ON 13 MAY, Sergeant Ralph Schaps and a large part of the 34th Red Bull Division reached Scotland after a trip in convoy aboard RMS Aquitania, one of the biggest, most elegant four-funnel trans-Atlantic liners ever to have graced the seas. Those days were over for the time being, however, and now she was a grey, stripped-down troop liner. Schaps had felt as though he were a sardine in a tin and, with cramped conditions, bad food and the menace of U-boats, he and his pals had been mightily relieved to get on to dry land. This, however, had been short-lived, because they were then transferred to smaller vessels and shipped to Omagh, in Northern Ireland. ‘To us,’ noted Schaps, ‘it was the most beautiful sight we had ever seen.’1
Also reaching Britain was Brigadier-General Mark Clark, who had flown into Prestwick aboard a Boeing Stratoliner on 25 May along with his old friend Major-General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, since February, had been head of the US Army’s entire War Plans Division, soon renamed the Operations Division (OPD), and given the task of putting together plans for the Germany-first policy adopted at Arcadia. The key to this, as far as Eisenhower was concerned, was ensuring that Russia stayed in the war, which, in early 1942, was looking more likely than it had the previous summer, but still very far from guaranteed. With this in mind, at the end of March Eisenhower proposed a plan to invade northern France with forty-eight Anglo-US divisions by no later than 1 April 1943. The codename for the plan to establish beachheads around the Le Havre–Boulogne area was SLEDGEHAMMER, while the expansion of the bridgehead and breakout phase was codenamed ROUNDUP. The Americans promised to have thirty divisions and 2,550 combat aircraft ready by 1 April 1943, but pledged only three and a half divisions and 700 combat aircraft ready in Britain by 15 September 1942. The aim, therefore, was to cross the Channel in spring 1943, but to mount an emergency offensive in 1942 if the Russia position looked particularly desperate; effectively, this would be a suicide mission to France. In the meantime, more and more troops, aircraft and supplies needed to be hurriedly sent to Britain as part of Operation BOLERO.
These plans were approved by General Marshall and then Roosevelt, then presented to the British, who thought April 1943 seemed rather ambitious. Their caveat was that there needed to be, by then, signs that Germany was ‘weakened in strength and morale.’2 This agreed, Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff gave their approval too. At the time, Eisenhower was delighted. ‘I hope that at long last,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘we are all definitely committed to one concept of fighting.3 If we can agree on major purposes and objectives, our efforts will begin to fall in line and we won’t just be thrashing around in the dark.’
Eisenhower, known to all as ‘Ike’, had been born in 1890 to humble beginnings. From the age of two, home had been Abilene, Kansas, a modest town deep in America’s Midwest. After working hard at school and doing well, he managed to get into West Point, the military academy, graduating in 1915. Unlike Mark Clark, however, Eisenhower did not see action in France. Rather, his career took him into a number of staff posts, in which he soon made a name for himself. By the end of the 1930s, he was in the Philippines, working under General Douglas MacArthur, but he returned in 1939 and joined the Third Army. His performance in the Louisiana Maneuvers in summer 1941 caught the eye of General Marshall. For those who made an impression in these rapidly changing times, it was possible to rise up the chain very quickly, as both Clark and Eisenhower were discovering.
Now he was making his first trip to Britain, to talk about plans and command structure. After trips to see troops training in Scotland and the newly formed US Rangers practising amphibious landings, they headed to London and to Claridge’s Hotel, which would become a favoured base with the Americans. There they met Major-General James E. Chaney, currently commanding US troops in Britain. Marshall had big question marks over Chaney and part of Eisenhower’s and Clark’s brief was to talk to him and then make recommendations back to Marshall; certainly, the joint Anglo-US command structure in Britain was something that needed ironing out.
On 27 May, they went to see a large divisional exercise in Kent, part of Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery’s South-Eastern Command. Invited to Montgomery’s HQ, they sat waiting for him in his office, looking at walls covered in maps. Eventually, he came in and began lecturing them in his crisp, energetic, no-nonsense way. There were a number of other officers there and halfway through Eisenhower lit up a cigarette.
Montgomery stopped and glared. ‘Who’s smoking?’ he demanded.4
‘I am,’ said Eisenhower.
‘I don’t,’ said Montgomery sternly, ‘permit smoking in my office.’
Eisenhower put out his cigarette and Montgomery continued. ‘We got a good laugh out of the incident,’ noted Clark, ‘but not until we were well out of Montgomery’s hearing.’
With bitter fighting now going on in Burma, with India still under threat and with further losses in the Pacific, the Allies were struggling to stem the tide of Japanese advances. In fact, it now looked possible that the Japanese Imperial Navy might even stretch their reach across the Indian Ocean to take Madagascar, currently held by the Vichy French. If they established a base there, British shipping to both India and the Middle East would be threatened. As a result, the Chiefs of Staff decided to launch their first amphibious invasion of any scale since Gallipoli back in 1915.
On 5 May, Force 121, led by the Royal Marines and including two brigades of the 5th Division and a further Commando brigade group, landed on Madagascar. Defending the island were around 8,000 Vichy French troops, most of whom were poorly equipped local colonial soldiers. None the less, on the first day of the invasion their defence at the port of Diego-Suárez was surprisingly stiff. Only an outflanking manoeuvre by fifty Royal Marines into the Vichy rear area the following day broke the deadlock. The town surrendered the next day, with the Vichy forces retreating deep to the south of the island. The fighting would continue, but the island’s main port had been captured and occupied. For the time being, at any rate, the crucial supply routes between Britain, the Middle East, India and Australasia were secure.
This was very much to the betterment of the British forces in North Africa desperately trying to make good the losses sent to India and the Far East. Certainly by May 1942, the Desert Air Force, at least, was in reasonable fettle, even if it had not the superiority of numbers it had enjoyed the previous autumn.
Among those who had recently joined was Billy Drake, long since recovered from the wounds he had received in France back in May 1940 and now a squadron leader. In fact, after a stint instructing, he had rejoined a combat squadron at the tail-end of the Battle of Britain. By early 1942, he was posted to Sierra Leone, where for a month or so he languished until someone higher up the chain realized this was a waste of a very able pilot and commander, and so in March he had been posted to 280 Squadron as a supernumerary. On 25 May, he was posted again, this time to command 112 ‘Shark’ Squadron, so called because of the vivid shark’s teeth painted on to the cowlings of their Kittyhawks.
Drake was still only twenty-four years old, but an ace with over ten victories to his name and a stack of combat experience. He had learned the hard way: that to shoot anything down, he had to get in as close as possible, that he needed to watch his back at all times and to so thoroughly understand his aircraft that he knew exactly how hard he could push it. Flying had to be second nature so that he could concentrate on fighting. He also knew that pilots had to adapt quickly to any situation, which was just as well because the Kittyhawks were no longer being used purely as fighters in air-to-air combat. ‘The first thing I saw,’ said Drake on his arrival at 280 Squadron, ‘was a Kittyhawk with a bloody great bomb underneath it.’5 The emphasis now for the Shark Squadron was on ground attack: flying in swiftly at low levels, dropping a single bomb, then strafing other targets. ‘It was ground attack first and foremost,’ said Drake, ‘then occasional air-to-air work.’
The man behind this change of emphasis for the fighter squadrons was Air Vice-Marshal ‘Mary’ Coningham. Although he had led the DAF successfully since taking command the previous summer, his grasp had tightened considerably since the arrival of new staff, not least Air Commodore Tommy Elmhirst as his deputy. Elmhirst similarly had a long career in the RAF behind him, and had worked in both Air Intelligence during the Battle of Britain and later as a controller at Bentley Priory, Fighter Command Headquarters in north-west London. From here, he had been posted as a station commander in Bomber Command. This gave him, like Coningham, a very complete and rounded view of the differing components of modern air warfare, something that was invaluable out in the evolving North African theatre.
In many ways, Coningham and Elmhirst were chalk and cheese. As Coningham was tall and beefy, so Elmhirst was small and less imposing; as Coningham was boisterous, so Elmhirst was more softly spoken. Coningham was inspiring and charismatic, but somewhat haphazard in his methods. Elmhirst, on the other hand, was a superlative organizer and it was as chief administrator that he had joined Coningham’s Air HQ at Gambut in Libya back in February.
There had been columns of smoke rising from burning aircraft destroyed on the ground when he first arrived at Gambut, but within a few days he had gained a pretty good idea of what was needed. The lull in the fighting had given him and his chief three clear months in which to reorganize the DAF completely. Gone were piecemeal units. In their place came a group of fighters, divided into three wings with their own administrative staffs and repair units, and, where possible, based on the same landing ground. This centralization of administration enabled wing and squadron commanders to get on with the job of leading their men rather than sweating over logistics, and by the same token halted the dangerous fragmentation of the DAF.
With the administration of the squadrons taken out of the hands of the squadron leaders and flight commanders, Coningham now had the infrastructure that enabled him to lick his air force into shape. Between February and the end of May, training was extensive and carried out between ongoing operations. First on his list was an improvement in the standard of gunnery. This was, understandably, a difficult aspect of air fighting in which to train, because there was no real means of practising live firing against a live target. In the desert, however, with its clear skies and blazing sun, it was quite possible to practise ‘shadow firing’ rather than pointlessly going after a towed drogue. Navigation was also improved and regular discussions held with bomber crews. Ground crews, too, were expected to up their game: rapid refuelling and rearming, as well as packing and unpacking bases, was drilled into every man. There were weekly conferences between Coningham and his wing commanders, in which tactics, training and administration were all discussed, analysed and refined. All this was designed not only to sharpen his force, but to help give them a renewed sense of purpose and confidence.
Coningham was also using this regrouping of his air force to hone his own ideas. Like Tedder, he believed the aim should be to win air superiority over the battle area. Once that was achieved, he could then more directly support the ground forces. Yes, the DAF could provide close air support, but they could do more than that, and while it was clearly important to form close working relationships with the Army command, it was essential that he was left to command his force how he, as an airman, thought fit. Sometimes, for example, he could best help the troops down below not by responding to a specific target request, but by neutralizing a threat further back behind the immediate front.
Coningham was also learning from the enemy. He had been impressed by how effective dive-bombing could be, but realized how vulnerable Stukas were as they came out of a dive, and how slow they were in all forms of flight. He had begun using US-built Kittyhawks in such a role. These lacked the rate of climb to be much use above heights of 10,000 feet, but below that were highly manoeuvrable as well as quick. Furthermore, they could out-dive both the new Italian Macchi 202s coming into service and the latest Me109s. They also had a very stable gun platform. With this in mind, he had started using them as ‘Kitty-bombers’. With a bomb slung beneath them, they could hurtle in towards a target, diving down at speed, drop their load, then scurry out of the fray. The idea was to use them like a Stuka, but without the Ju87’s increasingly obvious shortcomings.
Hurricanes, too, were being used more at low level. Like the Kittyhawk, they were no match for either the Macchi 202s or Me109s – and nor had they been for some time. Coningham’s view was that if they were unlikely to compete against them at higher altitude, there was little to be achieved by trying. Far better that their strengths be exploited. A number had now been fitted with high-velocity cannons and were being used as low-level ground attack ‘tank busters’. With a stable gun platform, high speed and a robust air-frame, they still had a very important role to play. Operating both Kittyhawks and Hurricanes at low height meant they would be vulnerable to being bounced by Axis fighters, but that was a risk that would have to be taken.
There was an obvious solution to this particular risk, and one that had been adopted successfully during the Battle of Britain. While Hurricanes – and now Kittyhawks – concentrated on targets below 10,000 feet, Spitfires could take on those troublesome Axis fighters. Ever since arriving in the Middle East, Coningham had been calling for Spitfires, and by May, as had happened at Malta, he at last had a squadron of Mk Vs, complete with special Vokes tropical air filters to cope with the sand. And as on Malta, getting them into action, once the decision had been made, had not been anything like as difficult as the brass back in Britain had been suggesting.
In sharp contrast, the Luftwaffe was suddenly looking a little short of ideas. It is so often the case that trailblazers are caught up and then overtaken, and so it was proving with the air war. One of Rommel’s failings was that he never got to grips with the operational art of war – logistics and supplies were, to his mind, someone else’s problem – and nor did he understand air power. Again, he viewed it rather in the same way most British Army commanders did: as a direct support to the ground forces and therefore a junior partner to be held at his beck and call. General Otto Hoffmann von Waldau, the current commander of the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean, disagreed with this view, and the relationship between the two was fraught, to put it mildly. In fact, Rommel was acting as British Army commanders had been acting the previous summer. The difference was that Tedder and Coningham had stuck to their guns and had then advanced their ideas of tactical air support, while Rommel and von Waldau had not remotely resolved their differences.
In terms of administration, so important in the vast emptiness and huge distances of the desert, there was no system comparable to the one being developed by the DAF. German and Italian squadrons could not rapidly move from one airfield to another; rather, they effectively closed down when on the move. In the air, fighters might carry out strafing runs, but their prime role was not even to shoot down enemy bombers, but rather enemy fighters – as Jochen Marseille was proving so spectacularly. The cult of the ace, or Experte, was as developed in the Mediterranean as it was anywhere and, as elsewhere, helping the leading aces shoot down yet more lay at the very heart of Luftwaffe fighter tactics. That, however, did not mean it was necessarily the right tactic.
The Desert Air Force might have been imbued with a very clear and dynamic sense of purpose, but this could not be said for Eighth Army. Despite the numerous advantages the British held in terms of new up-gunned Grant tanks, manpower and supplies, the tactical leadership was in a bit of a muddle. General Neil Ritchie, thrust into command during the CRUSADER battles, was a highly competent staff officer but had little combat experience; really, he was there as the Auk’s man on the ground rather than as an independently minded Army commander, but Auchinleck was back at GHQ in Cairo and Ritchie, hastily promoted to three stars, did not have the respect he needed from his corps and division commanders, and neither the tactical experience nor the wherewithal to impose himself. As the British desperately tried to work out how to combat the dash and drive of Rommel and his Afrikakorps, decisions had started to be made by committee rather than with any sense of purpose and vision.
The net result was a line, just under 40 miles long, running roughly north to south, in which units and brigades were concentrated in what were called ‘boxes’ – areas in the desert marked out by entrenchments containing all arms of artillery, infantry and engineers, and linked only by minefields. The trouble was, the distance was so great, these boxes were too far apart to be mutually supporting. Even worse, the Free French Brigade, under Général Pierre König, were right at the very end at Bir Hacheim, cut off from their nearest neighbour by about 15 miles. Isolating – or, rather, abandoning – the highly sensitive French in such a way was politically not very smart.
One man despairing at this state of affairs was Major-General Francis ‘Gertie’ Tuker, who since December had been commanding 4th Indian Division. Having survived the First World War, he had briefly considered giving up the Army to become an artist. However, he remained in the Indian Army and saw further action in Iraq, Assam and northern Iran, as well as in border operations along the Northwest Frontier. Tuker was, and remained, an obsessive student of warfare, and spent a huge amount of time thinking and writing about the shape future wars might take. He was also, however, keenly aware that he was an unusual case in the inter-war Army, where talking ‘shop’ was largely frowned upon. In the 1930s he had also done much to develop new infantry training methods in the Indian Army and these had been so successful they had not only been adopted but he had been appointed Director for Training for the Indian Army, based at Quetta.
On his arrival in the Middle East, Tuker had met with Auchinleck, who promptly asked him for his views; the Auk was an Indian Army man too and knew about Tuker’s highly regarded training methods. Eager to help, Tuker soon submitted a paper in which he emphasized the need for a mobile corps of two armoured divisions, supported by a lorried infantry division whose assault troops would be mounted in armoured fighting vehicles. This was much the same model as the Afrikakorps.
His suggestion, however, was not adopted. In fact, he was never given any feedback at all. Instead, Auchinleck split up his armoured forces into much smaller all-arms brigades, based on an earlier even smaller mobile column known as the ‘Jock Column’, named after Jock Campbell, formerly of the 7th Armoured Division. These smaller Jock Columns had worked brilliantly in helping to run rings round the static and hopelessly dispersed Italians, but were no good against larger mobile formations. Auchinleck was trying to ape the Germans but with smaller units, which, he thought, would give him greater flexibility.
Tuker, however, understood far more clearly what the Auk did not: that the way to beat the enemy was by concentration of force. By splitting Eighth Army’s infantry and artillery into isolated boxes and the armour into small penny packets, Rommel would be able to bring his massed armour against them and pick them off one by one. As Rommel said to a captured British officer, ‘What difference does it make if you have two tanks to my one, when you spread them out and let me smash them in detail?’ That one sentence really did encapsulate the nub of the matter and the failure of the Auk’s approach.6 Frankly, he and his senior commanders should have known better by now.
Back in February, 4th Indian Division had been sent forward to help build the Gazala Line, and Tuker, who had used the opportunity to have a thorough look around, had been appalled. He simply could not understand the logic of stringing Eighth Army out across the desert when a fairly small garrison in Tobruk had held out against all Rommel’s best efforts for more than eight months. Tobruk could be comparatively easily resupplied: there were water pipes and supply dump facilities and it would have been easy to build up its now crumbling defences and stocks of water, food, oil and arms for six months. The fortress of Tobruk could have been reinforced with strong defences covering the landing grounds of Gambut, El Adem and Sidi Rezegh, and the main coast road blocked. The two armoured divisions and 4th Indian, fully motorized, supporting the armour, would provide the kind of mobile armoured corps Tuker had originally suggested to Auchinleck.
With these dispositions there would have been no need for a long defensive line that could so easily be outflanked and enveloped, for so long as Tobruk was held in strength, Rommel would be unable to invade Egypt. This was because Tobruk lay in the path of the Axis lines of supply, and even if successfully bypassed – and Tuker thought that would be unlikely – Rommel’s forces would not get very far before the vanguard was severed from the main body of supply. And because superior Axis forces had been unable to dislodge the defenders of Tobruk the previous year, there was absolutely no reason at all why they would do so now that Eighth Army had superiority of supplies and troops.
Tuker suggested to Ritchie in February that he had grave misgivings about the Gazala position, but the Eighth Army commander told him he disagreed. In March, Tuker spoke at length to General Willoughby Norrie, the commander of XXX Corps, and outlined his idea for an alternative defensive position based around Tobruk. ‘He did not accept the proposal as far as I know,’ noted Tuker.7 On 15 March, Lieutenant-General Tom Corbett, Auchinleck’s Chief of the General Staff (CGS), had also come to the front and Tuker spent the best part of twenty-four hours trying to open his eyes to the flawed dispositions. ‘His final reply,’ noted Tuker, ‘was that he had put in about a million mines, or some such figure, at Gazala, and could not use more by filling up Tobruk.’
Tuker had been banging his head against a brick wall. What a tragedy it was for British fortunes in North Africa that he had not been appointed Eighth Army commander instead of Ritchie – after all, they had been the same rank. In fact, his self-confidence, calm logic and vastly superior tactical understanding were precisely what Eighth Army needed.
As it was, Auchinleck clearly felt undermined by Tuker and none of the other corps and divisional commanders at the front had much idea about what they were doing at all. If they had, they would have recognized that Tuker’s plan not only made sense, but was self-evidently the right approach. Really, their unwillingness to adopt his obviously sensible plan to build up Tobruk beggars belief. What on earth were they thinking? The men of Eighth Army, many of whom were now tough, battle- and desert-hardened and experienced in the ways of war, deserved a lot better. The British people deserved better.
Instead, Tuker’s 4th Indian Division was not even at the front. Rather, he was sent up alone to the front on 26 May to assume command of the left flank of the Army – that is, of the Free French, 7th Motor Brigade, 3rd Indian Motor Brigade and 29th Indian Infantry Brigade. It sounded piecemeal, and so it was, and ironic that Tuker, who was so against penny-packet static positions, should have been given such a command.
British tanks and British equipment have repeatedly come in for criticism in the narrative of the war. German tanks were better, German small arms were better, German troops were better trained. This is a massively distorted view. While, by the end of May 1942, Eighth Army lacked a powerful anti-tank gun, otherwise their equipment was broadly pretty good and their tanks were, for the most part, better than anything either the Germans or the Italians had in their arsenal. British troops were, overall, also a match in terms of training and fighting power.
The difference lay in the quality of the commanders. At Gazala, British tactical leadership had, sadly for the men, reached its nadir.
Meanwhile, in Rome, Count Ciano found Mussolini much improved after a bout of flu and now feeling bullish about Rommel’s coming offensive. He told Ciano that the Axis armies in North Africa would reach the Delta, and even for the capture of Malta he was willing to make good forecasts. Of course, Il Duce was merely expressing his hopes rather than voicing a prediction based on sound military logic.
He made little mention of Russia, where he had just sent another seven divisions to join the three of the Italian Expeditionary Corps; the Corps had become Italian Eighth Army and the commander, Generale Giovanni Messe, replaced by Generale Italo Gariboldi, much to Ciano’s chagrin, as he rated the outgoing commander highly but thought the latter too old and tired. Mussolini and Cavallero, however, had felt that Messe was becoming just a little bit too important out there and needed his wings clipping. ‘Cavallero,’ noted Ciano, ‘is a faithful follower of the theory which calls for the decapitation of poppies that grow too high.’8
Just a week earlier, Ciano had had a long conversation with Messe on his return to Rome. Messe was understandably furious at his ousting, but had warned Ciano that he thought there would be no ‘total liquidation’ of Russia before winter. ‘Which,’ added Ciano, ‘raises some very serious problems for us since we shall soon have 300,000 men on the Eastern Front.’9 Three hundred thousand men they could barely equip and could ill afford to send.
On Tuesday, 26 May, Rommel launched his attack with General Crüwell’s Italian Corps noisily approaching the line in the north and Stukas dive-bombing British positions there, occupied by men of the 1st South African Division. That same afternoon, General Tuker flew up to the front, landing around 6 p.m. at El Adem and then heading to XXX Corps HQ, about 10 miles to the south and 25 miles south of Tobruk harbour. It was still quiet in the southern sector, but the bombardment of the north had increased. As daylight slipped away, Tuker watched a single searchlight beam up over the sky to the west. Outside the canvas tents and caravans, he spent a tranquil hour, chatting and watching the stars emerge. The night was now still and, from where he stood, not a gun could be heard. Even so, the battle was now under way and reports from the north suggested a major assault had been made on the South Africans’ positions. The silence made Tuker and others feel suspicious and uneasy.
It was even quieter to the far south of the line, where the men of the 7th Motor Brigade, part of Tuker’s new command, were dug in at the Retma Box, exactly 20 miles to the south-east of Bir Hacheim, waiting for something to happen. Among them were Albert Martin and his fellows in 2nd Rifle Brigade. For them, 26 May had been an ‘ordinary day’; the only news Martin had heard was that the Japanese had made a fresh attack on the Chinese, and so he’d bedded down that night with no particular sense of expectation.10
He was roughly woken, however, at 5 a.m. and told to get to his position right away as ‘Jerry was on his way’.11 Minutes later, he was jumping into his slit-trench, ‘fully alert and senses tingling’. He only just made it, because no sooner had he leaped in than a heavy artillery barrage burst down upon them, ripping apart the quiet and shaking the hard desert beneath them.
Rommel’s Afrikakorps, with XXI Motorized Corps attached, had amassed some 10,000 vehicles for this main thrust and amongst the spearhead of the 21. Panzerdivision was Major Hans von Luck and his 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion. They had assembled overnight, when it had been pitch black, with only the southern stars to guide them. Navigation was done by exact compass bearings. ‘It was a ghostly scene,’ noted von Luck.12 ‘Each man could just see the vehicle to his front or side.’ They drove at reduced speed to avoid raising too much dust and risking losing sight of their neighbours.
As dawn spread, it was clear the British were not expecting them, which was surprising as numerous reports of enemy movement to the south had reached both XXX Corps and Eighth Army HQs through the night. These had been logged but not acted upon. Any doubt was finally dispelled at 6.30 a.m., however, when 3rd Indian Motor Brigade had signalled that ‘a whole bloody German armoured division’ was bearing down upon them.13
By early morning, 21. and 15. Panzer had cleared the southern flank and were turning north towards a crossroads of desert tracks the British had named ‘Knightsbridge’, while the 90th Light Division had sped on north-east – it was this division that had stormed into most of Tuker’s brigades. Meanwhile, the XXI Italian Corps had circled around Bir Hacheim and were attacking the French outpost from the rear. Hans von Luck was exhilarated by their drive. ‘We were in the best of spirits,’ he wrote, ‘the surprise seemed to have worked.’14
In fact, Rommel’s attack had been launched with very sketchy intelligence to say the least. So strained were his relations with von Waldau, there had been insufficient Luftwaffe reconnaissance and, despite the best efforts of his own intelligence team, he had a very incomplete picture of Eighth Army’s dispositions and was unaware both of the number of British tanks and that a large number of them were new US-built Grants.
None the less, the sheer scale of so many vehicles, concentrated into four giant columns, whipping up dust and blazing away with their guns and artillery, was certainly impressive to those on the receiving end. At the Retma Box, shells were screaming and whining and exploding, and between the smoke and dust Albert Martin could see hundreds of enemy vehicles spread out in front of him, as 90th Light Division charged north-east towards El Adem. Clearly, 7th Motor Brigade could not hold their ground. ‘These wonderful defensive positions, which had taken so long to prepare,’ scribbled Martin, ‘were broken, smashed to the four winds.’ Dashing for their vehicles, they sped away, firing as they went. By 9 a.m., the Retma Box was gone. One after another, as 90th Light continued its march, the brigades in the south were overrun and forced to fall back.
General Tuker, meanwhile, was still at XXX Corps HQ, where he had been waiting several hours to be taken to see the French at Bir Hacheim. Eventually, General Norrie turned to him and told him there was little left for him to command. Tuker asked what he wanted him to do instead. Norrie said he wasn’t sure, but asked him to stay put for the moment. Tuker did as he was asked, twiddling his thumbs and wondering how such a fiasco could ever have been allowed to happen.
Meanwhile, the two panzer divisions thundered on towards Knightsbridge. By midday they were thereabouts, and at this point Hans von Luck and his men spotted a tank column heading their way. These were Grants, which the Germans had not seen before, and before long they had turned and opened fire at a range that was too great for von Luck’s 50mm pieces. Halting the advance, he ordered the setting up of a defensive front to the north and, as his men were doing this, he left his command tank and ran towards the anti-tank guns. Shells were bursting all around and suddenly he felt a powerful blow to his right leg and fell to the ground. A shell had struck an armoured car and a piece of shrapnel had cut his upper right thigh. Blood welled from his trousers and he briefly lost consciousness. When he came round, a scout car had pulled alongside and men were picking him up and taking him back for medical help.
‘You are lucky in your bad luck, Major,’ the doctor told him.15 ‘You’ve got a hole the size of a fist in your right groin. Another few centimetres and you would have lost your manhood, but no veins or nerves have been hit.’ After having a tourniquet applied and being bandaged up, he was given several morphine injections and then returned to command his battalion, aware that he needed further treatment but unable, at present, from his position sandwiched between British infantry on the Gazala Line and two British armoured brigades on the right, to extricate himself. For the time being, he would have to grin and bear it.
In fact, despite the tumble of British positions that had been overrun, Rommel’s position by later that afternoon was extremely precarious. Rather than folding up the British main line, they were now dangerously hemmed in, with infantry boxes and a mass of minefields on one side and the bulk of British armour on the other. British positions in the south might have been overrun, but the troops there had not been destroyed – rather, like 2nd Rifle Brigade, they had managed merely to fall back.
What’s more, the Deutsches Afrikakorps had suffered serious losses and some units had broken in the dust and confusion. In fact, a third of their panzers had been knocked out, they were short of fuel and desperately fractured. Now it was the Afrikakorps that was almost surrounded and with their lines of supply all but severed. After the rout of the southern brigades, the tables had turned dramatically and suddenly it was the Axis forces, rather than Eighth Army, that were facing annihilation.