Concentration of force and effort were not dominant characteristics of Hitler’s Reich. The Führer had initially reacted to Italy’s debacle in North Africa and its frustrated invasion of Greece with the amused malice the Germans call Schadenfreude. His interests in the Mediterranean involved encouraging support for Germany’s Atlantic ambitions on the part of Vichy France and Falangist Spain, and attracting Balkan support for the developing attack on the Soviet Union. Neither end was best served by Italian-initiated upheavals that challenged the status quo by open-ended claims to enlarged spheres of influence. They were served even worse, however, by open-ended military catastrophe.
The Italian defeat in Greece created opportunities for
Britain to negotiate a Balkan front of its own, supporting it by stationing
planes on Greek bases. The oil fields of Romania were only the most obvious
potential target. If the Italians were driven from North Africa, the stresses
on British shipping would be reduced by the reopening of the Mediterranean. The
French North African colonies might reconsider their allegiance to Vichy. An
Italy subject to air and naval strikes would face the consequences of a loss of
prestige that could potentially lead to the collapse of the Fascist system
itself.
Hitler grew correspondingly determined to take action. As
early as July 1940, the High Command had suggested dispatching a panzer
division to North Africa. Spanish veteran Wilhelm von Thoma, sent to evaluate
the situation, reported any serious mobile operations would require at least
four divisions for an indefinite basis. In the run-up to Barbarossa, that
proposal had no chance. As the Italian situation continued to deteriorate, the
commitment of ground forces in the Mediterranean basin nevertheless seemed
necessary.
The General Staff responded by projecting a large-scale
mechanized offensive in the Balkans, to be mounted in the spring of 1941—quick
in, quick out. Hitler entertained hopes that its threat would be sufficient:
that the Greek government would reject British support and Yugoslavia would align
itself with the Axis. Hitler sweetened the latter prospect by offering to
exchange Yugoslavia’s copper, zinc, and lead for modern weapons. The former
prospect grew increasingly remote, particularly as Greece observed the steady
movement of German planning missions and combat aircraft—specifically the
ground-support specialists of VIII Air Corps—into Bulgaria and Romania. When
Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia formally joined the Axis in November 1940,
allowing German troops transit rights across their territory, the question
regarding war became not if but when. Even then it was not until the first
arrival of British ground troops in Greece on March 7 that the German
redeployment began in earnest.
From the beginning, the Balkan operation had been planned
around the panzers. This flew in the face of Great War experience, of
unpromising terrain, limited road networks, undeveloped infrastructures, and
just about every other common-sense reservation that prudent staff officers
could conceive. In another context, however, the projected force structure
reflected, more clearly than at any time since the occupation of Austria,
Hitler’s conception of the ideal relationship between diplomacy and force. He
sought to expand the basis for war in the eastern Mediterranean, to secure the
southern flank of his forthcoming attack on the USSR, and to sequester Balkan
economic resources for German use. None of those ends was best achieved by the
use of force as a first option, and Hitler was correspondingly willing to keep
talking. But time was an enemy when wasted. Even at the last minute, the panzer
divisions could be turned loose to crush both local opposition and the
burgeoning British presence in Greece—immediately and unmistakably, not least
to discourage intervention by the Soviet Union, perhaps Turkey as well.
The actual deployment underwent a series of changes that
both illustrated German skill in operational planning and reinforced confidence
in the skill’s applicability to the wider Russian stage. The final dispositions
put a worked-in command and staff team on the Greek frontier: List’s 12th Army
and Kleist’s renamed Panzer Group 1. With three panzer divisions and two
motorized ones plus Grossdeutschland and two similarly configured claimants to
elite status, the SS Leibstandarte and the Luftwaffe’s Hermann Göring Brigade,
Kleist was expected to overrun Greece from a standing start.
On March 27 the situation changed utterly. A coup deposed
the Yugoslav government. Hitler responded with Operation Punishment: the
destruction of Yugoslavia with “merciless harshness.” Kleist swung his group 90
degrees and, beginning on April 8 as the Luftwaffe eviscerated Belgrade, drove
into Yugoslavia’s side with the force of a knife thrust. Breaking through
initially stubborn resistance and scattering two Yugoslav armies, the group
drove north as another panzer corps came south from Hungary into Croatia.
Belgrade was the objective. What remained of it capitulated on April 12. The Yugoslav
army, its morale shaken by recent political events, divided along ethnic lines.
Lacking modern equipment, it never had much of a chance. In a week the panzers
had shattered its fighting spirit and its fighting power alike by speed and
shock, in terrain regarded as less suitable even than the Ardennes for mobile
warfare, and without breaking a military sweat. The major challenge to the rear
echelons was coping with the thousands of Yugoslavs trying to surrender. On
April 14 the Yugoslav government called for terms.
A country was dismembered; a stage was set for more than a
half century of civil war; and the panzers were responsible. Kleist’s divisions
were pulled into reserve as quickly as possible for redeployment to the Russian
frontier, with a collective sense of a job well done that suggested favorable
prospects for the future. The new divisions and the new commanders had
performed well compared to the standards of 1940. A continuing tendency to
outrun the infantry had no significant tactical consequences; the tanks alone
spread demoralization wherever they went. Logistics posed occasional problems,
but the fighting ended before they metastasized. Total German casualties were
150 dead, 400 wounded, and 15 missing. Nothing emerging from Yugoslavia, in
short, inspired any last-minute second thoughts about another operation against
a Slavic army and culture.
Kleist’s turn to Yugoslavia left a suddenly diminished 12th
Army the task of dealing with Greece. The initial German commitment to a Balkan
blitz is indicated by an order of battle that even without the panzer group
included a motorized corps headquarters, the first-rate 2nd and 9th Panzer
Divisions, and the Leibstandarte motorized brigade of the Waffen SS—with
Richthofen’s Stukas flying close support. The Viennese tankers overran a Greek
motorized division, seized Salonika, and took 60,000 prisoners, all in four
days. The 9th Panzer Division, the Leibstandarte, and the Stukas on the
Germans’ other flank scattered an entire Yugoslav army, and then turned south
into the plains of Thessaly. It took until April 12 to break through Greek,
Australian, and New Zealand resistance and the British 1st Armored Brigade and
cut off the strong Greek forces reluctant to retreat from Albania. But yet
again, once through the forward defenses, the panzers set the pace. Never
out-fought, the Greek army was increasingly overmatched. On April 21 the
British decided to evacuate.
From the perspective of the Anzacs and the tankers, the rest
of the campaign was a long fighting retreat, enduring constant air attack and
bloodying the Germans where they could. For the panzers it was more of a
mop-up, with the lead role played by 5th Panzer Division. Transferred from
Kleist’s group after the fall of Yugoslavia, it was bloodied at Thermopylae
where a rear guard knocked out 20 of its tanks as they moved through the still-
narrow pass. Recovering, the division pursued the British south, crossed the
Isthmus of Corinth, and took more than 7,000 prisoners on the beaches of
Kalamata, men left behind when the ships were withdrawn.
The Balkan Operation also laid the groundwork for a legend.
On February 12, 1941, Erwin Rommel was appointed commander in chief of German
troops in Libya. It was a fancy title for a force composing only one of the new
panzer divisions, the still-organizing 15th, a scratch brigade grandiloquently
titled 5th Light Division (later upgraded as the 21st Panzer Division), and
another mixed bag that became the 90th Light Division. Renamed the German
Africa Corps (Deutsches Afrika Korps) it would make two years of history.
Hitler seems initially to have made his choice of commander
as much on grounds of Rommel’s availability as from any intuitive sense that he
was giving a wider stage to a budding genius. German intervention in North
Africa was originally intended as a minimum-scale holding operation. No senior
panzer general suggested Rommel might be more useful against Russia; no one
requested him as a corps commander in a mobile force needing a half dozen new
ones. Instead he was dispatched to a sideshow that he would move to history’s
center stage by a spectacular succession of battlefield victories—the first of
them enabled by the drawdown of British forces in the desert in favor of the
campaign in Greece.
There are fashions in generalship as there are in clothing.
For a quarter century after World War II, Rommel was considered a paragon of
mobile war at the tactical and operational levels. In the next quarter century,
military historians and professional soldiers have judged him with a sharper
pencil. Nevertheless there remains an Erwin Rommel for every military writer’s
taste. There is the muddy-boots general leading from the front, inspiring his
men by sharing their hardships as he led them to victory. There is the brilliant
opportunist, master of forcing mistakes and exploiting them, dancing rings
around British generals with courage and character but no imagination. There is
the master of war on a shoestring, using Germany’s military leftovers to
frustrate and challenge the major land effort of a global empire. There is the
soldier, making war by the rules, upholding the army’s honor albeit serving a
criminal regime. And there is the maverick, defying his superiors, his allies,
and the Führer himself to fight and win his way.
In Britain these images ameliorate two years of humiliation.
In the United States they play into idealized concepts of what a real general
should be. There is, however, another side to the scale. That one depicts a
general whose leadership style generated as much confusion as success. It
presents a commander consistently overreaching his operational capacities, and
correspondingly indifferent to issues of logistics and sustainability. It
highlights an extensive, long-term network of connections between Rommel and
Hitler—not least a publicity machine that critics describe as creating a myth
from lucky breaks and obliging enemies. What emerges is a good corps commander,
challenged beyond his talent by the problems of war-making at higher levels.
The desert war’s principal contribution to the panzer
mystique is its status, affirmed alike by Rommel’s critics and supporters, as a
“clean” war. Explanations include the absence of civilians and the relative
absence of Nazis; the nature of the environment, which conveyed a “moral
simplicity and transparency”; and command exercised on both sides by prewar
professionals, encouraging a British tendency to depict war in the imagery of a
game and a corresponding German pattern of seeing it as a test of skill and a proof
of virtue.
The nature of the fighting also diminished the close-quarter
actions that are primary nurturers of mutual bitterness. Last stands, as
opposed to stubborn defenses, were uncommon. Usually a successful German attack
ended with a compound breakthrough. With tanks seeming to appear everywhere on
the position, with no effective means of close defense, capitulation was an
acceptable option. The large numbers of troops usually involved also inhibited
both on-the-spot killings and post-action massacres. Hard war did not
necessarily mean cold murder. Surrender offered and accepted correspondingly
became part of the common law of the desert.
Creating preconditions for surrender was another problem.
The two-year seesaw conflict across North Africa has been so often described in
so much detail that it is easy to exaggerate its actual impact on Hitler’s
panzers. The campaign involved only three mobile divisions and never more than
around 300 tanks at any one time. Technically the Germans maintained a consistent,
though not overwhelming, superiority—reflecting as much the flaws in British
tank design as the qualities of the German vehicles. The Panzer III, especially
the L version with the 50mm/62-caliber gun, was the backbone of Rommel’s armor,
admirably complemented by the Panzer IV, whose 75mm shells were highly
effective against both unarmored “soft-skinned” vehicles and unsupported
infantry, even when dug in.
Not until the arrival in autumn 1942 of the US M3 medium did
the balance begin to shift. With a 37mm high-velocity gun in its turret and a
sponson-mounted 75mm, the M3 was a poor man’s Char B without the armor of its
French counterpart, with a high silhouette that made it difficult to conceal,
and with a gasoline engine that caught fire easily. But there were a lot of
them, and their reinforcement in time for El Alamein by more than 300 Shermans
definitively tipped the armor balance in Allied favor. The Sherman’s
mid-velocity 75mm gun, able to fire both armor piercing and high-explosive
rounds, made it the best tank in North Africa—except possibly for the later
marks of Panzer IV, who brought their even higher velocity 75mm gun on line in
numbers too small—never more than three dozen—to make a difference.
Nor was the Afrika Korps a chosen force, the best of the
best. Its medical preparation consisted of cholera and typhus inoculations. Its
equipment was Wehrmacht standard, with the addition of a few hundred sun
helmets—most of them soon discarded in favor of field caps—and a few thousand
gallons of camouflage paint in varying shades of brown. But the Germans had
confidence in themselves and their officers, in their training and in their
doctrine. Their divisions were teams of specialist experts trained to fight
together, combining and recombining as the situation changed. Assembling them
was like working with a child’s set of Legos: individual pieces, once fastened
together, would hold even if the construction seemed awkward.
That flexibility proved vital. German doctrine based on
avoiding tank-on-tank combat meant that when it occurred it was likely to be a
close-quarters melee. German gunnery training after the 1940 campaign stressed
snap shooting and rapid fire—not least because of the limited effect of single
hits on French armor plate. The British for their part during much of the
campaign remained committed to destroying German armor by direct action, and
their tanks were usually fast enough to counter the tactical maneuvering
effective in 1940.
Rommel and his subordinates in consequence recast the section
of the panzer-war handbook that addressed antitank operations. In their
developed and ideal form, German positions were structured by interlocking
antitank-gun positions supported by infantry, the panzers deployed behind them.
Contrary to belief at the time, which eventually acquired the status of myth,
the 88mm gun was not a standard element of German antitank defense in the
desert. Its high silhouette made it vulnerable; its limited numbers made it an
emergency alternative. The backbone of German defenses was the 50mm gun, able
to knock out any British tank that could move well enough to survive in desert
conditions. By 1942 these were being supplemented and replaced in turn by 75mm
pieces, heavy and difficult to move but effective even against the new American
Grants and Shermans. Eventually the 90th Light Division would be configured as
a virtual antitank formation, with 75mm Pak 40s assigned at rifle company
level.
British tanks repeatedly and obligingly impaled themselves
on the German guns. Robert Crisp, a South African-born officer serving with the
Royal Tank Regiment, observed that British tank design and British tactical
doctrines reflected a mentality that wanted to make a tank that was as much
like a horse as possible, then use it as horses had been used in the Charge of
the Light Brigade. As Rommel once asked a captured British officer, “What does
it matter if you have two tanks to my one, when you spread them out and let me
smash them in detail?”
British armor enmeshed and worn down by the antitank guns
was disproportionately vulnerable to counterattacks from flank and rear by
panzer forces numerically inferior but with the advantage of surprise—an
advantage enhanced by the ubiquitous clouds of dust obscuring desert
battlefields as powder smoke had done in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Europe. Superior numbers were unnecessary. Properly timed, a single hard tap
could shatter an already-confused British armored brigade like glass. Success
depended on timing, and for that the excellent German radios were important.
But even more important were situational awareness, initiative, and mutual
confidence—the infantrymen and antitank crews knowing they were not being
sacrificed; the artillery concentrated to provide fire support; the tankers
confident the screening forces would hold while they moved into position. Time
and again, from Operation Battleaxe in 1941 through Operation Crusader in
November 1941 to the Battle of Gazala in May-June 1942, the technique
worked—and set up the attacks that became Rommel’s signature.
The panzers’ offensive tactics in the desert followed and
extended patterns established in Europe. Speed, shock, and flexibility
repeatedly proved devastating against a British opponent whose reaction times
were sluggish, whose tactics were uninspired, and whose coordination was so
limited that desert humor described it as existing only when the commanding
officers involved had slept with each others’ wives before the war—a
significant handicap, one might think, to multiunit operations.
Encirclement was, however, likely to prove chimerical. There
were no obvious terrain features or cultural sites with deep meaning to
encourage last stands. Even Cairo was not Verdun. The wide-open terrain and the
Germans’ always limited “desert sense” facilitated breakouts, the most familiar
examples being the French at Bir Hacheim and 201 Guards Brigade at
Knightsbridge. The British were even more completely motorized than the
Germans, and correspondingly able to outrun them. The “Gazala gallop” of May 1942
may not have been heroic, but it did preserve much of 8th Army to fight again
at El Alamein.
British defense systems were also far more formidable than
anything encountered even in France during Case Red. The often-derided “boxes”
developed as fixed position at mid-campaign usually featured elaborate
minefields to disable vehicles, complex barbed wire systems to frustrate
infantry, and defenders ready to fight to the limit, like 5th South African
Brigade at Sidi Rezegh and 150th Brigade’s stand in the Cauldron during Gazala.
Losses in both men and vehicles incurred while overrunning these positions were
likely to be high and, given the theater’s low priority for replacements,
permanent.
If the Afrika Korps did not want to conquer itself to death,
an alternate approach must be developed. Rommel would respond by taking
flexible movement to the operational level. His first major offensive, in April
1941, was undertaken despite a direct order to the contrary. Once the
vulnerability of the thinly manned British positions was exposed, the battle
became an exercise in deep penetration on a level not seen even in France.
Columns became lost in broken, poorly mapped terrain, or were deceived by
mirages. Engines overheated in 120-degree temperatures. Sandstorms slowed rates
of march. But the German tanks, artillery, antitank guns, and motorized
infantry wove tactical tapestries that baffled their counterparts.
Rommel seemed to appear everywhere he was needed, driving
and inspiring. Benghazi fell on April 3. With the British reeling backward and
the fortress of Tobruk besieged, Rommel set the next objective as the Suez
Canal. His spearheads reached the Egyptian frontier. When the massive
counterattack of Operation Crusader rolled the Germans back in turn, Rommel
checked the drive, and then swung completely behind the British. This “dash to
the wire” overextended his forces so badly that his own staff called it off
while Rommel was out of touch at the front.
This time the pendulum swung all the way back to Rommel’s
original starting point around El Agheila. Two weeks later he counterattacked,
taking the British by surprise and forcing them back 350 miles to the partially
prepared Gazala line. Both sides reinforced as best they could, but again it
was Rommel who struck first. On May 26, 1942 his last great offensive began. A
month later the port of Tobruk and its 30,000 man garrison were in German
hands. Eighth Army, what was left of it, had retreated to the El Alamein line.
In Cairo, rear-echelon commandos were burning documents. In London, Churchill
faced—albeit briefly—a vote of no confidence on the House of Commons.
Gazala was by any standards a striking victory. But by most
standards the Axis troops were fought out. Men and equipment were worn to
breaking points, depending on captured fuel and supplies for momentum. Down to
fifty tanks at the sharp end, Luftwaffe support left behind in the wake of the
ground advance, Rommel was nevertheless convinced that only by attacking could
his force sustain the initiative. To halt was to be attacked by massively
superior forces, and another backward swing of the desert pendulum might well
be the final one. Better to try ending the process altogether: roll the dice,
take the British off balance, and regroup in Cairo.
“Attack” had worked for Rommel in North Africa as it had in
France. It had been the armored force’s mantra since the beginning. It was a
keystone of the German approach to war-making. This time under a new commander,
Bernard Law Montgomery, 8th Army held. At Ruweisat Ridge on July 1, the panzers
broke in. For the first time in the desert, they failed to break through. An
end run was stopped cold at Alam Halfa by a mixture the Germans had patented:
combined-arms tactics in a context of air supremacy. By this time Rommel’s health
had declined sufficiently that he returned to Germany, partly to recover and
partly to lobby for more of everything. Rommel informed his doctor, “Either the
army in Russia succeeds in getting through . . . and we in Africa manage to
reach the Suez Canal, or . . .” He accompanied his unfinished sentence with a
dismissive gesture suggesting defeat.
The stalemate at El Alamein is frequently described as the
final, fatal consequence of either Rommel’s fundamental ignorance of logistics
or his culpable carelessness in supervising them. He thus epitomizes a senior
officer corps whose tactical and operational proficiency manifested tunnel
vision, with caste pride, misunderstood professionalism, or exaggerated
vitalism relegating administration to those unsuited to command troops in
combat.
When Halder asked Rommel what he would need to conquer Egypt
and the Suez Canal, Rommel replied that another two panzer corps should do.
When Halder asked how Rommel proposed to supply that force, Rommel replied that
was Halder’s problem. Rommel was being neither arrogant nor insouciant. He was
expressing the mentality of the German army as reorganized after 1933. Even
Halder declared after the war that quartermasters must never hamper the
operational concept. Rapid expansion encouraged a more pragmatic, hands-on
ethic than had been the case prior to the Great War. The pace Hitler demanded
encouraged focusing on the operational level of war. Planning in turn revolved
more than ever around operational considerations; the logisti cians were called
in afterward.
Rommel saw as well as anyone on either side of the war that
victory in the desert depended on supply. He also understood that he had
relatively little control of his logistics. Germany was a guest in the
Mediterranean, depending on Italian goodwill and Italian abilities to sustain a
small expeditionary force. From his arrival, Rommel successfully cultivated
Italian senior officers and gained the confidence of Italian fighting
formations. The Ariete Armored Division was close enough in effectiveness to
its German stablemates to be virtually the Afrika Korps’ third panzer division
for much of the campaign. Italian infantry, artillery, and engineers time and
again were the fulcrum on which the lever of Rommel’s mobile operations
depended.
The Italian army was not as retrograde in its understanding
of mobile war in tactical and operational contexts as is frequently assumed. By
1940, Italian theorists had studied German successes in Poland and France and
developed a doctrine of guerra di rapido corso (fast-moving war).
Strategically, however, their generals considered Rommel’s focus on Cairo and
the Suez Canal as culpable overextension. The Wehrmacht High Command understood
the Mediterranean theater’s strategic function was to cover the German southern
flank during the decisive struggle in Russia. North Africa was an outpost, best
secured by a flexible defense.
On the other hand, Hitler had been reappraising Germany’s
strategic prospects ever since Pearl Harbor. The German navy was calling for
systematic cooperation with Japan in a campaign designed to produce a junction
in the Indian Ocean that would bring about the final collapse of the British
Empire. For Hitler, the war’s globalization only confirmed his decision for a
1942 campaign against the Caucasian oil fields. Hitler saw the Japanese
conquests in Asia as weakening Britain’s imperial position sufficiently that
the presence of Axis troops in the southern foothills of the Caucasus would
convince Britain to negotiate, and leave Russia to be finished off before the
industrial potential of the United States, which Hitler admitted he had no idea
how to defeat, could be developed and deployed.
If America’s entry into the war threatened the Reich with
grand-strategic encirclement, the military situation provided a window of
opportunity—six to eight months, perhaps—for consolidating Germany’s position
in a continental redoubt of the kind depicted by geopoliticians like Halford
Mackinder and Karl Haushofer. Mastery of what they called the “Heartland”—the
Eurasian landmass—would set the stage for eventual mastery of the world.
Rommel had a complementary strategic vision. He believed,
especially given the growing imbalance in material resources between Germany
and its opponents, the best approach in North Africa involved maintaining the
offensive at operational levels, taking advantage of German leadership and
fighting power to demoralize the British, keep them off balance, and eventually
create the opportunity for a decisive blow. That was a common mind-set among
Germany’s panzer generals as the war reached its middle stages. Rommel, though
anything but an “educated soldier” in the traditions of the German General
Staff, took the concept one level higher. He realized British strength would
continue to be renewed as long as North Africa remained the primary theater
where Britain could deploy modern ground forces. Yet he was also convinced that
through operational art he could conquer Egypt and eventually move northeast
toward the Caucasus, providing the southern pincer of a strategic double
envelopment that would secure the oil fields of south Russia and drive across
Iraq and Persia, breaking permanently Britain’s power in the Middle East.
The prospect of Rommel at the head of a full-blooded Axis
drive into the Middle East continues to engage counterfactual historians. It is
a staple chapter in the alternative histories that show Germany winning World
War II. But a crucial prerequisite for large-scale offensive operations in the
Middle East was Axis maritime superiority in the Mediterranean. The Germans
could make no significant contributions. The Italian navy had suffered heavy
losses that its construction and repair facilities could not replace. Air power
was no less vital, and here too the burden would have fallen on an Italian air
force whose effectiveness was steadily declining. Obsolescent aircraft, lack of
fuel, and indifference at senior levels proved a fatal trifecta. As for the
Luftwaffe, those human and material resources not deployed to Russia were
increasingly being reassigned to home defense.
Any Middle East offensive mounted from the Mediterranean
would require a port. Alexandria, even if captured relatively undamaged, would
be no more than the starting point for an increasingly long line of
communication over terrain even more formidable, and less developed, than
Russia. The survivability of German and Italian trucks in the mountains of
Syria and the deserts of Iraq was likely to be less than on the Rollbahns of
the Soviet Union. The Middle East lacked anything like a comprehensive,
developed railway network. The problem of securing a thousand miles and more of
natural guerilla/bandit country would have daunted the most brutal Nazi
specialists in genocide.
The final damping factor of a Middle East campaign was its
dependence on a successful drive through southern Russia to the Caucasus.
Should Rommel’s panzer strength be doubled, without regard for the demands of
the Russian front, or for how the additional tanks and trucks would be
supplied, the offensive through Egypt would nevertheless remain a secondary
operation. If German tanks did not appear in the southern passages of the
Caucasus by early winter, any successes Rommel might achieve were likely to
prove all too ephemeral. And yet the question remains: What might Rommel have
achieved with a couple of additional panzer divisions, a little more gasoline .
. . ?
