18

The Fall of Tobruk

LORD HALIFAX, a Roman Catholic, had gone to church at St. Thomas—“where everybody was provided with fans” to combat the heat—having been assured that “the party had got back all right” from Hyde Park.¹ He was relieved to know Churchill wouldn’t be returning to the embassy—the Prime Minister having been invited by the President to stay at the White House for the remainder of his visit.

Once Churchill was reestablished in his old bedroom on the second floor, he and Major General “Pug” Ismay joined the President and General Marshall in the Oval Study to debate the pros and cons of Bolero and Gymnast. They had barely begun, however, when the whole issue of a Second Front in 1942 was exploded by a bombshell. It came in the form of a piece of pink paper: the copy of an urgent telegram, brought up from the Map Room and handed to the President.

The President read it, then handed it to Churchill.

It came from the war cabinet in London.

“Tobruk has surrendered,” the message ran—“with twenty-five thousand men taken prisoners.”²

 

Twenty-five thousand British troops? Without fighting?

“The year before,” recalled the President’s speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, “Tobruk had withstood siege for thirty-three weeks. Now it had crumpled within a day before the first assault. This was a body blow for Churchill. It was another Singapore. It might well be far worse even than that catastrophe in its total effect—for with Tobruk gone, there was little left with which to stop Rommel from pushing on to Alexandria, Cairo—and beyond.”³

In his diary, Breckenridge Long, the assistant secretary of state, noted that the British “lost 1009 tanks”—largely to Rommel’s secret weapon, his dreaded “88” (millimeter) antiaircraft gun, used as a long-range antitank weapon—“and just smashed the British. They have had six months to prepare—and are now licked. It is serious now. They have no real fortifications between Rommel and Cairo or Suez—and a broken army. It may easily mean the loss of Egypt—unless we can stop it.”⁴

As Churchill himself later wrote, it was “a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.”⁵

 

Lord Halifax heard the same news. Meeting Churchill’s doctor, Sir Charles Wilson, the ambassador “discussed probable reactions in England” to the catastrophe, “and how it is likely to affect the Prime Minister’s plans here.” The Prime Minister had “never meant to stay long this time,” Halifax reflected, “and he certainly will not make the mistake he made in January of overlooking feeling at home”—critical outcries that might well lead now to a vote of censure in the House of Commons.⁶ He would surely have to fly home, instanter.

Back in England there was, indeed, consternation and calls for Churchill to stand down as prime minister. At the Foreign Office, Sir Alec Cadogan had just acknowledged in his diary that “Libya is a complete disaster”⁷ when he learned “that Tobruk had fallen.” It seemed impossible to believe. The heavily fortified port, with ample munitions, water, and troops, had “held out for 8 months last time, and for about as many hours this. I wonder what is most wrong with our army. Without any knowledge, I should say our Generals. Most depressing.”⁸

Averell Harriman, who had returned to the United States with Churchill for talks about munitions and Lend-Lease consignments, called it “a staggering blow” to the Prime Minister, which Churchill at first refused to believe. “But when it was confirmed, by telephone from London, he made no attempt to hide his pain from Roosevelt.”⁹

General Ismay recalled the same. Churchill had “scarcely entered” the President’s study when the news was delivered. “This was a hideous and totally unexpected shock, and for the first time in my life I saw the Prime Minister wince.”¹⁰ Before Ismay could get official confirmation, on Churchill’s disbelieving orders, he met Churchill’s secretary, John Martin, in the corridor bearing a new telegram. This one was from the British naval commander in chief in the Mediterranean, Admiral Harwood. It confirmed not only that Tobruk had surrendered but went on to explain to the Prime Minister that, in the circumstances, Harwood was sending the Royal Navy’s Eastern Mediterranean Fleet south of the Suez Canal, toward the Indian Ocean.

General Alan Brooke, the next day, recorded the timing differently—noting news of the disaster had come through only in the afternoon of June 21, after he’d lunched with the President. “Harry Hopkins and Marshall also turned up,” and it was only in the midst of a “long conference” that “the tragic news of Tobruk came in!” he scribbled. “Churchill and I were standing beside the President’s desk talking to him when Marshall walked in with a pink piece of paper containing a message of the fall of Tobruk!”¹¹

Whatever the actual timing, the British team seemed distraught, even lost. As Brooke subsequently admitted, in his annotations to his diary, “Neither Winston nor I had contemplated such an eventuality and it was a staggering blow”¹²—with neither man having any idea what to do.

Certainly, when Sir Charles Wilson was finally summoned and went over to the White House to see the Prime Minister, later in the afternoon of June 21, 1942, around 3:00 P.M., he found Churchill “pacing his room. He turned on me,” Moran recorded in his diary notes. “Tobruk has fallen.”¹³

“He said this as if I were responsible. With that, he began again striding up and down the room, glowering at the carpet.” “What matters is that it should happen when I am here,” Churchill confessed—stung by the humiliation in front of his American hosts.¹⁴

Churchill went to the window. “I am ashamed. I cannot understand why Tobruk gave in. More than 30,000 of our men put their hands up. If they won’t fight—”¹⁵

Churchill paused, midsentence—bitterly aware of the effect abroad of such an abject British surrender, following the disastrous showing of British imperial forces in Malaya, Burma, and the Indian Ocean. Not only might people in the occupied nations lose heart, but the surrender could even drive neutral countries like Turkey, Portugal, or Spain to parley with Hitler . . .

 

Directing all Third Reich propaganda, Joseph Goebbels reveled in the news from North Africa.¹⁶ The Spanish press agency EFE, he noted, was describing “an atmosphere of catastrophe in Washington.”¹⁷

Even Goebbels had not expected Rommel to be so successful, given the general’s skimpy reports to Berlin since the beginning of Operation Theseus, his plan to drive the British out of Libya and Egypt, on May 26, 1942. Not only had the great port of Tobruk now been captured by Rommel, but it contained enough food, oil, and weapons to keep the Panzerarmee Afrika going for three months. Churchill must have knowingly flown the coop in order to be out of London, Goebbels conjectured cynically—the Prime Minister knowing he’d be blamed for misleading the public into thinking the British were winning the desert war. The British press were now in an uproar, making mincemeat of Churchill’s lamentable military leadership and personal “responsibility for the catastrophe.”¹⁸

Goebbels thus gloried in Britain’s shame. The British did not possess a “single general who has shown himself a real commander, on any current field of battle. After Wavell, Auchinleck; after Auchinleck, Ritchie”—the Eighth Army commander, appointed by Auchinleck after he’d had to fire General Alan Cunningham, his first commander. “And every one a failure,” Goebbels sneered.¹⁹ The latest German 88mm antitank guns and their armor-piercing shells had made a killing of British armored vehicles in the desert—even decimating the American M-3 “Grant tanks” the British had been given.²⁰ Rommel, who had invented a new tactic—luring the British armor onto his concealed 88mm gun positions, to be “shot like hares”—was “the hero of the hour”²¹ and was instantly promoted by the Fuhrer to the rank of field marshal, on the field of battle.

In such circumstances “talk in the U.S. of a Second Front can only be considered a joke,” Goebbels sniffed.²² “Churchill is no longer the leader of the most powerful empire on earth,” the propaganda minister dictated in his office diary. “On the contrary, he has had to go to Washington like a pilgrim, seeking help, and Roosevelt has now taken over many of the functions that were once the Prime Minister’s. Doubtless the President intends to inherit Britain’s empire one day. But that is of no significance to us. We aren’t interested in that. We’ll be quite content to be allowed a free hand in Europe”—a free hand that would exterminate all Jews and reduce all non-Germans to accomplices, servants, slaves—or ashes. “That,” he concluded, “is what we have to achieve in this war.”²³

 

How much Hitler’s mind was focused on the territories to the east of Germany, rather than to the west, had again been made clear to Goebbels the previous month, as Hitler gave the orders for his legions to recommence their armored drive deeper into Russia. The Führer had already gotten a formal resolution from the Reichstag granting him absolute judicial powers as dictator, “without being bound by existing legal precepts.” Thus empowered, Hitler had briefly returned from his East Prussian headquarters to Berlin again in May, certain he would overwhelm Russian forces by the end of the summer; if not, his armies would be better prepared for winter, he promised the country’s assembled Nazi Party Gauleiters in a two-hour peroration.²⁴ To Goebbels’s surprise, the Führer then confided to the assembled administrators just how critical the previous winter had been—admitting that by the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor the Third Reich had been facing retreat and possible defeat on the field of battle. The Japanese had saved the Third Reich.²⁵ Now, thankfully, the situation was reversed—with the Soviet armies facing collapse before German might. Nothing could now stand in his way.²⁶

The Führer had respect neither for Roosevelt nor untested American troops.²⁷ He had blindly forecast—thirteen days before Midway—that the Japanese Navy would destroy the U.S.-British fleet if it came to a major sea battle.²⁸ American preparations for a Second Front in the West were not worth taking seriously, either, he had mocked, given the current success of Germany’s U-boat war. He’d positioned enough German troops in Norway to repel any invasion attempt, as was rumored to be planned by the British; moreover, with some twenty-five German divisions on call in the West, and no less than four first-class German panzer divisions and even a parachute division ready to meet an Allied landing,²⁹ he predicted a drubbing if the Americans and British attempted to create a Second Front anywhere on the French coast.

“Of course the Führer doesn’t believe for a moment that, were there to be a British invasion even lasting ten or fourteen days, it would end with anything but an absolute catastrophe for the British. That might alter the whole course of the war, perhaps even end it,” Goebbels recorded the Führer’s words.³⁰ The Allies would hardly be so stupid, surely. In the meantime, German’s destiny lay in the East, the Führer had emphasized. It was there that Germany needed room to expand—Hitler’s perennial mantra since the 1920s—establishing as it did a sort of Chinese wall that would separate the West from Asia.³¹

“Never,” Goebbels had recorded the Führer’s strategic imperative in May, “must Germany allow itself to be sandwiched between two military powers, for then the Reich would always be threatened.” Thankfully, the Führer had claimed, Germany had “succeeded in destroying the military power on its western front. Over the summer it would now proceed to destroy the military power on its eastern front. Then we’ll be able to begin the process of reconstruction,” he noted the gist of the Führer’s address. “In the East we want, above all, to use our soldiers as frontier settlers. In that way German resettlement will proceed as it had in the greatest days of Germany’s first empire. The German diaspora should be brought back from foreign countries, even from America, its men applied to the Reich’s skills in colonization. We won’t need to be cultural fertilizers for foreign countries any more, we’ll be able to develop our own territories culturally, intellectually, and spiritually. . . . This was the point of the war,” he sketched the Führer’s tour d’horizon, “for the spilling of so much blood will only be justified by future generations on the basis of swaying cornfields. Of course it would be nice to inherit a few colonies, where we could plant coffee or rubber trees. But our colonial future lies in the East. That is where rich black earth and iron lie, the foundation of our national wealth. By smart demographic measures, above all using Germans returning from abroad, it would be easy to increase the German population to 250 million . . .”³²

The future—“the next stages straightforward. Our punitive air raids on English cities [“Baedeker” raids on Exeter, Bath, Norwich, and York, following massive RAF bomber raids on Lübeck and Rostock] have already taught them a lesson. Once we have established our eastern frontiers, the British will reflect on whether to pursue such air attacks on German territory, because our Luftwaffe will once again be free for action . . . Once matters are settled in the East—and we all hope that will be done this summer—then Europe can, as the Führer says, get stuffed. For the war will be won for us. We’ll be able to indulge in piracy on the high seas against the Anglo-Saxon powers, who won’t be able to withstand it. The United States will lose all enthusiasm for the war, once they see the British empire plundered and disemboweled . . .”³³

On and on in this vein the Führer had shared his apocalyptic vision with his Nazi functionaries—none of whom dissented. “He doesn’t take American declarations of intent too seriously. Against their boast of their 120 million people at war with us, we can counter with about 600 million on our side. For now that Japan has entered the war, we are not talking just of a few continental powers, but we shall soon be able to turn it into a global struggle, spreading it across all continents. The United States are still thinking in terms of world war; but world war terms don’t begin to describe this war.”³⁴ All that was required to fulfill his demonic dream, Hitler repeated, were Nazis with nerves of steel; also Hitler’s own personal survival “to the end of the war,” in order that all actually happened as he willed, despite the inevitable trials and setbacks that would occur.

Spring had come, thankfully; the Führer seemed to be in the “best of spirits,” Goebbels had noted. “In glänzendster Form.”³⁵

Four weeks later, as spring had turned to summer and the German armies had driven deeper into southern Russia, and in Libya Rommel turned the tables on General Ritchie’s British Eighth Army, Hitler’s dream had seemed eminently achievable to Goebbels. In late June 1942, it was simply marvelous, he felt, to be alive.

 

Gloom had meanwhile descended on Washington in the aftermath of the British surrender of Tobruk.

In the sticky heat, sixteen of the most senior British and American military staff officers met on June 21, 1942. They had intended to discuss offensive strategy, but they now switched to defense: addressing the ramifications of the collapse of the British in North Africa, and the possible fall of Churchill as prime minister.

The President’s response, however, was different—indeed, would go down in world history. At the British Empire’s nadir of shame, with British Empire soldiers refusing to fight—the number of those surrendering at Tobruk increasing to thirty-three thousand in subsequent hours—the President turned to Churchill and said: “What can we do to help?”³⁶

General Marshall was consulted, and to the consternation of Secretary Stimson—who was not summoned—the President offered, with Marshall’s approval, to take the Second U.S. Armored Division, currently being equipped with the latest M-4 Sherman tanks with swiveling turrets, and dispatch it immediately to Egypt, with its men and artillery, to defend Alexandria, Cairo, and the Suez Canal.

Churchill, shocked, chastened, and grateful, accepted. Americans and Britons would thus fight side by side.

It was in this way that the strategic Second Front “crisis” of June 1942 was temporarily averted—not by argument but by British disaster.

What earthly hope, after all, could there be of a successful Second Front that fall, at a moment when the British were collapsing in the Middle East? “Nobody seriously believes in the feasibility of a Second Front,” even Goebbels noted in his diary on June 25.³⁷ After all, the majority of the forces for such an invasion would have to be British, given the time it would still take to ship significant numbers of U.S. troops to England. And in the wake of Tobruk’s disgraceful surrender, what possible victory could be won on the fields of Europe, if the British lacked generals who could win offensive battles, or soldiers willing even to fight them?