A World at Arms (48 page)

Under these circumstances, the British decided that, come what may, it was necessary to shift Syria from Vichy French to Free French control. The forces available were inadequate, but a hastily put together combination of Australian, British, Free French, and Indian troops–the last fresh from victory in Italian East Africa-struck into the Syrian and Lebanese mandates from the south on June 8. The Free French and the British both publicly announced their support for independent status for the mandates while the British commander also drew on forces released by the surrender of Rashid Ali to strike into Syria from the southeast as well as the east.
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The Vichy French forces fought bitterly but in vain. The Germans were now so fixated on the coming invasion of the Soviet Union that almost the only help they provided was to allow the French to move troops and supplies from North Africa to Syria and by train from France to Salonika where they were stopped by the British blockade. A stalemate before Damascus was avoided when the failure of “Battleaxe,” Wavell’s offensive in the western desert, released further British forces after June 17. On June 21 the Syrian capital fell. Dentz now concentrated his remaining strength on the defense of Beirut. In bitter battles, the British approached the city and took it on July 10. On the following day, Dentz asked for an armistice. The hard-fought campaign was over. With Turkey refusing to allow train transit of troops and supplies, British control of the sea held down reinforcements to Dentz at a time when Germany was no longer willing to risk substantial numbers of planes after the losses on Crete and just before the attack on Russia.

The armistice was signed, perhaps appropriately, on July 14. De Gaulle took over in Syria. Thereafter he could and would quarrel endlessly with Great Britain as well as Syrian nationalists over the policies to be followed in the mandates, but the Axis hopes were shut out. If they could not defeat the Soviet Union, where they were already locked in bloody battle by the time the fighting in Syria ended, there would be no base for Germany at the center of the Near East.

The turning of Syria over to the Free French did relieve the Germans of having to be concerned about French susceptibilities in promising pieces of Syria to Turkey if that should prove desirable and in proclaiming their support of Arab nationalist demands.
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This was a subject about which they had agonized a good deal before and continued to debate among themselves and with the Italians for some time yet. They at times hoped that with the help of Haj Amin al-Husayni, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, they could get uprisings going against the British. However, while al-Husayni was all in favor of defeating Great Britain and thrilled by German persecution and subsequent killing of the Jews, there was never anything practical he could do to help install the Axis in the Near East; and until after the anticipated victory over Russia, there was little the Germans could do to install al-Husayni in Jerusalem. Years later he could recruit some Muslims in occupied Yugoslavia to participate in anti-partisan warfare and the massacres of civilians so beloved by the Germans, but how this activity furthered the aims of Arab nationalism was. never very clear. He and Hitler could exchange compliments but little else.
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If the Near East was too far, India was even farther. Like al-Husayni and Rashid Ali, Bose hoped that a German victory in the war would
bring independence to his country–a speculation which reflects very poorly on the intelligence of a man who spent considerable time in Germany and had plenty of opportunity to observe the way in which the Germans treated peoples who had come under their control. Like the refugees from Jerusalem and Baghdad, he would spend a good deal of time in Berlin and Rome, collecting subsidies and arguing for German proclamations of support for his cause. It is difficult to believe, but there were still those who thought Hitler’s word when given in public and in written form might prove useful outside the toilet. The Germans themselves, not surprisingly, shared this view and debated the subject throughout the war. As will become clear subsequently, Bose was eventually shipped off to Japan,
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while al-Husayni and Rashid Ali remained in Europe to feud with each other and share in the arguments between and within the governments in Rome and Berlin.

If the British campaign in Syria which closed a major path for the Axis into the Near East had been assisted by the transfer of forces after the “Battleaxe” campaign in North Africa as well as the fighting in East Africa, the conclusion of the fighting in Syria in turn freed units for a return to Egypt and their concentration there for a renewed offensive against Rommel. Under insistent pressure from London, the new British commander, General Claude Auchinleck, built up his army for what came to be known as operation “Crusader.” The British, now finally able to concentrate their Near Eastern strength on
one
front, would strike in the Western Desert where Rommel could get no major reinforcements at a time when Germany concentrated on the Eastern Front. With the British holding on to Tobruk, Rommel would have had to attack there first before heading east into Egypt again. Before he could launch such an offensive, Auchinleck began his on November 18, 1941.
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The British offensive involved English, New Zealand, South African and Indian units and, for the first time, included 300 American tanks, some 40 percent of those employed.
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In rapidly moving warfare, the German and Italian armored units at first held their own. British numerical superiority began to tell even as the New Zealand division attacks near the coast reached the Tobruk perimeter. There followed German counter-attacks which briefly isolated them alongside the Tobruk garrison, but then new British attacks and a rather foolish raid by Rommel himself toward the Egyptian border left the Axis forces so weakened that retreat was clearly necessary. Although Auchinleck replaced the commander of the British army on the spot, his replacement was no more able to concentrate the British armor in a decisive blow. The German and Italian forces near the Egyptian border were not evacuated or ordered to break out and hence had to capitulate in January, but
Rommel was able to pull the bulk of his forces out of Cyrenaica and return to El Agheila. This time there would be no Beda Fromm victory cutting off the retreating Axis forces as in the preceding year. German armor and anti-tank guns were still superior both in quality and in their handling.
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Rommel was back where he had started ten months earlier. What did it all mean?

The Germans and Italians, with the latter fighting far harder and more effectively than before, suffered almost 40,000 casualties, roughly double those of the British. For the first time in the war, the British had succeeded in administering a defeat to the German army. They still had a great deal to learn, as the campaign which followed showed all too dramatically, but they had made a start.
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Similarly, the Germans had made a start at abandoning forces cut off by Allied advances rather than evacuating them or ordering a break–out attempt, a major contributing factor in the capture of thousands of German soldiers.

More important was the way in which this first major Allied offensive against the Germans in World War II interacted with other fronts of that world-wide conflict. In the summer of 1940, when Britain was fighting for its life, the Soviet Union had provided the Germans with oil. In the winter of 1941-42, as the Soviet Union was fighting to defend its capital, the British North African offensive forced the Germans to shift from the Eastern Front to the Mediterranean their 2nd Air Force fleet (
Luftfiotte
2) because the 10th Air Corps (
Fliegerkorps
X) which had been sent a year earlier–itself weakened by transfers to the Eastern Front–was no longer sufficient to the most urgent needs of the Mediterranean theater.
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Equally dramatic was the effect of the North African situation on the war at sea. The Axis supply situation in North Africa became desperate as more and more ships were sunk by the British, in part because the Italians at German insistence had adopted German enigma code machines which the British could read from the summer of 1941 on.
^k
Hitler again worried, and probably with good reason, that a complete defeat in North Africa would lead to a collapse of the Mussolini regime. To help out, not only the 2nd Air fleet but also large numbers of German submarines were diverted to the Mediterranean–a point illustrated by the famous movie “Das Boot” –with serious consequences for the Battle
of the Atlantic.
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The leaders of the German navy had long argued that the Mediterranean was a critical theater in the German war against Great Britain; now they had to commit forces to that theater at precisely the time they least wanted to: when they were finally about to get the war against the United States for which they had been pleading for two years.

Once it had become clear that the Germans were not about to try an invasion of England in the fall of 1940,
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the newspaper and newsreel accounts of the war between Germany and Great Britain were dominated for months by the bombing of English cities. Night after night German planes, occasionally assisted by Italian ones, dropped bombs, mines, and incendiary bombs on the major cities of the country; pictures of fires raging around St. Paul’s Cathedral and of Londoners sleeping in the subway corridors caught the attention of the world.

Occasionally smaller numbers of British planes struck at German cities; for the first time on December 12, 1940, the British attacked an entire city, Mannheim, in retaliation for a German raid on a city, Coventry, in this case.
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It was an approach to bombing that came to be more important later. In Churchill’s eyes, it was always an option once the Germans had dropped all pretence of aiming at military targets,
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but it did not come to dominate British air strategy until an attempt to concentrate on oil targets in the first months of 1941 had failed. Here was a target system correctly believed to be critical to the German war effort; the problem was that, with the technology of the time, the targets could not be readily located, and if they could be located, they could not be hit.
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Over the course of the summer of 1941, it became increasingly obvious that because of the strength of German fighter defenses, the RAF not only had to bomb at night–a discovery the Germans had earlier also made–but also because of technical inadequacy was incapable of hitting specific targets in darkness. That meant either abandoning offensive action against Germany entirely or bombing industrial cities as a whole. The British government, which had earlier been drawn by German initiatives to abandon the restrictive bombing policy with which it started the war, naturally opted for the latter.
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Subsequent developments in the new British alliance with the Soviet Union, the self-perpetuating process of resource commitment, and the real needs of the war would all reinforce this choice. Many in Germany received an opportunity to rethink the question of whether the rebuilding of an air
force in the face of treaty commitments not to do so was in reality the great success some had thought it; but since almost no one has taken advantage of that opportunity even as this is written, one must assume that few did so at the time.

Although not as spectacularly reported upon as the bombing raids, the German attempt to throttle England’s lifeline by attacks on Allied shipping was considerably more effective and dangerous. Important factors in the German war against the oceanic supply routes of the United Kingdom were surface warships, both regular navy and auxiliary cruisers operating as commerce raiders, long-distance airplanes, especially the famous Condor (Focke-Wulf 200), mines put out by German ships and planes, and air force attacks on British shipping in port. By far the most important component in this effort, however, was the submarine campaign. Month in and month out in the war’s longest battle, the U-Boats and the Allies fought the Battle of the Atlantic.
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The German navy’s program for the construction of greater numbers of submarines was still in its infancy. Furthermore, there was no more a solution in 1941 to its endless controversy with the air force for greater assignment of planes to aerial reconnaissance than earlier or later in the war.
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On the subject especially dear to the navy’s heart, the freedom to sink any and all ships at the risk of provoking an American entrance into the war, Hitler was also as reluctant in 1941 as in 1940. Until he had defeated the Soviet Union and could turn back to the construction of a huge navy, he preferred to postpone war with the United States. This issue of possible incidents between Germany and the United States in the Atlantic will be examined further shortly, but there was still another problem for the Germans in the war at sea on which Hitler came to differ with Admiral Raeder, the Commander-in-Chief of the German navy. This was the surface fight employing battleships and cruisers.

Raeder wanted the big ships to participate in the war against British shipping to demonstrate their usefulness to Germany and to preclude the deterioration of morale and discipline in idleness which had affected the surface fleet in World War I. In this he ran into trouble with Hitler for two reasons. Hitler’s skepticism was repeatedly strengthened by the fate of the big ships in action. The designs for the engines of Germany’s navy turned out to be very poor; the ships were subject to repeated breakdowns and long repair periods. In addition, their fate in combat action proved as risky as could have been expected. On April 6, 1941, the battleship
Gneisenau
was hit by a British aerial torpedo. A few days later it was further badly damaged by British bombers while in port at Brest. The following month, the new battleship
Bismarck,
accompanied
by the heavy cruiser
Prinz Eugen,
headed out into the Atlantic, was spotted, sank the British battle cruiser
Hood
and damaged the battleship
Prince of Wales,
but was itself sunk on May 27.
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The next major surface ship to try for an Atlantic operation, the pocket battleship
Lützow,
was torpedoed on June 13. In this, British code-breaking played a key role,
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a point also to be reviewed.