By late August, London code-breakers had improved their ability to read enemy communiqués in advance of major engagements. Their expertise was put to good use on the 30th, when Rommel tried to take the Alam el Halfa ridge. The British were waiting for him, and knew his plans in advance. Four days later, he was beaten back with forty-nine tanks and fifty artillery destroyed, plus 2,450 casualties. These losses were especially painful, because only dwindling numbers of Italian freighters were now able to successfully elude ULTRA-guided anti-shipping aircraft and naval units. For the rest of September and most of October, Rommel carefully husbanded his forces for a final showdown that might yet turn the tables on the Allies, as he had done so often in the recent past. He was a mortal human being, however, and an over-long tour of duty began to tell on his nerves. The stress of eighteen months non-stop combat was effecting his health. On 23 September, he was flown to several hospitals in Europe, suffering from acute liver problems and high blood pressure.
While he was hospitalized on leave in Austria, ULTRA cryptographers flashed the news to the Commander of the British 8th Army, General Bernard Montgomery, who used Rommel’s absence to launch the second Battle of El Alamein on the night of 23 October. It opened with a barrage of 900 artillery pieces, virtually all of them U.S.-made. By then, the Eighth Army’s shot-up British equipment had been more than amply replaced by American stockpiles of armour and ammunition, without which Operation Lightfoot would not have been possible. Since the previous June, Axis supplies to North Africa had been steadily pinched off, as Regia Marina convoys were slaughtered by Allied bombers and warships. The arrival of desperately needed oil and ammunition was reduced to a trickle. Meanwhile, stores of arms and equipment accumulated at Montgomery’s disposal.
A comparison of forces arrayed against each other prior to the battle demonstrates the scope of the numerical advantage he possessed. His 230,000 Commonwealth troops faced 80,000 German and Italians. Some 700 Axis aircraft participated, but of this number only 180 dive-bombers and 150 fighters were confronted by more than 1,000 British ground-attack planes and interceptors. Rommel’s 1,468 guns contrasted with 2,311 enemy artillery pieces, and he was down to just 210 Panzers, plus another 280 inferior Italian light tanks. These faced off 1,230 Shermans, Grants, Lees, Crusaders, Valentines and Matildas. As though this numerical disparity on Montgomery’s side was not enough to ensure him a complete triumph, he had advance copies of all German and Italian intentions, supplies, dispositions, and movements on his desk days before the first shot was fired, thanks to ULTRA intercepts.
Not surprisingly, Operation Lightfoot began as planned, but it soon ran into a defensive barrier prepared in advance by military engineers of the Folgore Parachute Division. Their 15-kilometer-long strip comprised a thick minefield overseen by 3,500 paratroopers and 1,000 infantry of the Guastatori d’Africa manning eighty field cannons and five Panzers. Bracing for action near Naqb Rala on 24 October, they were outnumbered by the enemy five to one in guns, thirteen to one in men, and seventy to one in tanks. Despite these apparently impossible odds, the British were thrown back in four different assaults in as many days with severe losses.
By then, the Afrika Korps and other Italian forces had been badly mauled in separate fighting, but skillfully disengaged from the annihilation Montgomery planned for them on 4 November. Only the Folgore paratroopers, with 1,100 dead, wounded or missing, still held out, and Rommel ordered them to join his retreat through the desert. He left behind in El Alamein 32,000 men, 1,000 artillery pieces and 450 tanks. Only 35 Panzers and less than 100 Italian tanks escaped the carnage, an amazing achievement in view of the disproportionate numbers they fought.
But the British paid dearly for Operation Lightfoot. About 13,560 of their best troops were casualties. The élite 9th Australian Division alone was drained by more than 3,000 casualties, and losses in armour were high. Although the Axis had been badly bloodied, Montgomery’s chief goal had been to end the North African Campaign with their capture or obliteration. Aware that the Panzers were desperately low on fuel, he tried to cut them off at Fuqa, but failed. His enervated army was still too weak from sacrifices at El Alamein. Then he tried to pin down the outnumbered, under-equipped Germans at Mersa Matruh, but they escaped him again. For all his efforts to capture the Afrika Korps, it continued to elude his grasp.
Neither, however, was Rommel strong enough to counter-attack. His only hope lay in surviving long enough for fresh supplies to reach him from Europe. The Regia Marina and Luftwaffe must regain the initiative in the Mediterranean, he insisted to Mussolini and Hermann Goering, or North Africa would be lost. Additional squadrons of Stukas and Junker Ju.88 medium-bombers were hurriedly withdrawn from the Eastern Front to escort Italian freighters, while the Duce ordered all available warships into convoy duty, regardless of the Regia Marina’s fuel crisis.
Just weeks after the debacle at El Alamein, first specimens of the Messerschmitt Me.323 Gigant landed near Tunis. With a range of 1,300 kilometers, the six-engine transport could carry a 10,000-kg. cargo of arms, ammunition and spare parts. It less often ferried 120 fully equipped troops with additional room for sixty stretcher patients and medical personnel. The ‘Giants’ typically flew in large groups at a time, accompanied by smaller Junkers Ju.52s, veterans of the Spanish Civil War and a half-dozen campaigns since. Provided fighter escort by long-range Messerschmitt Me.109 and Macchi MC.202 Folgore fighters, the transports played a major role in saving the Italo-German forces from destruction in 1942.
The monstrous Messerschmitts touched down in Tunisia, where Rommel had diverted his armies to prevent himself from being outflanked by 107,000 U.S. troops landing at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers on 8 November. But the Americans posed less of a threat than he anticipated. In their first confrontation with the Germans, a U.S. infantry battalion relieving the British 1st Guards Brigade at Longstop Hill was brushed aside with little effort. The Guards retook Longstop, but another German counter-attack soon forced them off, too.
The British suffered a far more serious defeat that December. Panzerabteilung 501, supported by Stuka dive-bombers, captured Tebourba, near Tunis, destroying 134 of 182 enemy tanks engaged in the furious battle. The extent of British demoralization was demonstrated two days later, on the 6th, when the mere appearance of three Tiger and four Pz III tanks traveling from Dscheideida to El Bathan routed the remaining forty-eight Churchills and Matildas without firing a shot.
Signs of Axis revival continued into 1943, when, on 10 January, teams of nine and ten troopers from the Italian Arditi Regiment parachuted behind enemy lines in Algeria, Libya and Tunisia to demolish bridges at Beni Mansour, Bonira and Uadi Bouduvaou. After three years of virtually incessant combat, however, Rommel was ill with an ulcer condition, his willpower drained, and hitherto unrivaled decision-making ability impaired. Instead of riding herd on the panicked Americans all the way back to Casablanca after thrashing them at the Kasserine Pass, he turned around to face the British 8th Army still pursuing him since El Alamein. General Montgomery had been forewarned by ULTRA of every aspect of Rommel’s intended attack. At the Battle of Medenine, 6 March, German armour was thoroughly repulsed with heavy losses. But the Axis capacity for swift recuperation continued to frustrate Allied commanders.
Montgomery’s pursuit was stopped during late March at the Mareth Line, where his 56th Division was badly shot up by Italian artillery. At the same moment, U.S. General Patton’s thrust to the Eastern Dorsal hit a dead end defended by the Afrika Korps in front of Fonduk and Faid. Beginning 7 April and for the next two days, repeated attempts by the 34th American Infantry Division to take Kairouan met with such fierce counter-attacks the G.I.s refused to leave their fox-holes when ordered to counter-attack. But attrition suffered by Italo-German forces could no longer be made good. During early spring 1943, the Allied edge in military intelligence and espionage was bolstered by a superfluity of weapons spilling from America’s industrial cornucopia.
In mid-April, RAF fighters intercepted a flight of German transports winging their way across the Mediterranean Sea toward Tunisia. Each Me.323 was formidably defended by two 20mm MG 151 cannons in wing-turrets; two 13mm MG 131 machine-guns protruding from the nose-doors, with five additional 13mm’s firing from behind the flight deck and positions along the beam. Although some British pilots paid with their lives for close passes on the well-armed Gigant, a low cruising speed of only 225 km/hr, plus its 55-meter wing-span, prevented the huge aircraft from executing evasive maneuvers. Out of the sixteen attacked in the April formation, just two Gigants survived the encounter.
These losses were compounded with renewed sinkings incurred by Italian convoys, their escorts overwhelmed by five-to-one odds. Of the 60,000 tons of supplies shipped to Rommel in March, he received only about 8,000. Tonnage declined even more steeply the following month. Although the Afrika Korps and Italian desert forces operated on strictly husbanded equipment–much of it worn out almost beyond use–and materials captured from their enemies, they continued to inflict severe reverses on the British and Americans until the last day of the campaign. On 20 April, the Folgore attacked Takrouna, an important British stronghold. Deemed unassailable because of its position atop a high, sheer-sided hill impossible to climb, it was nonetheless taken by the Division’s last 200 surviving paratroopers. They held out for two days against overwhelming opposition, fighting to the last man. That same day, 30 Macchi Lightnings and Greyhounds of the 1st Stormo clashed with twice as many Spitfires over the Straits of Sicily, where the British lost seventeen fighters to the Italians’ two.
From 19 to the 29 April, for all his efforts, Montgomery failed to dislodge the 1st Italian Army from Enfidaville. His 56th Division, still licking its wounds from an unpleasant encounter with Italian artillery at the Mareth Line a few weeks before, suffered additional heavy losses. The Italians, horrendously outnumbered and down to their last ammunition in a hopeless situation, set an incomparable standard for personal heroism. But theirs was the final hurrah of the Axis in North Africa. On 8 May, Tunisia fell. Nearly a quarter-million prisoners were taken at the Cape Bon peninsula five days later. With the destruction of all convoy systems and air traffic, any and all means to evacuate them no longer existed. “Owing to the enemy’s complete sea and air command of the Sicilian Channel,” Mussolini explained, “only very few soldiers and officers escaped capture. A few boat-loads of intrepid navigators left the shores of Cape Bon, and succeeded in reaching the western coast of Sicily.”3
The Campaign had been decided by its lack of supplies. As Marc’ Antonio Bragadin, Commander (R), Regia Marina, observed, “The enemy understood that to win in Africa it was necessary only to strangle the Italian supply line. Therefore, the British concentrated their efforts to that end. The Italian Navy in its turn was forced to devote practically its entire energy to meeting this increasingly pressing problem. From the violent collision of these two determined programs, a long period of warfare resulted.”4
Mussolini knew that victory had been possible in North Africa during 1942 only “if the flow of troops and supplies to the Axis had been on a scale enabling them not only to resist, but attack, particularly in the initial period, when American forces had not yet reached the size they subsequently attained … as to supplies, these were hindered on a growing and almost prohibitive scale by the English naval and air forces which had command even of the shortest crossing, i.e., the Sicilian Channel, which might well be called the graveyard of the Italian merchant marine.”5
General Montgomery, for his part, owed the British Desert Army’s crucial victories largely to a deadly brew of ULTRA intercepts and U.S. materiel. Not even the genius of Erwin Rommel nor the devotion unto death of the men under his command could succeed against such a combination.