The Battle for North Africa: El Alamein and the Turning Point for World War II
337
The Battle for North Africa: El Alamein and the Turning Point for World War II
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Overview
In the early years of World War II, Germany shocked the world with a devastating blitzkrieg, rapidly conquered most of Europe, and pushed into North Africa. As the Allies scrambled to counter the Axis armies, the British Eighth Army confronted the experienced Afrika Corps, led by German field marshal Erwin Rommel, in three battles at El Alamein. In the first battle, the Eighth Army narrowly halted the advance of the Germans during the summer of 1942. However, the stalemate left Nazi troops within striking distance of the Suez Canal, which would provide a critical tactical advantage to the controlling force. War historian Glyn Harper dives into the story, vividly narrating the events, strategies, and personalities surrounding the battles and paying particular attention to the Second Battle of El Alamein, a crucial turning point in the war that would be described by Winston Churchill as "the end of the beginning." Moving beyond a simple narrative of the conflict, The Battle for North Africa tackles critical themes, such as the problems of coalition warfare, the use of military intelligence, the role of celebrity generals, and the importance of an all-arms approach to modern warfare.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253031433 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2018 |
| Series: | Twentieth-Century Battles |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 337 |
| Sales rank: | 959,744 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Glyn Harper is author of many books, including Acts of Valour (with Colin Richardson), Johnny Enzed, and Images of War. He is Professor of War Studies at Massey University in New Zealand, and Massey Project Manager of the "New Zealand and the First World War" Centenary History Project.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE MILITARY BACKGROUND
Since late 1940, after Italy joined the war on the side of the Axis on June 10 that year, both sides had waged military offensives in the Western Desert with varying degrees of success. Egypt was a vital cog in Britain's war effort, described by John Connell as "the fulcrum of the British Empire." Egypt protected the sources of oil in the Middle East and its route to the United Kingdom. It was a center of communications for the far-flung parts of the Empire "east of Suez" and a critical base for naval operations in the Mediterranean. For these reasons, Egypt became the largest British military base outside of the United Kingdom. It was a vital, strategic asset. But, after June 1940, one of Britain's Axis enemies was just across the border in Libya with a huge military force. Italian forces in Libya, under Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, numbered 250,000 organized into two armies and fourteen divisions. British forces in Egypt under General Sir Archibald Wavell had just 36,000 men and consisted primarily of an understrength armored and two infantry divisions. The Western Desert Force, as these were called — there were not yet enough assets to form a corps or an army — was short of much essential equipment including artillery, tanks, transport, and logistical support.
Given their overwhelming force, it was natural that the Italians should strike first. They took some time doing so, though. It was not until September 13 that the Italians crossed the border and began a slow, ponderous advance into Egypt. After four days, all the time harassed by artillery fire, minefields, and bombed by the Royal Air Force (^AF), the Italians reached Sidi Barrani, just sixty-five miles into Egypt. There they halted, dug in, and planned their next moves.
They were still contemplating them when, on December 9, the Western Desert Force launched Operation Compass. It achieved complete surprise and was a stunning success. Within two days, the Sidi Barrani position was captured, four Italian divisions destroyed, and the remainder of the Italian force sent reeling back in utter defeat. Amongst the 38,000 Italian prisoners taken were four generals. Also captured were 237 guns, seventy-three tanks, and more than 1,000 vehicles. Losses in the Western Desert Force were 624 killed, missing, or wounded. As an exultant Anthony Eden informed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, "debasing a golden phrase" in the process, "Never before has so much been surrendered by so many to so few."
In the pursuit phase that followed the Italians' rout, British forces advanced deep into Libya. On January 3, 1941, they captured Bardia just over the border and pushed on. On January 22, Tobruk was captured, Derna eight days later, and Benghazi fell on February 7. Two days later, the Western Desert Force, now renamed 13 Corps, reached El Agheila, where they halted. This was the first British offensive of the Second World War and their first land victory. It was a significant one, too. In just two months, a British force, never numbering more than 30,000 men, had advanced some 500 miles, destroyed ten Italian divisions, captured 130,000 prisoners, 850 guns, 400 tanks, and given the British Commonwealth something to celebrate in the darkest of times. British casualties had been fewer than 2,000. It was an impressive victory and the Allies would not have another like it for nearly two years.
The success of the British forces in Operation Compass had the effect of tarnishing the reputation of the Italian army there. But Operation Compass was an aberration where Italian troops had been inexperienced, lacked vital equipment, and were poorly led. The Italians fought in North Africa for almost three years, " its longest camp aign of the Second World War." From 1941-43, in concert with its German allies, "most Italian soldiers fought well against the British forces." Italian losses in various actions were similar to German losses, indicating that their formations had fought equally hard. The North African campaign would eventually result in twenty-six Italian divisions being destroyed, with 12,000 Italian soldiers being killed in action.
Two developments occurred in capital cities thousands of miles from the fighting that were to have profound implications on this theater of war. First, on the same day that Bardia fell, Churchill took the decision that offensive operations in the Middle East were to be halted, the advance should not proceed beyond Benghazi and the position there made secure. Then all military assistance should be rendered to Greece in their fight against the Italian invaders there. This was to be the military priority now. From his already stretched resources, Wavell was directed to prepare a sizable expeditionary force to Greece. Then, just over a month later on February 2, 1941, Adolf Hitler wrote to Mussolini expressing his concerns about events in North Africa and offering a German armored division to assist in the defense of Tripoli. Mussolini reluctantly accepted the assistance and things moved quickly from here. On February 6, Adolf Hitler summoned one of his favourite generals to see him. After giving "a detailed account of the situation in Africa," Hitler informed Erwin Rommel that Rommel "had been recommended to him as the man who would most quickly adapt himself to the altogether different conditions of the African theatre." Rommel was elated with his new appointment and wrote to his wife, Lucie-Maria, that evening apologizing for cutting short his leave. "Things are moving fast," he informed her. "The new job is very big and important."
Things were certainly moving fast. On February 11, Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel arrived in Rome to discuss military arrangements. Only three days later, the first German units arrived in Tripoli and were immediately dispatched to the front. They would eventually become the famed Deutsches Afrika Korps (DAK). The timing was crucial. Just as the British were winding down their operations and diverting their forces to meet other commitments, "a new and formidable factor had entered the desert war." It would soon be the British forces' turn to be surprised and it began the period for them that David Fraser called "the habit of defeat." On February 16, just two days after their arrival, the Germans were in action against the depleted British forces and Rommel had taken command of the battle front. At the end of March, despite the reluctance of his Italian allies and in defiance of orders from the German Oberkommondo des Heeres (Army High Command), Rommel launched a raid in force against the British positions in Libya. It turned into much more than that. Rommel wrote to his wife on April 3 that their attack had met with "dazzling success" and that the British forces were "falling over each other to get away." It was true. By April 10, the Axis forces had pushed the British back across the Egyptian border, leaving just the isolated Tobruk garrison holding out now eighty miles behind the frontline. By the end of April, the Axis were occupying all the old Italian positions along the frontier and had established a forward outpost at Halfaya Pass, ten miles inside Egypt. Axis casualties had been light and three British generals, including the Army commander Richard O'Connor, had been captured. Rommel and the Axis had clearly won this round of the "Benghazi Handicap" as the race across North Africa was now called. His success was as immensely satisfying to him as it was galling to his British opponents. He wrote to his wife that, "It's wonderful to have pulled this off against the British." But there was a tactical thorn that threatened to prick his growing reputation. The town of Tobruk and its wide defended perimeter held out against the Axis. It was defended largely by the 9th Australian Division, which was determined not to lose it. As Barrie Pitt has written, Tobruk "was to prove a continual distraction to Rommel's further ambition and his attempts to storm its defences were to cause him serious losses in both men and material during the months which followed." It would cause considerable losses for the British forces, too.
While Tobruk was besieged, with its harbor providing a tenuous lifeline, three attempts were made by the British to drive the Axis forces back from the Libyan-Egyptian border and lift the siege. The British Army in these early years of the war was hampered by two serious flaws, both of them a legacy of the First World War. While the British Army had pioneered tank development in the 1914-18 war, it had then seriously neglected its development in the decades that followed. Tanks, many felt, were a marginal asset and were certainly unreliable. They were expensive and definitely not as likeable as horses. So it was then that "the British Army entered the Second World War without a coherent doctrine of armoured operations, and with little general understanding of how those operations might change the whole pattern of warfare." It was a serious gap in the British Army's warfighting doctrine, one that would be responsible for several disasters ahead and that would affect how the last Alamein battle would be fought. It was also the reason that the British failed to produce a quality tank during the war that could match those of the Germans. In response to the German challenge, "we produced tanks with too thin a skin or too feeble a weapon, or both." It was not until mid-1942 during the Gazala battle that the M3 Grant provided the British with a tank that could match the best of the German tanks. Later in the year, the British received an even better US-designed M4 tank: the Sherman, which would eventually become the mainstay of British armored formations. The other flaw reflected the shadow of the barbed wire of the trenches of the Western Front. The defense, it was assumed, was the strongest and the wisest method of war. It also engendered, as the historian/soldier David Fraser admitted, "a spirit of caution and hesitancy [that] was never completely eradicated from all parts of the British Command." But as Fraser acknowledged, often bold offensive moves can lead to fewer casualties when a cautious approach can accumulate many casualties for small gains.
The first attempt to relieve Tobruk was the appropriately named Operation Brevity launched on May 15. The offensive began well. The British forces achieved a tactical surprise and initially captured the key border locations of Halfaya Pass, Sollum, and Fort Capuzzo. But the offensive was brought to an abrupt halt when the Axis forces launched spirited counterattacks and the British tanks encountered for the first time in this theater the powerfully effective 88 millimeter (mm) anti-aircraft gun being used in an anti-tank role. The range and hitting power of this weapon was devastating on the lightly armored British tanks. The 88 mm gun came to have an important effect on the morale of British armored formations from this time. It soon became "the most feared weapon in North Africa." Curiously, the British had their equivalent of the 88 mm in the 3.7-inch (94 mm) anti-aircraft gun, but hide-bound British staff officers refused to allow it to be used in a dual role. One anti-aircraft gunner, Lieutenant David Parry, felt there was "no excuse for the sheer stupidity" of this decision. An 88 mm gun had three times the effective range of a two-pounder gun. Unfortunately, the two-pounder gun was the standard armament of British tanks and their anti-tank weaponry at this stage of the war. An 88 mm gun "could completely destroy a Crusader tank with one shot from a distance of one-and-a-half miles." With its range and sheer velocity, the 88 mm gun "wrought havoc" on the North African battlefields and "remained queen of the desert."
After ten days and with the loss of five tanks and around 200 men, the offensive was called off. It was a humiliating defeat for the British 13 Corps. Rommel, who recaptured the last position lost to the British on May 27, recorded a succinct summary of the fighting:
The British were soon driven out and fled in panic to the east, leaving considerable booty and material of all kinds in our hands. Our losses were comparatively insignificant.
It was an inauspicious start to lifting the siege of Tobruk.
The next attempt, Operation Battleaxe, launched on June 14, was even worse. Barrie Pitt summed it up as "a disastrous failure." Reinforced by the arrival of more than 200 new tanks and pressured by Winston Churchill to use them as soon as possible, the attack revealed just how much the British had to learn in this type of warfare. The army commander Wavell was not confident and identified part of the problem in a report on May 28. Wavell wrote:
Our infantry tanks are really too slow for a battle in the desert, and have been suffering considerable casualties from the fire of the powerful enemy anti-tank guns. Our cruisers have little advantage in power or speed over German medium tanks.
Wavell, however, hoped to "succeed in driving the enemy west of Tobruk." Wavell's dashed hopes would lose him the command of the Middle East. As indicated above, the new tanks were not suited for desert conditions and their crews were unfamiliar with how they could be used. Worse still was the fact that an all-arms approach to the battle was not yet part of British doctrine. British armored units did not know how to work in tandem with the infantry, artillery, and engineer formations that made up their land force in this theater. Cooperation and coordination with the Royal Air Force was also nonexistent. These were fundamental flaws and doomed Operation Battleaxe to failure. And by the time Battleaxe was launched, Rommel's forces had been strengthened by the arrival of an additional formation — the 15th Panzer Division.
On the first day, the British armor skirted around the fortified positions on the border but came up against strong German defenses at Fort Capuzzo. There they were attacked by the tanks of the 15th Panzer Division and routed. Within the space of a few short hours, the British armored formations had lost more than half their tanks. The next day, the third of the battle, Wavell called off the operation and his army retired ignominiously to their start lines. Inferior British equipment, poor planning, faulty doctrine, inadequate training, and British generalship that was "remote and inexpert" had caused this defeat. In the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill described the failure of Battleaxe as "a most bitter blow." Victory in the Western Desert was of "supreme consequence" and "all our hearts at home had been set on beating Rommel." Churchill was deeply disappointed by the British forces' dismal performance in Battleaxe and decided a new commander was needed to deliver him the victory he so desperately needed in the Middle East. "The fact remains," he wrote somewhat defensively in his history of the war, "that after 'Battleaxe,' I came to the conclusion that there should be a change." Wavell was informed on June 21 that he was being relieved of command of the armies in the Middle East.
The Germans soon recovered their lost tanks and many of the British ones, too, and restored them to working order. So severe had been their defeat that the original intent of destroying Rommel's forces and lifting the Tobruk siege was kept hidden from the British public. It was described to them as "merely a reconnaissance in force." The Germans were not deceived, though, and Rommel was elated with his success. He described it to his wife as a "complete victory." After the battle, Rommel went around the front line troops to thank them personally. The morale of the Afrika Korps troops was "tremendous" and Rommel's confidence soared. "Now the enemy can come," he wrote, and "he'll get an even bigger beating." The enemy would not be coming for several months now.
*
Appointed as the commander to deliver Churchill the elusive land victory against German ground forces he so desperately wanted was an impressive-looking general nicknamed "The Auk." This was General Sir Claude Auchinleck, who had limited experience for such a crucial appointment. Auchinleck was a major general at the start of the war in 1939, and the following year had commanded Allied land forces during the latter half of the ill-fated Narvik expedition in Norway. He then commanded a corps in England and was promoted as the GOC Southern Command. Auchinleck's star was definitely on the rise in 1940 and in November, he was promoted to general and appointed as the Commander-in-Chief India. It was in this role that Auchinleck's swift dispatch of soldiers to deal with an uprising in Iraq in 1941 caught Churchill's eye. He appeared to be the decisive, skilled commander he needed to replace Wavell. But Auchinleck was, like the Duke of Wellington, a "Sepoy General" from the Indian Army. In the British Army, "he was not widely known, nor did he widely know others." This would lead to a fatal flaw. While his own soldierly qualities were clearly evident, Auchinleck was a poor selector of subordinates. As David Fraser has written, Auchinleck "did not choose subordinates wisely, nor judge their performance as shrewdly as was needed." In the battles ahead, this would become glaringly obvious and cost Eighth Army dearly.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Eyes of the Whole World, Watching Anxiously
1. Military Background
2. The First Battle
3. Drastic and Immediate Changes
4. Alam Halfa
5. Preparations and Plans
6. Attempting the Break-In
7. Slugging It Out
8. Operation 'Supercharge'
9. Assessment
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
A well-researched and highly readable account of one of World War II's most important 'turning point' battles. . . . Harper provides a 'fresh look' from an unbiased perspective at this decisive battle just in time for its 75th anniversary.
A well-researched and highly readable account of one of World War II's most important 'turning point' battles. . . . Harper provides a 'fresh look' from an unbiased perspective at this decisive battle just in time for its 75th anniversary.