How Churchill Saved Civilization by Harte John

Author:Harte, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

Rommel’s Afrika Korps

At the beginning of 1942, the Afrika Korps and the Eighth Army faced each other off at El Agheila—by which time the Axis had already lost 24,500 dead and wounded since the launch of the campaign, and 36,500 taken prisoner. The British had lost only half that number.

Rommel’s forces attacked and captured Benghazi on January 21. He expressed great respect for Auchinleck, whom he thought cool and skillful and who would not allow himself to accept second-class solutions. General Auchinleck’s problem was that they were often not carried out in the way he wanted. It was a failure in the British army culture and lax training.

Rommel was finally given the go-ahead by the OKW to take Egypt and seize the Suez Canal.11 After his capture of Benghazi, the British mined the line for forty miles. They outnumbered Rommel’s forces by this time. Nevertheless, his offensive against the Gazala Line on May 28 began three weeks of heavy fighting. Field Marshal Carver calculated he averaged only two and a half hours of sleep in every twenty-four hours at the time. Rommel now threatened the rear of the Eighth Army. And General Ritchie anxiously withdrew to Halfaya on the Egyptian border. Tobruk was besieged. And it fell to the Afrika Korps after a combined attack with aircraft.

The fall of Tobruk was viewed as the biggest blow to the British in the entire war. It was also another shock to Winston Churchill, who was embarrassed when handed a note of the news on a visit to Washington. Now he had to explain the reasons for the defeat to the House of Commons, as he had previously done about the humiliating defeats in Greece, Crete, and of Force Z in Singapore.

Auchinleck was in a perfect defensive position by this time. And the Afrika Korps was exhausted and overextended. But Rommel was bolstered by his victory and believed British morale would be at a low ebb, so he attacked the British on July 1. Battles went back and forth until both sides settled down to refresh, refit, and retrain for the summer, and Rommel laid a massive minefield to protect his forces.12

Auchinleck warned the high command in London that the counterattack could not be launched until September in order for him to train reinforcements in desert conditions. It brought Churchill to the front to assess the situation for himself. But Churchill and Brooke had already decided that General Auchinleck was not sufficiently offensive in his attitude, that neither he nor the gentlemanly Wavell possessed the killer instinct. They replaced him in early August with General Sir Harold Alexander who would be commander in chief, and with Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery who would now be in command of the Eighth Army.13

“General Sir Claude Auchinleck did not really deserve to be removed from his command in North Africa,” wrote historian Andrew Roberts. He held the Afrika Korps from breaking through British defensive lines on the Ruweisat Ridge at the first battle of El Alamein in early July, when he took seven thousand prisoners, and made excellent plans for an autumn counterattack.

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