Libya and Egypt, autumn 1941–summer 1942

In the Western Desert, a major offensive against Rommel’s front was undertaken on November 18, 1941, by the British 8th Army, commanded by Cunningham under the command in chief of Wavell’s successor in the Middle East, General Sir Claude Auchinleck. The offensive was routed. General Neil Methuen Ritchie took Cunningham’s place on November 25, still more tanks were brought up, and a fortnight’s resumed pressure constrained Rommel to evacuate Cyrenaica and to retreat to Agedabia. There, however, Rommel was at last, albeit meagrely, reinforced; and, after repulsing a British attack on December 26, he prepared a counteroffensive. When the British still imagined his forces to be hopelessly crippled, he attacked on January 21, 1942, and, by a series of strokes, drove the 8th Army back to the Gazala–Bir Hakeim line, just west of Tobruk.

Both sides were subsequently further reinforced. Then, on the night of May 26–27, Rommel passed around Ritchie’s southern flank with his three German divisions and two Italian ones, leaving only four Italian divisions to face the Gazala line. Though at first Rommel did some damage to the British tanks as they came into action piecemeal from a weak position, he failed to break through to the coast behind Gazala. In a single day one-third of Rommel’s tank force was lost; and, after another unsuccessful effort to reach the coast, he decided, on May 29, to take up a defensive position.

The new German position, aptly known as the Cauldron, seemed indeed to be perilously exposed; and throughout the first days of June the British attacked it continually from the air and from the ground, imagining that Rommel’s armour was caught at last. The British tanks, however, persisted in making direct assaults in small groups against the Cauldron and were beaten off with very heavy losses; and Rommel, meanwhile, secured his rear and his line of supply by overwhelming several isolated British positions to the south.

Whereas in May 1942 the British had had 700 tanks, with 200 more in reserve, against Rommel’s 525, by June 10 their present armoured strength was reduced, through their wasteful tactics against the Cauldron, to 170, and most of the reserve was exhausted. Suddenly then, on June 11, Rommel struck eastward, to catch most of the remaining British armour in the converging fire of two panzer divisions. By nightfall on June 13 the British had barely 70 tanks left, and Rommel, with some 150 still fit for action, was master of the battlefield.

The British on June 14 began a precipitate retreat from the Gazala line toward the Egyptian frontier. A garrison of 33,000 men, however, with an immense quantity of material, was left behind in Tobruk—on the retention of which Churchill characteristically and most unfortunately insisted in successive telegrams from London. Rommel’s prompt reduction of Tobruk, achieved on June 21, 1942, was felt by Great Britain as a national disaster second only to the loss of Singapore; and 80 percent of the transport with which Rommel chased the remnant of the 8th Army eastward consisted of captured British vehicles.

At this point Auchinleck relieved Ritchie of his command and in a realistic and soldierly way ordered a general British retreat back to the Alamein area. By June 30 the German tanks were pressing against the British positions between el-Alamein (al-ʿAlamayn) and the Qattara Depression, some 60 miles west of Alexandria, after an advance of more than 350 miles from Gazala. Hitler and Mussolini could expect that within a matter of days Rommel would be the master of Egypt.

The ensuing First Battle of el-Alamein, which lasted throughout July 1942, marked the end of the German hopes of a rapid victory. Rommel’s troops, having come so far and so fast, were exhausted; their first assaults failed to break the defense rallied by Auchinleck; and they were also subjected to disconcerting counterstrokes. At this point, the respite that Rommel had to grant to his men gave Auchinleck time to bring up reinforcements. By the end of July Rommel knew that it was he rather than Auchinleck who was now on the defensive.

Auchinleck had saved Egypt by halting Rommel’s invasion, but his counterattacks had not driven it back. Early in August, when Churchill arrived in Cairo to review the situation, Auchinleck insisted on postponing the resumption of the offensive until September, so that his new forces could be properly acclimatized and trained for desert warfare. Impatient of this delay, Churchill removed Auchinleck from the command in chief in the Middle East and gave the post to General Sir Harold Alexander, while the command of the 8th Army was transferred eventually (after the sudden death of Churchill’s first nominee) to General Bernard Law Montgomery. Paradoxically, Montgomery postponed the resumption of the offensive even longer than Auchinleck had desired.

While the British in the course of August raised their strength in armour at the front to some 700 tanks, Rommel received only meagre reinforcement in the shape of infantry. He had, however, about 200 gun-armed German tanks and also 240 Italian tanks (of an obsolete model). With this armament, in the night of August 30–31, 1942, he launched a fresh attack, intending to capture by surprise the minefields on the southern sector of the British front and then to drive eastward with his armour for some 30 miles before wheeling north into the 8th Army’s supply area on the coast. In the event, the minefields proved unexpectedly deep, and by daybreak Rommel’s spearhead was only eight miles beyond them. Delayed on their eastward drive and already under attack from the air, the two German panzer divisions of the Afrika Korps had to make their wheel to the north at a much shorter distance from the breach than Rommel had planned. Their assault thus ran mainly into the position held by the British 22nd Armoured Brigade, to the southwest of the ridge ʿAlam al-Halfaʾ. Shortage of fuel on the German side and reinforced defense on the British, together with intensification of the British bombing, spelled the defeat of the offensive, and Rommel on September 2 decided to make a gradual withdrawal.