Gauss
BANNED
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2014
- Messages
- 514
- Reaction score
- -1
- Country
- Location
When Rommel arrived in Tripoli on 12 February 1941, he found the Italians' morale at rock bottom after the enormous defeats which they had received at the hands of O'Connor. He also found that Graziani had given up the Italian High Command in Africa and had been succeeded by his Chief-of-Staff, General Garibaldi. From the start, Rommel was impatient with his Italian allies and lacked confidence in their Command.
He decided to take over immediate command at the front, ignoring the advice that he had received to confine his visit to an initial reconnaissance and wait until the German units arrived. On his first afternoon in Tripoli, he flew forward to Sirte to inspect the terrain and the meagre Italian defences round the village. He decided immediately that the Sirte position must be defended properly, but found that there was no more than a single Italian regiment in the vicinity, the remaining Italian formations being two hundred miles to the rear - halfway back towards Tripoli. However, on 14 February, three days after his own arrival, Rommel was relieved to witness the first German units starting to disembark. They consisted of a reconnaissance battalion and an anti-tank battalion - not much, but in the prevailing climate of insecurity in Tripoli, they were clearly more than welcome.
Because Rommel was still unaware of the recent British decision to divert resources to Greece - he became aware of it only after a week or so - his first days were spent arranging measures to obscure what he thought was the basic weakness of his position and to bluff what he imagined were the still overwhelming British forces into believing that a substantial Axis reinforcement was in progress. In those early days, Rommel literally commuted every morning from Tripoli to Sine, flying back in the evening for a round trip of seven hundred miles. He started to plan a counter-offensive at the moment at which his early patrols told him that his fears of an imminent British attack were unfounded. On their side, the British appear to have had little awareness of the aggressive commander now facing them. On 19 February, Wavell, in Cairo, wrote an appreciation which argued that there was at that stage no serious risk of an Axis counter-attack in Cyrenaica. Moreover, even after his own staff, a few weeks later, had worked out a dummy appreciation, putting themselves in Rommel's shoes and assuming a successful recapture of Cyrenaica, the implications were not generally accepted. Admittedly, had Wavell and his advisers been privy to Rommel's sessions with Hitler, von Brauchitsch and Halder on 19 March, they would have felt their confidence vindicated. But they would have been reckoning without Rommel, as indeed the German High Command in Berlin appeared to do too. Rommel left Berlin distressed at the OKH efforts to keep down the number of his troops and to 'leave the future of this theatre of war to chance'. If that was what they intended to do, then one can imagine his resolving to play a decisive part in shaping that chance, if necessary with only the few troops he then had, until by his actions with them he could convince his masters of the case for more.
Even before he had gone to Berlin, he had ordered his 5th Light Division to attack El Agheila on 24 March, and this attack was duly, and successfully, accomplished. The El Agheila assault was not intended to be the beginning of a major campaign, but once he had started, Rommel soon found that he could not stop. Warfare was to him something more like a continuous operation than a series of set-piece attacks. It was a dynamic and unpredictable process in which the only hope of any kind of mastery was to keep moving. So, six days after the El Agheila assault, he ordered another reconnaissance in force to Mena Brega, forty miles farther on. General Neame, the British commander who had succeeded O'Connor, was ordered to withdraw. General Wavell told him that his task for the next two months was to prevent Rommel from crossing the 150 miles between El Agheila and Benghazi, without incurring heavy losses to the British armour and motorised units. In the event, Rommel was in Benghazi in a few days, Neame was a prisoner and his armoured forces were scattered over the desert well to the rear.
From Mersa Brega, Rommel went straight on to surround Agedabia. In his diaries, one senses the same atmosphere of dynamism and constant movement which characterised his narrative of the French invasion nearly a year before. Of course, there are differences: instead of the divisional commander carrying out his forward reconnaissance on foot, and travelling up and down his divisional area in an armoured car, we now see the corps commander flying everywhere in a little Storch spotter aircraft. Where, in France, fifty miles was an exceptional leap for his division, here the Africa Corps is already strung out over desert distances twice or three times as long. One thing about Rommel's campaign which never changed, however, was his capacity to become exposed to personal danger, and his equally good fortune in escaping from that danger. Near Agedabia, his plane was fired on, at a height of only 150 feet, by Italian troops who had never seen a Storch before. Another time, he was caught in a sandstorm, and only the refusal of the pilot to be bullied by Rommel into flying on saved them both from flying into death.
By 3 April, ten days after the first move, Rommel's personal air reconnaissance had given him enough evidence to conclude that a major British retreat was in hand. He decided to recapture the whole of Cyrenaica. Indeed, his thoughts were already reaching much farther than that. One evening, in his tent, upon hearing the bad news from the Eritrean campaign, he laughed and told his staff officers: 'We shall reach the Nile, make a right turn and win back everything.'
As the speed of the advance started to quicken, two things happened to Rommel which typified the highly idiosyncratic and personal nature of his command of the Africa Corps. Near Mechili, his Storch landed in a sandhill and could not take off again. He narrowly escaped capture by an approaching British column only by taking flight in a discarded German truck which he found in the vicinity. The other event, which was a direct consequence of the first, was that he was completely out of contact with his headquarters - indeed with his entire army. No one knew where he was or where to find him. There was thus a certain amount of confusion between Rommel's original orders for the newly-arrived 5th Light Division to advance on Mechili, and new orders from his staff who felt that the situation had developed promisingly enough to justify by-passing Mechili in a leapfrog movement straight to Tobruk. When Rommel reappeared, he declared angrily that he had personally visited the 5th Light Division headquarters and confirmed his original order to attack Mechili. But his anger could not obscure the fact that the corps had been forced to operate for some time in a fast-moving mobile battle without its commander, who might easily have come to the same decision to go straight to Tobruk had he remained in a central position at which he could more competently assess the overall situation. Had he done so, he might well have reached Tobruk in time to prevent the British defences consolidating. As it was, the British had time to build up Tobruk, and Rommel's subsequent failure to capture it in 1941 prevented him from a much longer eastward advance.
In fairness to Rommel, he was not the only general in the desert hurrying about out of touch with troops and headquarters. The North African campaign was singular for the number of generals who were captured simply because sharp battlelines were so seldom drawn, and because each engagement resembled nothing so much as a general melee over a very large area. On the night of 6 April, Generals Neame and O'Connor got lost together in their staff car and were captured by a German recce group as they drove north from Mechili to Derna, hoping to make contact with the British units which were trapped in Derna. When Rommel drove into Mechili the next day, he found O'Connor's armoured command vehicle, the Mammoth, lying abandoned but otherwise intact, even to the provision of a pair of sun- and sand-goggles. He climbed into the vehicle and put on the goggles saying: 'Booty - permissible, I take it, even for a general.' The goggles and the Mammoth were to become an inseparable part of Rommel's image during the next two years.
By 10 April, Rommel had reached the outer defences of Tobruk, and there he was brought to a halt for the first time. However, in the space of just over two weeks, what he called 'an unprepared offensive' had driven the British out of western Cyrenaica and had reversed the strategic situation which had obtained in North Africa when he arrived. Naturally, it was not entirely his own doing, but Rommel's genius in the desert was his exploitation of every offensive opportunity that presented itself to him, however small, in the hope of acquiring such momentum that his innate confidence in victory would become, in a sense, self-fulfilling. Indeed, from his point of view, the victories in those two weeks had the desired effect on the British.
Wavell was certainly taken by surprise by the speed and success of Rommel's offensive. He had not believed that an enemy offensive was really possible until May, and in this he was objectively right, if one assumed that, to be effective, the offensive needed the supplies and reinforcements which had not even started to arrive when Rommel began his advance eastward. But Wavell also found that in Neame he had chosen the wrong man to succeed O'Connor. When, after a week of fighting, the fall of Benghazi was imminent, Wavell became convinced that Neame had lost control of the situation, and he wanted to go to the front and assert his own authority over the battle. History might then have changed direction, but, incredibly, there was no suitable aircraft available for Wavell to travel in, and his journey was delayed. When he finally got to Tobruk, a week later, the situation was much more out of hand. Wavell too was nearly captured on his return to Cairo: his plane had to make a forced landing and the Commander-in-Chief of the entire African and Middle East theatre was saved from falling into the hands of the advancing Germans only by a lone Sudanese soldier who turned up in a single truck and drove him to safety.
Rommel was indeed fortunate to have as his opposing Commander-in-Chief a man whose time and energy during those critical weeks were almost entirely taken up with the rapidly-developing disaster in Greece and Crete. Indeed, throughout the two years in which Rommel was in the desert, there was a striking contrast between the relative independence of his own command - subject of course to the stringent supply shortages from which he later suffered - and in particular his freedom to concentrate entirely on the desert battle in front of him, and the incessant, multifarious and very much more strategic preoccupations affecting an enormous theatre of operations which continuously beset the British Commander-in-Chief in Cairo. Yet each time that his opposing Commander-in-Chief - both Wavell and his successor Auchinleck - got up from his desk in Cairo and came down to fight Rommel face-to-face, Rommel's dominance of the battle was no longer assured.
As Rommel approached Tobruk in early April, Wavell just had time to fly up to Tobruk and pull the British forces together to stop the helter-skelter slide back into Egypt. He decided to make Tobruk into a fortress, with the main British defence line farther east at Sollum. Then he was off to Athens. While three unsuccessful German assaults were being repulsed from Tobruk, Wavell was coping with the deteriorating Greek campaign, which ended in Greece's capitulation to the Germans on 24 April, and the evacuation of those precious British troops who had been diverted from the Cyrenaica campaign only a few months before. In Cairo, the situation appeared to have grim possibilities. The general staff dusted out its files on the 'worst possible case' of Rommel breaking through to the Nile. These plans had first been postulated a year earlier, when the Italians captured Sidi Barrani. But, as is usual with contingency plans, their significance was exaggerated outside the headquarters, and Churchill never really forgave Wavell for the defeatism which he believed was implicit in this contemplation of the unmentionable. Indeed, once again he lost his temper at the mere suggestion that Egypt might be lost, and told his army chiefs that, 'if Wavell lost Egypt, blood would flow and he would have firing parties to shoot the generals'.
Ironically, while Wavell in adversity was getting into trouble with London, Rommel in victory was in almost as much bother with Berlin. In fact, though it would not be true to say that it was Rommel's victories which were upsetting Berlin, the German general staff were clearly reluctant to make any further provision for the Africa Corps, whatever its successes, if this would jeopardise the final preparations for Barbarossa. Rommel had hardly reached the outskirts of Tobruk before Halder was referring to his 'preposterous demands'. After Rommel's forces had again been repulsed from Tobruk, Halder drily notes: 'Rommel has at last admitted that his forces are not strong enough to take full advantage of the unique opportunities. It is the impression we have had for some time.' A week later, he is at Rommel again:
The reports from North Africa worry me. Rommel has not reported, but I feel things are in a mess. Reports from officers show that he is in no way up to his operational task. All day long he rushes about between widely scattered units. He fritters away his forces in reconnaissance raids and piecemeal thrusts of weak armoured forces which are costly. Our air transport cannot meet his senseless demands: Aircraft landing there find no fuel for the return flight.
Should he go out to make an on-the-spot assessment? No, Halder concluded; but decided instead to send out General Paulus as 'perhaps the only man with enough personal influence to head off this soldier gone stark mad'.
What had gone wrong? Two factors were really at work. One was the crescendo of preparation for Barbarossa, which was due to start in just under two months' time. The other was the fact that, basically, the German general staff did not want to be bothered by the Africa campaign. They had sent Rommel out there to get on with it with a certain number of troops. If he did anything which required more troops, they would be basically rather irritated, even if, as it turned out, his demand for reinforcements derived from the greater opportunities which he had exposed, rather than because the troops they had originally allocated to him were unequal to the task he had been given.
In fact, the OKH reluctantly agreed to send Rommel five more battalions, and to improve the supply organisation through Naples. Halder's assessment was that a decisive attack on Tobruk was out of the question, and Rommel came to the same conclusion about ten days later. Should the siege of Tobruk be raised, and Rommel withdraw from his positions at Sollum a hundred miles farther east? Halder recognised the political undesirability of this course, but told Paulus, prior to his visit, to impress on Rommel that resources were slender, that no more help could be forthcoming and that if he could not maintain his present position in those circumstances, he must make the necessary adjustments. Even Hitler was taking a cautious view. If Tobruk fell, he instructed Rommel to advance only as far as the Sollum/Bardia line, to consolidate there and to make only reconnaissance forays deeper into Egypt - even if the enemy withdrew farther. If the British held out in Tobruk (as indeed they did), then Rommel should withdraw to a defensive line about forty miles to the west at Gazala.
A few days later, Paulus radioed his report from North Africa. The Tobruk assault was over, he said, and Rommel's troops were in bad shape. He had instructed Rommel to hold Cyrenaica at all costs and to construct a firm defensive line. Above all, the crux was neither Sollum nor Tobruk, but supply. He then returned to Berlin and reported personally to Halder while Rommel's 'distress calls became more urgent'.
Halder concluded that Rommel, 'by overstepping his orders has brought about a situation for which our present supplies are insufficient. Rommel cannot cope with the situation.' As it happened, he was wrong, but there was one outcome of the Paulus visit which no German could predict. It had a galvanising effect on the British.
This quite unpredictable consequence arose because Paulus's first cable to Berlin was intercepted and decoded in London. Churchill reacted instantly. He cabled to Wavell urging him to take advantage of the weaknesses in Rommel's situation which had been so helpfully exposed for him by General Paulus. Wavell must retake the offensive, he said, as soon as he received the three hundred tanks which were then already on their way in convoy through the Mediterranean. On 15 May, without waiting for the tanks, Wavell instructed one of his corps commanders, General Gott, to attack Rommel in the Sollum area. The British captured Sollum and Capuzzo momentarily, but then Rommel counter-attacked and the British withdrew from all their newly-won positions except the Halfaya Pass, and retreated even from there a few days later, under the impact of a renewed attack by Rommel. Churchill's pressure on Wavell continued. Rommel, meanwhile, consolidated his positions round Halfaya, and round the perimeter which kept the Tobruk garrison from breaking out behind his front line. Eventually, Wavell was reluctantly forced, against his instincts, into planning Operation 'Battleaxe' for 15 June.
Wavell's plan for the battle was to be based on a three-pronged attack against' Rommel's forces. The first prong, between the coast and the high escarpment, would advance on and capture Sollum barracks. The second column, on top of the escarpment and to the south of it, was to advance to Halfaya and Capuzzo, while the third column, consisting of most of the armour, was to keep farther south and, by threatening to sweep round Rommel's right flank and attack his rear, and his supply lines, lure his armour into a tank battle in the' open desert south of Capuzzo or Halfaya. If Rommel then withdrew into Bardia, Wavell intended to press on to El Adam, and ultimately to join up with the garrison at Tobruk, but that second phase would have to depend on how the first part of the battle progressed.
Rommel, for his part, intended to let any British offensive just wear itself out on the by now well-prepared anti-tank defensive positions. He hoped virtually to keep the powder dry in his two armoured formations, holding them in the rear for later committal as the battle developed. His army was poised rather like a dancer ready to sway or swivel in any direction. Perhaps this is how Rommel himself saw it, because he later described how 'in a decisive moment it is often possible to decide the issue by making an unexpected shift of one's main weight'. On the third day of Battleaxe, that is just what he did.
The first day of the British attack found Rommel well prepared, in both the Halfaya and Capuzzo areas. No great British headway was made at Halfaya, though the centre column succeeded during the first afternoon in taking Capuzzo and then turning right-handed towards Sollum and the sea. One of the most serious factors affecting early British tank losses was the devastating use made by the Germans of their 88 mm anti-aircraft guns converted into an anti-tank role. However, the British plan for the second day was to continue slogging on. Rommel meanwhile decided to commit his two armoured formations to the battle, having decided that the British armour had by then been satisfactorily worn down on his defences. As it turned out, he was half wrong. When the 15th Panzer Division was sent into battle in the Capuzzo area, it made little headway and eventually, towards the end of the second day, had to disengage. The 5th Light Division, however, some sixteen miles farther west, succeeded in overcoming the British brigade opposing it and continued its advance towards Sidi Suleiman, some eight to ten miles to the rear of Britain's forward position in the fight round Capuzzo.
It was at this point, on the second night of the three-day battle, that Rommel decided to shift his weight. In doing so, he achieved a decisive change in his fortunes. Until that moment, the battle of attrition of the first two days had, on balance, probably ended better for the British than for the Germans. Certainly, that was what the British felt on the second night, and Rommel too knew that the 15th Panzer Division's tank strength had dropped from eighty to thirty. But Rommel's subsequent manoeuvres managed to take the British by surprise, throw them off balance and cause-a hasty withdrawal, leaving Rommel in sole possession of the battlefield.
Retaining only enough units in the Capuzzo area to pin down the British front, he disengaged the rest of the 15th Panzer Division from the battle and wheeled them round in a wide right-handed arc to join forces with the 5th Light Division, which was by then coming in from the wings and threatening the British rear at Sidi Suleiman. With the German forces thus concentrated, the British commanders had barely enough time to withdraw across the enemy's front before Rommel bore down on them.
By the afternoon of 17 June, it was all over. Wavell, who had flown up too late to see for himself, returned to Cairo and opened his signal to London with the words: 'I regret to report the failure of Battleaxe.' Rommel and the Africa Corps were exultant. To Lu, Rommel wrote of 'a complete victory'. He spent three days going round the battlefield and then wrote again, 'Now the enemy can come, he'll get an even bigger beating.' Even Halder could scarce forbear to cheer from his usually cheerless office at the OKH. 'Losses at Sollum', he wrote, 'are 560 - reasonable, and a better proportion than at Tobruk.' He then turned to his Barbarossa calculations - German divisions in the field, 141; Russian, 213. In a few days' time, in the Russian theatre, he was to start calculating losses in hundreds of thousands, but of Africa all he could say was that 560 was reasonable. In London, Churchill, if not inconsolable, nevertheless resolved to change his commanders. On 21 June, the day on which Hitler attacked Russia, Wavell was replaced by Auchinleck. With his victory in Battleaxe, Rommel's first phase in Africa was virtually over. It was to be some months before the new phase began.
He decided to take over immediate command at the front, ignoring the advice that he had received to confine his visit to an initial reconnaissance and wait until the German units arrived. On his first afternoon in Tripoli, he flew forward to Sirte to inspect the terrain and the meagre Italian defences round the village. He decided immediately that the Sirte position must be defended properly, but found that there was no more than a single Italian regiment in the vicinity, the remaining Italian formations being two hundred miles to the rear - halfway back towards Tripoli. However, on 14 February, three days after his own arrival, Rommel was relieved to witness the first German units starting to disembark. They consisted of a reconnaissance battalion and an anti-tank battalion - not much, but in the prevailing climate of insecurity in Tripoli, they were clearly more than welcome.
Because Rommel was still unaware of the recent British decision to divert resources to Greece - he became aware of it only after a week or so - his first days were spent arranging measures to obscure what he thought was the basic weakness of his position and to bluff what he imagined were the still overwhelming British forces into believing that a substantial Axis reinforcement was in progress. In those early days, Rommel literally commuted every morning from Tripoli to Sine, flying back in the evening for a round trip of seven hundred miles. He started to plan a counter-offensive at the moment at which his early patrols told him that his fears of an imminent British attack were unfounded. On their side, the British appear to have had little awareness of the aggressive commander now facing them. On 19 February, Wavell, in Cairo, wrote an appreciation which argued that there was at that stage no serious risk of an Axis counter-attack in Cyrenaica. Moreover, even after his own staff, a few weeks later, had worked out a dummy appreciation, putting themselves in Rommel's shoes and assuming a successful recapture of Cyrenaica, the implications were not generally accepted. Admittedly, had Wavell and his advisers been privy to Rommel's sessions with Hitler, von Brauchitsch and Halder on 19 March, they would have felt their confidence vindicated. But they would have been reckoning without Rommel, as indeed the German High Command in Berlin appeared to do too. Rommel left Berlin distressed at the OKH efforts to keep down the number of his troops and to 'leave the future of this theatre of war to chance'. If that was what they intended to do, then one can imagine his resolving to play a decisive part in shaping that chance, if necessary with only the few troops he then had, until by his actions with them he could convince his masters of the case for more.
Even before he had gone to Berlin, he had ordered his 5th Light Division to attack El Agheila on 24 March, and this attack was duly, and successfully, accomplished. The El Agheila assault was not intended to be the beginning of a major campaign, but once he had started, Rommel soon found that he could not stop. Warfare was to him something more like a continuous operation than a series of set-piece attacks. It was a dynamic and unpredictable process in which the only hope of any kind of mastery was to keep moving. So, six days after the El Agheila assault, he ordered another reconnaissance in force to Mena Brega, forty miles farther on. General Neame, the British commander who had succeeded O'Connor, was ordered to withdraw. General Wavell told him that his task for the next two months was to prevent Rommel from crossing the 150 miles between El Agheila and Benghazi, without incurring heavy losses to the British armour and motorised units. In the event, Rommel was in Benghazi in a few days, Neame was a prisoner and his armoured forces were scattered over the desert well to the rear.
From Mersa Brega, Rommel went straight on to surround Agedabia. In his diaries, one senses the same atmosphere of dynamism and constant movement which characterised his narrative of the French invasion nearly a year before. Of course, there are differences: instead of the divisional commander carrying out his forward reconnaissance on foot, and travelling up and down his divisional area in an armoured car, we now see the corps commander flying everywhere in a little Storch spotter aircraft. Where, in France, fifty miles was an exceptional leap for his division, here the Africa Corps is already strung out over desert distances twice or three times as long. One thing about Rommel's campaign which never changed, however, was his capacity to become exposed to personal danger, and his equally good fortune in escaping from that danger. Near Agedabia, his plane was fired on, at a height of only 150 feet, by Italian troops who had never seen a Storch before. Another time, he was caught in a sandstorm, and only the refusal of the pilot to be bullied by Rommel into flying on saved them both from flying into death.
By 3 April, ten days after the first move, Rommel's personal air reconnaissance had given him enough evidence to conclude that a major British retreat was in hand. He decided to recapture the whole of Cyrenaica. Indeed, his thoughts were already reaching much farther than that. One evening, in his tent, upon hearing the bad news from the Eritrean campaign, he laughed and told his staff officers: 'We shall reach the Nile, make a right turn and win back everything.'
As the speed of the advance started to quicken, two things happened to Rommel which typified the highly idiosyncratic and personal nature of his command of the Africa Corps. Near Mechili, his Storch landed in a sandhill and could not take off again. He narrowly escaped capture by an approaching British column only by taking flight in a discarded German truck which he found in the vicinity. The other event, which was a direct consequence of the first, was that he was completely out of contact with his headquarters - indeed with his entire army. No one knew where he was or where to find him. There was thus a certain amount of confusion between Rommel's original orders for the newly-arrived 5th Light Division to advance on Mechili, and new orders from his staff who felt that the situation had developed promisingly enough to justify by-passing Mechili in a leapfrog movement straight to Tobruk. When Rommel reappeared, he declared angrily that he had personally visited the 5th Light Division headquarters and confirmed his original order to attack Mechili. But his anger could not obscure the fact that the corps had been forced to operate for some time in a fast-moving mobile battle without its commander, who might easily have come to the same decision to go straight to Tobruk had he remained in a central position at which he could more competently assess the overall situation. Had he done so, he might well have reached Tobruk in time to prevent the British defences consolidating. As it was, the British had time to build up Tobruk, and Rommel's subsequent failure to capture it in 1941 prevented him from a much longer eastward advance.
In fairness to Rommel, he was not the only general in the desert hurrying about out of touch with troops and headquarters. The North African campaign was singular for the number of generals who were captured simply because sharp battlelines were so seldom drawn, and because each engagement resembled nothing so much as a general melee over a very large area. On the night of 6 April, Generals Neame and O'Connor got lost together in their staff car and were captured by a German recce group as they drove north from Mechili to Derna, hoping to make contact with the British units which were trapped in Derna. When Rommel drove into Mechili the next day, he found O'Connor's armoured command vehicle, the Mammoth, lying abandoned but otherwise intact, even to the provision of a pair of sun- and sand-goggles. He climbed into the vehicle and put on the goggles saying: 'Booty - permissible, I take it, even for a general.' The goggles and the Mammoth were to become an inseparable part of Rommel's image during the next two years.
By 10 April, Rommel had reached the outer defences of Tobruk, and there he was brought to a halt for the first time. However, in the space of just over two weeks, what he called 'an unprepared offensive' had driven the British out of western Cyrenaica and had reversed the strategic situation which had obtained in North Africa when he arrived. Naturally, it was not entirely his own doing, but Rommel's genius in the desert was his exploitation of every offensive opportunity that presented itself to him, however small, in the hope of acquiring such momentum that his innate confidence in victory would become, in a sense, self-fulfilling. Indeed, from his point of view, the victories in those two weeks had the desired effect on the British.
Wavell was certainly taken by surprise by the speed and success of Rommel's offensive. He had not believed that an enemy offensive was really possible until May, and in this he was objectively right, if one assumed that, to be effective, the offensive needed the supplies and reinforcements which had not even started to arrive when Rommel began his advance eastward. But Wavell also found that in Neame he had chosen the wrong man to succeed O'Connor. When, after a week of fighting, the fall of Benghazi was imminent, Wavell became convinced that Neame had lost control of the situation, and he wanted to go to the front and assert his own authority over the battle. History might then have changed direction, but, incredibly, there was no suitable aircraft available for Wavell to travel in, and his journey was delayed. When he finally got to Tobruk, a week later, the situation was much more out of hand. Wavell too was nearly captured on his return to Cairo: his plane had to make a forced landing and the Commander-in-Chief of the entire African and Middle East theatre was saved from falling into the hands of the advancing Germans only by a lone Sudanese soldier who turned up in a single truck and drove him to safety.
Rommel was indeed fortunate to have as his opposing Commander-in-Chief a man whose time and energy during those critical weeks were almost entirely taken up with the rapidly-developing disaster in Greece and Crete. Indeed, throughout the two years in which Rommel was in the desert, there was a striking contrast between the relative independence of his own command - subject of course to the stringent supply shortages from which he later suffered - and in particular his freedom to concentrate entirely on the desert battle in front of him, and the incessant, multifarious and very much more strategic preoccupations affecting an enormous theatre of operations which continuously beset the British Commander-in-Chief in Cairo. Yet each time that his opposing Commander-in-Chief - both Wavell and his successor Auchinleck - got up from his desk in Cairo and came down to fight Rommel face-to-face, Rommel's dominance of the battle was no longer assured.
As Rommel approached Tobruk in early April, Wavell just had time to fly up to Tobruk and pull the British forces together to stop the helter-skelter slide back into Egypt. He decided to make Tobruk into a fortress, with the main British defence line farther east at Sollum. Then he was off to Athens. While three unsuccessful German assaults were being repulsed from Tobruk, Wavell was coping with the deteriorating Greek campaign, which ended in Greece's capitulation to the Germans on 24 April, and the evacuation of those precious British troops who had been diverted from the Cyrenaica campaign only a few months before. In Cairo, the situation appeared to have grim possibilities. The general staff dusted out its files on the 'worst possible case' of Rommel breaking through to the Nile. These plans had first been postulated a year earlier, when the Italians captured Sidi Barrani. But, as is usual with contingency plans, their significance was exaggerated outside the headquarters, and Churchill never really forgave Wavell for the defeatism which he believed was implicit in this contemplation of the unmentionable. Indeed, once again he lost his temper at the mere suggestion that Egypt might be lost, and told his army chiefs that, 'if Wavell lost Egypt, blood would flow and he would have firing parties to shoot the generals'.
Ironically, while Wavell in adversity was getting into trouble with London, Rommel in victory was in almost as much bother with Berlin. In fact, though it would not be true to say that it was Rommel's victories which were upsetting Berlin, the German general staff were clearly reluctant to make any further provision for the Africa Corps, whatever its successes, if this would jeopardise the final preparations for Barbarossa. Rommel had hardly reached the outskirts of Tobruk before Halder was referring to his 'preposterous demands'. After Rommel's forces had again been repulsed from Tobruk, Halder drily notes: 'Rommel has at last admitted that his forces are not strong enough to take full advantage of the unique opportunities. It is the impression we have had for some time.' A week later, he is at Rommel again:
The reports from North Africa worry me. Rommel has not reported, but I feel things are in a mess. Reports from officers show that he is in no way up to his operational task. All day long he rushes about between widely scattered units. He fritters away his forces in reconnaissance raids and piecemeal thrusts of weak armoured forces which are costly. Our air transport cannot meet his senseless demands: Aircraft landing there find no fuel for the return flight.
Should he go out to make an on-the-spot assessment? No, Halder concluded; but decided instead to send out General Paulus as 'perhaps the only man with enough personal influence to head off this soldier gone stark mad'.
What had gone wrong? Two factors were really at work. One was the crescendo of preparation for Barbarossa, which was due to start in just under two months' time. The other was the fact that, basically, the German general staff did not want to be bothered by the Africa campaign. They had sent Rommel out there to get on with it with a certain number of troops. If he did anything which required more troops, they would be basically rather irritated, even if, as it turned out, his demand for reinforcements derived from the greater opportunities which he had exposed, rather than because the troops they had originally allocated to him were unequal to the task he had been given.
In fact, the OKH reluctantly agreed to send Rommel five more battalions, and to improve the supply organisation through Naples. Halder's assessment was that a decisive attack on Tobruk was out of the question, and Rommel came to the same conclusion about ten days later. Should the siege of Tobruk be raised, and Rommel withdraw from his positions at Sollum a hundred miles farther east? Halder recognised the political undesirability of this course, but told Paulus, prior to his visit, to impress on Rommel that resources were slender, that no more help could be forthcoming and that if he could not maintain his present position in those circumstances, he must make the necessary adjustments. Even Hitler was taking a cautious view. If Tobruk fell, he instructed Rommel to advance only as far as the Sollum/Bardia line, to consolidate there and to make only reconnaissance forays deeper into Egypt - even if the enemy withdrew farther. If the British held out in Tobruk (as indeed they did), then Rommel should withdraw to a defensive line about forty miles to the west at Gazala.
A few days later, Paulus radioed his report from North Africa. The Tobruk assault was over, he said, and Rommel's troops were in bad shape. He had instructed Rommel to hold Cyrenaica at all costs and to construct a firm defensive line. Above all, the crux was neither Sollum nor Tobruk, but supply. He then returned to Berlin and reported personally to Halder while Rommel's 'distress calls became more urgent'.
Halder concluded that Rommel, 'by overstepping his orders has brought about a situation for which our present supplies are insufficient. Rommel cannot cope with the situation.' As it happened, he was wrong, but there was one outcome of the Paulus visit which no German could predict. It had a galvanising effect on the British.
This quite unpredictable consequence arose because Paulus's first cable to Berlin was intercepted and decoded in London. Churchill reacted instantly. He cabled to Wavell urging him to take advantage of the weaknesses in Rommel's situation which had been so helpfully exposed for him by General Paulus. Wavell must retake the offensive, he said, as soon as he received the three hundred tanks which were then already on their way in convoy through the Mediterranean. On 15 May, without waiting for the tanks, Wavell instructed one of his corps commanders, General Gott, to attack Rommel in the Sollum area. The British captured Sollum and Capuzzo momentarily, but then Rommel counter-attacked and the British withdrew from all their newly-won positions except the Halfaya Pass, and retreated even from there a few days later, under the impact of a renewed attack by Rommel. Churchill's pressure on Wavell continued. Rommel, meanwhile, consolidated his positions round Halfaya, and round the perimeter which kept the Tobruk garrison from breaking out behind his front line. Eventually, Wavell was reluctantly forced, against his instincts, into planning Operation 'Battleaxe' for 15 June.
Wavell's plan for the battle was to be based on a three-pronged attack against' Rommel's forces. The first prong, between the coast and the high escarpment, would advance on and capture Sollum barracks. The second column, on top of the escarpment and to the south of it, was to advance to Halfaya and Capuzzo, while the third column, consisting of most of the armour, was to keep farther south and, by threatening to sweep round Rommel's right flank and attack his rear, and his supply lines, lure his armour into a tank battle in the' open desert south of Capuzzo or Halfaya. If Rommel then withdrew into Bardia, Wavell intended to press on to El Adam, and ultimately to join up with the garrison at Tobruk, but that second phase would have to depend on how the first part of the battle progressed.
Rommel, for his part, intended to let any British offensive just wear itself out on the by now well-prepared anti-tank defensive positions. He hoped virtually to keep the powder dry in his two armoured formations, holding them in the rear for later committal as the battle developed. His army was poised rather like a dancer ready to sway or swivel in any direction. Perhaps this is how Rommel himself saw it, because he later described how 'in a decisive moment it is often possible to decide the issue by making an unexpected shift of one's main weight'. On the third day of Battleaxe, that is just what he did.
The first day of the British attack found Rommel well prepared, in both the Halfaya and Capuzzo areas. No great British headway was made at Halfaya, though the centre column succeeded during the first afternoon in taking Capuzzo and then turning right-handed towards Sollum and the sea. One of the most serious factors affecting early British tank losses was the devastating use made by the Germans of their 88 mm anti-aircraft guns converted into an anti-tank role. However, the British plan for the second day was to continue slogging on. Rommel meanwhile decided to commit his two armoured formations to the battle, having decided that the British armour had by then been satisfactorily worn down on his defences. As it turned out, he was half wrong. When the 15th Panzer Division was sent into battle in the Capuzzo area, it made little headway and eventually, towards the end of the second day, had to disengage. The 5th Light Division, however, some sixteen miles farther west, succeeded in overcoming the British brigade opposing it and continued its advance towards Sidi Suleiman, some eight to ten miles to the rear of Britain's forward position in the fight round Capuzzo.
It was at this point, on the second night of the three-day battle, that Rommel decided to shift his weight. In doing so, he achieved a decisive change in his fortunes. Until that moment, the battle of attrition of the first two days had, on balance, probably ended better for the British than for the Germans. Certainly, that was what the British felt on the second night, and Rommel too knew that the 15th Panzer Division's tank strength had dropped from eighty to thirty. But Rommel's subsequent manoeuvres managed to take the British by surprise, throw them off balance and cause-a hasty withdrawal, leaving Rommel in sole possession of the battlefield.
Retaining only enough units in the Capuzzo area to pin down the British front, he disengaged the rest of the 15th Panzer Division from the battle and wheeled them round in a wide right-handed arc to join forces with the 5th Light Division, which was by then coming in from the wings and threatening the British rear at Sidi Suleiman. With the German forces thus concentrated, the British commanders had barely enough time to withdraw across the enemy's front before Rommel bore down on them.
By the afternoon of 17 June, it was all over. Wavell, who had flown up too late to see for himself, returned to Cairo and opened his signal to London with the words: 'I regret to report the failure of Battleaxe.' Rommel and the Africa Corps were exultant. To Lu, Rommel wrote of 'a complete victory'. He spent three days going round the battlefield and then wrote again, 'Now the enemy can come, he'll get an even bigger beating.' Even Halder could scarce forbear to cheer from his usually cheerless office at the OKH. 'Losses at Sollum', he wrote, 'are 560 - reasonable, and a better proportion than at Tobruk.' He then turned to his Barbarossa calculations - German divisions in the field, 141; Russian, 213. In a few days' time, in the Russian theatre, he was to start calculating losses in hundreds of thousands, but of Africa all he could say was that 560 was reasonable. In London, Churchill, if not inconsolable, nevertheless resolved to change his commanders. On 21 June, the day on which Hitler attacked Russia, Wavell was replaced by Auchinleck. With his victory in Battleaxe, Rommel's first phase in Africa was virtually over. It was to be some months before the new phase began.
Last edited:
