by Bryn Hammond
This critique presupposes that circumstances would have allowed a different approach. They did not. Just as the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in the Great War had struggled to inculcate ‘the lessons of the fighting’ in its forces whilst engaged in almost continuous conflict on the Western Front, with few opportunities for meaningful tactical training schemes incorporating, for example, tanks and artillery, so circumstances dictated possibilities for the British Eighth Army (as Western Desert Force became known on expansion to a two-corps organization in September 1941). There was simply no time to review the lessons of the offensive at the level of detail required before events intervened. The strategic situation in the Mediterranean and Africa required Wavell to dispatch a large part of O’Connor’s command to Greece. The units that replaced them were newly formed and inexperienced (especially in desert warfare). There was little continuity of learning and few opportunities for training. There were also fundamental problems with the structure and organization of British formations which were not addressed and which were to present particular problems.
British armoured divisions were too heavy on armour and too light on infantry and lacked sufficient artillery (with no self-propelled guns). In tactical terms, this encouraged them to focus on tank-versus-tank operations in which there was no co-operation with the other arms – something which O’Connor believed was a result of the influence of Liddell Hart’s theories on commanders of armoured units.7 As a consequence, ad hoc formations of all arms except tanks were formed. These ‘Jock Columns’ – named after their inventor Lieutenant-Colonel J.C. ‘Jock’ Campbell VC of 4th Royal Horse Artillery (RHA) – were typically made up of a battery of 25-pounder field guns, a motorized ‘motor’ infantry company, an armoured car troop, a troop of 2-pounder anti-tank guns and a section of 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns, plus ancillary arms such as medical personnel and signallers. Until July 1942, these seemingly aggressive formations were actually responsible for dissipating the artillery strength of the British in the desert and impeded effective co-operation between the infantry and armour.8 This tactical schism was exploited repeatedly by the new, and extremely skilful, tactician who arrived soon after the defeat at Beda Fomm to lead their opponent’s forces.
The leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, was not prepared to see his ally defeated in North Africa and was swift to act. In doing so, he abandoned the ‘parallel warfare’ approach that had seen Germany and Italy allied but not co-ordinating military action. In view of the critical situation for his Italian allies, a Sperrverband (blocking force) of two German troops was sent to Libya to their aid under Operation Sonnenblume. The newly promoted, forty-nineyear-old Generalleutnant Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel was to take command of this Deutsches Afrika Korps (DAK). Rommel was an experienced commander of armoured forces, who had distinguished himself leading 7. Panzer-Division during the invasion of Belgium and France in the previous year. Leutnant Heinz Werner Schmidt of the Deutsche Motorisierte Kompanie recorded his impressions of the Afrika Korps commander soon after arriving from Eritrea to join Rommel’s staff:
The General stands before me. His figure is compact and short. I gain a measure of confidence as I note that, although I am only of middle height, the General is shorter. He gives me a brief, powerful shake of the hand. Blue-grey eyes look steadily into mine. I notice that he has unusual humour-wrinkles slanting downward from above the corners of his eyes to the outer edges of his cheekbones. His mouth and chin are well-formed and strong, and reinforce my first impression of an energetic, vital personality.9
From the first, Rommel demonstrated qualities that characterized his entire command of the German and Italian forces in North Africa: a shrewd cunning which, in connection with tactics, earned him the nickname (from his own troops) of der Wüstenfuchs, the Desert Fox,10 and a flagrant disregard for the orders and opinions of the Italians. He was, notionally, under the command of Generale di Corpo Armata Italo Gariboldi, who had succeeded Graziani after the latter’s resignation. However, neither Gariboldi nor Generale d’Armata Ettore Bastico, who in turn succeeded Gariboldi in July 1941, could control Rommel. From the first arrival of German troops, Rommel’s decisions were the critical ones for the deployment and use of both German and Italian units.
A misleading impression resulted in that it was seemingly solely the arrival of the Germans that saved the Axis war effort in North Africa. But Rommel also benefited from Italian reinforcements, including 132a Divisione Corazzata ‘Ariete’ – the first complete armoured division to arrive – under Generale di Divisione Ettore Baldassarre and a motorized division, 102a Divisione Motorizzata ‘Trento’. These were formations better suited to desert conditions by virtue of possessing motorized transport, although Italian tanks were both under-gunned and not as well armoured as the German Panzer III and IV.
It was Italian formations that were initially sent forward to Sirte on 14 February, at Rommel’s insistence, to oppose any further British advance. On the same day Aufklärungs-Abteilung 3 (mot), the first German Army unit, landed at Tripoli. The next day, the first tanks of Panzer-Regiment 5 were landed. By 10 March the regiment, consisting of twenty-five Panzerkampfwagen (PzKpfw) I forty-five PzKpfw II sixty-one PzKpfw III, seventeen PzKpfw IV and seven Panzerbefehlswagen (armoured command vehicles), had disembarked. Rommel covered this build-up of armour by two acts of deception. The first was intended to fool British aerial reconnaissance, as Oberleutnant Hans-Otto Behrendt, an Ordonnanzoffizier, or staff officer, in the blocking force, explained:
In the port of Tripoli in February 1941, Rommel told my friend, Leutnant Hundt – an engineer: ‘Hundt, here you can build me 150 tanks’. The man looked stupefied and Rommel told him ‘Don’t you have timber here in the harbour and canvas of sails to make 150 covers for Volkswagens? So you can give me 150 tanks.’ And those tanks misled the British in the first campaign.11
A parade of German armoured strength through Tripoli offered the second opportunity. Behrendt’s fellow Ordonnanzoffizier, Heinz Werner Schmidt, provided a vivid description:
Singly and at regular intervals the Panzers clattered and rattled by. They made a devil of a noise on the macadamized streets. Not far past the saluting base the column turned into a side street with mighty squeaks and creaks. I began to wonder at the extraordinary number of Panzers passing, and to regret that I had not counted them from the beginning. After a quarter of an hour I noticed a fault in one of the chains of a heavy Mark IV Panzer which somehow looked familiar to me although I had not previously seen its driver. Only then did the penny drop, as the Tommies say, and I could not help grinning. Still more Panzers passed, squeaking and creaking round that bend.12
Thus, a relatively small force of tanks was made to appear much larger simply by following a circuitous route. These ruses de guerre bought Rommel useful time. On 21 February his force was officially named the Deutsches Afrika Korps, when Generalmajor Johannes Streich’s 5. leichte-Division arrived. Rommel was helped by the British reorganization of units, which included the withdrawal of 7th Armoured Division to the Nile Delta to refit. With the British forces taking a defensive posture, initiative passed to the Axis commander. Rather than staying on the defensive, he decided to attack and, on 31 March 1941, a series of battles began which were to ebb and flow eastwards and westwards across the Western Desert for the next fourteen months.
Rommel’s initial advance had been intended as an armoured reconnaissance in keeping with his orders for defence, but soon became a fully fledged offensive. Fifteen convoys had delivered 25,000 German troops, 8,500 vehicles and 26,000 tons of supplies to Tripoli by the end of March.13 This included the first elements of 15. Panzer-Division. With this strength, his forces no longer had to be shielded by the Italians. On 19 February, the Luftwaffe (in the form of Messerschmitt Bf-110s of Zerstörergeschwader 26 (ZG-26)) claimed its first victories in the Desert Air War whilst Fliegerführer Afrika, Generalmajor Stefan Fröhlich, now had two Gruppen (squadrons) of Junkers 87 ‘Stuka’ dive-bombers, a Jagdge
schwader (fighter wing) of Messerschmitt Bf-109s and an Aufklärungsgeschwader (reconnaissance wing) with which to support land operations.
Under attack, the British forces were forced back out of Cyrenaica in a matter of days and several senior commanders including O’Connor, Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Neame VC (O’Connor’s successor), Major-General Michael Gambier-Parry (2nd Armoured Division) and Brigadier John Coombe, who had played an important role in the successful British operations in late 1940 to early 1941, were all captured. As the retreat continued Wavell decided that the port of Tobruk must be defended. Lieutenant-General Sir Leslie Morshead’s 9th Australian Division and a brigade from 7th Australian Division with four regiments of British artillery and some Indian troops occupied fortified positions around the port, which was soon invested. The remaining British formations withdrew eastwards to the Egyptian border. Tobruk remained besieged from April to November with the defenders supplied and reinforced by sea thanks to the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy.
With Tobruk surrounded by the main German–Italian force, a proportion of Rommel’s forces pressed eastwards, capturing Fort Capuzzo and Bardia before advancing into Egypt. By the end of April, Sollum had been taken and the tactically important Halfaya Pass was reached. Here the advance was stopped and Rommel garrisoned the captured positions. Significantly, repeated attempts to take Tobruk failed.
The importance of logistics in the Desert War was again emphasized by this failure. Rommel’s most advanced units were at the end of a vastly overextended supply chain stretching back to Tripoli. Without possession of Tobruk as an advanced supply base, it was doubtful whether the Axis forces could remain in these dispositions for an extended period. The wider strategic situation was also influential as the Luftwaffe Fliegerkorps X, which had been attacking British land and naval forces and the besieged island of Malta, was moved to Greece in May to support the Axis forces there and against Crete. This allowed Malta to be resupplied and sustained as a threat against the German–Italian North African force’s supply routes.
With Churchill demanding action, Wavell launched two attempts to relieve Tobruk. Neither Operation Brevity in May, nor a larger-scale offensive Operation Battleaxe in June, was successful. Battleaxe was a triumph for the German 88mm Flak anti-aircraft guns, numbers of which were deployed in an anti-tank capacity.14 These knocked out even the most heavily armoured British tanks, the Infantry ‘Matildas’, at ranges of 1,500 yards, although the 88mm was not recognized as the weapon responsible until some time afterwards.
Rommel’s first offensive operations included several features that were significant throughout the North African campaign. The influence of the problems arising from supplying both British and Axis forces cannot be understated. Theoretically, the much shorter supply routes from Italy to the theatre of operations should have been to the German and Italians’ advantage. Supplies of equipment and troops from Britain had to be sent round the South African Cape and into Egypt ‘via the back door’. These extended supply routes were still vulnerable to German U-boats, aircraft and surface raiders – especially in the North Atlantic. Nonetheless, the efforts of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force and the continued presence of an untaken Malta as an advanced base for attacks by aircraft and submarines on the Italian shipping chiefly responsible for transporting all necessary supplies to the Axis forces meant that an important threat remained unconquered, with significant consequences later.
However, the chief problem for Rommel and his Italian allies was the limited capacity of the Libyan ports that restricted Axis supplies. In ideal circumstances, Tripoli could deal with, at most, only five large cargo ships or four troop transports at any one time, and about 45,000 tonnes of supplies per month could pass through. Benghasi could manage only three cargo ships or two troop transports, and deal with 24,000 tonnes per month. It was also often subject to bombing. When Tobruk was captured and used by the Panzerarmee, its capacity was found to be about the same number of vessels as Benghasi but only 18,000 tonnes of supplies per month. Because of these restrictions, generally the requirements of the Axis forces operating in North Africa greatly exceeded the capacity of the ports to supply them.
There were more problems when transporting supplies from the ports. From Tripoli to Benghasi alone was about 600 miles and there was only one proper road along the coast which could be used for this. By comparison, it was only 600 miles from the Polish border to Moscow and there were many roads and railways along this route.15 Almost all supplies for the Axis fighting formations had to be transported by large numbers of lorries – an enormous logistical operation which used up perhaps as much as a third of all the vital and scarce supplies of fuel landed. The lorries were also constantly at risk from air attack on this road.
Further east, British transport and supplies were transported with the same risks in similar circumstances. However, it was the Axis forces, rather than the British and Commonwealth troops, who were forced to lead a hand-to-mouth existence for much of the time. Allied troops could also be supplied from India – although the soldiers might rail at the quality of some ‘essentials’ (particularly cigarettes) they received from this source. The Germans and Italians seldom had sufficient supplies for their needs and often struggled to have even the most basic requirements on occasion. At best, they had to do without many non-essential items. At worst, even supplies of fuel or ammunition dropped to critical levels.
This dearth of essentials meant that Axis troops soon turned to other sources of supplies – especially those of their opponents. Uniforms, vehicles, equipment, weaponry, rations and fuel were all captured and used – although in some cases the quality of their own issue was markedly better. The supply question was a source of acrimonious dispute between the Axis allies. Many German commanders and their men blamed the Italians for the inadequacy of supplies, although, in fact, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) – the German High Command – had set the priorities after June 1941, with the war against the Russians foremost. The Italian war economy was not geared to supply its own forces on land, sea and in the air with adequate resources and, in struggling to do so, had nothing to spare for the Germans. The failure to address these logistical problems was an indication of Rommel’s weakness in a crucial area of generalship at the level of command he now held.
A further feature of the fighting was Rommel’s aggressive personal style of leadership, more suited to the command of an armoured division than a corps or army. Hans-Otto Behrendt described him as follows:
He was a commander with instinct, as he told me once. An instinct to know where the enemy was weak – but he found that out personally. He was a good leader because he did not ask more of his troops than he was ready to give himself.
The Afrika Korps soldiers sensed instinctively that he knew his business as a leader; he was never indecisive and, above all, he was often right up there with them, at the front facing the enemy. There he often issued orders that asked a lot of his troops and more, but thanks to their efficiency and devotion they resulted in victories in the ‘good times’ and were faithfully executed without grumbling during the retreat.16
This energetic and high-risk approach inevitably took its toll on his health but whether in a Fieseler Storch aircraft on personal reconnaissance or in a captured AEC Dorchester command vehicle known as a Mammut, Rommel maintained close contact with his front-line troops. Frequently, he was well forward with only his Begleitkommando, or escort group, for protection. This body later became the basis from which his Gefechtsstaffel (his tactical operations command and signals unit) or Kampfstaffel (combat echelon) was formed.
It should be emphasized, however, that this ‘personal example’ command style was not uniquely Rommel’s. The nature of the Desert War and the employment of mobile formations often necessitated this approach. British formation commanders – particularly those of armoured divisions but also corps commanders – adopted similar approaches, either by choice or because of necessity. Often, like Rommel
, it was because of their background at lower levels of command. Thus, for example, Lieutenant-General William ‘Strafer’ Gott, who had commanded 7th Armoured’s support group and the division itself, had a similar command style whilst Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Willoughby Moke Norrie commanded XXX Corps in late 1941 from a mobile tactical headquarters consisting of four vehicles carrying a couple of staff officers, a wireless tuned to his own corps message net and a second tuned to intercept messages from Rommel’s Panzer units.17 Whilst these men may not have been in direct combat situations, neither is it suggested that Rommel himself fought when with his leading units. The difference between the British commanders and Rommel was the unreliability of the British communications. It was all too often the case that at critical junctures in the key battles, British formation commanders in forward positions could not communicate or be contacted. In the battles of manoeuvre, Rommel had more than proved himself, but he had been greatly assisted by the work of his signals units.
The single most important influence on all the campaigns was the desert itself. ‘All against the desert’ was a truism even before it was used in a memorable post-war film.18 In combination with the supply situation, the environment had an enormous impact on the conduct of military operations and on the participants in them, as Havildar Nila Kanten of the 5th Indian Brigade, 4th Indian Division, vividly recalled:
