History of the Second World War (33 page)

Yet all this time the New Zealand Division and the ‘I’ tank brigade of the 13th Corps had been lying only seven miles away, at Bir Gibni — panting to advance and eager to help. But it was not called on to take a hand in the armoured battle, and its offers to help were declined. It is an extraordinary revelation of how far the ‘two-compartment’ idea was carried in conducting this battle.

When morning came, on November 21, the British armoured brigades at Gabr Saleh found that the enemy had vanished from their front. This time it was not for a blow in the air — for Rommel had by now gained a clear picture of the British lay-out, and had ordered Cruewell to strike a concentrated blow, with both panzer divisions, against the British advanced force at Sidi Rezegh.

Norrie had just told this force to drive on towards Tobruk, and ordered the Tobruk garrison to start its breakout attack. But before the drive got going it was thrown out of gear. At 8 a.m. two German armoured columns were seen approaching from south and east. Two of the three British armoured units at Sidi Rezegh were hurriedly diverted to meet them. Thus only one (the 6th Royal Tanks) was left to lead the drive for Tobruk, and was soon shattered by the enemy’s well-posted guns, which were able to concentrate on this single unit. It was another ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ — a too light brigade in this case. Meanwhile the other two armoured units were assailed by the full weight of the Afrika Korps. One of them, the 7th Hussars, was overrun and almost wiped out by the 21st Panzer Division. The other, the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, attacked the 15th Panzer Division so boldly and with such effect, thanks to its superior skill in firing on the move, that the enemy turned away. But the Germans attacked afresh in the afternoon, and cleverly employed their new tactics of pushing forward anti-tank guns unobtrusively ahead of their tanks and round the opponent’s flanks. In this way they took such heavy toll that the rapidly dwindling remnant of the 7th Armoured Brigade was only saved from annihilation by the long-awaited and belated arrival of the 22nd Armoured Brigade from Gabr Saleh — the 4th did not come up until next day. As for the breakout attack from Tobruk, this drove four miles deep into the German-Italian investing position, but was then suspended in view of the setback which the 30th Corps had suffered — and the breakout force was thus left in an awkwardly deep and narrow salient.

When dawn broke on the fifth day the Afrika Korps had again disappeared — but this time only to replenish its fuel and ammunition. Even that short lull was not to Rommel’s liking, and about midday he arrived at the headquarters of the 21st Panzer Division, which had stayed near the battlefield, and launched it on an indirect approach and attack. Driving westward through the valley north of Sidi Rezegh, the panzer regiment wheeled round and struck at the western flank of the British position there. Sweeping up the slope, it overran the airfield and overwhelmed part of the Support Group before the two remaining British armoured brigades were able to intervene. Their belated counterattacks were not coordinated, and ended in a state of confusion as darkness fell. But that was not the end of a bad day. For the 15th Panzer Division, returning to the battle area at dusk after its ‘day off’, hit the rear of the 4th Armoured Brigade and surrounded the leaguer in which its headquarters and reserve, the 8th Hussars, were lying. Taken by surprise, most of the personnel, tanks, and wireless links were captured. The brigade commander had been directing the counterattack at Sidi Rezegh, and thus escaped capture — but when dawn came on the 23rd he found himself left with a mutilated and scattered brigade while short of the means to direct and reassemble its fragments. That plight paralysed his action on what proved a still more critical day.

It was a compensation, though not immediately, that the headquarters of the Afrika Korps suffered a similar fate early on the 23rd. This came about because Cunningham had at last given the order for the 13th Corps to start advancing — although only in a limited way. The New Zealanders took Capuzzo on the 22nd, and one brigade (the 6th) was then told to push on towards Sidi Rezegh. Soon after dawn on the 23rd it bumped into and overran the Afrika Korps H.Q. Cruewell only escaped capture because he had just gone off to conduct the next phase of the battle. But his loss of operational staff and wireless links became a serious handicap in the days that followed — more of a handicap than was realised by the British, who were concerned with their own troubles and growing afflictions.

November 23 was a Sunday — in England the ‘Sunday next before Advent’ and in Germany ‘Totensonntag’, the ‘Sunday of the Dead’. In the light of what happened in the desert that day it was grimly apt that the battle was subsequently given that name by the Germans.

During the night the British force at Sidi Rezegh had withdrawn a short step southward, to await reinforcement by the 1st South African Division, which was now being brought up. But the junction was never achieved. For a concentrated thrust by the two panzer divisions, emerging from the early morning mist, took the British and South Africans by surprise and split them apart, as well as sweeping through their transport leaguers and producing a stampede. The disaster would have been greater if the panzer divisions had not been called off at this moment by a signal from Cruewell, who had not got a clear picture of the situation, and wanted to link up with the Italian Ariete Division before attempting a decisive blow. But the Italians were cautiously slow in advancing, and it was not until the afternoon that Cruewell launched his attack, from the south, against the major portion of Norrie’s advanced forces, the now isolated 5th South African Brigade and 22nd Armoured Brigade — some of the smaller fragments had managed to slip out of the trap in the interval. By the time he struck, a good defence had been organised. His concentrated attack eventually succeeded in bursting into the position and overwhelming the defenders — of whom some 3,000 were captured or killed. But the Afrika Korps lost over seventy of its remaining 160 tanks.

The tank losses suffered in this one direct attack on a defensive position largely offset the material profit gained by skilful manoeuvre during the previous days. Indeed the crippling cost of this tactical success was strategically more damaging to the Germans than anything else in the course of ‘Operation Crusader’. While the 30th Corps had suffered much heavier losses — and had only some seventy tanks left fit for action out of the 500 with which it had started — the British had a large reserve from which to restore their tank strength, whereas Rommel had no such reserve.

On November 24 the battle took another dramatic turn. For Rommel now sought to exploit his success by a deep thrust to, and over, the frontier — into the rear area of the Eighth Army — with all his mobile forces. Rather than lose time while they were assembling, he set off with the 21st Panzer Division as soon as it was ready to move, and himself took the lead — telling the 15th to follow, and being promised that the Italian Mobile Corps (Ariete armoured and Trieste motor divisions) would back up the panzer divisions, to close the ring round the British forces.

His initial intention, as indicated by his overnight report to Berlin and Rome, was to take advantage of the splintered state of the British forces and relieve the German-Italian frontier garrisons. But during the night his aim expanded, according to the evidence of his principal staff officers, and their statements are borne out by the headquarters war diary, which recorded that: ‘The Commander-in-Chief decided to pursue the enemy with his armoured divisions, to restore the situation on the Sollum front, and at the same time advance against rearward communications of the British in the area of Sidi Omar. . . . This would mean that they would soon be compelled to give up the struggle.’

Rommel was striking at the mind of the opposing commander, as well as against the rear of the opposing forces and their supplies. At that moment such a stroke had greater promise than Rommel knew. For on the previous day, following the disastrous outcome of the armoured battle, Cunningham had thought of retreating over the frontier, and had only been stopped by the arrival of Auchinleck — who flew up from Cairo and insisted on a continuance of the struggle. Rommel’s dash for the frontier, however, then caused a stampede among those who were in its path, and naturally produced still greater alarm at Eighth Army Headquarters.

By four o’clock in the afternoon, Rommel reached the frontier at Bir Sheferzen — having covered sixty miles in five hours” drive through the desert. On arrival, he immediately sent a battle-group through the frontier wire on a north-eastward drive to the Halfaya Pass, to dominate the Eighth Army’s coastward route of retreat and supply, while extending the threat to its rear. After leading the battle-group some distance on its way, Rommel turned back, but was stranded in the desert by engine trouble. Luckily for him, Cruewell happened to pass the spot in his own command vehicle, and picked him up. But darkness was falling, and they could not find a gap in the frontier wire. Thus the two commanders, together with their chiefs of staff, spent the night amid the British and Indian troops in that area — dependent for their safety only on the natural instinct of ordinary soldiers to ‘let sleeping generals lie’. For Cruewell’s command vehicle was one that had been captured from the British. That also helped them to slip away at dawn unchallenged and get back safely to the headquarters of the 21st Panzer Division.

But on returning there, after twelve hours’ ‘detention’, Rommel found that the 15th Panzer Division had not yet arrived on the frontier, while the Ariete Division had come to a halt at an early stage of its follow-up advance — on sighting the 1st South African Brigade in position across its path. The transport columns bringing up fuel supplies had also failed to arrive. These delays not only hindered but diminished the development of Rommel’s counterstroke. He could not carry out his plan of sending a battle-group eastward to Habata, the British railhead, to block both the descents of the escarpment and the main inland route to Egypt along its crest. He also had to drop his idea of sending another battle-group southward to the Jarabub Oasis, along the track past Fort Maddalena, where the Eighth Army’s advanced headquarters lay — a move which would have multiplied the confusion and alarm there. Even in the frontier zone, the day slipped away without any more fruitful action than an abortive and costly attack on Sidi Omar by the already weak tank regiment of the 21st Panzer Division. When the stronger 15th Panzer Division belatedly appeared on the scene, its northward sweep along the near side of the frontier merely achieved the destruction of a field workshop where sixteen British tanks were under repair.

Such a slight development of the menace that had loomed so large the day before allowed the British a chance to recover their breath and their balance. Moreover, early on the third day, November 26, Cunningham was replaced as Commander of the Eighth Army by Auchinleck’s Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Neil Ritchie — appointed in this emergency as a way of ensuring that the battle should be continued whatever the risks. It was very fortunate for the British that the enemy’s drive had missed the two big supply dumps south of the Trigh el Abd on which they were largely dependent for the possibility of continuing the battle and resuming their advance. The panzer divisions’ south-eastward drive from Sidi Rezegh passed well north of the dumps, but the Italians’ line of advance, if they had pushed on, would have come closer to the dumps.

But although Rommel’s thrust had lost momentum, the British situation remained very precarious on the morning of the 26th. The 30th Corps was so disrupted that it did nothing during the day to relieve the enemy’s threat to the rearward parts of the 13th Corps — and these, besides being widely separated, were also isolated by wireless breakdowns. The Germans, however, were also suffering from intercommunication trouble, due to loss of wireless links, and it was far more detrimental in their case. For their prospects depended on quick and co-ordinated action to develop the threat to the British rear, whereas the best thing that the British troops there could do was to stand firm in their frontier positions while the advanced part of the 13th Corps continued to push on westward and link up with the Tobruk force in a double threat to Rommel’s rear. This threat had now begun to produce a succession of signals from Panzer Group H.Q., back at El Adem, calling for the return of the panzer divisions to relieve the pressure.

These disturbing calls from the rear combined with wireless breakdowns and fuel shortages in the forward area to upset the continuation of Rommel’s counterstroke. He had ordered Cruewell that morning, the 26th, ‘to clear the Sollum front quickly’ — by a simultaneous attack with the 15th Panzer Division on one side and the 21st on the other. But he was dismayed to find that the 15th had moved back to Bardia early in the morning to replenish its fuel and ammunition, and then, just as it was returning to the battlefield, he found that the 21st had withdrawn from Halfaya, on a misinterpreted order, and was likewise on its way back to replenish at Bardia. So no action developed that day, and in the evening Rommel reluctantly decided to let the 21st Panzer Division continue its return journey to Tobruk. Next day he ordered the 15th to follow suit — after an early morning attack in which it succeeded in overwhelming the headquarters and support elements of the rearmost New Zealand brigade. That was the fade-out finish of a counterstroke that had opened so promisingly.

Retrospective comment on it has naturally been influenced by the knowledge that the thrust failed. Tactically minded critics have taken the view that Rommel should, instead, have concentrated on a more local exploitation of his success at Sidi Rezegh: finishing off what remained of 30th Corps, or crushing the New Zealand Division in its advanced position, or capturing Tobruk — thus clearing his flank and line of supply. But none of these tactical courses offered as great a chance of decisive strategic results against the British, while they carried more risk to him of losing time and being decisively weakened in a fruitless assault. The balance of numbers was so heavily against Rommel from the outset that he was bound to be beaten in a prolonged battle of attrition. If he tried to follow up and wipe out the remaining tanks of the 30th Corps, they could always evade battle — being faster than his own. The other courses meant attacking infantry and artillery in defensive positions. Since he could not afford to fight a battle of attrition, it would have been folly to pursue any of these tactical courses if any better prospect was open. Such a prospect was provided, inherently, by the course he chose — a deep strategic thrust with all his mobile forces. The chances were increased by the fact that he had at last induced Mussolini to put the Italian Mobile Corps under his command.