Operations in North Africa and the Middle East 1939-1942

458 Pages·2015·5.27 MB·English

by  John Grehan

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
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Copyright © John Grehan and Martin Mace, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78346-217-9
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Contents
List of Plates
Introduction
Abbreviations
1. General Wavell’s Despatch on operations, August 1939 to November 1940
2. General Wavell’s Despatch on operations, December 1940 to February 1941
3. General Wavell’s Despatch on operations, February 1941 to 15 July 1941
4. General Auchinleck’s Despatch on operations, 5 July 1941 to 31 October
1941
5. General Auchinlek’s Despatch on operations, 1 November 1941 to 15 August
1942
List of Plates
Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief of the
Indian Army is pictured with Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, and Field
Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Chief of Imperial General Staff.
A unit of the Somaliland Camel Corps on patrol along the Somaliland-
Abyssinian border in the summer of 1940.
A bomb bursting at Rutba Fort on 9 May 1941.
A Junkers Ju 90 military transporter – as used by Sonderkommando Junck during
the German intervention in Iraq.
Habbaniya War Cemetery in Iraq contains 292 burials. A memorial within the
cemetery commemorates an additional 106 soldiers and RAF Levies who died
while serving in Iraq during the Second World War and were buried in remote
and un-maintainable graves.
After the successful Battle of Palmyra (1 July 1941), Allied troops found this
wreck of a Heinkel He 111, a relic of Sonderkommando Junck, on Palmyra
airfield.
German Fallschirmjäger emplaning at the start of Operation Merkur (Mercury)
– the code-name for the Axis invasion of Crete in 1941.
A German parachute drop underway over Crete, 20 May 1941.
A pair of gunners at one of the many British anti-aircraft positions surrounding
Suda Bay, Crete, in May 1941.
Two British tank officers are pictured reading an Italian newspaper on 28
January 1941.
A British patrol is on the lookout for enemy movements over a valley in the
Western Desert, on the Egyptian side of the Egypt-Libya border, in February of
1942.
A Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber attacking a British supply depot near
Tobruk, Libya, during October 1941.
Two soldiers pictured at work producing a military newspaper or information
sheet during the Siege of Tobruk.
Standing amongst the rubble, a soldier looks through holes made by Axis bombs
into a church in Tobruk, 1941.
Disaster off Tobruk. A picture showing the Grimsby-class sloop HMS Grimsby,
on the left, and the merchant ship SS Helka, on the right, sinking following the
attack by Junkers Ju 87 Stukas.
The 3,359 GRT Dutch tanker MV Adinda pictured on fire in the harbour there
during February 1941.
Introduction
The Middle East Command was formed under General Sir Archibald Wavell in
August 1939, having under its control the British and Commonwealth troops in
Egypt, Palestine, Sudan, Cyprus, Kenya and, at the start of 1940, British
Somaliland. At the outbreak of war the entire command, spread across all these
countries, consisted of just twenty-one battalions of infantry with only sixty-four
field guns. Reinforcements were received from as early as September 1939, and
were continually added to, and these came predominantly from India, Australia
and New Zealand, as well as Rhodesia, South Africa and even Malta, Mauritius
and Poland. It was truly a multi-national force that had been assembled and was
as prepared as could be when Italy declared war on France and Britain in June
1940 and the fighting in the Middle East began.
What Wavell’s mixed force faced were 215,000 Italian troops in Libya and
over 200,000 in Italian East Africa. Though considerably outnumbered, Wavell
immediately went onto the offensive, sending raids into Libya. Nevertheless, the
Italians gradually built up their strength on the Libya-Egyptian frontier and
launched an assault across the border. This assault was beaten off at the cost of
just 150 men; the Italians suffering around 3,500 casualties.
These operations are described in Wavell’s first despatch as are those of
General Platt in the Sudan. In this despatch Wavell refers to operations in British
Somaliland which are covered in our volume on that theatre of war.
His second despatch deals exclusively with operations in the Western Desert.
This saw his so-called Army of the Nile defeat the Italians at the Battle of Sidi
Barrani and capture of the small port of Bardia and then of the more important
port of Tobruk. Wavell followed this up with the almost total destruction of the
enemy forces. During the two months from 7 December to 7 February 1940,
Wavell’s men had advanced 500 miles. They had beaten and destroyed an Italian
army of four Corps comprising nine divisions and part of a tenth, and had
captured an astonishing 130,000 prisoners, 400 tanks and 1,290 guns, as well as
vast quantities of other war material. In these operations Wavell never employed
a larger force than two divisions, of which one was armoured.
Wavell’s third despatch deals with the British support for Greece and the
defence and withdrawal from Crete. Despite Wavell’s well-known objection at
having been forced to halt his offensive against the Italians in order to send
troops to Greece, he later concedes that ‘The losses inflicted on the enemy in
Crete undoubtedly saved the general position in the Middle East by destroying
the greater part of the enemy’s air-borne troops and a very large number of his
aircraft.’
During the period covered in this, his final despatch from the Middle East,
Wavell’s Middle East Command was involved in six major operations – in
Greece, Cyrenaica (Libya), Crete, Iraq, Syria, and in Italian East Africa. As
Wavell points out the theatres of these operations were several hundreds of miles
apart and in some instances well over a thousand miles.
Because he had halted his offensive in Libya to send troops to Greece, the
Italians, having been joined by Rommel and the Afrika Korps, had pushed the
Western Desert Force back to the Egyptian border, leaving the key port of
Tobruk surrounded and besieged by the Axis forces. This disappointed Churchill
who decided to replace Wavell with General Claude Auchinleck who had
previously held India Command.
Wavell had actually performed well and this was acknowledged by
Auchinleck: ‘In no sense do I wish to infer [sic] that I found an unsatisfactory
situation on my arrival – far from it. Not only was I greatly impressed by the
solid foundations laid by my predecessor, but I was also able the better to
appreciate the vastness of the problems with which he had been confronted and
the greatness of his achievements, in a command in which some 40 different
languages are spoken by the British and Allied Forces.’ In reality the two men
simply swapped jobs as Wavell was appointed to Auchinleck’s previous Indian
Command.
One of the first problems that Auchinleck had to deal with was the conclusion
of the operation to occupy Lebanon and Syria by the combined Anglo-Free
French forces. De Gaulle wanted complete control over the former French
Protectorate but, in view of the Free French’s limited military capacity this was
impractical. Fortunately, after discussions with de Gaulle in Cairo, it was agreed
that the Free French would take over the civil administration but that all Free
French military forces would come under Middle East Command.
The next issue Auchinleck had to resolve was the situation in Iraq where anti-
British sentiment was growing. It was decided that it was necessary to expel the
Germans in that country and oust the nationalists that were opposed to Britain.
This was accomplished along with Soviet troops entering Iraq from the north.
Auchinleck’s main area of concern was, of course, with the Axis forces under
Rommel and the siege of Tobruk. How Auchinleck intended to deal with the
Germans and Italians was spelt out in a document issued to his corps
commanders entitled ‘Policy covering the defence of the Western Desert.’ This
is reproduced as an appendix to the despatch. Auchinleck optimistically saw that
the Axis forces could be held and that as more tanks were delivered to him he
could move onto the offensive. In this respect, it was the relief of the garrison at
Tobruk that was his principal objective. Those operations against the Axis forces
in Libya form part of Auchinlek’s second despatch.
He believed that by the end of October, 1941, the land forces under his
Command were strong enough and sufficiently well-equipped to warrant making
an attack. However, he lacked the aerial support to make this possible which
necessitated drawing together practically all the available air forces under his
command, thus leaving Syria, Palestine and Cyprus unprotected. To help
understand the situation in which he was placed, Auchinlek provides the Order
of Battle for his entire command.
Auchinlek aimed to occupy the whole of Libya, firstly by trapping and
destroying the Axis forces in Eastern Cyrenaica. This having been achieved he
would then attempt to drive what remained of the enemy forces out of
Tripolitania. The success of the second stage depended on how well he was able
to overcome the difficulty of supplying his forces over such great distances.
The initial plan was to destroy the German armoured divisions which
Auchinlek rightly regarded as ‘the backbone’ of the enemy’s army. To
accomplish this, his three armoured brigades were concentrated together and
given the task of seeking out and destroying Rommel’s armour. The panzers had
dominated the desert fighting but now the tables would be turned.
Almost nothing went as expected and the British armour was practically
wiped out. This Auchinlek attributes, in no small measure, to the artillery.
‘Whenever our tanks attempted to take the enemy in the rear,’ he wrote, ‘they
were confronted by formidable 88 millimetre guns to which we possessed no
counterpart.’ The Italian tanks also proved to be better than expected.
Nevertheless, the Germans had themselves received ‘a hammering’ and their
strength had been considerably reduced by the British attacks both on land and
from the air. ‘It became therefore a question of maintaining the momentum of
our attack,’ Auchinlek wrote, ‘and I was determined that it should be
maintained.’
It was as the Eighth Army was grinding inexorably forwards that Japan
entered the war. As this meant that Wavell’s Indian Command would have its
hands full dealing with this new enemy, Middle East Command had to take over
responsibility for Iraq and Persia. It also meant that reinforcements originally
destined for Egypt were diverted to India. Auchinlek was also asked to send
some of his tanks and aircraft to the Far East.
Consequently Auchinlek consolidated his gains before further augmentation
of his strength enabled him to resume his offensive. Auchinlek provides a
detailed account of the operations in Libya. This despatch numbers more than
90,000 words – the length of a standard-size book.
*
The objective of this book is to reproduce those despatches as they first appeared
to the general public some seventy years ago. They have not been modified or
edited in any way and are therefore the original and unique words of the
commanding officers as they saw things at the time. The only change is the
manner in which the footnotes are presented, in that they are shown at the end of
each despatch rather than at the bottom of the relevant page as they appear in the
original despatch. Any grammatical or spelling errors have been left uncorrected
(for instance Auchinlek spells Benghazi as Bengasi which is the old Italian
spelling) to retain the authenticity of the documents. Where words are no longer
legible, due to the passage of time, this has been indicated in the text.