The World at War (24 page)

CAPTAIN HANS-OTTO BEHRENDT

Intelligence Officer on Rommel's Staff

One of my favourite
Rommel stories is when in the port of Tripoli in February–March 1941, Rommel told my friend Lieutenant Hundt, an engineer, 'Here you can build me a hundred and fifty tanks.' The man looked stupefied and Rommel told him, 'Don't you have timber here in the harbour and canvas of sails to make a hundred and fifty covers for Volkswagens? So you can give me a hundred and fifty tanks.' Those 'tanks' misled the British in the first campaign.

PRIVATE BOLZANO

Italian Army

One day I stood on the road near the sergeant of panzers and I ask him, 'Tell me the truth – how many working panzers you have now still?' And he said, 'This morning we report seven but the truth is,' he whispered in my ear, 'we have sixteen – but if Rommel knows that, he attacks immediately.'

CAPTAIN BEHRENDT

Rommel was much loved by the Italian simple soldiers because he cared more about them than anybody else in the desert and they called him 'Santo Rommel', I have heard them say this. Rommel himself once said they have other than military virtues and he liked the Italians because they admired and saluted him very nicely, whereas the Germans were not so ready to do this as the Italians. I think that Rommel's criticism of some Italian leaders was also decisive for this Italian esteem, the esteem of the simple soldier towards this German general.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL DE GUINGAND

During the meantime when we had denuded the desert, Rommel had landed in Tripoli, not very strong, but in accordance with his character dashed forward eastwards with the very meagre resources he had there. And absolute chaos reigned, our forces started tumbling back towards
Tobruk and we were getting no news in Cairo whatsoever. Wavell sent for me and said, 'Will you go up with my personal liaison officer and try to find out what is happening and see O'Connor and persuade him to hold Tobruk?' I found an Australian division in absolute state of exhaustion and all lying around the place in Tobruk, had several days without sleep and I couldn't find O'Connor. After many hours I found Brigadier Harding who was absolutely magnificent; exhausted, he was holding the fort and he behaved in a simply amazing and wonderful way. He said certainly they would try and hold Tobruk.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM

Wavell's decision to hold Tobruk at the time of that retreat was the greatest single factor in enabling him to hold Rommel at the Egyptian frontier and the great risk created by the intervention in Greece was overcome.

MAJOR GENERAL O'CONNOR

It was a great shock to be captured. I never thought it would ever happen to me – very conceited, perhaps – but it was miles behind our own front and by a sheer bit of bad luck we drove into the one bit of desert in which the Germans had sent around a reconnaissance group and we went bang into the middle of them.

BRIGADIER HARDING

I was following behind O'Connor and Philip Neame when they got captured and I found myself with no general at all and joined forces with General Moorshead who was commanding the Australian division and together we tried to sort things out, but it was pretty chaotic. At the same time we sent out search and rescue parties to see if we could find out what had happened to O'Connor and Neame and the people who were with them, but it took us a little time to sort things out, and it wasn't until Wavell came up and came into Tobruk and brought with him General Lavarack, another Australian and two Staff Officers, and sorted the whole thing out and left General Lavarack in command, and we really got the situation under control again.

ANTHONY EDEN

Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, from the air point of view particularly, ruled out any further advances along the coast towards Tripoli because of the growth of the German air activity from Sicily, which would have been very formidable at that time if we'd gone beyond Benghazi – at least that was his view and of the other Chiefs of Staff.

MAJOR GENERAL O'CONNOR

It was a question, really, of whether or not we could go on and do both Tripoli and
Greece, but Tripoli immediately. If we could do Tripoli immediately it still left all the options open for doing Greece if we wanted to. Some of my friends say, oh, yes, you could have got to Tripoli all right, but could you have stayed there, could you have stood up to the bombing that you would have got from Sicily? My answer is that Rommel stood up to the bombing by the British when his line was extended, his line of communication extended right the way from Tripoli to Alamein, and he was there for a number of months and stood up to it, and if he could do it so could we. The time to have done it was straight away, the same afternoon. That would have been the battle finished. We could have gone on: we had an Australian brigade ready that was coming in by vessel, and we could have used them. I entirely blame myself for not having done this. I think it was quite inexcusable – I ought to have.

BRIGADIER HARDING

It's always rash to hazard a guess but I think not very far off it. It would have taken tremendous time and resources to have driven Rommel out of North Africa, but certainly I think we could have driven him back to a point, to a position where it would have been difficult. With the increasing air power at the disposal of the Allies it would have been difficult for the Germans to phase a further offensive with any prospect of reaching the Delta.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL DE GUINGAND

When I got back from Greece I was absolutely convinced that evacuation would have to take place even if we got the forces there, and I discussed with the Joint Planning Staff plans for evacuation and I was told by Wavell to stop any work on that and not to mention the word. I felt so strongly that I saw the Naval and Air Commanders-in-Chief and put it to them and they said they felt that they would like us to go on planning the possibility of evacuation, which we did. I eventually went over to Greece to tie up with the Air Force and the Navy various details for evacuation, that is after we had sent the troops over.

ANTHONY EDEN

We had agreed with the Greeks for certain withdrawals, which they said they could make at our first meeting. In the event they couldn't withdraw troops from Macedonia and expose Salonika, and they didn't bring their troops back from Albania to the extent which we expected. That meant we were not strong enough on the Aliakmon Line. At any rate it didn't alter the balance sheet in the final result and I think the argument that, in war, you take action which you think may have some positive results, but you can't really see beyond a certain distance, and if you're likely to come a cropper.

JOHN COLVILLE

Assistant Private Secretary to the Prime Minister 1939–41

Wavell was one of the few soldiers who Churchill did not know personally but he had heard him spoken of with admiration on all sides, and so he persuaded Lord Roscbury to bring Wavell to Chequers and he made very little impression on Churchill because he was a shy man. Nevertheless Churchill had heard his praises sung so frequently that he took him on trust and Wavell then commanded the Middle East. This trust lasted for a time but Churchill lost faith in Wavell, first in the spring of 1941 when Rommel got as far as Alamein before Wavell's intelligence had even registered the fact the Germans were in Africa and they captured General O'Connor and two other high officers. Churchill thought it incredible. The second thing was
Crete: he thought it important that Crete should be held at all costs; if we lost Crete we lost our bases in the eastern Mediterranean. And he kept telegraphing Wavell, 'Surely you can spare a dozen tanks for the defence of Maleme airfield,' and Wavell replied that he had no tanks: they were all having their tracks mended or having their engines greased and he couldn't spare even a dozen. Crete was lost, it was a great disaster, upset everybody in the House of Commons, the country – it was a low point for us in the war. Colonel Laycock who at this time was a comparatively unknown officer but was a friend of Churchill's social acquaintances was brought to Chequers for luncheon. And as he'd been to Crete, Churchill listened with great interest to what he had to say. And there came the moment when Laycock said, 'I really believe Crete could have been saved if only we could have kept the airfield – if we'd just had a dozen tanks we could have held the airfield from the Germans.' And Churchill's eyes opened wide and I felt as if I could hear a nail being hammered into Wavell's reputation and coffin.

ANTHONY EDEN

One has to admit that we didn't attain the objectives we'd hoped for. We weren't able to conduct, with the help of the Yugoslavs, any effective campaign in the Balkans. We lost Greece and many brave men, and more were captured, and we lost Crete too. So in that sense the balance sheet was much against us and it was a depressing time at home as well as for those responsible for the campaign.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM

The philosophy of combined operations between the Royal Air Force and the Army had not evolved and this was probably because there was not a sufficiency of Royal Air Force to prompt the evolution. But it's more difficult to understand in the case of armour. Manifestly at the battle of Tobruk the very heavy armoured losses we sustained indicated there was something wrong with the handling of the armour and perhaps one would have expected General Wavell to have summoned an armoured expert to be his right-hand man at that time.

ANTHONY EDEN

At the minimum, I think, you put the delay which the battle of
Yugoslavia and the battle of Greece entailed on German plans, that was four weeks. You would certainly be in a very unpleasant situation if the Russians had had to stand another month of good weather at least before 'General Winter' came to their rescue.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM

General
Auchinleck certainly had his problems.
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Firstly he was manifestly unlucky in his choice of subordinates: General Cunningham had done very well in Ethiopia but conditions in the desert were very different; then General Ritchie afterwards justified himself in his operations in Normandy and elsewhere, but at the time that he assumed command of the Eighth Army he was completely unready and unprepared for such a responsibility. As a result, for the second time Auchinleck had to go up to the desert at a moment of utter crisis, had to relieve General Ritchie and again take personal command of the Eighth Army at a moment when we were in full retreat and when even Mussolini was already in Africa with a white horse, waiting to lead the Italian columns in a victory march through Cairo.

CHAPTER 9
BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC 1940–41

Following the capture of the French Atlantic ports, the young German U-boat commanders enjoyed what they called 'the first happy time'. It was the heyday of 'aces' like Günther Prien, Joachim Schepke and the most successful of them all, Otto Kretschmer, interviewed below. Admiral Dönitz was at last able to put his 'wolf-pack' tactics to work and the effects were devastating. In October 1940 Convoy SC-7, with only four small escorts, lost twenty of thirty five ships, seven of them sunk by Kretschmer. In February 1941, the Admiralty moved the headquarters of Western Approaches Command from Plymouth to Liverpool and on 6 March Churchill proclaimed the 'Battle of the Atlantic'. Only now was RAF Coastal Command brought under the operational control of the Royal Navy. The counter to the wolf-packs were permanent escort groups, the most famous led by Captain 'Johnny' Walker, but it was the escort group led by Captain Donald MacIntyre that on 17 March 1941 killed Schepke and captured Kretschmer in the battle for Convoy HX-117. Elsewhere, the same day, Prien's
U-47
was lost with all hands. The Germans were reading the British naval codes and it was not until HMS
Bulldog
recovered an intact German Enigma machine from
U-110
on 9 May that the intelligence war began to turn in favour of the Allies. In June the rapidly expanding Royal Canadian Navy took over escort duties to the mid-Atlantic and the advent of technical innovations – high frequency direction-finding (HF/DF), short-wave radar sets and side-firing depth-charges to create a wider pattern – greatly increased escort effectiveness. Against which the Germans were equipped with increasing
numbers of the reliable, long-range Type VIIC U-boat and, although most convoys were steered around their patrol lines, merchant-ship losses continued at well above replacement levels: 1,345 (4.6 million tons) against twenty-four U-boats sunk in 1940; 1,419 (4,7 million tons) against thirty-five in 1941. However, merchant-ship losses peaked between October 1940 and April 1941.

LIEUTENANT ERNST VON WITZENDORFF

U-boat officer, achieved first command
(
U-121
) in March 1942
I must say in this time we were young naval officers and we were interested to do our duty and to be successful. When we attacked in daytime looking through our periscope, or attacking in the night being on the surface, we saw these big merchant ships like animals creeping over the sea then we were eager to sink them and we didn't think on those poor merchant seamen which were on the merchant ships. But later on when we have been successful we thought about them sometimes and we had a bad feeling. But it was our duty in the war, and what could we do?

CAPTAIN GILBERT ROBERTS

Western Approaches Staff, Liverpool

We were aware that their intelligence was for some reason good, but I myself put it down to very superior hydrophone equipment that the U-boats had, probably being able to pick up the noise of the convoys' propellers up to, oh, eighty or a hundred miles. But in addition I knew that they would place their U-boats in a line across at right angles in the expected path of the convoy and this line with, say, five U-boats could be a hundred miles from end to end and so against a good hydrophone very little disguise of the position of the convoy could be effected. It was only after the war that we knew they were breaking the
codes and they knew very well the time of leaving port of the convoys and in addition how many escorts would probably be with them and how many merchant ships were in each convoy, including tankers.