THE LAST DAY of May was a Sunday and, back in Italy, Count Ciano allowed himself a day off at his family home in Livorno, where he tried to relax with a spot of fishing off the coast. It was, however, only the briefest of respites, because that day he still had to deal with grumbles and complaints from his staff about the food and wine shortages. His fisherman, Renato, complained to him that he had lost 30 lb in weight in just a few months; the rest of his family, he said, were also seeing their waistlines shrink.
Just about everyone in the Mediterranean was hungry, but what else could be expected with the war raging in North Africa and the entire region largely cut off from the rest of the world? In Italy, rationing was severe – most adults were reduced to around 1,000 calories a day – and there was a shortage of fuel for both vehicles and heating, although most private cars had been requisitioned in any case. Shoes, basic medicines and even soap had largely vanished from the shops. The young menfolk had been sent away to fight or as occupying forces, and for those left behind merely existing was a day-to-day struggle, especially since, traditionally, Italian women did not bring money into the family, but were kept busy bringing up children, cooking, washing and keeping house. Money sent home from the front, if it ever arrived, was a pittance. Compared with the sufferings of Italians – and it was even worse in Greece and the Balkans – Gwladys Cox and British civilians were swimming in the land of plenty.
Ciano had other problems, however. It wasn’t only Generale Messe who was warning of bleak times ahead on the Eastern Front, but the journalist Lamberto Sorrentino, who wrote for the weekly magazine Tempo. Sorrentino had been shocked by the level of brutality meted out by the Germans. ‘Massacres of entire populations, raping, killing of children,’ recorded Ciano, ‘all this is a matter of daily occurrence.’1 Against this, Sorrentino told him, was the Bolshevik insistence on resisting and fighting to the end. ‘The coming four months,’ the journalist warned him, ‘may mark the beginning of a catastrophe the like of which has never been seen.’ While Allied leaders in London and Washington were fretting over Molotov’s bleak picture, so Italians, it seemed, were bracing themselves for disaster.
Then there was the current battle, which was certainly causing Ciano some anxiety, and the conundrum over Malta, which, as far as the Italians were concerned, was still very much on the cards. Later that day, having returned from fishing, Ciano spoke with Generale Giacomo Carboni, the commander of one of the assault divisions earmarked for Malta. Carboni told him flatly that he, too, was dead against an invasion of the island, and equally pessimistic about the Eastern Front. ‘From this,’ Ciano noted, ‘he draws the most sinister conclusions for the German future.’2
At the bottom of the British line at Gazala, Lieutenant Jean-Mathieu Boris and the French forces were still holding out. Since defeating the first major tank attack on 27 May, they had remained under fire, although they had sent out some harassing patrols of their own; but now, on the evening of the 31st, all seemed quiet and Général König had been told to get ready to move up the western side of the line. This, however, was swiftly cancelled and two days later they were still there, waiting, when two Italian officers approached with the white flag of truce. Rommel, it seemed, was offering them the chance to surrender. König thanked them but sent them on their way; there could be no question of surrender. ‘You are brave soldiers,’ the Italians replied as they departed.3
By this time, they were already running short of water and ammunition, and within an hour of König’s refusal, the first shells started to fall once more, followed by aerial assaults by Stukas. Bir Hacheim was proving something of a stubborn thorn in the Axis side, so on 3 June Rommel signalled them again, once more urging them to throw in the towel. Again, however, König refused, and pressed home the point by ordering all his guns to open fire.
Being out on a limb, Bir Hacheim was, however, an obvious target for the Stukas as it was easy to spot in its isolated position, and, the following day, Boris watched an intense aerial battle going on overhead; at one point he saw seven Stukas shot down in a matter of minutes. Then overnight a British relief convoy arrived, having broken through enemy lines, bringing with them precious supplies of ammunition, food and water. The following morning, Boris accompanied Capitaine Charles Bricogne on an inspection of the 75mm batteries, only for a shell to burst nearby. Boris immediately lay flat on the ground. ‘I hope you haven’t hurt yourself falling, M. Cadet,’ said Bricogne.4 Boris hastily got to his feet again, feeling chastened. It was, he later realized, a good lesson, and from now on he became determined he would always remain on his feet, leading by example.
While the bombers were exhausting themselves against Bir Hacheim, the fighters were continuing their policy of hunting their opposite numbers. Early on 30 May, Jochen Marseille and his Schwarm – his four-aircraft flight – attacked a formation of British fighters from 250 Squadron and 450 Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) between El Adem and Tobruk. Picking out Flight Sergeant Graham Buckland, one of the Aussie pilots, who was turning into a shallow climb, Marseille fired off a burst and crippled the plane. He then watched Buckland bail out, but his parachute never opened and the man plummeted to his death. ‘Poor bastard,’ shrieked Marseille in horror.
It was his sixty-fifth victory, but Marseille made a note of the co-ordinates and, after landing back down, headed off in a vehicle with his wingman, Reiner Pöttgen, and soon found the body, which still lay where it had fallen, behind Axis lines. The wreckage of Buckland’s Kittyhawk was a few hundred yards away. Collecting Buckland’s papers and confirming his identity and unit, they then hurried back to the airfield. There, Marseille clambered back into his Messerschmitt and flew back over Allied lines before swooping in low over 250 Squadron’s landing ground and dropping a bag with Buckland’s things and a note he had written. Once clear, he climbed and headed back to base. Over the British landing ground, no one had fired a shot.
It wasn’t the first time Marseille had done this. Really, he was something of an idealist, a man fighting a war that was quite different to the one almost all other combatants were fighting. His number 14 Messerschmitt was known by both sides – a new Red Baron for the desert war, only his mount was painted sand yellow; after Rommel, he was already the most famous man in the North African theatre. For him, it was a duel, in which honour and respect for one’s enemy was an essential part of the fighter pilot’s role.
He was also obsessed with death and the thought of the men he had killed never being found, their mothers and families not knowing what had happened; in this, he had not changed a bit since his first victory. Perhaps it was because he was so close to his mother, who had divorced Marseille’s father after learning of an affair. He wrote to her a great deal, always worrying that she should know where he was. ‘He could have been viewed as a contradictory man,’ said Ludwig Franzisket, one of his comrades in 3/JG27, ‘killing and then trying to save, or inform and recover the dead.5 I would say that he was a humanist thrown into a very inhumane environment, and he was just trying to make the best of a very terrible situation.’
Certainly the Desert Air Force was taking hits – in three days, from 29 to 31 May, thirty-nine fighters were lost, but over a thousand enemy vehicles had also been destroyed. But in sharp contrast to the dithering leadership of Eighth Army, Mary Coningham had a very firm grip on his Desert Air Force. On the morning of 28 May, he had issued orders that no pilot was to engage enemy fighters or fly above 6,000 feet; rather, attacks on Axis supply columns were the top priority. Leaving his pilots exposed to Jochen Marseille and his fellows was a lot to ask, but he knew that supporting the Army in this opening move by Rommel was their prime objective and, apart from his few Spitfire Vs, he had no other fighters to spare as top-cover.
Operating from the landing ground at Gambut was 112 Shark Squadron, part of 239 Wing. Billy Drake had taken over command at a critical moment. Pilots were up before first light and expected to be at their dispersal tents ready to be scrambled at a moment’s notice. ‘Usually we knew roughly what we were about to do,’ said Drake.6 ‘On the whole, we were carrying out offensive operations. We’d find out what was cooking and then, depending on how many aircraft were required, I’d detail who would fly.’ The ground crew would already be there waiting with the starter batteries and soon the airfield would be alive with the roar of engines. Swathes of sand and dust would be whipped up by the propellers; vision over the nose of the plane was difficult at the best of times, but with swirls of dust and sand, forward sight was terrible. The answer was to take off in a long line; space was one thing they were not short of in the desert.
Billy Drake had flown Hurricanes in France, then Spitfires over Britain, but was new to the US-built P-40 Kittyhawk. He rather liked it, though, and soon realized that under 10,000 feet it performed as well as an Me109 – although not when it had a bomb strapped underneath. Dive-bombing was tricky – Drake learned he had to dive down from around 8,000 feet at about 60 degrees, then drop his bomb and pull out at about 1,500 feet. ‘You’d get in as close as you possibly could without hitting the ground,’ he said.7 After a few days, he soon started to get the hang of it.
By 1 June, after four days of incessant dive-bombing and strafing attacks, he had lost three pilots. Low-level flying was particularly lethal because there was always plenty of light flak and small arms fizzing about and, if hit, there was little room in which to bail out or recover. Whether one was hit was purely a matter of chance. ‘That’s why the golden rule on any ground attack was to only attack once,’ said Drake.8 ‘You dropped your bomb and got the hell out. You always made sure you strafed a different target on the way back.’
The DAF’s attacks were certainly working, however, and on average were accounting for some 150 vehicles a day. ‘Low-level machine-gunning,’ noted one German in a captured diary.9 ‘RHQ dispersed. Some MT abandoned and lost. Chaos. Panic.’
Limited resources and aircraft were Coningham’s and Elmhirst’s biggest concern. Juggling what aircraft they did have was very much the order of the day. ‘I am sure everything is being done to send a few more Spitfires to us,’ Coningham wrote to Tedder on 1 June, in a tone more of hope than expectation.10 The difficulty was that it was impossible to know how long they would be expected to operate at such a high level of intensity.
On 1 June, Rommel and his senior commanders, still in the Cauldron, held a council of war. They all agreed that the situation remained desperate and that as soon as possible they should attempt a break out to the west through the British minefield. Soon after, however, Rommel’s senior staff officer, Oberst Siegfried Westphal, was wounded and then so too was General Gause, Rommel’s Chief of Staff of the Panzerarmee, when he was thrown backwards into a panzer by the blast from a British tank shell. Bayerlein was immediately told he would be taking over.
It was only now, as they prepared to break out, that they realized that within the minefield immediately to their west was another British box, in which 150th Brigade were still holding their positions. At the urging of Feldmarschall Kesselring, who had arrived at the front to lend a hand and take over from the captured Crüwell, Rommel now decided to hurl his armour at 150th Brigade. Rommel had faults, but indecision was not one of them, so he attacked at once with his panzers from the east and the Italians from the west. The battle lasted all day, but by dusk 150th Brigade had been destroyed. ‘The defence was conducted with considerable skill,’ Rommel admitted, ‘and as usual, the British fought to their last round.’11 Bayerlein was certain it was the destruction of the 150th Brigade box that turned the battle. ‘If we had not taken it on 1 June,’ he said, ‘you would have captured the whole of the Afrikakorps.12 By the evening of the third day, we were surrounded and almost out of petrol. As it was, it was a miracle that we managed to get our supplies through the minefield in time.’
It also enabled Hans von Luck finally to be evacuated from the battlefield, having been trapped in the Cauldron with much of the rest of 21. Panzer. For five long days he had remained in his command car, a tourniquet around his thigh, dosed up with morphine, and still attempting to command his battalion. At the aid station the doctor told him his wound did not look good and that he must get to the casualty clearing station at Derna as quickly as possible. With a heavy heart and close to tears, von Luck handed over command to his deputy and then was driven to Derna. There, the doctors told him his wound had become infected. He was cleaned up and put on a ship to Sicily, arriving the following morning and then taken straight into theatre for a small operation to stabilize the wound. From there he would be sent back to hospital in Germany. However, medical supplies were already so poor, the Italian surgeon began operating without any kind of pain relief. ‘Clench your teeth, please,’ the surgeon told him.13 Two nurses held him tight while the surgeon began to cut at his wound. ‘I cried like an animal,’ noted von Luck, ‘and thought I would faint with pain.’ His turmoil stopped only when General Gustav von Vaerst, the wounded commander of 15. Panzer, heard his screams and insisted the surgeon give him an anaesthetic.
That the Afrikakorps had been able to break out west from the Cauldron was not a miracle, as Bayerlein had thought, but rather came down to abject leadership on the part of Eighth Army’s commanders. In fact, while this battle was raging, the rest of the British forces, with their still-large number of tanks and artillery, were doing very little. In the north, barely a shot was fired all day.
Ritchie had decided to take up Lumsden’s idea of a night attack, however, and had they done so that evening, as had been his plan, they would almost certainly have succeeded. The Panzerarmee was exhausted after its battle with the 150th Brigade and was now short of everything: ammunition, food, water and fuel. Bayerlein had been among those who had pleaded with Rommel to call the attack off or surely face defeat in turn – the situation seemed to them that dire. But in a telling contrast of leadership styles, Ritchie acquiesced to his subordinates who wanted to hold off, while Rommel ignored his and drove his men on. By evening, 150th Brigade was no more, and a huge hole had been punched right through the centre of the line.
For three whole days Rommel’s panzer divisions had been trapped in the Cauldron, ripe for destruction, yet the chance to close in for the kill had been repeatedly passed over. That Ritchie and his commanders failed to ram home the advantage was disgraceful. The desert was, effectively, a giant gladiatorial arena – a dust-swept expanse in which two opponents could slug it out without hindrance. Here, in the sand and heat, the skills and failings of each side were starkly exposed. Against Rommel, Ritchie was failing.
It was true that sandstorms, smoke and dust added to the fog of war – little flying could be done on 2 June, for example, because of sandstorms – but that was no excuse in this case. The various Eighth Army message logs show that Ritchie had a very clear picture of what was going on most of the time, and a far clearer one than Rommel was afforded. At his Tactical HQ at Gambut, tents and trucks full of radios and maps, clerks and telephonists dealt efficiently with the mass of messages, relaying them to the various members of staff, who hovered with coloured pencils waiting to plot the latest positions on to maps. Coningham had his own Tac HQ nearby and was available for conferral at any time. Since the start of the battle, the DAF had flown large numbers of ground attacks but also ‘Tac Rs’ – tactical reconnaissance flights, reporting on enemy movements.
Thus, Ritchie’s picture of what was happening could not have been clearer. It makes his prevaricating even less excusable.
The British night attack was finally launched on 1/2 June, too late to save 150th Brigade, and was a fiasco. Two separate assaults were planned – one from the north, which achieved nothing, and one from the south by the re-formed 7th Armoured Division. Albert Martin and 2nd Rifle Brigade had been moved up as part of this attack, but then it was called off due to lack of reconnaissance. A new plan was devised, Operation ABERDEEN, which Ritchie delegated to Norrie, who in turn delegated it to his two divisional commanders. It was then discussed and argued over, each commander finding reasons why his own troops should not be committed. In the end, the plan for ABERDEEN was this: a night attack with a heavy artillery barrage followed by infantry and then armour. All the while, however, the Afrikakorps still in the Cauldron were being substantially reinforced and revitalized.
Back in Britain, while Eisenhower and Clark had been dashing about the country, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had been visiting London. Molotov was not a man either Britain’s or America’s democratic war leaders would ever have imagined they would have staying under their roofs. A long-term loyal supporter of Stalin, he had been personally involved in the purges of the Red Army of the 1930s that had seen some 25,000 officers executed. He was also the implementer of the programme of compulsory farm collectivization and the taking of Ukrainian grain that had led to an entirely man-made famine that resulted in the death of somewhere between 7 and 11 million Ukrainians. In May 1942, not even Hitler had the deaths of so many people on his hands. Molotov had also been the man who had negotiated the pact with von Ribbentrop in August 1939 that had directly led to the outbreak of war. Now he was in London as an ally.
Although there primarily to discuss the terms of a new Anglo-Russian Treaty, he was also determined to pin down the Allies to a new second front. He was quite frank with Churchill, warning him that the Allies needed to launch an offensive as soon as possible to draw off at least forty German divisions from the East. The PM replied with equal candour that it would not be possible in Europe that year – the Allies were simply not ready. He was quite right – they most certainly were not.
With this bombshell, Molotov then travelled to Washington, by which time Churchill had written to Roosevelt reporting on his talks with the Russian and reminding the President of a suggestion he had first made the previous October and again during the Arcadia conference – namely, a joint Anglo-US invasion of French North Africa. This, he had argued, would kill two birds with one stone, if not three: it would speed up the conquest of North Africa and clear the southern Mediterranean; it would help hustle Italy out of the war; and it would give the British and US forces a chance to act together in an operation where victory was likely before they attempted a cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied France.
At Washington, Molotov stayed in the White House as a guest of the President, and when a valet unpacked his case he discovered a sausage, a loaf of black Russian bread and a pistol. Although the President’s bodyguards took a dim view of this when it was duly reported, no one said a word. The pistol – and bread and sausage – remained in his room. The Americans, perhaps more than the British, were determined not to get on the wrong foot with Molotov.
In the first of their meetings, Molotov wasted no time in pressing for the opening of a second front, warning again that the Red Army might not be able to hold out that summer and asking for a straight answer: would there be one or not? At this point, Roosevelt turned to General Marshall. Was the situation clear enough to say they were developing a second front?
‘Yes, Mr President,’ Marshall replied.
Apparently satisfied, Roosevelt then told Molotov to inform Stalin that they could expect the formation of a second front that year. That was not quite what Marshall had said, but he could not publicly contradict the President. At the same time, Roosevelt must have known, as Marshall had known, there was little chance of such a front being opened on the continent that year. That would have meant a cross-channel invasion in August or September at the latest.
Meanwhile, Major-General Eisenhower had returned to America impressed by British organization but depressed by their doubts about a successful invasion in the spring of 1943. The ‘reservations’ were, it seemed, the British way of euphemistically saying they did not like the plans at all. As General Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), made clear, ‘the prospects of success are small and dependent on a mass of unknowns, whilst the chances of disaster are great and dependent on a mass of well-established military facts.’14
Nor had Eisenhower been much impressed by General Chaney and his staff, and, back in Washington, he had submitted to Marshall a draft of a ‘Directive for the Commanding General, European Theater of Operations’. This was, Eisenhower told his chief, one paper he should read in detail. ‘I certainly do want to read it,’ Marshall told him.15 ‘You may be the man who executes it. If that’s the case, when can you leave?’
Just three days later, Eisenhower’s appointment as commander of the European Theater of Operations was confirmed. And once more, Clark would be accompanying him, this time as his deputy and as commander of US II Corps, whose headquarters were about to be shipped to Britain. It was Eisenhower who had recommended Clark to Marshall. ‘It looks as if you boys go together,’ Marshall told him.16
Back in the Libyan desert, the battle still raged. Axis air forces and the Desert Air Force had continued to fight hard over and around Bir Hacheim, where the French were still grimly hanging on and around which Axis supply chains were continuing to move.
On 3 June, seven Stukas from a flight of twelve were shot down by DAF fighters – cheered noisily by the Frenchmen below. The next day, Bill Drake dropped his bomb right on the middle of an Axis formation forming up for attack. On the 6th, he was leading a flight of his Shark Squadron over Bir Hacheim yet again when he spotted four Me109s below them. Making the most of his rare advantage, he led his flight into an attack and in the ensuing mêlée all four 109s were shot down, including one by Drake. They then bombed Axis vehicles, leaving one in flames and six more shot up. Later in the day, the squadron destroyed a further five vehicles and damaged twelve more. In all, thirty-eight sorties were flown by 112 Squadron that day, with most of Drake’s pilots flying at least three times, including an attack over the Cauldron. This was entirely typical of all the DAF’s squadrons.
No matter how valiant their efforts, however, it was not going to be enough to save Eighth Army from the disaster about to unfold on the ground.
By 4 June, the situation still looked horribly worrying as far as Count Ciano was concerned. Maresciallo Cavallero that day described the results of the Libyan battle as being ‘considerable’. ‘Which for anybody who knows the mysterious language of this mountebank general,’ noted Ciano, ‘means that things have gone very badly.’17
Later, Ciano saw Generale Giovanni Messe again. He both liked and thought highly of Messe, so listened carefully to what he said. ‘Like everybody else who has had anything to do with the Germans,’ wrote Ciano later, ‘he hates them, and says that the only way of dealing with them is to punch them in the stomach.’ Messe then told Ciano that the Red Army was still strong and well armed and that any idea that they would suddenly collapse was pure fantasy. The Germans would probably still have some successes, but the winter would catch them once more and they would face an even greater shortage of supplies. It was hard, sometimes, to remember these two countries were allies, and that their troops were fighting together – and not least in Libya.
In the desert, ABERDEEN finally got under way in the early hours of 5 June. The initial infantry infiltration by the British swiftly achieved its objectives, but their intelligence had been wrong and all they did was overrun a few Axis outposts rather than destroy the anti-tank screen. When the main assault began, the mostly German anti-tank guns opened fire with devastating results. Because the one weapon Eighth Army was short of was a decent anti-tank gun, the South Notts Hussars, for example, were forced to use their 25-pounder field guns in an anti-tank role, for which they were totally unsuited. The South Notts Hussars were decimated. Then the ‘I’ tanks were thrown in, which were not as good as the Grants, and in very little time fifty of the seventy thrust into the battle were knocked out by the German 88s, 75s and 50mm anti-tank guns, all of which could fire multiple rounds per minute at high velocity and at ranges far exceeding those of the tanks.
To make matters worse, and unbeknown to the attackers, Rommel’s forces had by now cleared a gap in the minefields to the south of the Cauldron, and through this had been able to retrieve and resuscitate a number of tanks knocked out in the earlier fighting. While 90th Light and 21. Panzer fought up the attack in the Cauldron, 15. Panzer moved out through this gap and began working its way up the east side of the British position. For the British, disaster loomed, while for the Panzerarmee, what had looked like almost-certain annihilation just a week earlier now looked like developing into a stunning victory.
With no troops or position to command, General Tuker had headed back to the Delta to rejoin his division, but not before he had witnessed the failed opportunities and heard the plan for the counter-attack in the Cauldron. On reaching Egypt, he had headed to GHQ and pleaded with General Tom Corbett, the CGS, to urge the Auk to head to the front immediately and concentrate all he could lay his hands on for a single heavy blow to rapidly seize back the initiative, otherwise, he warned, they were heading for the most unnecessary disaster of the war.
Corbett immediately went to see Auchinleck, but returned a short while later saying the C-in-C would not go. Having pushed it as far as he could, Tuker headed off to his division.
The Auk should have heeded the warning, because after the failure of the attack on the Cauldron, events rapidly started to slip out of Eighth Army’s control altogether. The Gazala Line was being unpicked in stages, but after the Cauldron Rommel’s next focus was to smash Bir Hacheim once and for all.
By 10 June, it was clear the French garrison at Bir Hacheim could not hold out much longer. They were heavily surrounded, supplies of everything were critically low and food had actually run out entirely. For Lieutenant Boris, it had been an astonishing baptism of fire. Just a few days earlier, on 6 June, he had seen a childhood friend, Lieutenant Jean-Pierre Rosenwald, killed right in front of him by a shell. It had greatly shocked him. Two days later, the battle had intensified further and the fighting around Bir Hacheim had lasted all day. Boris had been on duty at the regiment HQ when the field telephone rang. Lieutenant Gérard Theodore had been wounded but no doctor could be found, so Boris hurried off, found his wounded friend and tied a tourniquet, then was about to take over his command when he heard someone calling him from the HQ shelter. ‘Message from the Commandant!’ he called out. Boris crawled towards the radio operator, then a bullet fizzed, hit the man in the head and he dropped forward, dead.
Now, on 10 June, König decided they would attempt a breakout that night. Boris was told to get word to the captain manning the forward observation post, but since the field phone line was cut and using radio risked blowing their plan, Boris sent one of his gunners forward with a message. He had not gone more than 50 metres, however, when he was killed. Boris sent another, but he was shot as well. This time, Boris ordered a sergeant to go, but the man pleaded to be spared. He had a wife and children back in France, he said, beseeching him. Only when Boris threatened him with his pistol did he finally set off, and this time managed to make it there and back in one piece.
By midnight, a path through the minefields had been cleared and an armoured convoy of some forty vehicles assembled. Boris was in a car with Capitaine Bricogne and to begin with all went well, but then shots rang out, rifles then machine guns. They stopped to help some of the wounded who were running after the lorries to clamber on, then sped on themselves through a hail of bullets and tracers. One Bren Carrier hit a mine, while above them flares were whizzing into the air, bursting with a crackle and showering the desert with light. ‘Not all bullets kill,’ Bricogne said to him and then a split-second later one zapped through the car and struck the captain in the heart, killing him instantly.18 On the driver sped, and then, at last, they were through and among the British once more. ‘I eat soup,’ noted Boris, ‘and sleep for twenty hours in the car that drives us away from the battle. The artillery regiment has lost sixty-six officers and men. Of the twenty-four cannons we had, there are only eight left.’
On 10 June, Churchill sent for Major-General John Kennedy, the Director of Military Operations at the War Office. The PM wanted to see him right away along with the Director of Military Intelligence, Major-General Francis Davidson, at No. 10 to discuss the strengths of the opposing forces in North Africa. Kennedy was forty-eight, a gunner in the last war but since then a staff officer and War Office man through and through. He and Davidson ran two of the directorates that served Brooke as CIGS. As DMO, Kennedy was a vital cog in Britain’s war administration, involved in wider strategy but also distilling information from commanders in the field into appreciations of the military situation for both the CIGS and the War Cabinet. There was a strong element of planning too. At any rate, Kennedy was a man at the very heart of Britain’s war machine and, other than those already out in North Africa, probably the person best placed to give Churchill a clear picture of what was going on in the desert.
It was around 11.30 a.m. when they were ushered into the Cabinet Room and found the PM sitting there already, his back to the fire and wearing one of his all-in-one boiler suits. After lighting a cigar, Churchill turned to a sheaf of papers on which were lists of British forces in the Middle East. Rather to Kennedy’s surprise, Churchill’s and his own figures seemed to tally, but they then swiftly moved on to the nub of the matter. The Prime Minister had with him a telegram from Richard Casey, who had taken over from Oliver Lyttelton as Minister of State in the Middle East. Casey was reporting on a meeting of the Middle East Defence Committee, which consisted of himself and the service chiefs out there. They had been addressing what they should do were the Germans to break through on the Russian front and burst down into the Middle East. Should they hold the Delta or the Abadan oilfields? They had concluded they could not hold both.
Kennedy felt that considering a worst-case scenario was no bad thing, but it was clear Churchill had found this deeply frustrating. It suggested an overly defensive mindset; in fact, it hinted at a defeatist one. There was no conceivable way the Germans could achieve this over the comparatively narrow summer campaign season; such considerations, the PM believed, were horribly premature. He then held forth for about an hour on the situation in the Middle East. He had already been having serious doubts about Auchinleck – so too had Kennedy for that matter. Just under a month earlier, on 14 May and before Rommel’s attack, the Auk had sent Brooke a long letter voicing his concerns about India and wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to give up the offensive in the desert in order to strengthen the situation in the Far East instead. ‘The possibility of having to relieve Auchinleck had been discussed in London for some time,’ noted Kennedy.19 ‘Now we began to feel that the change would have to be made fairly soon.’
It was a shame the concerns about the Auk had not been acted upon earlier and before he made such a hash of his command, but it would clearly have to come if and when this current crisis passed. In the meantime, Churchill was venting his frustration on Kennedy and Davidson.
‘I don’t know what we can do for that Army,’ he railed.20 ‘All our efforts to help them seem to be in vain.’ New divisions had been sent out, Sherman tanks were being sent there and Grants were already in place. ‘Nothing seems to help them. And I am the one who gets his neck wrung when things go wrong.’
Kennedy felt that there was some substance to the criticisms, but was not really sure what he could say.
‘I doubt that Army’s offensive spirit,’ added Churchill.21 It wasn’t the Army’s fault, though, but its commanders’. Concerns about India, about the vastness of his command, about Germany driving in through the back door, were clearly distracting Auchinleck and clouding his mind. Ritchie was a desk-wallah and totally out of his depth. Personality clashes were infecting the cohesion and co-operation of corps and divisions, and neither Auchinleck in Cairo nor Ritchie at the front seemed able to grasp the situation, focus on what was needed and provide a clear, logical tactical approach. Fear of failure was leading to caution and indecision, which was, of course, leading to failure.
And failure meant defeat. Out in the desert, the British infantry in the north were still grimly holding their boxes, but the next, and decisive, clash was between the armour. The British armoured brigades – or what was left of them – had fallen back around the Knightsbridge crossroads waiting for Rommel to make his next move. He did so on the afternoon of the 11th and, with his forces concentrated and confidence back to its normal sky-high levels, they destroyed many of the demoralized British armoured units they came up against. By the 13th, Ritchie had accepted the Gazala Line was finished, and the following day the South African Division – whose commander, General Dan Pienaar, had repeatedly refused to obey the orders of Gott, his corps commander, to go on to the attack – began pulling back to Tobruk. On the night of 16/17 June, El Adem, just to the south of Tobruk, was evacuated. Early on the morning of the 17th, with Rommel personally leading the charge, his panzers crossed the Via Balbia – the coast road – to the east of the town, and in so doing the town was once more effectively surrounded.
Much of Eighth Army was now racing to the Egyptian frontier in full retreat, but the 7th Motor Brigade was still operating south of El Adem, harassing enemy leaguers and columns at night. On the 19th, a resupply column reached them, which included not only food and ammo but letters too. Orders that day were vague – they were to carry on with their harassing activities, but they knew they were now out on a limb. ‘Everything has been a jumble,’ wrote Albert Martin.22 ‘Does anyone at the top know what they are doing?’
Later that night, the British Riflemen attacked a German leaguer that was not yet napping and got a bad shock as a vicious fire-fight was unleashed across the night. It quickly became clear to Martin and his fellows that this was one harassing raid they could not win, so they hastily pulled out, losing two men in the process. ‘One of those suicide patrols,’ Martin commented in his diary, ‘when all we seem to achieve is annoying the enemy.’23
Soon after, as they fell back into the safety of the desert, they heard distant guns and firing, and as dawn broke they looked northwards to see the ominous sight of rising plumes of thick black smoke.
By the evening of 20 June, Tobruk had been sliced in half, with the South Africans stuck on the western side. At 8 p.m., Ritchie signalled for them to fight their way out, but by dawn on the 21st they had not made much headway, their route blocked at every turn by Axis troops, guns and armour. As the first glint of sun appeared on the horizon, on this, the longest day of the year, the white flag was raised over the fortress of Tobruk.
While the midsummer heat had blasted down on the battle around Gazala and Tobruk, in Washington the heat was also stultifying. On 21 June, Churchill was in the American capital along with Brooke and other senior commanders for further talks about the direction of Anglo-US strategy. While General Marshall and Brooke had been agreeing that they were against a joint invasion of North Africa, Churchill had also been having private talks with Roosevelt at the President’s country house, Hyde Park in New York. However, they were now back at the White House and were in the Oval Office when an aide entered with a pink slip of paper and, having glanced at it, silently passed it to Churchill. ‘Tobruk has surrendered,’ said the note, ‘with 25,000 men.’ In fact, it was worse than that – some 32,000 were in the bag. Utterly horrified, Churchill hardly dared believe it and asked for confirmation. It arrived soon after. ‘This is one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war,’ he wrote later.24 ‘I did not attempt to hide from the President the shock I had received. It was a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing. Disgrace is another.’
General Tuker put it even more tersely. ‘This,’ he wrote, ‘was one of the worst fought battles in the history of the British Army.’25 It is very hard to disagree with either opinion.