Western Desert campaign
The Western Desert campaign (Desert War) took place in the deserts of Egypt and Libya and was the main theatre in the North African campaign of the Second World War. Military operations began in June 1940 with the Italian declaration of war and the Italian invasion of Egypt from Libya in September. Operation Compass, a five-day raid by the British in December 1940, was so successful that it led to the destruction of the Italian 10th Army (10ª Armata) over the following two months. Benito Mussolini sought help from Adolf Hitler, who sent a small German force to Tripoli under Directive 22 (11 January). The Afrika Korps (Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel) was formally under Italian command, as Italy was the main Axis power in the Mediterranean and North Africa.
"Desert Campaign" redirects here. For the Argentine campaign, see Desert Campaign (1833–34).
In the spring of 1941, Rommel led Operation Sonnenblume, which pushed the Allies back to Egypt except for the siege of Tobruk at the port. At the end of 1941, Axis forces were defeated in Operation Crusader and retired again to El Agheila. In early 1942 Axis forces drove the Allies back again, then captured Tobruk after the Battle of Gazala but failed to destroy their opponents. The Axis invaded Egypt and the Allies retreated to El Alamein, where the Eighth Army fought two defensive battles, then defeated the Axis forces in the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942. The Eighth Army drove Axis forces out of Libya to Tunisia, which was invaded from the west by the Allied First Army in Operation Torch. In the Tunisian campaign the remaining Axis forces surrendered to the combined Allied forces in May 1943.
The British Western Desert Force (renamed Cyrcom and later the Eighth Army) had been reduced in early 1941 to send units to Greece, rather than complete the conquest of Libya, just as German troops and Italian reinforcements arrived. British Commonwealth and Empire troops released after the conclusion of the East Africa Campaign were sent to Egypt and by summer, the surviving Commonwealth troops had returned from Greece, Crete and Syria. From the end of 1941, increasing amounts of equipment and personnel, including US supplies and tanks, arrived for the Eighth Army. The Axis never overcame the supply constraints limiting the size of their land and air forces in North Africa and the desert war became a sideshow for Germany, when the expected quick conclusion of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was not achieved.
Background[edit]
Libya[edit]
Cyrenaica (Libya) had been an Italian colony since the Italo-Turkish War in 1911–1912. With Tunisia, part of French North Africa, to the west, and Egypt to the east, the Italians prepared to defend both fronts through a North Africa Supreme Headquarters, under the command of the Governor-General of Italian Libya, Marshal of the Air Force, Italo Balbo. Supreme Headquarters had the 5th Army (General Italo Gariboldi) and the 10th Army (General Mario Berti), which in mid-1940 had nine metropolitan divisions of about 13,000 men each, three Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (Blackshirt) divisions and two Libyan divisions, each with an establishment with 8,000 men. Italian army divisions had been reorganised in the late 1930s from three regiments each to two; reservists were recalled in 1939, along with the usual call-up of conscripts.[2]
1942[edit]
Unternehmen Theseus[edit]
The Eighth Army advance of 500 mi (800 km) to El Agheila transferred the burden of an over-stretched supply line to the British. In January 1942, the British withdrew from the front to reduce the supply burden and to prepare for Operation Acrobat, a 1941 plan to advance west against Tripolitania. Vichy authorities in Tunisia were pressed to allow British troops and then the Anglo-Americans, after December 1941, into French North Africa, which made it possible to invade Sicily.[61] The British overestimated Axis losses during Operation Crusader and believed that they faced 35,000 troops, rather than the true total of 80,000 men and also misjudged the speed of Axis reinforcement from Europe. The Eighth Army expected to be ready by February, well before an Axis attack.[62] The 1st Armoured Division held the area around El Agheila and from 28 to 29 December was engaged near Ajedabia and lost 61 of 90 tanks, vs. seven German tanks lost.[61]
Panzerarmee Afrika began Operation Theseus on 21 January and defeated the 2nd Armoured Brigade in detail.[63] By 23 January, the brigade was down from 150 to 75 tanks, against a German loss of 29 tanks out of 100. Benghazi fell on 28 January and Timimi on 3 February. By 6 February, the British were back to the Gazala line, a few miles west of Tobruk, from which the Panzerarmee had retreated seven weeks earlier. The British had 1,309 casualties from 21 January, had 42 tanks knocked out and another 30 damaged or broken down and lost forty field guns.[64] The commander of XIII Corps Lieutenant-General Alfred Reade Godwin-Austen resigned over differences with the Eighth Army commander, Neil Ritchie.[65]
1943[edit]
Buerat[edit]
Rommel planned to defend the Gabes Gap in Tunisia east of the French pre-war Mareth line by holding the port of Buerat, while Army Group Africa (Generaloberst [Colonel-General] Hans-Jürgen von Arnim), already in Tunisia, confronted the British First Army, which contained the II US Corps and French troops.[106] The front was 400 mi (640 km) from Tobruk and with such supply difficulties, the Eighth Army was unable to use all its strength. Buerat was not strongly defended and despite intelligence on the state of the Axis forces, Montgomery paused until 16 January 1943, when the Eighth Army had a 4:1 superiority in infantry and a 7.5:1 superiority in tanks.[107] Bombing began on 12 January and XXX Corps attacked on 15 January, picking its way along the coast road through minefields, demolitions and booby-traps. The 2nd New Zealand Division and the 7th Armoured Division swung inland via Tarhuna, supplied by the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) and the New Zealand Army Service Corps. The Eighth Army needed to capture the port quickly to avoid a supply shortage. Rommel withdrew from Buerat on 15 January, retreated from Tripoli on the night of 22/23 January, after destroying the port and then conducted a delaying action into Tunisia. The 7th Armoured Division entered Tripoli on 23 January; the last elements of Panzerarmee reached the Mareth line, another 200 mi (320 km) west, on 15 February, as LRDG patrols surveyed the defences.[108]
Tripoli[edit]
The main British attack was made along the coast road by the 51st (Highland) Division and an armoured brigade as the 7th Armoured Division advanced via Tarhuna, Castel Benito and Tripoli. The 90th Light Division fought delaying actions along the road, which exacerbated the Allied transport difficulties. From 20 to 21 January, the 90th Light Division made a stand at Corradini, having made 109 craters in the road from Buerat to Homs. The vanguard of the 7th Armoured Division reached the vicinity of Aziza on 21 January and next day the 51st (Highland) Division reached Castel Verde. A race developed and the Germans retired from Tripoli during the night; the 11th Hussars were the first into Tripoli, 675 mi (1,086 km) west of Benghazi, on the morning of 23 January.[109] Five hours later, a Naval Base Party arrived and surveyed the wreckage of the port. On 26 January, five ships anchored outside the port and began to unload via lighters; on 30 January, 3,000 long tons (3,000 t) of stores were landed. In March the Eighth Army entered Tunisia and on 9 March, Rommel returned to Germany to communicate to Hitler the realities of conditions in North Africa. Rommel failed to persuade Hitler to allow the Axis forces to be withdrawn and was not allowed to return to Africa, ostensibly on health grounds.[110]
Aftermath[edit]
Analysis[edit]
In 1977, Martin van Creveld wrote that Rommel had claimed that if the supplies and equipment, sent to Tunisia in late 1942 and early 1943, had been sent earlier, the Axis would have won the Desert War. Creveld disagreed, since only the German occupation of southern France after Operation Torch made French merchant ships and Toulon available for dispatch and Bizerta available for receipt, which did not apply in 1941. The extra distance from Bizerta to the Egyptian border would also have negated the benefit of using a larger port. Axis supply had always been determined by the small size of the ports in Libya, a constraint that could not be overcome and attacks on Axis shipping had compounded chronic supply difficulties. With the German army bogged down in the USSR, there was never sufficient road transport available for the Afrika Korps and the Panzerarmee, despite the relatively lavish scale of transport compared to other fronts.[111]
The cancelled attack on Malta in the summer of 1942 had less influence on events than the small size of Tobruk harbour and its vulnerability to air attack. Only a railway, similar to the one built by the British, could have alleviated Axis supply difficulties but lack of time and resources made it impossible to build one. The influence of Axis ship losses on the defeats inflicted on the Panzerarmee in late 1942 has been exaggerated, because lack of fuel was caused by the chronic difficulty of transporting goods overland, rather than lack of deliveries from Europe. During the Second Battle of El Alamein, 1⁄3 of the fuel destined for the Panzerarmee, was stranded at Benghazi. Rommel wrote that Axis supply difficulties, relative to those of the British, determined the course of the military campaign and were a constraint that was insoluble.[112]
Montgomery has been criticised for failing to trap the Axis armies and bring them to a decisive battle in Libya. His tactics have been seen as too cautious and slow, since he knew of the exiguous supply situation of the Panzerarmee and Rommel's intentions from Axis signals decrypts and other intelligence.[113] In 1966, the British official historian Ian Playfair wrote that the defensive ability of the Afrika Korps in particular and British apprehensions of another defeat and retreat, would have constrained the freedom of action of any commander. Warfare in the desert has been described as a "quarter-master's nightmare", given the conditions of desert warfare and the supply difficulties. Montgomery emphasised balance and refrained from attacks until the army was ready; Eighth Army morale greatly improved under his command.[114] The Axis forces retreated through Libya into Tunisia and fought the Tunisian campaign, eventually to be trapped between the Anglo-American forces of the First Army to the west and the Eighth Army from the east.[115]