When Benito
Mussolini declared
war on the Allies on 10th June 1940, he already had over a million
men in the Italian Army based in Libya.
In neighbouring Egypt the British
Army had only 36,000 men guarding the Suez
Canal and the Arabian oilfields.
On 13th
September, 1940, Marshall Rodolfo Graziani
and five Italian divisions began a rapid advance into Egypt
but halted in front of the main British defences at Mersa Matruh.
Although outnumbered, General Archibald Wavell
ordered a British counter-offensive on 9th December, 1940. The Italians
suffered heavy casualties and were pushed back more than 800km (500
miles). British troops moved along the coast and on 22nd January,
1941, they captured the port of Tobruk in Libya from the Italians.
Adolf
Hitler was shocked by the defeats being suffered by the Italian
Army and in January 1941, sent General Erwin
Rommel and the recently formed Deutsches
Afrika Korps to North Africa. Rommel mounted his first
attack on 24th March 1941, and after a week of fighting he pushed
Archibald Wavell and the British
Army out of most of Libya.
Archibald
Wavell attempted a counter-attack on 17th June, 1941, but his
troops were halted at Halfaya Pass. Three weeks later he was replaced
by General Claude Auchinleck.
On 18th
November, 1941, Auchinleck and the recently formed Eighth Army went
on the offensive. Erwin Rommel was forced
to abandon his siege of Tobruk on 4th December, and the following
month had moved as far west as Archibald Wavell
had achieved a year previously. Aware
that Wavell's supply lines were now overextended, and after Rommel
gained obtained reinforcements from Tripoli
he launched a counterattack. It was now the turn of the British
Army to retreat.
British
forces under General Leslie Morshead
repulsed German attacks on the fortress and on 4th December, 1941,
Rommel decided to abandon the siege of Tobruk.
After his
victory at Gazala Rommel returned to Tobruk
and took the port on 21st June, 1942. This included the capture of
military equipment and 35,000 British troops.
On 1st
November 1942, General Bernard Montgomery
launched an attack on the Deutsches
Afrika Korps at Kidney Ridge. After initially resisting
the attack, Rommel decided he no longer had the resources to hold
his line and on the 3rd November he ordered his troops to withdraw.
However, Adolf Hitler overruled his commander
and the Germans were forced to stand and fight.
The next
day Montgomery ordered his men forward. The Eighth Army broke through
the German lines and Erwin Rommel, in
danger of being surrounded, was eventually given permission by Hitler
to retreat. Those soldiers on foot, including large numbers of Italian
soldiers, were unable to move fast enough and were taken prisoner.
For a while
it looked like the the British would cut off Rommel's army but a sudden
rain storm on 6th November turned the desert into a quagmire and the
chasing army was slowed down. Rommel, now with only twenty tanks left,
managed to get to Sollum on the Egypt-Libya border.
On 8th
November Erwin Rommel learned of the Allied
invasion of Morocco and Algeria that was under the command of General
Dwight
D. Eisenhower.
His depleted army now faced a war on two front. The British
Army recaptured Tobruk on 13th November, 1942, bringing the battle
at El Alamein to an end.
(1)
Denis
Falvey,
A Well-Known Excellence (2002)
In the summer of 1942
the Eighth Army had lost confidence in its commanders. It was confused
and bewildered, but it knew for certain
that something was seriously wrong in the higher reaches of the command,
a view shared by the War Cabinet. The record was dreadful. After the
costly victory ('Crusader'), we had been jostled out of Benghazi in
early 1942 without the excuse of the previous year, when the competing
claims of the Greek campaign had diverted attention and
resources. At Gazala, Auchinleck had the advantage in infantry and
artillery and the superiority in tanks he had specified, (three for
every two enemy tanks, but four to one against the Germans alone,
who, nevertheless, defeated our armour decisively). He was directly
responsible for the strategic misjudgement which led to the loss of
Tobruk. Then had followed the muddled scramble to the Alamein gap,
and the ensuing blocking action.
|
Denis
Falvey fought at many of the major actions in Egypt, Greece, Crete,
North Africa, Sicily, the D-day beaches, across France and Belgium
and into Germany. His account of his war is not only informative
but controversial. It is also likely to be among the last published
accounts of military action in the 2nd World War by a surviving
soldier. Anyone seeking a real understanding of what it was like
to fight on foreign fields in the 1939-1945 conflict will gain
much from this insightful work. (Denis Falvey,
A Well-Known Excellence, Brassey's, ISBN 1 85753 312 7) |
Denis
Falvey, A Well-Known Excellence (Brassey's)
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
