After the battle of the Nile Delta, Rommel paused briefly to reassemble his forces and bridging pontoons, before he was ready to strike onward across the Suez Canal. He always had to guard against fresh attacks from the Cairo flank to his south, which absorbed a large proportion of his available infantry and artillery, but this still left him with the core of the DAK available for mobile operations toward the east. He selected a suitable bridging point about 35 miles south of Port Said, between El Quantara and Ismailia, and prepared a formal “river-crossing” operation according to the classical rules of military science. Nevertheless he now believed that he had finally broken the backbone of the opposition, and resistance would gradually but inevitably collapse, provided he could continue to maintain a high level of onward pressure.
The crossing went ahead smoothly on the night of August 7-8, following an extensive bombardment from artillery, tank guns and bombers. The front-line troops established their bridgehead without difficulty on the Asian side, but they were fascinated to find that the “opposition” had (perhaps appropriately) consisted of no more than a colony of unarmed Chinese laborers employed by the canal company, whose distinctively decorated barrack block was immediately nicknamed “Chinese Villa”—a name that subsequently came to designate the battle as a whole.
Once the Germans were across the canal, they immediately sensed that the military threat to them had dramatically lightened. They were loose in a new continent, and free to roam north and south, to surround the naval base at Port Said from the east and pick off the many dispersed outposts of canal defense troops at will. Provoking particular amusement was the discovery of a squadron of tracked and armored “canal defense lights” that had apparently been designed by the respected British tank expert (and friend of Adolf Hitler) J.F.C. Fuller, but which on close inspection turned out to be militarily useless, and actually laughable. Their chassis were stripped of their innocuous searchlights and converted to carry more lethal cargo such as mortars and antitank guns, instead.
By this time the level of moral supremacy enjoyed by the Germans had risen by several vital pegs. The trickle of civilian refugees hastening out of Cairo had grown to a flood. The docks at Suez had become permanently choked with traffic, and the Egyptian population was increasingly releasing its formerly repressed hostility to the British. In the air, the RAF was still capable of winning some spectacular victories, but in general its fighting efficiency was wilting away, day by day. The loss of the Alexandria base area had been a fatal blow to the continuity and coherence of air operations, and the atmosphere of crisis around Cairo had produced other problems. Though all the military HQs continued to operate calmly and professionally, after the failure of so many of their battle plans, the British could not avoid a deeply frustrating feeling that they always seemed to be getting something wrong and were incapable of working out exactly what it was. The mood in GHQ was somber, and even Alexander’s confidence and the knowledge that major reinforcements were on the way—including 300 of the latest Sherman tanks from the United States—could not convince them that the best future plan was a successful offensive to the north rather than a humiliating retreat to the south.
In these circumstances, Rommel found he was well able to hold the 8th Army and the Cairo command in check while the DAK crossed the Sinai desert and made daring new thrusts deep into the effectively undefended 9th Army area in Palestine. His armored spearheads managed to enter Jerusalem as early as August 15, despite a spirited (albeit incongruously multifaith) resistance offered by combined elements of the Arab Legion, the Jewish Haganah, a brigade of Indian infantry, and squads of the British Palestine Police Force, who hailed mainly from the Presbyterian quarters of central Belfast. However, all attempts at defense ultimately proved to be in vain, and the city fell entirely under Axis control by dusk the following day. Rommel was then able to make another logistic pause, consolidating his forces and extending his hold over the surrounding areas, during which he was gratified to receive additional air, infantry, and logistic reinforcements from Germany. But he was considerably less amused to learn that a special SS detachment was also being sent to “help him with Jewish relations.”
It was perhaps no accident that the Axis pause during late August coincided with some major Allied reevaluations. In the first place, Churchill’s proposed visit to Moscow, intended to consolidate interallied relations, was brusquely cancelled by Stalin, who was disgusted that the British could apparently no longer guarantee his southern flank—nor even the flow of Lend-Lease supplies through Persia. Historians have often suggested that this was the decisive moment when, to all intents and purposes, the Second World War was lost by the Allies.
Secondly, the Anglo-American armada destined to arrive in Morocco and Algeria in November had to be radically rejigged, since it was now obvious that North Africa had become a definitively Axis-controlled zone. Apart from anything else, it was known that the Germans had seized secret files in Alexandria that revealed the whole plan, with the result that any possibility of surprise was lost. Half of the invasion flotilla was therefore rerouted to Britain, to increase the invasion forces preparing to invade France in some indeterminate future; while the other half, including Eisenhower’s and Patton’s tactical HQs, was sent by the long sea route via South Africa to Suez. The intent was that these forces would turn the tide in Egypt, but alas, by the time they arrived the whole situation had taken a serious turn for the worse, and they had to be forwarded yet again—this time to Burma, where their arrival was mirthfully hailed as a near-circumnavigation of the globe.
The final act in the Middle Eastern drama began in early September, when the DAK again lunged forward, this time against Gen. “Jumbo” Maitland Wilson’s 10th Army in Iraq. Once again it encountered a defensive force that was morally enthusiastic but institutionally disorganized and badly coordinated. The 31st Indian Armored Division, for example, ought to have put up a gallant resistance, except for the inconvenient fact that it possessed no actual tanks. Equally the individual infantry battalions of the XXI Indian Corps each fought well, but there were no corps troops or central artillery reserve to support them, and no coherent defensive plan sufficient to cope with the scale and shock of the German onslaught. Even so, it became a hard and grueling campaign, concluded only on October 23, when Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was finally able to send his decisive last telegram to Berlin that stated: “Baghdad & all oil fields now in hands Panzerarmee Afrika.”
Within the hour he was at long last free to relax, and to board a plane home for two months’ well-earned leave with his dear wife Lu.
All the military events recounted up to and including July 1 occurred exactly as described, with the single exception of the high command arrangements on the British side. Auchinleck’s offer of resignation on June 23 was not in fact accepted, so Alexander was left free to continue his onward journey to Britain. Auchinleck then took personal command of the 8th Army and fought a highly flexible and ultimately successful defensive battle at Alamein, only to be sacked on August 8 after he failed to convert that significant victory into a successful counteroffensive. Auchinleck’s reputation was tainted by the suspicion that his “flexibility” meant he was ready to continue the retreat not only back to Cairo, but even—and this was the particularly shocking thing to the lounge lizards at the Gezira tennis club—that he was ready to abandon Cairo itself. He had tolerated the mass burning of secret documents on “Ash Wednesday,” July 1, which suggested a readiness to evacuate, and it helped generate panic. Therefore when Alexander was made CinC ME in August, he had to make it clear that there would be “no more retreats,” and many regretted that this had not been spelled out much earlier. As for Strafer Gott, he was designated to take over the 8th Army at the same time, but his Bombay aircraft was shot down and he was killed before he could take up the post, which then fell to one of Brooke’s self-important cronies from England.
From July 2 on, the real First Battle of Alamein was fought very differently from my fictitious description. In my version Rommel turned south against two exposed British brigade boxes, when in fact both of those brigades had already been withdrawn farther to the east, as a result of Auchinleck’s realism and readiness to maneuver. Rommel was actually defeated when he reinforced failure by turning to help the 90th Light Division in the north. However, if Alexander had been in charge, instead of the Auk, we may speculate that British tenure of the front line would have been rigid and unbending, out of a misplaced and potentially disastrous belief in the later revisionist 8th Army propaganda line that Auchinleck’s willingness to contemplate a further retreat was corrosive of morale throughout Egypt and all the military forces.
Agar-Hamilton, J.A.I., and Turner, L.C.F.,
Crisis in the Desert, May-June 1942
(Oxford UP, Cape Town, 1952).
Barnett, Correlli,
The Desert Generals
(Kimber, London, 1960).
Greacen, Lavinia,
Chink, a Biography
(Macmillan, London, 1989). “Chink” was the nickname of Gen. Eric Dorman-Smith, one of Auchinleck’s staff officers.
Mellenthin, F. W. von,
Panzer Battles
(trans Betzler, Cassell, London, 1955, and Oklahoma University 1956: Futura edn, London, 1977).
Neillands, Robin,
The Desert Rats, 7th Armoured Division 1940-45
(first published 1991, Orion edn., London, 1995).
Nicolson, N.,
Alex, The Life of Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1973).
Playfair, I.S.O.,
et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East
, vol. 3,
British fortunes reach their lowest ebb
(UK Official History, HMSO, London, 1960).
Richardson, Charles,
Flashback, A soldier’s story
(Kimber, London, 1985).
Rommel, E.,
The Rommel Papers
(first published 1950 as
Krieg ohne Hass:
English translation ed. B.H. Liddell Hart, Collins, London, 1953).
Schmidt, H. W.,
With Rommel in the Desert
(Harrap, London, 1951).
1
. “If Egypt had fallen, the hinge of three continents would have snapped,” Nicolson,
Alex
, 152.
2
. Quotation taken from Nicolson’s summary of the Alexander/Montgomery view in late August,
ibid.
, 158.
3
. On July 1, 1916 the British 4th Army on the Somme had suffered 58,000 casualties killed and wounded in less than a day.
4
. Barnett,
The Desert Generals
, 198.
5
. The daily “WC” reports, sent from July 20 onward, Richardson,
Flashback
, 104.
*
6
. The day would become popularly known as “Palm Sunday,” from the many hands raised to the sky in surrender, although in statistical fact far more prisoners would be captured on the following day, Monday, July 6.
*
7
. The code name “Locust” was the inspiration of some bright spark from GHQ who had read his Bible around Exodus 10, shortly after dining well in Shepheard’s Hotel.
John H. Gill
For many inhabitants of the Wolfsschanze, the military situation in early 1942 was as bleak as the view through the narrow windows of Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters. Although Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had regained much lost ground in the Western Desert with his surprise offensive in January, and U-boats were rampaging up and down the coast of the United States in Operation Drum Beat (Paukenschlag), the appalling developments on the Eastern Front cast an almost impenetrable gloom over the Führer’s staff. The gargantuan undertaking had opened with high hopes—“The world will hold its breath!” their leader had declared—and fabulous successes that had carried the Wehrmacht to the very gates of Moscow. The fighting over the winter of 1941
-
42, however, brought an abrupt crash from the heights of euphoria.
In addition to the dramatic retreats and the severe blows to the army’s prestige and confidence, ten months of war with the Soviet Union had inflicted staggering losses in men and material. Among other problems, a March 1942 study prepared by the Army High Command (OKH) highlighted the loss of nearly 7,000 artillery pieces of all calibers, 75,000 motor transport vehicles, and more than 179,000 horses, as well as the expenditure of huge amounts of motor fuel and ammunition. None of these deficits could be repaired in the weeks before the expected summer offensive.