Len Deighton - Blood_ Tears And by Blood Tears & Folly

Author:Blood, Tears & Folly [Blood, Tears & Folly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

QUARTERMASTER’S NIGHTMARE

Victory is a mirage in the desert created by a long war.

CRETE GAVE A GREAT NAME; Africa gave a greater.

The words of the Roman poet Martial describe the rival bids for glory made by Karl Student and the even more ambitious Erwin Rommel, who was appointed to command the Deutsches Afrika Korps on 12 February 1941: “In the evening the Fuhrer showed me a number of British and American illustrated papers describing General Wavell’s advance through Cyrenaica. Of particular interest was the masterly coordination these showed between armoured land forces, air force and navy.”

Events moved quickly. A British intelligence summary dated March 1941 said: “Detachments of a German expeditionary force under an obscure general, Rommel, have landed in North Africa.”

Stripped of much equipment and transport (which had been sent to Greece), tired, depleted and untested units made up much of the British army facing Rommel in North Africa. Wavell and his staff in Cairo were not unduly worried. They comforted themselves with the belief that the Italians in Tripolitania could be disregarded and that German reinforcements would not be sufficient for any attack to be started in the near future.

The code crackers at Bletchley Park were keeping tabs on Rommel. When Churchill asked what was happening, he was supplied with German OKW, High Command of the Armed Forces, signals showing the approximate arrival dates of components of the Afrika Korps. Although Cairo frequently complained of Bletchley Park’s slowness, this time there was no delay in passing on these figures to Wavell.

By early March Wavell’s director of intelligence was telling him the Afrika Korps might attack very soon. He showed Wavell the sort of plan he thought might be on Rommel’s desk. Wavell dismissed it.

Without disputing the figures from London, his staff-guided by the way the British army did such things calculated that Rommel could not be ready before May. His supply line was long and he would need considerable time to prepare reserves and dumps before going into action.

In Berlin the German army’s C-in-C, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, came to the same conclusion as Wavell. He told Rommel that there could be no question of staging an offensive in Africa in the near future. The Italian high command took the same view. But Rommel was aggressive and ambitious. He saw that Berlin was hoping that the Western Desert fighting might lull into a stalemate, and he had no intention of letting his command become a backwater. He was determined to make war, and he was in a hurry. When his ships arrived he kept the dockside lights on, and worked all night unloading despite the danger of air raids. The armoured cars that were swinging from the cranes in Tripoli in mid-February were in action ten days later.

The remarkable General O’Connor had been sent away to rest and the fighting army was now commanded by General Philip Neame, a man of outstanding valour, as his VC indicated, but lacking experience of mechanized desert fighting. Rommel knew from intelligence

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