slow to grasp the weight and identify the focus of the British assault. Eighth Army swept forward to relieve Tobruk after heavy fighting. Rommel’s counterstrokes failed: he was obliged to withdraw, having suffered 38,000 Italian and German casualties to 18,000 British, and lost three hundred tanks to Cunningham’s 278. By the last days of 1941, the Axis army was back at El Agheila, some five hundred miles from its furthest point of advance into Egypt. The British briefly supposed that they had turned the tide of the desert war; Churchill rejoiced in a rare success.
But most Axis soldiers saw their predicament as readily reversible. Lt. Pietro Ostellino wrote on 7 December: ‘I can only now take up this letter: before, the English wouldn’t let me! We were surrounded for two and a half days by forces who were a hundred times superior, with artillery that really hammered us. But we held out until reinforcements arrived, then put the enemy to flight. We captured prisoners and armoured vehicles. Of course, we too suffered painful losses. Please don’t worry if I don’t write to you so often at the moment: the post can’t operate every day.’
The pattern of the desert war was established. The Germans held at least marginal air superiority, because most of the RAF’s best aircraft remained in England, obliging its desert pilots to fight the Luftwaffe’s Bf 109s with inferior Tomahawks, Kittyhawks and Hurricanes. The British also lagged behind their enemies in developing techniques of air–ground cooperation, using planes in a tactical role as artillery. They had numerical superiority of men and armour, but this advantage was nullified by weaknesses of command, tactics and equipment. German tanks were better. Mechanical failure imposed a battlefield toll even more serious than enemy action, and the British tank recovery and repair system was weak; petrol cans leaked; Cunningham’s army did not match the Afrika Korps’ skill in mixing panzers, anti-tank guns and infantry. Again and again, British armour exposed itself unsupported – and was destroyed: during Crusader, for instance, 7th Armoured Brigade lost 113 of its 141 tanks.
‘We can learn from the Germans,’ wrote Australian John Butler during the siege of Tobruk. ‘Their battalions are a complete unit – with anti-tank guns, tanks, air force and field workshops and ack-ack defence and artillery – with us if we wanted support from the air force we must give 48 hours notice – a Gilbertian situation like writing a letter to the fire-brigade when one’s home catches alight.’ The institutional weakness of the British Army produced commanders at every level who lacked energy, imagination and flexibility; most units deployed in the desert were poorly led and trained. ‘In 1941 and early 1942 the morale of the British Army…was very low,’ wrote one of its officers, Lt. Michael Kerr. ‘The standard of infantry training was really quite terrible. Soldiers were unable to understand what they were meant to be doing and what everything was about.’
The scale of operations in North Africa was tiny by comparison with the war’s decisive confrontation in Russia: at that period the British seldom deployed more than six divisions against three German and five Italian formations. But Eighth Army’s doings commanded intense attention at home, because this was the only theatre in which Britain’s soldiers were fighting Germans. Rommel achieved celebrity on both sides, admired for flair, boldness, and dashing leadership. Less was known about his neglect of logistics, a critical factor in North Africa. The British chose to regard the Afrika Korps’ commander as a ‘good German’, ignoring the fact that he remained an impassioned supporter of Hitler until it became plain that Germany was losing the war. The Allies usually enjoyed a notable intelligence advantage through their breaking of Axis codes, but in 1941–42 Rommel was uniquely well-informed about British operations, thanks to his interception of the daily reports of the US Military Attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner Fellers. Rommel referred affectionately to these signals as his ‘little Fellers’, and they gave him an important edge until Fellers’ recall to Washington in July 1942. The chief influence on the battlefield, however, remained the superiority of the German army. This contributed more to Rommel’s successes, and his own generalship rather less, than the contemporary British media acknowledged and modern legend sometimes suggests.
There was a perceived romance about combat in the vast spaces of Libya, with headlong advances and retreats. Much anecdotage, sometimes reported in the British press, noted the Afrika Korps’ humane treatment of prisoners, and occasional truces between combatants for the recovery of wounded. ‘One enemy post was approached,’ wrote Australian Private Butler during the siege of Tobruk, ‘just in the act of drawing the pin [on a grenade] when a voice was heard from a sangar, “Stay Aussie – we have two wounded Diggers here”…The Aussies said the Germans had shot them and then went out at great personal risk, brought them in and dressed their wounds, gave them hot coffee and then sent for their medical assistance. Thank God there is chivalry.’ Likewise, a participant recorded a halt in fighting while both sides recovered their wounded: ‘Men of both armies stood up under an astonished sun. The absolute stillness almost tinkled with tension…It was the more incredible in contrast with the fury of the night…The truce was as if two armoured combatants had paused and raised their visors, and for a moment one had glimpsed the human faces behind the steel.’ After one failed German attack an Australian wrote: ‘We were sitting up on the parapet, waving and singing to them. There were shouts of “Heil Hitler.” “How would a pint of beer go, mate?” “Have another go tonight,” and many other remarks not so complimentary.’
As Sergeant Sam Bradshaw searched for the rest of his tank squadron during the shambles of Crusader, he glimpsed an enemy soldier limping beside the sandy track.
I drew alongside and called out, ‘Are you Italian?’ He replied, in very good English, ‘No, I’m not a bloody Italian, I’m a German,’ obviously annoyed at the suggestion. He was wounded, so I gave him a lift on the tank [and] a drink of water. He gave me a Capstan cigarette. ‘We got one of your supply columns,’ he said. We saw some German armoured cars about 1,000 yards away and he rolled off the tank and hobbled towards them. My gunner traversed on to him and I shouted on the intercom ‘Don’t fire – let him go.’ He turned around and saluted and called out cheekily, ‘I’ll see you in London.’ I called back, ‘Make it Berlin.’
There were disadvantages, however, to this ‘civilised’ approach to making war. Allied troops who regarded their tactical position as hopeless saw little risk and no shame in surrendering, rather than fight to the death or submit themselves to a waterless desert. British commanders, and their superiors in London, became increasingly dismayed by local capitulations and the allegedly excessive sporting spirit of the campaign.
Eighth Army comprised a remarkable range of national contingents. Its New Zealand division – later a corps – was recognised as outstanding, reflecting all its nation’s virtues of resolution and self-reliance. Two Australian divisions were also highly rated, especially after the legend was established of ‘the Diggers” stand at Tobruk. A German officer shouted indignantly at a prisoner: ‘You are an Australian and you come all the way over here to fight for the filthy, bloody English!’ War correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote of ‘men from the dockside of Sydney and the sheep-stations of the Riverina [who] presented such a picture of downright toughness with their gaunt dirty faces, huge boots, revolvers stuffed in their pockets, gripping their rifles with huge, shapeless hands, shouting and grinning – always grinning’. Notoriously ill-disciplined out of the line, and sometimes poorly officered, they deserved their formidable reputation, especially for night operations. ‘The Australians regarded themselves as the best fighters in the world,’ wrote a British officer. ‘They were.’ He added that their units were held together by ‘mateship’, almost always a stronger motivation for successful soldiers than any abstract cause.
Opinions about the South African component of Auchinleck’s army were more equivocal. On good days it was good, but on bad ones the division did not impress. The same might be said of Indian units: the Indian Army sometimes displayed remarkable courage and fighting skill, but its performance was uneven. The British justly esteemed the prowess of their beloved Gurkhas, but not every man or battalion excelled. For all white officers’ complacency about their men’s loyalty to the King Emperor, the Indian Army was a force of mercenaries.
