All Hell Let Loose (63 page)

Rommel, returning from sick leave to the battlefield, signalled Berlin that he was embarking upon a full-scale retreat, revealed by Ultra to the triumphant British. By 4 November, Eighth Army was advancing in pursuit across open desert, while Axis units sought escape. Formica wrote that day: ‘As we drove, vehicles of every sort crossed my path, carrying pale and battered men. When I questioned officers and soldiers I realised that our whole line had cracked. It seemed impossible! … “Look,” said my battalion commander. “There are the English tanks.” I saw the enemy … silent and still like some treacherous wild beasts, half hidden in the early-morning mist.’

Lt. Pietro Ostellino wrote that night: ‘We could see flares all around us in the starry sky: red for English and green for German. We had been moving slowly, at the best speed possible given the terrain and the darkness, when I was forced to abandon my tank in the desert because it couldn’t keep up with the others.’ He and a handful of fellow Italians drove trucks westwards through the darkness, occasionally pausing so the officer could dismount and check his compass, until a German vehicle chanced upon them. Ostellino asked for news of the British, and though they had no language in common the Germans made plain that the enemy were all around them, that their only hope was to cover distance before dawn.

They paused briefly around midnight to eat and doze. Ostellino was woken by a shout, walked to investigate, and came upon the remains of an infantry battalion, heading for El Daba. ‘The men were at the end of their tether and desperately thirsty. Only the officers, who all had southern accents, sustained some spirit and energy and urged their men to keep going … It was a pitiful scene when those men driven to desperation by thirst and exhaustion went down on their knees around me so that I could give them a drink.’ He found their colonel, a little veteran of the First World War with one eye covered by a black patch, following his men in a field car. The old man said pityingly, ‘We officers have other spiritual resources but my soldiers, poor fellows, can think only of their thirst.’ In truth, throughout the whole desert campaign Italian leadership was deplorable.

Eighth Army’s armoured units sped westward, their tracks churning sand, their crews thrilled that months of deadlock were broken. ‘The view from a moving tank is like that in a
camera obscura
or a silent film,’ wrote Keith Douglas, ‘in that since the engine drowns all other noises except explosions, the whole world moves silently. Men shout, vehicles move, aeroplanes fly over, and all soundlessly: the noise of the tanks being continuous, perhaps for hours on end, the effect is of silence.’ On and on they drove, though heavy rain and Montgomery’s caution prevented them from converting success into destruction of Rommel’s army. Vicenzo Formica noted in some embarrassment the contrast between the chaotic Italian rout and the ordered withdrawal of the Afrika Korps. ‘I met Captain Bondi, the Ariete’s German liaison officer, cordially disliked by our men. He pointed to parties of German soldiers who were retreating on foot, very tired but still in perfect order, even as enemy shells fell between their files.’

Vittorio Vallicella found the experience of retreat considerably less disagreeable than much else that had happened to him since 1941. He drove fast westwards with only six companions, successfully avoiding the roadblocks established to halt stragglers and reassemble broken units. For some days they were troubled by no news and no officers, and outpaced RAF strafing. They found dumps of petrol and oil to sustain their flight, and even managed to shoot a gazelle for fresh meat: ‘In the tragedy of the war these are some of our best days.’ Such good things came to an end, however: one of the group became sick, and on arrival at a field hospital they found themselves once more under military discipline. Each man was presented with a copy of an Order of the Day which ended with the words: ‘Every effort, every sacrifice will reap a happy and precious reward for the greatness of our country –
nostra patria
.’ Vallicella wrote: ‘Reading this order makes us want to throw up. Some generals always have the word
Patria
on their lips while they themselves are merely busy organising their messing arrangements.’

Panzer officer Tassilo von Bogenhardt said: ‘All the fight seemed to have gone out of the men … We were carpet-bombed, dive-bombed and machine-gunned … The last thing I remember [before being wounded and evacuated] is blowing up my panzer when the petrol had run out, and watching flames slowly envelop it. It was then that I knew this was the end of our Afrika Korps … I remember wondering why the British advanced so cautiously … if they only knew. I almost wished they did know.’

The 1942–43 Advance of Eighth Army

Rommel was able to extricate a substantial part of his forces, but Eighth Army had taken 30,000 Axis prisoners and destroyed large quantities of weapons and equipment. This time, for Rommel’s retreating army there would be no further tilt of the seesaw eastwards. The British had achieved the only substantial land victory of the western war for which they shared laurels with no ally. In the course of December, the Germans turned and fought several fierce rearguard actions, but on each occasion Eighth Army prised them from their positions, and pushed on. Tripoli fell on 23 January 1943. Three days later, Montgomery’s forces found themselves in Tunisia, where the last protracted phase of the North African war was fought out.

The
Torch
landings in Vichy French Algeria and Morocco on 8 November 1942 represented the first big combined operation against the Germans by the US and British armies. Churchill and Roosevelt decreed it in the face of strong opposition from the US chiefs of staff, who saw the Mediterranean merely as the focus of British imperialistic ambitions. Once it was acknowledged that there could be no Continental D-Day in 1942, the president accepted the prime minister’s view that some significant military gesture must be made, to sustain a sense of Allied momentum; North Africa was the only plausible objective.
Torch
involved an initial Anglo-American force of 63,000 men and 430 tanks. It was hoped that Vichy French forces would offer no resistance to the two American assault divisions. Instead, however, these incurred 1,500 casualties in early actions ashore, and were obliged to hit back hard.

A Foreign Legionnaire manning a Vichy battery above Casablanca described the gunners’ horror when American planes fell upon their uncamouflaged positions: ‘In five minutes it was all over. I crept out of the ditch where I had flung myself when the first bomb fell … Out of thirty men and one officer, fifteen men and the officer were dead; ten more were wounded. The two guns were out of commission and two trucks were on fire. For a moment I felt great bitterness in my soul as I saw my comrades scattered all around. Ever since the fall of France, we had dreamed of deliverance, but we did not want it that way.’ On 10 November, Allied supreme commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower brokered a ceasefire. Thereafter, French forces progressively joined the Allied front against the Germans, though hampered by lack of weapons and – in the case of some officers – of enthusiasm for their new cause.

The North African advances thrilled the peoples of the Allied nations, once they dared to believe that these were more than mere swings of the pendulum. Land girl Muriel Green scribbled on 11 November: ‘Suddenly realized the news has become exciting. I had grown so tired of advances and withdrawals in Egypt for the past few years I did not realize this one was anything to jump about over. It is marvellous the Americans striking the other side, I really think things are beginning to happen and that victory is on the way.’ Some Germans were of the same opinion. ‘It is enormously impressive to see how sea power prevails,’ wrote Helmuth von Moltke, who yearned for Hitler’s downfall, on 10 November after the
Torch
landings. ‘It advances like a colossus.’ To the Russians, the war in Africa usually seemed of scant relevance to the immensity of their own struggle. But tidings of
Torch
and Alamein reached the Red Army, and gave its soldiers a small new infusion of hope. Even as Muriel Green was composing her diary in western England, on the Eastern Front Captain Nikolai Belov wrote, ‘Good news came today: the Americans and English are giving the Germans a real thrashing. Though Africa is very far, now it feels so close.’

In the town of Derna, four hundred miles west of Alamein, one November day a party of Italian soldiers hungry for information met some Germans, one of whom who spoke good Italian. This man was a proud Nazi who insisted that the Axis would achieve victory in 1943. He had just been listening to the radio, he said, which announced Germany’s capture of Stalingrad. That obviously meant the end of the Russians. The Italians were in no mood to be so credulous. ‘We hope he is right,’ wrote one, ‘but find his optimism unconvincing.’ Their scepticism was soon vindicated.

During the early stages of the North African campaign, US commanders feared a possible German intervention through Spain. Once this failed to materialise, the invaders were securely ashore and the Vichy French abandoned resistance, the Allies anticipated swift clearance of the entire littoral. In this they were confounded. Hitler made an unexpected decision to send more men to North Africa. After twenty months in which he had denied Rommel support that might have yielded victory, the Führer now chose to reinforce failure. By air and sea, 17,000 German troops and supporting armour moved from Italy into Tunisia, with the acquiescence of its Vichy French resident-general. The Allies still had numerical superiority, but all the American troops and many of the British were green; the Luftwaffe provided effective air support to the Germans, led by Gen. Jürgen von Arnim.

Vittorio Vallicella and his comrades of Italy’s dwindling desert contingent spent Christmas 1942 on the Tunisian shore, nursing homesickness and sheltering from British bombs: ‘At midnight mass, I gaze upon sad faces. The English upset us by launching an air raid, and everyone rushes to their posts. It is thus that we spend Christmas Eve rather than eating the feast Doliman’ – their hugely admired cook – ‘had promised.’ Next day, however, matters improved: the master chef prepared for them pasta with ragù, boiled potatoes, a slice of meat, and – to their astonishment – panettone, ‘never seen in these parts’. Doliman proudly showed them its box: ‘Panettone Motta’. Their Christmas lunch was washed down with half a litre of wine and half a mess-tin of brandy. ‘Never has a meal been so good. We end the day swimming naked in the Mediterranean while our loved ones are almost certainly immersed in fog.’ Vallicella had the good fortune to be taken prisoner by the French soon afterwards, and spent the next three years as an agricultural labourer in their hands; he did not return to his beloved homeland until 1947.

Amid winter rain and mud, the Germans were able to frustrate Allied efforts to rush Tunis: in a series of January offensives, von Arnim’s formations drove back ill-equipped French forces, and held open the supply line to the Afrika Korps further east. In February, they achieved a series of smashing successes against the Americans, destroying two tank, two infantry and two artillery battalions of Lt. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall’s corps in a single forty-eight-hour operation. Rommel then launched an attack through the Kasserine Pass, which drove back Eisenhower’s forces in humiliating disarray. The Americans learned lessons often forced upon the British before them: about the quality of enemy armour, the speed of the Germans’ actions and reactions, the ruthlessness with which they pressed every advantage. Some US units panicked in a fashion which inspired contempt among senior British officers, including Alexander, who should have known better. The performance of the British First Army in Tunisia revealed many shortcomings, both in the skills of its soldiers and in the abilities of its commander, Gen. Kenneth Anderson. Sensible English people understood the folly of patronising their allies. RAF Corporal Peter Baxter wrote in his diary: ‘I think the Americans merely lack training in battle conditions, and maybe aren’t too sure what they’re supposed to be fighting the Germans for.’ Both these suppositions were true.