The Moscow Option (8 page)

On the morning of 2 November Cunningham compromised. Fatally. 7th Armoured Brigade would move north on Sidi Rezegh, but alone. 4th Armoured Brigade would have to stay at Gabr Saleh to protect 13th Corps’ left flank, and 22nd Armoured Brigade would have to secure 30th Corps’ left flank against the threat of the
Ariete
division, which its reconnaissance screen had discovered in the Bir el Gubi area. The British armour was divided up.

Thirty miles to the north Rommel was concentrating his armour and waiting for accurate intelligence of the British movements. When the skies cleared sufficiently that evening for air reconnaissance he could hardly believe his good fortune. He ordered General Cruewell, commander of the Afrika Korps, to take his two divisions south towards Gabr Saleh against the isolated 4th Armoured Brigade. As darkness fell the German tanks rolled forward into the clear desert night, lights extinguished and wirelesses turned off.

At dawn on the 3rd they were spotted by the RAF. Cunningham immediately ordered 22nd Armoured Brigade back from Bir el Gubi to Gabr Saleh. But it had twice as far to travel as the German panzers.

An hour or so after dawn the hastily breakfasting soldiers of 4th Armoured Brigade spotted the dust-clouds they had searched for in vain the previous day. At around 06.30 Cruewell launched a concentric attack on the sprawling leaguer around Gabr Saleh. 15th Panzer moved in from the north as 21st Panzer, which had taken a longer wheel round to the east, attacked from the south-east. The British tank crews, high on gallantry but low on tactical sense, rushed out to do battle in their Stuarts. Fast and reliable, but thinly armed and, since they ran on aviation fuel, liable to flare up, the Stuarts were no match for the Panzer IIIs. Soon the desert was littered with flaming wrecks as the experienced panzer commanders pressed home their advantage. By 09.00 between ninety and a hundred Stuarts had been destroyed for German losses of around fifteen, and the remainder were withdrawing in disorder to the south. Cunningham’s dispersion of his armour had claimed its first victim, and the German panzer force was astride the central position of the battlefield.

Towards noon the second victim arrived. 22nd Armoured Brigade had already lost twenty-four tanks in a foolhardy attack on
Ariete
the previous afternoon, but the lesson had apparently not yet been digested. The inexperienced brigade simply charged the German veterans, who proceeded to give a demonstration of what 4th Armoured Brigade should have done that morning. The tanks were held back and 22nd Armoured Brigade, rather than finding itself in a tank-to-tank encounter, found itself staring down the long barrels of the German 88mm anti-tank guns. By 14.30 another hundred British tanks were smouldering on the gravel wastes around Gabr Saleh and Cruewell had accounted for two of Norrie’s three armoured brigades.

During the afternoon, news of these disasters percolated through to Cunningham at Norrie’s HQ twenty miles to the south. He now had to decide how to save 7th Armoured Brigade, which for twenty-four hours had been engaging the Afrika division in the neighbourhood of Sidi Rezegh airfield. It was now out on a distinctly precarious limb, for should Rommel order Cruewell north it would be caught between the hammer and the anvil. 7th Armoured Brigade would have to be withdrawn to the west, where it could join up with the strong elements of 13th Corps - the New Zealand Division and the 1st Army Tank Brigade - which had been moving north behind the frontier defences. In the meantime Cunningham was hurrying forward his armoured reserves, a process hardly helped by the incompletion of the supply infrastructure. As Auchinleck had feared, Churchill’s haste was becoming Cunningham’s defeat.

In the Axis camp there was jubilation as news of Cruewell’s victories came through. But Rommel was not one to meditate on success. He ordered Cruewell to bring the panzer divisions north, as Cunningham had feared. They were to cut off 7th Armoured Brigade’s escape routes to the east and the south.

It was a race against time, and one which the British brigade all but won. 15th Panzer, wheeling in from the south-east between Bir Reghem and Bir Sciafsciuf, crashed into the rear echelons of the withdrawing British armour at first light on 4 November, and a savage melee ensued. Honours, for the first time in ‘Crusader’s’ ill-starred career, were fairly even, each side losing some thirty tanks. But the battlefield belonged to Cruewell and that evening, as the panzer force re-concentrated among the wreckage of war on Sidi Rezegh airstrip, Rommel was planning his next stroke.

What were the alternatives? One was to use the breathing-space offered by the temporary demise of the British armour to attack Tobruk. But this would take time, and allow the enemy to regroup and regain his balance. Another was to pursue 7th Armoured Brigade and to complete its destruction. This though offered only tactical gains, and Rommel was more interested in a strategic breakthrough. Furthermore there was the problem of the frontier troops to be considered, for while Cruewell had been breaking up 30th Corps the other British corps had been slowly enveloping the Sollum-Sidi Omar line. Rommel decided to strike out for the frontier with his entire armoured force. If he could get behind the British line there was a possibility of cutting off both 7th Armoured Brigade and the whole of 13th Corps from their supply bases.

On the morning of 5 November the three hundred tanks of the three Axis armoured divisions moved south-east towards Gabr Saleh and the frontier. In the process the
Ariete
division, on the right flank of the advance, overran the vast British supply depot south of Gabr Saleh and captured most of the fuel earmarked for the British conquest of Cyrenaica.

Rommel intended to push 21st Panzer north along the far side of the frontier to Halfaya Pass while 15th Panzer rolled up the near side. The British forces would be broken up, the road into Egypt forced open. But at this moment Auchinleck arrived on the scene to stiffen the wavering Cunningham’s resolve, and the German advance soon ran into trouble. Eighth Army, thanks to Auchinleck’s earlier insistence, had tank reserves; the Germans did not. On the evening of 5 November 21st Panzer ran into the newly- refurbished 4th and 22nd Armoured Brigades near Sidi Omar, and was halted in its well-worn tracks.

15th Panzer was faring almost as badly in its battle with 13th Corps, losing several tanks and making negligible progress. At the far northern end of the front 7th Armoured Brigade had already broken through the Italian infantry and reached the safety of the British lines. In the far south the South African division continued to block the advance of
Ariete
.

By the following morning it was obvious that the battle of movement was over, but Rommel was reluctant to admit as much. He brought 15th Panzer south to aid 21st Panzer, whereupon the British fed in their arriving reserves to help 4th and 22nd Armoured Brigades. A battle of attrition developed in the area around Sidi Omar.

This could only be to the Germans’ disadvantage - their fighting strength was rather more finite - and Rommel, bowing to the inevitable, finally disengaged his armour on 9 November. ‘Crusader’ was over. In eight days of battle the British had transformed a crushing superiority in armour into virtual parity, and had moved the front line not a single mile to the west.

V

As Cunningham’s battered force began to lick its wounds behind the line it had crossed with such misplaced enthusiasm nine days before, the Chiefs of Staff in London pondered the consequences of Eighth Army’s failure. There would be no moving of forces east to stem a German onslaught through Anatolia or the Caucasus; the armour gathered so assiduously with such eventualities in mind was now gathering sand in the desert. And Malta. The task of sustaining the island was now one of herculean proportions. With the Luftwaffe back in Sicily, with German airfields ranged either side of ‘Bomb Alley’ between Crete and Cyrenaica, the convoy route from Alexandria could only be used in the direst emergency and at the greatest risk. The naval forces at Gibraltar, weakened even as the Chiefs conferred by the U-boat sinking of their only carrier
Ark Royal
, were little better placed to succour the island. The British, though still unaware of the planning energies then being devoted to Malta’s capture, had to reckon with the possibility that the island would be bombarded and blockaded into submission.

In the German war-camp there was room only for celebration. Halder congratulated himself on restraining Rommel, the latter bathed in the warm glow of desert success. In Rome General Student studied maps of Malta and lectured his officers on the lessons they had all learned in Crete; in Karinhall the Reich Marshal eagerly anticipated the plaudits of a slowly recovering Führer. In the last week of November several trains of flat-cars rattled through Belorussia carrying 39th Panzer Corps west towards Germany and its new tropical equipment. The war was going well for the Reich.

But not for the British Empire. Their severely stretched forces in the Middle East were about to receive another shock. For as the armies in North Africa settled once more into relative immobility, other armies eight thousand miles to the east were being set in motion. The rising sun was about to fall on His Majesty’s Empire in the East.

At midnight, the bright sun.
from the Zemin Kushu

I

In the vast expanses of the northern Pacific Ocean, according to the
Kaga
Chief Air Officer, ‘not even a bird flew’.

Nor a reconnaissance plane. On the afternoon of 1 December no American pilot looked down upon the six carriers and their powerful escort as they battled their way through the heavy seas and dense fog. And on the ships’ decks were stacked crushed empty oil cans; down below the accumulating refuse was neatly piled away. No trail of rubbish would be thrown overboard to indicate this fleet’s passage.

Pearl Harbor was now eighteen hundred miles and six days away.
Kido Butai
, the First Air Fleet, was taking Japan to war. Its commander, Admiral Nagumo, stood on the
Akagi
bridge and fretted. ‘Will it go well?’ he repeatedly asked his Chief of Staff.
Daijobu
- ‘don’t worry’ - was Admiral Kusaka’s inevitable reply. The two of them watched the anti-aircraft gunners at target practice, shooting the brightly-coloured kites that darted to and fro in the grey sky above.

Below-decks the four hundred pilots of
Kido Butai’s
planes wrote poems and letters, painted watercolours and spent time in their cockpits so as not to lose the feel of the controls. Beneath them the miles slipped by.

Two thousand miles to the west the battleship
Nagato
rode at anchor in the calmer waters of Kure Bay. In his quarters the Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto, played Japanese chess with one of his staff officers. Another of them, Captain Kuroshima, the author of
Kido Butai’s
attack plan, was in the Operations Room with Chief of Staff Admiral Ugaki. They were bent over the huge map of the Pacific; taking stock of Nagumo’s progress. It seemed as if everything was going to plan.

That same day, in wintry Berlin, the Japanese Ambassador hurried down the Wilhelmstrasse and through the dark portals of the Foreign Ministry. He had news for von Ribbentrop. A telegram had arrived from Tokyo the previous night; it had ended with the words: ‘War may come quicker than anyone dreams.’ One can safely assume that Ribbentrop, a man who thrived on drama rather than thought, was suitably impressed.

The following afternoon Yamamoto cabled Nagumo the confirmation he was waiting for.
Kido Butai
was to ‘climb Mount Niitaka’, to attack as planned.

It was an aptly-coded message. In substituting Niikata, the highest mountain in the Japanese Empire, for the United States, the world’s leading industrial power, Yamamoto symbolised the immensity of the task facing Japan’s armed forces. To some Japanese it would seem like military madness, but few doubted that it was a national necessity.

II

For over a decade Japan had been drifting towards war with the other Great Powers who had East Asian interests to defend. The international division of spoils in China and South-east Asia, and Japan’s need to change it for domestic reasons, lay at the root of the conflict.

Japan’s rise to a position among the leading rank of capitalist powers had been too swift. The same depressing scenario that has haunted the underdeveloped world throughout the present century haunted the heirs of the Meiji Restoration. The two great gifts of western civilisation - medicine and mechanisation - had provoked vast changes in Japanese society, reducing available land while raising the population, and sending the excess millions into the cities in search of a living. But the growth of capital had proved unable to keep pace with the growth of population or its aspirations. Britain had faced similar problems in the nineteenth century and had carved an empire to solve them. The United States had used its open frontier as fuel for growth. But for the Japanese, searching for solutions in the middle of a world-wide depression, things were not so easy. Every effort to increase exports met with new import barriers, every attempt at emulating the western penchant for empires produced only moral rebukes and the threat of worse.

The problems were acute, but those Japanese whose job it was to solve them lacked either the wisdom or the resolution to do so. The country’s political institutions were immature, the democracy introduced in 1924 already knee-deep in corruption. The God-Emperor, though theoretically omnipotent, was supposed to keep himself aloof from such mundane matters as the problems of Japanese society. Real power was held, but not much exercised, by the twin pillars of the Army and Navy.

As in Weimar Germany the failure of the centre implied the rise of Right or Left. The latter, though growing more significant through the ‘30s, had no more roots in Japanese society than the centre; there was no strong tradition of radical materialism, no large socialist or communist parties seeking a compromise between economic growth and social justice.