The Moscow Option (18 page)

Auchinleck, arriving at Cunningham’s HQ around 08.30, and, receiving the first reports of Rommel’s attack, came to a similar conclusion. Eighth Army had to retreat. Fortunately 1st Armoured Brigade had not, for reasons unknown, received the order to move west, and with the newly arrived 5th Indian Division was fighting a resolute delaying action.

Cunningham’s mental condition gave less cause for satisfaction. The strain had been too much, and Auchinleck effectively assumed direct command of Eighth Army that morning, Cunningham being officially relieved some days later.

What could be saved from the wreck? The two infantry divisions, with the exception of 50th Division’s 150th Brigade, had suffered relatively few casualties. The South African Division was ordered out along the coast road, while 50th Division’s other two brigades would retreat across the rear of the German armour. The armoured brigades in the north would fall back slowly to provide cover as the South Africans withdrew through the narrowing gap between the panzers and the sea.

Rommel, naturally enough, was determined to close the gap. In this he was to be disappointed. Despite all the efforts of the panzer crews their progress was slowed by the prodigious efforts of the RAF. On 16 and 17 May, as Auchinleck later categorically stated, ‘Eighth Army was saved by the RAF.’ When Balck’s leading panzers reached the coast two miles east of Buq-Buq at 15.45 on 17 May only a few stragglers remained to the west.

But there was ample compensation for Rommel. The enemy was in full retreat, having suffered severe losses in supplies and equipment. His victorious Panzer Army was now not much more than two hundred miles from Alexandria. Egypt, he believed, was in his grasp.

VI

During the next few days, as 90th Motorised reconnaissance units moved east along the coastal road in the wake of the retreating British, the defenders and population of the Egyptian heartland prepared themselves for the inevitable onslaught. The proud remains of the British Mediterranean Fleet sailed from Alexandria on the night of 19 May; around the harbour the demolition gangs awaited the order to destroy the port installations. The town itself seemed like a ghost town, the effects of a strict curfew compounded by the absence of army units, most of whom had been sent either west to the front or south-east to Cairo for possible evacuation.

In the capital itself streets were jammed with traffic from the front, from the country districts, from Alexandria. It was impossible to find space on the densely-packed trains leaving the main station for Palestine. On the roads leading east and south away from Cairo long convoys carried noncombat personnel towards the Suez Canal, Suez itself and the Upper Nile valley. On an open stretch of ground between the British Embassy and the GHQ buildings a number of bonfires were consuming maps, codes, reports, documents of every kind. Cairo seemed to be echoing Moscow.

In the Abdin Palace a nervous King Farouk was closeted with ex-Prime Minister Ali Maher. The King had promised the British authorities that he would move to Gaza when the time came, but he had no intention of doing so. The Germans had also offered him sanctuary; the Abwehr had promised to spirit him and Ali Maher away to Crete. The two Egyptians had refused this offer. They would ‘disappear’ in the near future, they told their Axis contact, and resurface only to welcome the ‘liberation of our country’.

In the barracks of the Egyptian Army the plotting was also proceeding, though with little apparent effect. The Free Officers were trying to inveigle the powerful leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Hassan el Banna, to join them in mounting a coup. He advised them to wait for further Axis successes. When Rommel reached Alexandria, he told Anwar as-Sadat, then they would act together to free Egypt of the accursed British. While these two were sitting in Banna’s tree-shaded mansion in an expensive Cairo suburb, the British were busy building defensive positions on the outskirts of the capital, around Mena to the north-west and near the Pyramids to the west. Auchinleck was still in the desert, supervising Eighth Army’s retreat into the El Alamein positions, but messages were flashing back and forth between him and his deputy in Cairo, Lieutenant-General Corbett, concerning the defence of central Egypt. Though Auchinleck did not wish to alarm his already despondent army, he was determined to prepare for the worst. A plan to flood large areas of the Delta was being drawn up, a line of defences under construction between Wadi Natrun and the coast near Alexandria. If the worst came to the worst Auchinleck intended to pull Eighth Army back through Egypt step-by- step, half of it to the line of the Suez Canal, the other half up the valley of the Nile where it could threaten the flank of any German advance into Sinai and Palestine.

There was always the chance that such a retreat would not prove necessary. Eighth Army, though weak in the all-important armour, was drawing back in good order to the Alamein line. The 2nd New Zealand Division was already there, having arrived from Palestine the previous week. The 10th Armoured Division, though lacking tanks and training, was on the way. These movements naturally left the ‘northern front’ thin to the point of invisibility, but the Germans had not yet renewed their advance in Russia and more divisions were expected from England. The risk had to be taken.

The Prime Minister, whose political position in London was showing signs of deterioration as the military disasters accumulated, fully backed Auchinleck in his resolve to stand and fight at El Alamein. He further suggested, in a typical telegram, that the troops should be given a firm order to ‘stand or die where they stood’. This he thought would inspire them. Brooke, though naturally sharing the sentiment, thought that such a categorical order might well cost Britain the entire Eighth Army, which was considerably more precious than Egypt. He approved Auchinleck’s policy of demanding the best while preparing for the worst, and won Churchill round to his point of view.

In Washington, Roosevelt shared his ally’s alarm. When Churchill asked for help he immediately ordered that 300 new Sherman tanks, one hundred self-propelled guns and a considerable number of aircraft be sent forthwith to the Middle East. If Egypt fell while they were en route, then they would be unloaded at Aqaba or Basra rather than Suez.

In Rome the Duce was eagerly anticipating the triumphal march into Cairo that his ally’s army had made possible. It had long been agreed that Egypt, and indeed the whole of the Middle East, was in the Italian ‘sphere of influence’, and Mussolini intended to make the most of it. Accordingly, in the staterooms of the Foreign Ministry, Count Ciano was supervising his staff- in the difficult task of preparing a declaration of Egyptian independence which legitimised a virtual Italian annexation. The Rome newspapers were full of the ‘two thousand year friendship between Rome and Egypt’. Cleopatra’s problems with Octavian were not mentioned.

The Germans, while happy to reaffirm their ally’s primacy in public, were hard at work subverting it in private. The Italians had not been told of the Abwehr’s contacts with Farouk and Ali Maher - both detested them - and were not to be granted the singular authority they wanted in Cairo. Instead there was to be a German military government headed, for the moment, by Rommel, and an Italian civil government. Naturally, while the war lasted, the former would have priority powers. The latter, on the other hand, would carry the can for the Egyptian economy, itself unlikely to be strengthened by the German refusal to accept any agreement on either the division of war booty or the control of resources. Given that both Germans and Italians recognised that their good behaviour in Egypt might well prove the key to a decisive Arab uprising against British rule east of the Suez Canal, these ‘arrangements’ showed a characteristically remarkable lack of political acumen. Once again the arrogance and the greed would prove too strong, and the ideological poverty of the ‘New Order’ would prove its own undoing.

Still, the Axis leaders were never noted clairvoyants, and in the early summer of 1942 the bright glow of military success blinded them to all else. The Führer, arriving at the Wolfsschanze to preside over the new campaign in Russia, told Jodl that he would make Rommel a Field-Marshal on the day his forces entered Cairo.

VII

On the afternoon of 22 May the leading echelons of
Panzerarmee Afrika
loomed out of a sandstorm in front of the El Alamein ‘line’. Rommel was determined to attack on the following day, regardless of the fact that most of the Italian infantry and armour was still strung out along the two hundred miles of coast road from Sidi Barrani.

He had problems with the German armour as well. The two Afrika Korps had started the frontier battle with 665 tanks, and had lost over 150 in the process of winning it. More disturbing, a further 90 had broken down in the succeeding pursuit, leaving around 430 for the conquest of Egypt. Supplying even this number was subject to growing difficulties as, for reasons best known to the Italian supply organisations, fuel and ammunition was still being unloaded at Tripoli and Benghazi rather than the much closer Tobruk. Consequently both were short. Only water was plentiful, following 90th Motorised Division’s opportune capture of the British supply point at Habata.

The speed of the advance was also causing difficulties. The armour had outstripped its air cover. But Rommel, who wished to slice through the Alamein position before Eighth Army had time to compose itself, had no intention of slowing the pace. If the panzers had to fight for a day or two under an enemy-held sky then so it would have to be. Such problems tend to solve themselves when an army is going forward.

The problems confronting Auchinleck, whose army was going backwards, were of an altogether more serious nature. Eighth Army had lost more tanks in battle and retreat than the Panzer Army. 7th Armoured Division, now comprising 4th and 1st Armoured Brigades, had only 235 runners, and over two-thirds of these had been ‘borrowed’ from the now-skeletal 8th Armoured Brigade in reserve. 1st Armoured Division had only 135 tanks, 95 to 2nd and 40 to 22nd Armoured Brigades. For the first time in North Africa the British armour was outnumbered.

In infantry it still possessed a small numerical superiority. Four under-strength divisions were in the line. The greatly depleted 50th Division was inside the Alamein perimeter with the twenty-five tanks remaining to the 1st Army Tank Brigade. One brigade of the 2nd New Zealand Division was manning the Deir el Shein ‘box’ some fifteen miles inland from the coast; the other two were further back in the area of Alam el Onsol. The 1st South African Division held the Bab el Qattara and Deir el Munassib ‘boxes’ ten miles further south. At the far southern end of the line the weak 5th Indian Division was deployed in and behind the Naqb Abu Dweis position, a mile or so north of the cliffs which tumbled down into the Qattara Depression. All these units, with the exception of the New Zealanders, were weak in anti-tank guns and heavy artillery and low on morale. They had become somewhat accustomed to defeat.

Auchinleck, expecting Rommel to break through his right centre, had placed his armour behind and to the north of Ruweisat Ridge. He hoped to use it against the flank of a northward German swing to the coast. He had also formed the 5th and 6th New Zealand brigades into mobile battle-groups on the German pattern - lorried infantry with anti-tank guns capable of all-round defence. The relative success of this measure in the days to come would serve to emphasise the poverty of British tactics in the preceding months, and again bring into question Auchinleck’s perseverance with the unfortunate Cunningham.

Rommel’s hunger for speed precluded adequate intelligence of the British dispositions. He had to guess, and he guessed wrong. Unaware that he was now facing Auchinleck rather than Cunningham he expected the British armour to be further south than it was, ready to block a right hook by the panzer divisions. But Auchinleck had guessed his adversary’s intentions correctly, and the two Afrika Korps, advancing along either side of Miteiriya Ridge on the morning of 23 May, soon ran into unexpectedly stiff resistance. II Afrika Korps, trying to work its way around the Alamein perimeter towards the coast, ran headlong into the New Zealand battle-groups and the Grants of 2nd Armoured Brigade. The German advance slowed dramatically. Further south 15th Panzer spent the whole day overcoming the 4th New Zealand brigade in the Deir el Shein ‘box’, while 90th Motorised and 21st Panzer attempted to envelop the southern half of the British line from the rear. After brushing aside 4th Armoured Brigade’s weak attack on their left flank the two divisions came up against the South Africans on the ridge above Deir el Munassib. Night fell without the decisive breakthrough which Rommel had expected.

The major source of this relative failure seems to have been the over-confidence of the Panzer Army commander, and his consequent launching of the attack with inadequate air support. During the first thirty-six hours of the battle the efforts of the Desert Air Force provided vital compensation for the inferiority of the British armour. But this situation could not last.