History of the Second World War (31 page)

After a thirty-mile approach march by night, the Italian-held post at the top of the Halfaya Pass was stormed by surprise early on May 15 and several hundred prisoners taken, though seven Matildas were knocked out by the defenders’ artillery as they closed in. Two other posts, Bir Waid and Musaid, were quickly taken, but surprise had passed before Fort Capuzzo was reached, and when a German battle-group intervened by flank action the attack became disjointed. Although the fort was eventually captured, it was later evacuated. Meanwhile the flanking move to Sidi Azeiz had been broken off under threat of a counterattack. On the other hand, the enemy commander on the frontier had been so impressed by the apparent strength of the attack that he was led to start withdrawing.

Thus by nightfall both sides were in process of falling back. But while the German-Italian withdrawal was promptly countermanded by Rommel, who was rushing a panzer battalion to the scene from Tobruk, Gott had decided on a retirement to Halfaya, and the troops were already on the move, before a stand fast order reached him from the distant higher command. When daylight came the Germans found the battlefield empty — much to their relief, as the reinforcing panzer battalion had run out of petrol, and was immobilised until a refill arrived late that day.

The British withdrawal did not stop at Halfaya, but left a small garrison there. The Germans were quick to take advantage of its exposed position, and recaptured the Pass on the 27th by a sudden converging stroke from several directions. Its recapture was a valuable gain to them, as it seriously hampered the next and heavier British offensive, ‘Battleaxe’. Moreover, during the interval Rommel laid traps for the British tanks at Halfaya as well as at other forward posts by digging in batteries of 88-mm. guns, converted most effectively from an anti-aircraft to an anti-tank role.

That emergency step proved of great importance for the issue of the coming battle. At this time nearly two-thirds of the German anti-tank guns were still the old 37-mm., developed five years before the war, and much inferior to the British 2-pounder tank and anti-tank gun. They could do little against the British cruiser tanks and were helpless against the Matildas. Even the new 50-mm. anti-tank gun, of which Rommel now had fifty odd, could only pierce the Matilda’s thick armour at very close range. But the wheeled 88-mm. was capable of penetrating the Matilda’s frontal armour (77 mm. thick) at a range of 2,000 yards. Rommel had only twelve of these guns, but one battery (of four) was posted at Halfaya and another at Hafid Ridge — two points which the British aimed to capture at the outset of their attack.

That was fortunate for Rommel, for in many respects he stood at a serious disadvantage when the attack was launched, particularly in the number of tanks — the prime arm in these desert battles. No further reinforcements had arrived from Germany, and he had barely a hundred gun-armed tanks available when the battle opened, more than half of which were with the force investing Tobruk, eighty miles back. On the other side, the arrival of the ‘Tiger’ convoy enabled the British to deploy some 200 gun-armed tanks — which gave them a 4 to 1 advantage in the opening stage. Much depended on whether they could exploit this advantage to smash the enemy forces in the frontier area before Rommel could bring up the rest of his tanks (5th Panzer Regiment) from distant Tobruk.

Unfortunately for the British, the chances were diminished by an ‘infantry-minded’ planning of the offensive. This trend was fostered by the mixture of tank types and, in the event, led to a dissipation of the numerical advantage.

The arrival of the ‘Tiger’ convoy had enabled Wavell to reconstitute two armoured brigades for the new offensive, but so few tanks were left after the abortive ‘Brevity’ attack in mid-May that the total was only enough to equip two of the three regiments in each brigade.* Moreover the number of new cruiser tanks that had arrived sufficed only to equip one regiment, and of the earlier cruisers only enough remained for a second regiment. The two regiments of the other brigade were equipped with Matildas, ‘infantry tanks’ — which strongly influenced the Command decision to use this brigade at the outset to assist the infantry in a direct assault on the enemy’s fortified position, instead of concentrating all available tank strength to crush the enemy’s panzer forces in the forward area. The consequences of that decision proved fatally frustrating to the development of the offensive.

* Churchill urged that a further hundred tanks — the number required to equip a third regiment for each brigade — should be sent out by the Mediterranean route, but the Admiralty were reluctant to run the risk again. Churchill bitterly remarks in his memoirs: ‘I should not have been deterred from seeking and obtaining a Cabinet decision upon the issue but for the fact that General Wavell himself did not press the point, and indeed took the other side. This cut the ground from under my feet.’
(The Second World War,
vol. III, p. 223.) So the convoy went round the Cape and did not reach Suez until mid-July.

The aims of ‘Operation Battleaxe’ were ambitious — as set by Churchill, they were to gain a ‘decisive’ victory in North Africa and ‘destroy’ Rommel’s forces. Wavell expressed a cautious doubt about the possibility of such complete success, but said that he hoped the attack would ‘succeed in driving the enemy back west of Tobruk’. That was the object defined in the operation instructions he gave to General Beresford-Peirse who, as commander of the Western Desert Force, was to conduct the offensive.

The plan of attack comprised three stages, opening with an assault on the fortified area Halfaya-Sollum-Capuzzo by the 4th Indian Division, aided by the 4th Armoured Brigade (which was equipped with Matilda tanks), while the rest of the 7th Armoured Division covered the desert flank. In the second stage, the 7th Armoured Division was to make an exploiting drive for Tobruk, with both its armoured brigades. In the third stage, this division together with the Tobruk garrison was to push on westwards. It was a plan that contained the seeds of its own frustration. For by detaching half the armour to help the infantry in the first stage, it more than halved the chances of defeating the enemy’s panzer regiment in the forward area before this could be reinforced by the other panzer regiment from Tobruk, and thus greatly diminished the chances of achieving the second and third stages of the British plan.

To reach the enemy’s frontier positions the attacking force had to make a thirty-mile approach march, which started in the afternoon of June 14. The final bound, of eight miles, was made by moonlight in the early hours of the 15th, and the battle opened with the right wing’s attack on the enemy’s outlying position at the Halfaya Pass. But the defenders were better prepared than in May, while the chance of surprise was forfeited by the planning decision that the tanks should not deliver the assault until the artillery had sufficient light for shooting. That decision proved the worse because the one battery allotted to support the Halfaya assault became stuck in the sand. It was broad daylight when the squadron of Matildas leading this attack started on the last lap of the advance, and the first news that came back was from its commander’s voice on the radio: ‘They are tearing my tanks to bits.’ That was his last message. Of the thirteen Matildas, only one survived the ‘tank trap’ of four 88s that Rommel had placed at what the British troops aptly called ‘Hellfire Pass’.

Meanwhile the centre column had been pushing on across the desert plateau towards Fort Capuzzo, spearheaded by a whole regiment of Matildas. There were no 88s in the path, and the garrison’s resistance crumbled in face of this massed menace. The fort was captured, and two counterattacks repulsed later in the day.

But the brigade of cruiser tanks leading the left column, which was intended to turn the enemy’s flank, had run into Rommel’s tank trap on the Hafid Ridge, and there been checked. Renewing the attack in the late afternoon, it only pushed deeper into the trap, with heavier loss. By that time the bulk of the forward panzer regiment had come on the scene, and it developed a counter flank threat which caused the remaining British tanks to fall back slowly to the frontier wire.

By nightfall on the first day, the British had lost more than half their tanks, mainly in the two anti-tank traps, whereas Rommel’s tank strength was almost intact, and with the arrival of his other panzer regiment from Tobruk the balance shifted in his favour.

On the second day Rommel seized the initiative by using the whole of his 5th Light Division from Tobruk to envelop the British left flank in the desert in conjunction with a strong counterattack at Capuzzo by the 15th Panzer Division. This counterattack at Capuzzo was repulsed — the British here enjoying the advantage of the defensive in well-chosen and concealed positions. But the combined effect of the frontal and flank threats disjointed the British plan for a renewed offensive effort that day, and by nightfall the Germans’ enveloping move had made ominous progress.

Pressing this advantage, Rommel switched the whole of his mobile forces to the desert flank in the early hours of the third day, with the aim of making a scythe-like sweep to the Halfaya Pass and cutting the British lines of retreat. When the menace became manifest in mid-morning, the British higher commanders issued orders, after hasty consultation, for a precipitate retreat of their disjointed forces. The advanced portion at Capuzzo had a very narrow escape, but the stubborn resistance of the remaining British tanks there gained time for the extrication of the lorry-borne infantry, and by the fourth morning the British forces were back on the line — thirty miles back — from which they had started.

The human losses in the three days’ ‘Battleaxe’ battle were slight — less than a thousand killed, wounded and missing on the British side, and about the same on the other side. But the British lost ninety-one tanks and the Germans only 12. Being left in possession of the battlefield they were able to recover and repair most of their damaged tanks, whereas the British in their hasty retreat had to abandon many which were merely disabled by mechanical troubles, and could have been repaired if time had been allowed. The disproportionate tank losses emphasised the failure of this offensive to fulfil the high hopes, and far-reaching aims, with which it had been launched.

Tobruk, ‘Brevity’ and ‘Battleaxe’ marked a fresh turn in the tactical trend of the war. Hitherto, it had been an almost complete reversal of the ascendancy of the defensive that had prevailed during World War I and the previous half-century. Since September 1939 the offensive had been so repeatedly and sweepingly successful in every theatre, when carried out by fast-moving armoured forces, that both public and military opinion had come to regard the defensive as inherently weak, and to believe that any attack was bound to prevail. But ‘Battleaxe’ showed, as Tobruk and ‘Brevity’ had foreshadowed, how effective defence could be — even in such open country as the North African desert — if conducted with skill and based on an understanding of the properties of modern instruments. From this time onwards, as the war continued and experience grew, it became increasingly evident that defence, in a more mobile form, had regained the advantage it held in World War I, and could only be overcome by a great superiority of strength or a very high degree of skill — -in upsetting the opponent’s balance.

Unfortunately for the prospects of the next British attempt to crush Rommel and clear North Africa, the lessons of ‘Battleaxe’ were either missed or misunderstood. The most important point missed by the British higher headquarters in their conclusions was the part that the 88s had played in the defence. They discounted reports that this heavy anti-aircraft gun was being used as an anti-tank gun. When they came belatedly to realise that fact in the autumn, after further heavy tank losses from its fire, they remained obstinately sure that such a bulky weapon could only be used from a dug-in position. Thus they failed to foresee and evolve tactics to counter the next advance in Rommel’s defensive tactics — that of using the 88s in a mobile role.

Another important development missed, by the British fighting troops as well as by their higher commanders, was the enemy’s increasingly bold use of his normal anti-tank guns in close combination with his tanks — not only in defence but also in attack. In the coming battles that combination became a dominant factor, exerting an even greater influence on the issue than the 88s. Indeed, the principal cause of the disproportionately heavy loss of tanks on the British side appears, in analysis, to have been the way that the German. 50-mm. anti-tank guns, comparatively small and handy, were pushed out ahead of their own tanks to concealed positions in hollows. That was not realised by the British tank crews, who could not know whether an armour-piercing shot that penetrated their armour had been fired by a tank or anti-tank gun — and naturally tended to ascribe it to the most visible opponent. That mistaken deduction led, in the aftermath, to a mistaken belief that their own tanks and tank-guns were inferior to the enemy’s — and thereby to a spreading loss of confidence.

Besides the points that were missed in reviewing the course of the summer campaign, there was also an important one which was misunderstood, with serious effect on the British plan for the next offensive. Wavell in his Despatch, drafted nearly three months after ‘Battleaxe’, reached the conclusion that the prime ‘cause of our failure was undoubtedly the difficulty of combining the action of cruiser and “I” [Infantry] tanks. . . .’ But in fact the combination had not been tried, nor its possibility tested. The two regiments of Matildas had been detached from the armoured division and placed under the commander of the infantry division at the outset, and he had clung on to them throughout the battle, instead of releasing them after the first phase as intended in the plan. With intelligent combination the ‘I’ tanks could have played a valuable part in the armoured battle, operating as a strong offensive pivot of manoeuvre for the cruiser tanks. There was only a slight difference of speed between the Matildas and the A. 10 cruisers, which had effectively co-operated with the faster cruisers in the first Libyan campaign and in ‘Battleaxe’ itself. The Germans, both at this time and later, proved capable of combining tank types with as large a difference of speed as that between the faster British cruisers and the Matildas.