Battle Group by James Lucas

Author:James Lucas
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War II
ISBN: 9781473834927
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2014-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

Battle Group Marcks, which led the advance of the Italo–German Army during the 1942 spring offensive in Libya

A desert is by definition a bare and hostile region which cannot sustain human life much above a primitive level. A desert is a treeless wilderness whether it be the wastes of ice at the North and South Poles, or the hot, barren sand seas of Africa, Asia and Australia.

The Libyan desert in North Africa was a theatre of war in which German soldiers fought from March 1941 until the surrender of the Axis armies in May 1943. That Libyan desert, more than 1,000km from west to east, was described by one German commander, General von Ravenstein, as a tactician’s paradise but a quartermaster’s hell. It was crossed by only one, single, all-weather road, the Via Balbia, which ran from the provincial capital, Tripoli, to the frontier with Egypt where it met a British military road leading to the Canal Zone and Palestine. To supplement that road’s freight and passenger carrying capacity on their side of the frontier the British had built a railway line to the Nile delta, but there was no comparable railway system in the Italian colony. This meant that a land journey from from one side of Libya to the other could only be made by motor transport or by animal. In addition to the permanent Via Balbia there were the Trigh, impermanent tracks tramped out by the feet of generations of Arab desert dwellers. The Trigh surface could be destroyed by a strong downpour of rain but in dry weather it was often the only firm surface in a sea of shifting sand into which vehicles could be — and frequently were — bogged down to their axles. Although desert covered most of Libya’s land area there was a narrow fertile strip which ran along the Mediterranean coast. Deep in the southernmost region of Libya was the impassable, vast Qattara Depression. Below the narrow, fertile area the desert began. Only seldom was this made up of the golden dunes of popular imagination. More often the desert surface was a gritty grey dust which had been scoured over millenia from solid base rock and which blanketed the vast and empty wasteland. A sand desert is an arid region but even in the great Libyan desert there were native water wells which were identified on military maps by the Arabic term “Bir”, as for example, Bir Hachim, a place which we shall meet in the account of Kampfgruppe Briel.

As aids to navigation in the Egyptian section of the great desert, the British Army had set up trigonometrical points, piles of stones surmounted by an empty petrol drum on which the trig bearing was painted. These vital aids to orientation were carefully marked on British maps, yet even with such information it was possible to lose one’s way. The compass and the vehicle mileage counter were two indispensables in a wasteland that could be as featureless as the sea, or nearly so.

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