History of the Second World War (46 page)

Then in late October the British resumed the offensive, in greater strength than ever before — and this time decisively. After a thirteen-day struggle, Rommel’s resources were finished, and his tanks almost completely used up. His front then collapsed, and he was fortunate in escaping with the remnants of his army. They were too weak to make any further serious stand, and by the end of the year, eight weeks later, he had been driven back to Buerat in Tripolitania — a thousand miles back from Alamein. Even that was only a halt in a retreat that ended at Tunis, in the following May, with the complete extinction of the German and Italian forces in Africa.*

* For map, see pp. 110-11.

At the beginning of January 1942 the British regarded their repulse at Agedabia as no more than a momentary interruption of their advance on Tripoli. They were busy with plans and the build-up for this operation — which was too aptly named ‘Acrobat’. Before the month ended they had done a string of somersaults, backwards.

On January 5 a convoy of six ships, which had succeeded in slipping through the British naval and air curtain, reached Tripoli with a fresh batch of tanks that brought Rommel’s strength up to just over a hundred. With that aid, and in the light of a report about the weakness of the British advanced forces, he started to plan an immediate counterstroke — keeping his intention secret. He launched it on January 21. On the 23rd the Italian War Minister arrived at his headquarters to raise objections, but by then Rommel’s spearhead had already driven a hundred miles eastward, and the British were moving eastward even faster.

The British advanced force, at the moment when Rommel struck, was formed mainly of a newly arrived armoured division, the 1st, whose armoured brigade (of 150 cruiser tanks) was composed of three converted cavalry regiments — with little experience of armoured operations, and no experience of desert operations. Their handicap was increased because Rommel’s new batch of Panzer III tanks were better armoured (with plates of 50 mm. thickness) than the older ones, while the German anti-tank gunners had been practising a further development of their offensive tactics in combination with their own tanks. This development is described by Heinz Schmidt:

With our twelve anti-tank guns we leap-frogged from one vantage-point to another, while our Panzers, stationary and hull-down, if possible, provided protective fire. Then we would establish ourselves to give them protective fire while they swept on again. The tactics worked well and, despite the liveliness of his fire, the enemy’s tanks were not able to hold up our advance. He steadily sustained losses and had to give ground constantly. We could not help feeling that we were not then up against the tough and experienced opponents who had harried us so hard on the Trigh Capuzzo.†

† Schmidt:
With Rommel in the Desert,
pp. 125-6.

Worse still, the three British armoured regiments were brought into action separately. They lost nearly halt their tanks in the first engagements, when the Germans attacked them by surprise near Antelat. Rommel’s advance was then temporarily halted by the intervention of the Italian War Minister, General Cavallero, who refused to allow the Italian Mobile Corps to follow up the Afrika Korps. But the British failed to profit from this pause, and the absence of any strong countermove on their part emboldened Rommel to thrust forward again on the 25th, to Msus, bursting through the line held by the Guards Brigade and the 1st Armoured Division, which fell back northward, away from his line of advance, with its remaining thirty tanks.

Rommel’s deep and threatening thrust to Msus produced a hasty order that the 4th Indian Division at Benghazi was to evacuate this port, now crammed with supplies, and withdraw to the Derna-Mechili line. The withdrawal was countermanded that night, and the preparation of a counter-offensive ordered, following the arrival of Auchinleck, who had flown up from Cairo to see Ritchie at Eighth Army headquarters. But his intervention did not prove so fitting or effective as in November. For it resulted in the British becoming spread out and static in trying to cover the 140 miles stretch between Benghazi and Mechili, while Rommel, from his central position at Msus, was allowed time and freedom to develop his action, as well as a choice of alternative objectives.

This variability of threat on his part produced ‘orders, counterorders, and disorders’ in the British command during the days that followed. One sequel was that the corps commander, Godwin-Austen, asked to be relieved of his command because of the way that the army commander was issuing orders directly to the subordinate commanders. Worse results followed.

Since Rommel’s strength was small, he decided to turn westward against Benghazi as his next move, to quench any threat to his rear from that direction, while making a show of driving eastward to Mechili. The feint hypnotised the British command so that they hurried reinforcements to Mechili, while the widely stretched 4th Indian Division was left unsupported. Rommel’s rapid switch towards Benghazi came as a shock, and produced a hurried abandonment of the port, with all its accumulated stores. Exploiting the shock effect, he sent two small battle-groups to drive eastward. By their bold blend of thrust and threat they caused the British to abandon a series of possible defensive positions, and fall back to the Gazala line — although the bulk of the Afrika Korps, owing to shortage of supplies, had not yet advanced farther east than Msus. It was on February 4 that the British Eighth Army retreated into the shelter of the Gazala defences, but it was not until the beginning of April that Rommel, after overcoming the hesitation of the Italian higher command, was able to move up his forces close to the British position.

By this time the Gazala position was being developed, by constructing field works and laying extensive minefields, from a line into a Line — in the fortified sense of the term. But its preparation for defence was soon overshadowed by the planning for a renewed British offensive, and while it became a suitable springboard for that purpose, it was less suitable for defence — being too linear, and lacking in depth. Except in the coastal sector, the fortified points were too far apart to give one another effective fire-support. They extended fifty miles southward from the coast, with increasing gaps. The left flank position at Bir Hacheim, held by the 1st Free French Brigade under General Koenig, was sixteen miles beyond that at Sidi Muftah. Another complication for the defence was the forward base and railhead established at Belhamed, with a view to the renewed offensive. It was an obvious target for an outflanking thrust by the enemy, and the need to cover the vast amount of supplies piled up there was a constant worry to the British commanders in the battle, cramping their freedom of manoeuvre.

Policy and planning also suffered from a conflict of views on the British side about the practicability and desirability of an early offensive. From February onward, Mr Churchill urged early action, pointing out that the British had 635,000 men standing idle in the Middle East theatre while the Russians were fighting desperately and Malta, closer at hand, was being reduced to an extremity by Kesselring’s sustained air attack. But Auchinleck, who had a shrewd sense of the technical and tactical defects of the British forces, wished to wait until Ritchie’s strength was raised to a level sufficient to make sure of nullifying Rommel’s superiority in quality. Finally Churchill, overruling his arguments, decided to send him definite orders to attack which he ‘must obey or be relieved’. But Rommel struck first, on May 26 — again forestalling the British, whose offensive was intended to start in mid-June.

Reinforcements had brought both sides up to a strength greater than at the start of the November battle, ‘Operation Crusader’, although the number of divisions remained the same — three German (of which two were armoured) and six Italian (one armoured) against six British (two armoured). Reckoned in terms of divisions, as both statesmen and generals commonly do, Rommel was attacking with nine against six — and such military arithmetic has been used to account for the British defeat.

But the realities in comparative strength were very different, and showed how misleading it can be to reckon in ‘divisions’. Four of the five low-strength Italian infantry divisions were unmotorised, so that they could play no active part in a mobile battle of manoeuvre, such as this Battle of Gazala became. The British Eighth Army had not only an abundance of motor transport, but also two independent motor brigade groups and two ‘Army’ tank brigades additional to its six divisions, while one of its two armoured divisions (the 1st) had two armoured brigades instead of one — as was now the normal pattern. In all, the Eighth Army had fourteen tank units on the scene, and three more on the way, to meet Rommel’s seven — of which only the four German were equipped with effective tanks.

In numbers, the British had 850 tanks in the Eighth Army’s armoured formations, and 420 more available to send up as reinforcements. Their opponents had 560 tanks altogether, but 230 of these were obsolete and unreliable Italian tanks, and fifty of the 330 German were light tanks. Only the 280 German gun-armed medium tanks would really count in a fight, and there was none available in reserve, apart from about thirty under repair and a new batch of some twenty just landed at Tripoli. Thus on a realistic reckoning the British had a numerical superiority of 3 to 1 for the opening clash of armour, and of more than 4 to 1 if it became a battle of attrition.

In artillery, the British had a numerical superiority of 3 to 2, but that advantage was partly offset because all their guns were distributed among the divisions, whereas Rommel made very effective use of a mobile reserve of fifty-six medium guns which he kept under his own control.

In the air, the two sides were more closely balanced than in any other battle. The British Desert Air Force had a first-line strength of approximately 600 aircraft (380 fighters, 160 bombers, and 60 reconnaissance) against a German-Italian total of 530 (350 fighters, 140 bombers, 40 reconnaissance). But the 120 German Me 109s were qualitatively superior to the British Hurricanes and Kittyhawks.

A greater question is the qualitative balance between the tanks of the two sides. After the Eighth Army’s defeat, the British very naturally took the view that their tanks were inferior to the enemy’s, and that view was expressed as a fact in Auchinleck’s official Despatch. But it is not borne out by analysis of the technical and test data of their respective guns and armour. Most of the German medium tanks were armed with the short 50mm. gun, which had a penetration slightly inferior to the 2-pounder gun, of higher muzzle-velocity, with which all the British-built tanks were armed. In armour, most of the German tanks in 1941 had been more thinly protected than the newer British cruisers (30 mm. maximum armour against 40 mm.), but were now better protected except on the turret, some of the recent arrivals having thicker hull plates (50 mm.), and the rest having additional strips fitted on the most exposed parts of the hull. All the German tanks, however, were more vulnerable than the Matildas (78 mm. of armour) and Valentines (65 mm. of armour).

A new German medium tank — the Panzer III(J) Special — came into action in this battle, armed with a long 50-mm. gun similar to their anti-tank gun. But only nineteen of these tanks had reached the front, while a further batch of the same number had been landed at Tripoli. This reinforcement was far outweighed by the arrival in Egypt of more than 400 of the new American Grant tanks. By the time that the battle opened the two British armoured divisions at Gazala had been equipped with nearly 170 of these Grants — which were armed with a 75-mm. gun that had a penetration even better than the long 50-mm. gun in the German Panzer III(J) Specials, and also better protection (57 mm. thickness of armour compared with 50 mm.). Thus there is no basic justification for the oft-repeated assertion that the tanks used by the British were inferior to the German. On the contrary, the British had a qualitative advantage as well as a very large superiority in numbers.*

* For a fuller examination of this matter, see Liddell Hart:
The Tanks,
vol. II, pp. 92-8, and 154-6.

In anti-tank guns, too, the British had now regained the qualitative advantage through the arrival of their 6-pounder (57-mm.), which was 30 per cent superior in penetration to the long 50-mm. anti-tank gun of the Germans. Sufficient of the new 6-pounders had arrived to equip both the motorised infantry brigades and the motor battalions of the armoured brigades. Although the German 88-mm. gun still remained the most formidable ‘tank-killer’, Rommel had only forty-eight of these guns, and their high mounting made them much more vulnerable than any of the standard anti-tank guns on either side.

Analysis of the technical factors provides no adequate explanation of the Eighth Army’s defeat at Gazala. The evidence clearly shows that it was basically due to the Germans’ superior tactics in general, and especially to their tactical combination of tanks with anti-tank guns.

The fortified Gazala Line was held by the 13th Corps, now commanded by Lieutenant-General ‘Strafer’ Gott, with two infantry divisions forward — the 1st South African on the right, and the 50th on the left. The 30th Corps, still under Norrie, and comprising most of the armour, was to cover the southern flank and was also to counter any panzer thrust in the centre — which, rather strangely, the British commanders regarded as Rommel’s more likely course. This dual task led to the British armour being ill-positioned, the 1st Armoured Division being kept near the Trigh Capuzzo, while the 7th Armoured Division (which had only one armoured brigade) was posted some ten miles southward and stretched widely out to cover and support the French brigade that was holding Bir Hacheim. Auchinleck had written to Ritchie suggesting a closer concentration, but unfortunately his suggestions were not carried out by the men on the spot.