History of the Second World War (47 page)

On the moonlit night of May 26 Rommel moved swiftly round the British flank with his three German divisions and the two of the Italian mobile corps — while the four unmotorised Italian divisions ‘made faces’ at the Gazala Line. Although his outflanking move (with more than ten thousand vehicles) was spotted and reported before dark, and again at dawn as it swept round Bir Hacheim, the opposing commanders still thought that his main attack would come in the centre in accord with their expectation. The British armoured brigades were slow to move, and thus came into action piecemeal, while the two outlying motor brigades on the southern flank were disrupted while separated and unsupported. The headquarters of the 7th Armoured Division was overrun and the commander, Major-General F. W. Messervy, captured — although he later managed to escape. It was his second mishap within a few months, for he had been commanding the 1st Armoured Division when it was surprised and shattered by Rommel at Antelat in January.

But Rommel, despite his opening success, did not succeed in cutting through to the sea — and thus cutting off the divisions in the Gazala Line, as he had hoped. His panzer divisions had a shock on encountering, for the first time, the Grant tanks with their 75-mm. guns. They found themselves coming under destructive fire at ranges too long for them to hit back, and only succeeded in making headway when they brought up anti-tank guns, including three batteries of 88s, while their own tanks worked round the flanks of the British armour — whose units as well as brigades were separated, and thus the more susceptible to such flanking leverage. Even so, the panzer divisions had advanced only three miles north of the Trigh Capuzzo by nightfall, at heavy cost — and were still nearly twenty miles short of the sea coast. Rommel himself wrote in his diary: ‘Our plan to overrun the British forces behind the Gazala Line had not succeeded. . . . The advent of the new American tank had torn great holes in our ranks . . . far more than a third of the German tanks had been lost in this one day.’*

*
The Rommel Papers,
pp. 207-8.

Rommel’s renewed effort to reach the sea on the second day brought little progress and more loss. By nightfall his bid for quick victory had already failed, although the British had done nothing to exploit his loss of balance — their best chance of producing his downfall. But his situation was the more perilous because of the long detour his supply columns had to make round Bir Hacheim, under constant risk of interception by the British armoured and air forces. He himself had a narrow escape from capture when he went forward in his car — and was the more lucky because on his return to his battle headquarters he found that ‘during our absence the British had overrun my Staff’. The Afrika Korps had only 150 tanks left fit for action, and the Italians 90, while the British still had 420 in hand.

After another abortive day, he ordered his striking force to take up a defensive position. That was a precarious position. For it lay beyond the fortified Gazala Line, and left him separated from the rest of his forces by the British garrison and their far-stretching belt of minefields. To fight ‘with one’s back to the wall’ is grim, but to fight with one’s back to a mined barrier is worse.

During the days that followed, the British air force rained bombs on this position, which was aptly christened ‘the Cauldron’, while the Eighth Army attacked it on the ground. The newspapers were filled with triumphant reports that Rommel was now trapped, while in the British military headquarters there was a comfortable assurance that he could be dealt with at leisure, and was bound to surrender.

Yet by the night of June 13 the whole outlook had changed. On the 14th Ritchie abandoned the Gazala Line, and started a rapid retreat to the frontier which left the troops in Tobruk isolated. By the 21st Rommel had captured that fortress and 35,000 men in it, together with an immense amount of stores. It was the worst British disaster of the war except for the fall of Singapore. Next day the remainder of the Eighth Army abandoned its position on the frontier near Sollum, and beat a hasty retreat eastward through the desert with Rommel on its heels.

What had caused such a dramatic turnabout? Rarely has there been such a tangled battle, and the threads have never been properly unravelled. The ‘mystery of the Cauldron’ has continued to baffle those who have tried to write its story from the British side, and been made more puzzling by myths that sprang up.

Besides the myth that Rommel possessed superiority in tanks, another myth is that the scales were turned and the bulk of the British tanks lost in one fatal day, June 13. In reality that was only the culmination of a series of disastrous days. The basic clue to the ‘mystery of the Cauldron’ is to be found in Rommel’s notes. On the evening of May 27:

In spite of the precarious situation and the difficult problems I looked forward full of hope to what the battle might bring. For Ritchie had thrown his armour into the battle piecemeal and had thus given us the chance of engaging them on each separate occasion with just enough of our own tanks. . . . They should never have allowed themselves to be duped into dividing their forces. . . .*

* The Rommel Papers,
p. 208.

He then recorded that he took up what seemed his perilously exposed defensive position . . .

on the certain assumption . . . that the British would not dare to use any major part of their armoured formations to attack the Italians in the Gazala line [while strong German panzer forces stood in a position to threaten their rear]. . . . Thus I foresaw that the British mechanised brigades would continue to run their heads against our well-organised defensive front, and use up their strength in the process.†

†
ibid.,
p. 211.

Rommel’s calculation worked out all too well. The British persisted in a series of piecemeal assaults on his position, at heavy cost. Such direct assaults proved the worst form of caution. While beating them off, he overwhelmed the isolated ‘box’ at Sidi Muftah held by the 150th Infantry Brigade, which lay behind his back, and cleared a passage through the minefield for his supplies.

Four days later, on June 5, Ritchie launched a larger-scale attack on Rommel’s position. But this again was executed in a piecemeal way, while the defenders benefited from the long interval they had been allowed to organise and fortify their position. The complex attack plan suffered from a series of hitches and became a disjointed succession of too direct assaults, which were beaten off in turn. By the second evening the British tank strength had melted, through battle losses and breakdowns, from some 400 down to 170. Moreover, exploiting the attackers’ state of confusion Rommel launched a sudden pincer-like riposte on the first evening that scattered one of the brigades of the 5th Indian Division, then closed round the back of another, which was wiped out next day, together with all the artillery supporting the division. The capture of four regiments of artillery, as well as 4,000 prisoners, was a very important ‘bag’.

The British armoured brigades were kept at bay while this operation was proceeding. Their relieving efforts were spasmodic and uncoordinated — the breakdown of control being all the worse since the commander of the 7th Armoured Division, Messervy, had been chased off the scene the previous evening when the headquarters of the 5th Indian Division was overrun by the German tanks, his second exit from the stage in this battle.

Meanwhile Rommel was also carrying out the amputation of another important section of the Eighth Army’s position. For on the evening of June 1, immediately after excising the Sidi Muftah ‘box’, he had sent off a German battle-group and the Trieste Division to attack the still more isolated ‘box’ at Bir Hacheim on the southern flank held by the 1st Free French Brigade. It proved so tough that Rommel was compelled to go down and take personal command of the assault forces, and he says: ‘Nowhere in Africa was I given a stiffer fight.’ It was only on the tenth day that he penetrated the defences — and most of the French got away under cover of night.

Rommel was now free to make a fresh and longer pounce. Although the British armoured brigades had been brought up by fresh reinforcements to a total of 330 tanks — more than double the remaining strength of the Afrika Korps — their confidence was badly shaken, and the Germans were smelling the scent of victory. On June 11 Rommel struck eastward, and the next day cornered two of the three British armoured brigades between his panzer divisions — forcing the British to fight in a cramped area where he could batter them with converging fire. They might have made more effort to get out of the trap if they had not been deprived of leadership through Messervy being again cut off from his troops — for the third time in three weeks — by the enemy’s advance, when on his way to see the army commander. By mid-afternoon on the 12th the two armoured brigades were trapped, and remnants only escaped, while the third brigade, coming down to the rescue, suffered heavy losses from the well-posted Germans. On the 13th Rommel turned northward, and squeezed the British out of the ‘Knightsbridge Box’, while continuing to harry what remained of the British armour. By nightfall it had shrunk to barely a hundred tanks. Rommel now for the first time had a superiority in tank strength — and, being in possession of the battlefield, he could recover and repair many of his damaged tanks, unlike the British.

The two divisions holding the Gazala Line were now in imminent danger of being cut off and trapped, for on June 14 Rommel sent the Afrika Korps driving north past Acroma towards the coast-road. But it was delayed by the minefield there, which it did not get through until late in the afternoon, and the panzer-troops were by now so tired that they fell asleep where they halted at nightfall — heedless of Rommel’s calls to press on and cut the coast-road. That was very fortunate for the South Africans, whose motor-convoys were pouring back along the road throughout the night. But part of their rear-guard was cut off when the panzer forces raced on to the sea in the morning. The other division in the Gazala Line, the British 50th, only managed to escape by breaking out westward through the Italian front, followed by a long circuit south and then east to the frontier. The 1st South African Division, after slipping out along the coast-road, also continued its retreat back to the frontier — over a hundred miles distant and seventy miles beyond Tobruk.

Such a long step back was contrary to Auchinleck’s intention, and his instructions to Ritchie were that the Eighth Army should rally and stand on a line west of Tobruk. But Ritchie failed to tell his Commander-in-Chief that the Gazala Line divisions were going back to the frontier, and by the time Auchinleck became aware of this it was too late to stop them. Worse still, the British forces ‘fell between two stools’.

For on June 14, as the British were falling back, Mr Churchill sent an emphatic message saying: ‘Presume there is no question in any case of giving up Tobruk.’ He repeated this admonition in telegrams on the 15th and 16th. That long-distance advice from London conduced to the crowning blunder. For the hasty step of leaving part of the Eighth Army in Tobruk, while the rest withdrew to the frontier, gave Rommel the chance to overwhelm the isolated force in Tobruk before its defence was properly organised.

Quickly turned eastward again by Rommel, after their thrust to the coast, the panzer forces swept round the Tobruk perimeter, capturing or isolating the ‘boxes’ that had been established in the Eighth Army’s rear, and drove on to capture the airfields at Gambut, east of Tobruk. In this drive, they brushed aside the remnants of the British armoured brigades — which then retreated to the frontier. But Rommel did not pursue them, yet. For as soon as he had secured the Gambut airfields, he turned his forces back westward, and with astonishing quickness mounted an attack on Tobruk. Its reinforced garrison comprised the 2nd South African Division (which included the 11th Indian Brigade) under General Klopper, the Guards Brigade, and the 32nd Army Tank Brigade — with seventy tanks. But, after seeing Rommel’s panzer forces drive on eastward, they did not expect an attack, and were not prepared to meet it. At 5.20 a.m. on June 20, a hurricane bombardment started against a sector in the south-east of the perimeter, by artillery and dive-bombers, followed by an infantry assault. By 8.30 a.m. the German tanks were pouring through a breach in the defences, and Rommel himself was on the spot to speed up the exploiting flow. By the afternoon the panzer forces had overcome the resistance of the confused defenders, and drove into Tobruk. By morning the garrison commander, General Klopper, came to the conclusion that continued resistance was hopeless, and retreat impossible, so he took the fateful decision to surrender. Although a few small parties managed to escape, 35,000 troops were taken prisoner.

The consequence of that disaster was the headlong retreat into Egypt of Ritchie’s surviving force, with Rommel in hot chase. In maintaining this pursuit Rommel was greatly helped by the huge haul of stores he had made at Tobruk. According to Bayerlein, the Chief of Staff of the Afrika Korps, 80 per cent of Rommel’s transport at this time were captured British vehicles. But while this great catch provided him with the transport, fuel, and food to maintain his mobility, it did not restore his fighting strength. When the Afrika Korps moved up to the frontier on June 23 it had only forty-four tanks left fit for action, and the Italians only fourteen. Nevertheless Rommel determined to follow again the maxim ‘press hard on the heels of a rout’.

Field-Marshal Kesselring flew in from Sicily the day after Tobruk’s fall to argue against a further advance in Africa — calling for the return of his air force units for an attack on Malta, as earlier agreed. The Italian Supreme Command in Africa were also averse to pushing on, and on the 22nd Bastico actually gave Rommel an order to halt — whereat Rommel replied that he would not ‘accept the
advice
’, and jocularly invited his official superior to dine with him in Cairo. He could afford to take liberties after such a victory, and all the more because a signal from Hitler’s headquarters brought the news of his promotion to field-marshal in reward for the victory. At the same time, Rommel appealed direct to Mussolini and Hitler for permission to drive on. Hitler and his military advisers had become very dubious about the intended assault on Malta, feeling that the Italian Navy would fail to back them up in face of the British Navy, and that the German parachute troops dropped on Malta would be left stranded without supplies and reinforcements. A month earlier, on May 21, Hitler had decided that, if Rommel succeeded in capturing Tobruk, the attack on Malta, ‘Operation Hercules’, was to be dropped. Mussolini was also relieved by the possibility of a less formidable alternative to this labour of ‘Hercules’, and eager to embrace a more glorious prospect. So, early on the 24th, Rommel received a wireless message: ‘Duce approves Panzerarmee intention to pursue the enemy into Egypt.’ A few days later, Mussolini flew over to Derna, with a white charger following in another aircraft, ready for a triumphant entry into Cairo. Even Kesselring, according to Italian accounts, appears to have agreed that pursuit into Egypt was preferable to an assault on Malta.