An M3 Grant medium tank in North Africa. (US Army/NARA) First published in Great Britain in 2011 by PEN & SWORD MILITARY an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire. S70 2AS Copyright © Anthony Tucker-Jones, 2011 A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978184 884 5671 eISBN 978 1 78303 818 3 The right of Anthony Tucker-Jones to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing. 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For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact Pen & Sword Books Limited 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk Contents Introduction Photograph Sources Chapter One Mussolini’s Panzers Chapter Two The Western Desert Force Chapter Three ‘Fox killed in the open’ – Beda Fomm Chapter Four East African Distraction Chapter Five The Desert Fox Arrives Chapter Six Churchill’s ‘Battleaxe’ Chapter Seven Crusader – Panzergruppe Afrika Driven Back Chapter Eight Grant and Sherman – The Americans Are Coming! Chapter Nine El Alamein – Rommel Defeated Chapter Ten Kasserine – The Panzers’ Last Hurrah Chapter Eleven Mareth and Longstop – The Road to Tunis Introduction The battles fought in North Africa during the Second World War are largely remembered for the exploits of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’, and the British 7th Armoured Division, the ‘Desert Rats.’ Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery also established his reputation there with the decisive victory at El Alamein that sealed Rommel’s fate. The highly mobile armoured warfare in North Africa was essentially a clean war, a soldier’s war. The open desert wastes in Egypt and Libya were ideal for tanks, with few towns and civilians to distract from the business of fighting (or, indeed, result in atrocities). When the fighting moved into Tunisia, the landscape changed, with the Axis forces taking to the mountains. North Africa’s geography and climate meant that the style of mechanised warfare fought there was very different from that in France, Italy and Russia. The vast Western Desert stretches almost 400 miles from El Alamein in Egypt to Gazala in Libya. Some 150 miles to the south are the Jarabub and Siwa oases, while north of the coastal road lies the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Along the coast of Libya’s Cyrenaica province are Bardia and Tobruk, then the coastal bulge at Djebel Akhdar with the towns of Derna and Benghazi, and further westward Mersa Brega and El Agheila. Key choke-points are the Fuka, Halfaya and Sidi Rezegh passes. It was from Agheila to Alamein and back again that the critical battles between the Eighth Army and the German Afrika Korps took place. The vast, open desert sands of North Africa seemed an ideal place to fight decisive tank battles, but things are rarely that simple. Both sides struggled to maintain their lengthy and dangerously exposed lines of communication; any victory inevitably meant additional supply problems for the victors, which then tilted the fortunes of war back the other way. The naval and air war in the Mediterranean also impinged on both sides’ ability to deliver vital supplies and replacement equipment. The basic tasks of moving, resupply and reconnaissance soaked up the lion’s share of the time; combat was typically restricted to daylight and even then actual fighting only accounted for about three or four hours a day. British armoured and infantry units at nightfall often withdrew up to 5 miles from the scene of the action to form protective leaguers, like old-fashioned wagon trains. At rest both sides formed protective boxes with all-round covering fire for defence. By June 1940 France was out of the war, leaving Benito Mussolini free to attack British-controlled Egypt from his Libyan colony. With almost half a million Italian troops in Libya and in Italian East Africa, the situation in Egypt looked particularly grim. Nonetheless, while Mussolini’s forces enjoyed supremacy in the air and at sea, his armoured fighting vehicles were another matter altogether. The Italian Army suffered from poor mobility and limited mechanisation, both crucial ingredients for prosecuting a successful invasion. Although Mussolini was convinced that Britain would surrender after the fall of France, by August 1940 Winston Churchill had not succumbed to Adolf Hitler’s plans for a Nazi invasion of Britain and the Italian dictator was forced to strike in Egypt. Unfortunately for the Italian soldiers, Mussolini had gained an inflated impression of his military capabilities following his invasion of Abyssinia and his intervention in the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s. Hitler and other advocates of mechanised warfare had watched with interest the Italian Army’s performance during both of these wars. In fact, Hitler had tried to dissuade Mussolini from his Abyssinian conquest, seeing it as an unnecessary diversion, but in 1935 Mussolini had thrown three army corps, supported by light tanks, artillery, aircraft and poison gas, against the Abyssinians. An Abyssinian counteroffensive drove Mussolini’s forces back, ironically using German-and Japanese-supplied weapons. Air power was the deciding factor in Abyssinia, not tanks. In May 1936 Mussolini annexed the country and then committed himself to General Franco’s Nationalist cause in