty-three Stuart tanks against a loss of three German tanks.
The Germans, too, made a serious error. General Ludwig Cruewell, commanding Africa Corps, led all of his armor on a wild-goose chase toward Fort Capuzzo on the morning of November 20, after receiving a false report that a British advance was coming from that direction.
Although General Cunningham was informed of Africa Corps’s departure—which opened up a giant hole in the Axis position—he took no advantage of the bonanza. He should have concentrated his armor, driven straight for the Sidi Rezegh airfield, and relieved Tobruk. This would have fatally compromised the entire Axis position. Instead he did nothing, giving the Germans a chance to retrieve Cruewell’s blunder.
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 13
