The Moscow Option (19 page)

On the following morning Auchinleck played his only trump, directing the strong 1st Armoured Division against the right flank of II Afrika Korps and the much weaker 1st Army Tank Brigade against the left flank. For a few hours the Germans were in trouble, for while 14th Motorised was blithely making headway towards the coast the two panzer divisions were under attack from both sides by marginally superior forces. For once the British had managed to concentrate against a dispersed enemy.

If Auchinleck had been prone to euphoria - which he was not - these few hours would have been his last chance for indulging in it. For by early afternoon Rommel had brought 15th Panzer forward to support the other two divisions, the Luftwaffe was at last beginning to make its presence felt, and the British attack was beginning to wilt. At 16.00 Auchinleck received the distressing news that 14th Motorised had reached the coast. 50th Division was now cut off inside the Alamein perimeter, and between the Germans and Alexandria the road was virtually empty. This was the moment of decision. Should Eighth Army fight gallantly on to probable extinction, or should it break off the battle and withdraw to the Delta and perhaps beyond?

There was really no choice. Auchinleck ordered 50th Division to break out of its encirclement that night; the 5th Indian and South African divisions, now under pressure from both north and west with the belated arrival of the Italian armoured corps, were ordered to fall back to the north-east. The British armour would once again fight a delaying action, this time between the coast and Alma Haifa Ridge.

It was easier to issue these orders than to ensure that they were carried out. The battlefield between El Alamein and El Imayid was, by early evening on 24 May, a confused swirling mass of men and vehicles. Darkness fell with the forces of the two sides leaguered in promiscuous profusion across the desert. Soon after midnight 50th Division made its bid for freedom, its columns crashing eastwards through friend and foe alike. Most of the artillery was lost, but the majority of the men made it through to the greater safety of El Imayid.

Rommel too was having his problems turning desires into reality. The RAF had taken such a toll of his supply columns the previous day that yet again the panzer divisions were thirsting for unavailable fuel. It was not until evening on the 25th that he could unleash II Afrika Korps along the coast road towards Alexandria, some twelve hours behind the retreating British. Meanwhile the South African and 5th Indian divisions had somehow failed to receive the order to withdraw issued on the 24th, and by the next day the coast-road option was closed. They pulled back across the open desert towards El Faiyada. Eighth Army, though not destroyed, was now split in two.

Not so
Panzerarmee Afrika
. On the night of 25/26 May the two Afrika Korps rolled east under the moon on the trail of the British. Rommel already had his plan of campaign for the conquest of the area west of the Suez Canal worked out. 20th Panzer, supported by the Italian armour, would drive north-east to encircle Alexandria. The rest of the German armour would strike out east and south-east for the Delta region and Cairo.

Through 26 and 27 May the two armies drove east, their respective columns often intermingling on the same tracks and roads. Many minor actions were fought as commanders suddenly realised that the motley collection of British and German trucks running alongside them belonged to the enemy. But nothing occurred to stop the relentless march to the east. By evening on 27 May 20th Panzer had contemptuously pierced the virtually non-existent Wadi Natrun-Alexandria line and reached the coast four miles east of the city. Alexandria was cut off.

Of militarily greater significance, at around 18.00 the same evening, an armoured column approaching the vital Nile Bridge at Kafr el Zaiyat was mistaken for a British column by the engineers detailed to destroy it. It was in fact the leading column of 14th Motorised, largely equipped with British and American trucks. The bridge was taken intact, and the Germans were across the Nile.

Sixty miles to the south the tanks of I Afrika Korps were approaching the outskirts of Cairo. In the city itself sporadic street-fighting was in progress between the British military police and a few Egyptian Army units which had answered the Free Officer’s call to revolt. Farouk had disappeared as promised. Egypt was slipping swiftly from the British grasp.

On the morning of 28 May units of 90th Motorised seized, with Egyptian help, one of the Nile bridges in Cairo. This, for Auchinleck, was the final straw. He had been in touch with Brooke, and had been given carte blanche to save Eighth Army. The seizure of the Nile bridges and the speed of the panzer advance had ruled out the defence of any line short of the Suez Canal. It was certainly too late to mount any defence of the Delta, as had once been envisaged. Auchinleck took the logical step of sanctioning the retreat to the Canal which was already underway. The South African and 5th Indian divisions, which had lost the race for Cairo with I Afrika Korps, were ordered up the Nile valley. Cairo was abandoned to the enemy.

On the afternoon of 28 May 90th Motorised drove through the centre of the capital to a rapturous reception from its more vocal inhabitants. The Free Officers, whose belated but significant contribution had made them national heroes, were much in evidence. Less heroically, but right on cue, King Farouk and Ali Maher emerged from hiding.

The panzer divisions rolled as fast as fuel supplies would allow along the Suez and Ismailiya roads to the Canal. Rommel was still with them, having declined a room in the famous Shepheard’s Hotel booked for him by Egyptian admirers. He had driven past the Pyramids on the previous day - ‘larger than I imagined’ as he wrote to Lucie - but sightseeing in general would have to wait. That day he received news of his promotion to Field-Marshal.

On the east bank of the Canal the British were siting their guns, scanning the western horizon for the dust-clouds thrown up by the advancing Germans. In London the dreadful news was being digested. The battle for North Africa was over. The battle for the Middle East would soon be underway.

Well, if she gets insulted just because I insulted her!
Groucho Marx

I

In the distant Pacific the two warring navies prepared for what both believed would be the decisive confrontation. In Hiroshima Bay the Japanese admirals bent over maps in the
Yamato
operations room, and worked out the details of Kuroshima’s new plan. Haste was the order of the day.

It was a brilliant plan, which for sheer lethal simplicity could only be compared to Manstein’s plan for the invasion of France. It is one of the great ironies of the Second World War that both were second-best plans, only adopted when details of the preferred plans became known to the enemy. Both plans also made use of this fact, of the enemy ‘not knowing that we knew that he knew’. Both were the product of a gifted professional strategist’s dissatisfaction with the predictability of a tradition-bound plan. Both were cast to give full rein to the revolutionary possibilities inherent in new weaponry by men not professionally associated with those weapons. Kuroshima was no more a ‘carrier man’ than Manstein was a ‘panzer man’, but both had received support from those who were associated with the new weaponry, in the one case Yamaguchi and Genda, in the other Guderian.

There were also differences of emphasis. Kuroshima’s plan perhaps relied more on the ‘double-bluff’ aspect. The original plan would serve as a feint for the new one, and to this end the broken code was continued in use throughout the month of May. Naturally the information transmitted was somewhat selective. Kuroshima knew that the Americans would expect Nagumo’s carriers north-east of Midway, and it was intended to satisfy this expectation. This time, however, the main battle-fleet would be in close attendance. The Americans would also expect a diversion in the Aleutians and a convoy of troopships for the seizure of Midway. Both of these would certainly be at sea, but the first without the carriers
Junyo
and
Ryujo
and with severely limited objectives, the second with orders to assault the island only
after
the decisive naval engagement had been fought.

On the other hand, the Americans would not be expecting Nagumo to take his carriers south of Midway Island, in the general direction of the Hawaiian group. This would pull the American carriers south, towards the greatest surprise of all, a second carrier force under Vice-Admiral Takagi moving northwards on an interception course in complete radio silence. If, as seemed possible to Kuroshima, the American carriers retreated to the east rather than seek battle with Nagumo’s powerful force, then Takagi’s force would be in position to cut them off. Whatever happened the US carriers would find themselves outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, and swiftly dispatched to the ocean floor. And then nothing would stand between the Imperial Navy and the West Coast of America but a few planes on Oahu and a bevy of obsolete battleships in San Francisco Bay.

If Yamamoto’s haste was one side of the Pacific coin, an American need to temporise was the other. The ‘Two-Ocean Navy’ programme, which was designed to give the US Navy preponderance in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, had only been set in motion in late 1940, and the first of the new ships would not be leaving the stocks until the coming autumn. For the next six-nine months the new Pacific C-in-C, Admiral Chester Nimitz, would have to hold off the Japanese with what he had. If he could do so - hold Hawaii and its Midway sentry, keep open the route to Australia - then the balance would begin to swing faster and faster in America’s favour. But it would not be easy.

The Japanese preponderance in all classes of warships has already been noted; the American admirals were as aware of this basic fact as the Japanese themselves. The American public - or, to be more precise, the American press - was a different proposition. The pre-declaration of war attack on Port Arthur in 1904 might have been greeted by the American press as a ‘brilliant and bold seizure of the initiative’, but the identical attack on Pearl Harbor had not been viewed quite so magnanimously. It had been a ‘Day of Infamy’ and infamy, as all Hollywood western addicts will know, is always the work of the weak and the cowardly. The Great American Public clamoured for some decisive punitive action against these insolent little yellow men.

Though most of the US naval chiefs were obviously aware that these ‘little yellow men’ were travelling around in some very large warships it is hard to avoid the conclusion that at some level they shared the public under-estimation of Japanese capabilities. The admirals were worried, but they were not as worried as they should have been. Nimitz’s instructions to his carrier admirals on the eve of battle were cautious enough:

“. . . you will be governed by the principles of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean avoidance of exposure of your forces to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage on the enemy.”

 - but the mere fact of sending four carriers against an enemy force probably comprising twice that number made a mockery of such caution, and suggested a gross American optimism as regards the quality of the Japanese ships and crews, and the brains that directed them. Nimitz should have known better.

There was one mitigating circumstance. In August 1940, after eighteen months of solid work, Colonel William Friedman had broken the Japanese naval code. The codebook at the bottom of Darwin harbour, which Yorinaga had assumed to be the source of this illicit knowledge, had merely confirmed Friedman’s findings. The belief that they ‘had the drop’ on the Japanese provided Nimitz and his colleagues with an enormous fund of false confidence.

The Japanese did not disabuse them, and no suspicions were aroused when messages advancing Operation ‘AF’ by seven days were deciphered by the Black Chamber Intelligence Unit at Pearl Harbor.

But this change of date did necessitate a change in American plans. Task Force 16, centred round the carriers
Hornet
and
Enterprise
, had not yet returned to Pearl Harbor from its abortive mission to the Coral Sea. Now it would not have time to do so, and for one person this was indeed good news. Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey, the senior American carrier admiral, had a debilitating skin disease and was due for hospitalisation when the Task Force reached home. But now the bed and lotions would have to wait, and Halsey would have the chance to do what he had been itching to do since the attack on Pearl Harbor, to ‘chew Yamamoto’s ass’.