SINCE TAKING OVER as Armaments Minister, Albert Speer had become the pin-up for Nazi war production and, with Goebbels’ help, was making sure that Germans believed a huge improvement in war materiel – in terms of both quality and quantity – was well under way. And to a certain extent it was, although not at the rate Hitler or anyone else would have liked. Overhauling an industry as messed up as that of the Nazi war machine did not happen overnight and there were still innumerable barriers to overcome, not least the thorny problem of steel shortages. Steel rationing may have been largely solved, but an even bigger issue was how to produce more of the stuff.
The root of the matter lay not with iron ore, but with coal, that essential ingredient needed for steel production. In a nutshell, Germany was not getting enough. Steel production had fallen dramatically in the winter of 1941 and then, in the first months of 1942, had reached crisis point, largely because the Reichsbahn, the German railway, had been overstretched by the demands of the Eastern Front and so nothing like enough coal had been delivered to the steel mills.
In many ways, the shortage of coal was another Nazi own-goal, typified by the French coal-miners’ strike in the summer of 1941. Extracting coal was a dangerous and physically demanding job, and by stripping workers of food, money and transport, production had unsurprisingly dropped. By the summer of 1942, Speer had agreed with Hitler that steel production needed to be raised by at least 600,000 tons a month, but, for that to happen, supplies of coking coal also needed to rise to the tune of some 400,000 tons per month, and that would only suffice if more scrap metal and more skilled labour were thrown into the process.
Matters came to a head at a meeting between Hitler, Speer, Sauckel and leading steel industrialists on 11 August. Also attending was Paul Pleiger, the head of the coal industry, who was at a loss as to how to raise coal production. Germany’s own pits were ageing, in need of modernization and at the limit of production. Productivity in the coalfields of northern France and Belgium had continued to fall, Norwegian and Swedish stocks were low, and the civilian populations of Germany and all the occupied territories were also suffering from the shortages. The misery of having to suffer intense cold through yet another bitter winter would have a profound effect on morale. On top of that, there were other demands: really large amounts of coal were needed for the production of synthetic fuel, which Germany desperately needed to make up the shortfall of real oil, and it was used to power the electricity grid too; it was also required for the increasingly hard-pressed Reichsbahn. In fact, coal was absolutely central to Germany’s existence, let alone its war machine.
Pleiger could think of no way in which he could raise coal production without the urgent supply of tens of thousands of experienced miners from the Ukraine and Poland. Sauckel immediately told him this would be possible. Pleiger, however, was not convinced; it was one thing providing the men, but would they be well fed and strong enough to do the job?
‘Herr Pleiger,’ Hitler told him bluntly, ‘if, due to the shortage of coking coal, the output of the steel industry cannot be raised as planned, then the war is lost.’1 Shocked silence descended on the room, and then Pleiger said, ‘My Führer, I will do everything humanly possible to achieve the goal.’ Whether that was going to be enough remained to be seen.
At every turn, Germany was being forced to squeeze her resources to the maximum. There simply wasn’t enough of any of the key ingredients needed for war. At the end of June, General von Schell had approved a memorandum sent for Hitler’s signature warning of severe penalties for anyone violating the strict fuel restrictions. ‘The fuel situation does not allow such thoughtlessness or violations under any circumstances,’ it warned.2 This meant vehicles could not be used for any kind of recreational purposes, service journeys at the front were to be limited to a bare minimum, speed limits were to be observed to keep fuel consumption as low as possible, and no one was to drive on any kind of journey longer than 200 kilometres. Anything further, then trains were to be used.
This, then, was the desperate situation facing Germany in the summer of 1942. A generation earlier, similar problems had brought the country to its knees. Nearly a quarter of a century after that, Hitler pressed on with the war, his black-and-white vision for the future undiminished: the Third Reich would last a thousand years or crumble into Armageddon. There could be no middle ground.
Meanwhile, in Britain and the United States, people were still able to eat well and healthily. Even in Britain, where rationing had been extended, there were still plenty of products that had not been rationed, bread included. ‘The greengrocers,’ noted Gwladys Cox that August, ‘are full of splendid greengages.’3 They were fivepence a pound, half what they had been a year before. Although she wished she had a bit more sugar, she still bought 4 lb and made jam. There were also larger rations for those employed in physical labour, such as coal mining, which meant that the productivity of Britain’s workers was greater than those poor emaciated souls being forced to work as slaves for Nazi Germany. In America, factories continued to operate without fear of bombing or blackouts. This made a massive difference.
Britain was also facing a bumper harvest, as a good summer, combined with the increased productivity of the land, was now bearing fruit. Once again, Land Girls, civilians from the towns and troops – American, British and Canadian – all helped. In Wiltshire, A. G. Street, for one, had regained much pride in British farming. ‘Today I’ve driven the desert back to the very edge of the woods,’ he noted, ‘something that’s given me more satisfaction than anything else I’ve done in my life.4 And thanks be, thousands of farmers all over Britain have done the same.’ He was also penning the script for a short propaganda film that was being made, The Great Harvest: ‘From the reborn countryside of Britain is coming the food on which we are going to live this winter and next winter,’ he wrote, as the cameras filmed young girls driving tractors and carts brimming with corn.5 ‘Farming never stops. The great harvest is in. The land and its people are in good heart. The countryside itself is alive again – alive with the vigour and defiance of a land fighting for its people.’ Stirring stuff and, at its heart, perfectly true. Total grain harvested in 1939 had been 46 million tons; in 1942, it would be more than 80 million.6
Troops and war materiel was also continuing to reach Britain, at more than 200 million tons a month – a bounty rich enough to make the Nazis weep.7 Even during the second ‘Happy Time’ off the coast of America, total imports to Britain had barely dipped – 2,006,000 tons had arrived in January, and 2,214,000 in May, for example.
In fact, convoys to Britain were now crossing the Atlantic virtually untouched, as Commander Donald Macintyre had been discovering. Back in June, he had rejoined his old destroyer, HMS Hesperus, and had taken over command of the escort group B2, part of the Mid-Atlantic Escort Force. He had taken to his new crew immediately and, although only two officers were Regular Navy and the rest were all Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves, he quickly came to appreciate that not only were they a very happy team, but a competent one too.
Macintyre had rejoined Hesperus at a time when there was little U-boat activity in the mid-Atlantic. This was just as well, because early in the year the Kriegsmarine had added a fourth rotor to their Enigma coding machines and the boffins in Bletchley Park had been unable to crack it. There was, however, another means of tracking U-boat movement and that was by using high-frequency direction finding, or Huff-Duff, and Hesperus was not only equipped with ASDIC and radar but also with a Huff-Duff set.
These were able to pick up the signals sent by the HF radio sets used on U-boats. Although the signals were coded, the radio transmissions could be picked up so long as the Huff-Duff set was tuned to the right frequency. Provided there were a sufficient number of sets in an escort group, then all possible frequencies used by the U-boats could be covered. Reports would be intercepted and an estimated position worked out. Armed with this, an escort or aircraft would then go hunting for the U-boat safe in the knowledge that they would be operating in roughly the right area. It was almost certainly down to Huff-Duff, for example, that Teddy Suhren in U-564 had had his last journey across the Atlantic so frequently interrupted.
On Hesperus, Macintyre was blessed with a particularly able Huff-Duff operator, Lieutenant Harold Walker, who was known as ‘B-Bar’ from the opening Morse symbol of the U-boats’ signals. A former Marconi engineer, Walker had previously served in the Merchant Navy, had had his ship sunk from under him, and both his parents had been killed by Luftwaffe bombs. As a result, he had a passionate hatred of Germans, which gave him all the motivation needed to spend long hours glued to his Huff-Duff set. He was also sufficiently adept to be able to distinguish the Morse code styles of different German radio operators. ‘Time and again,’ wrote Macintyre, ‘he gave warning of impending attack and we took suitable action to shepherd our charges away from the danger.’8
Losses in escorts had been low in the Atlantic, which meant experience had been allowed to grow. More ships were being built and coming into service, but there was now a hard core of wartime personnel who could be spread throughout the escort fleet. This was also true for the Canadians, who were still more than pulling their weight in the battle to save Allied shipping, and who had been learning fast. At the same time, they were benefiting from improvements to technology; Macintyre’s task had been transformed by such developments. What’s more, this improved technology was being harnessed to experience – Lieutenant Walker on Hesperus was a case in point. Nor were these advances constrained to the escorts cruising the sea itself. In the skies up above, Allied air cover was also increasing and their ASW equipment improving too. The U-boats were finding it progressively hard, even in the vast expanse of the ocean, to find places to hide.
Ironically, it was only now that Dönitz was finally receiving the kind of numbers of U-boats he had been asking for since before the war – soon there would be more than 200 operational U-boats in service. But he was still not getting much support from the Luftwaffe. At the beginning of September, he sent a memo to Raeder asking ‘for the development of a powerfully armed aircraft with a great radius of action, to help us in the Battle of the Atlantic in the more distant areas beyond the reach of the He177.’9 The answer was swift. Such a request ‘cannot at the moment be met … Desirable as the possession of such an aircraft undoubtedly is, we have not, at present, the necessary technical data from which it could be developed.’ So that was that: nothing doing.
Nor had the problems of misfiring torpedoes been solved satisfactorily. The new U-boats were thus entering the battle lagging behind in terms of technology and air support. By September 1942, however, it was already too late. They had had a chance, before the war, to prepare for this epic and bitter battle on the seas in a way that could have proved catastrophic to Britain’s ability to wage war. That opportunity had been missed by Hitler and his land-centric commanders, and by a naval high command that had been, like the Führer, too easily excited by giant surface vessels. Now, as more U-boats entered service, so they were paying for having a U-boat force of just 3,000 men in 1939. So much of that hard-learned experience had gone, entombed in an iron coffin at the bottom of the sea. Unlike the British, the experience pool was dwindling rapidly and at a time when commanding a submarine was more dangerous than ever before. In the months to come, Dönitz’s increasingly young force would suffer appallingly.
In the United States, the armaments revolution that Bill Knudsen had promised was now starting to bear fruit under Don Nelson’s overall leadership. Bottlenecks were being ironed out and shortages solved. Steel production had been improved by the creation of a brand-new steel plant at Fontana in the San Bernardino Valley in California. This was another of the extraordinary Henry Kaiser’s enterprises – dam builder, road builder and shipyard builder and a man never to turn down a challenge. Conscious that there were no steel producers west of the Rockies, he had proposed, as early as April 1941, to build a brand-new steel plant himself, even though he had no experience of building such a thing, had no financing and not even a site. What he had been after was $100 million from the Government, which was swiftly turned down. A year on, however, and with a 4.2 million-ton steel shortfall, Don Nelson had felt he had no choice but to reconsider Kaiser’s proposal. On 19 March, the deal had been approved and Kaiser and his team wasted no time. By the end of April, the site at Fontana had been found and the ground broken up. It was a poor part of California, so they were quickly swamped with applications from potential workers. Seventy miles of railway lines were built to connect them to the main lines and new wells were dug, with methods devised to recycle the precious water they would use. It was due to be up and running by the end of the year and capable of producing some 470,000 tons of steel plate a year, enough to supply the shipyards up and down the west coast.
Meanwhile, Kaiser’s shipyards were, by August 1942, producing Liberty ship merchant vessels at an astonishing rate. Here, the principles of the assembly line were now being applied to shipbuilding. It had been originally estimated that it would take 220 days to build a Liberty ship, but by the beginning of the year that figure had been slashed to 105 days. At Richmond, California, Kaiser’s partner Clay Bedford had been reducing that time even further. At the same time, Kaiser’s son, Edgar, now running the shipyard at Portland, Oregon, was viewing Clay Bedford’s efforts as a personal challenge. In May, the Richmond yards built the James Whitcomb in seventy-three days. Two months later, in July, Kaiser’s men at Portland sailed the Thomas Bailey Aldrich in just forty-three days. Then in August, Bedford’s men built a ship in a staggering twenty-four days. This was shipbuilding on a truly astonishing scale. No one had ever believed in their wildest dreams that a 10,000-ton dry-cargo-weight merchant ship could be built in such a ridiculously short time. That record, however, would soon be beaten again. And again. How could the U-boats, with their still-failing torpedoes and lack of sufficient air cover, possibly compete? The answer, of course, was that they could not.
Back in the Mediterranean, the amount of Axis shipping available was falling. All the big ships in the arsenal had now gone, and there were neither the shipyards nor the materials to build more. Getting supplies to North Africa had become dependent on ever-smaller vessels, which worked against economies of scale, as more smaller ships took longer to load and unload than fewer larger ones.
Rommel launched his attack as planned on 30 August, by which time the first three Axis tankers that had set sail from Italy two days earlier had been sunk by a combination of Malta-based aircraft and submarines, and Wellingtons from the Middle East. Despite this, he had decided to go ahead anyway, praying that the next tanker due in, the San Andreas, would successfully reach Tobruk with her 3,000 tons of fuel. By the time the Axis barrage opened, however, the San Andreas was also lying at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Malta-based torpedo bombers had once again hit their mark.
Nor was Rommel a well man. His doctor had diagnosed ‘persistent stomach and enteric disorders’, and side effects included very low blood pressure and giddy spells. Rommel had asked to be relieved on 21 August and had suggested Guderian should replace him, but this suggestion was refused. So Rommel remained; he would fight this latest battle at least.
The Battle of Alam Halfa, as it became known, was, in many ways, a carbon copy of Gazala: a bombardment and holding attacks in the north designed to draw in the British, then a sweeping mobile attack with the Afrikakorps in the south, which would blast through the minefields and circle around to the north. This had been tactically suspect at Gazala because, having got around behind the British line, the Afrikakorps would then find itself cut off from its lines of supply. The ineptitude of the British commanders had enabled Rommel to get away with it, but only just, and not only would Montgomery not make the same mistake, he had also seen Rommel coming, thanks to a combination of Ultra decrypts of Enigma traffic and careful reconnaissance work by the Desert Air Force.
Rommel’s armoured spearhead reached the British minefields at around two in the morning on the 30th, right opposite the 2nd Rifle Brigade, who were once again operating with the rest of the 7th Motor Brigade in the south of the line. Now equipped with new higher-velocity 6-pounder anti-tank guns, they made the most of easy targets as the German armour struggled through the minefields. The panzers were also clobbered by Wellington night-bombers, who left some thirty German tanks ablaze. ‘Wave after wave of heavy bomber formations dropped their high explosives,’ noted Oberst Fritz Bayerlein, ‘while both sky and earth were intermittently made light as day by parachute flares and pyrotechnics.’10 He was witnessing this first hand and both he and Rommel were fortunate to survive the night. Other senior commanders were not. General Georg von Bismarck, the commander of 21. Panzer, was killed, while General Walther Nehring, commander of the Akrikakorps, was severely wounded by a bomb fragment. A British pilot appeared to have spotted Rommel’s Horch command car too and Bayerlein watched it swoop down towards them. A bomb fell just in front, the blast killing several officers, including the corps supply officer Walter Schmidt, who was a close friend of Bayerlein’s from back in Würzburg. ‘Of the four generals leading the attack,’ noted Bayerlein, ‘three were killed.’11 He now took over temporary command of the Afrikakorps.
At dawn, Albert Martin and his fellow Riflemen-turned-anti-tank-gunners pulled back, having sufficiently slowed the German spearhead. Already Rommel’s timetable was badly awry, and his slowly emerging panzers were saved from a further hammering by the RAF only by sudden desert winds that swirled into a brief sandstorm.
Fierce fighting followed all afternoon, but the Afrikakorps were barely making any headway at all. As dusk descended, they fell back, leaguering for the night. They were soon awoken, however, by flares that turned night into day and by wave after wave of Allied bombers. By morning, a pall of smoke hung over their positions from numerous burning vehicles. The night bombing had also disrupted attempts to resupply, and 21. Panzer was by now so short of fuel, its armoured formations could not move. The only spearhead now heading into action was 15. Panzer.
Moving forward to meet them was the newly formed 8th Armoured Brigade, which included the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry in their first-ever action in tanks. In this, they rather showed what a lot they still had to learn. B and C Squadrons led the charge and they opened fire at 2,000 yards, achieved nothing, then pushed on to within 800 yards, at which point they were blasted by the tanks and anti-tank guns of the Germans. Seven tanks were soon knocked out and a further four were damaged. Stanley Christopherson’s good friend Jack Whiting was killed and then they were ordered to withdraw. Fortunately for the Sherwood Rangers and 8th Armoured Brigade, however, 15. Panzer had by now also run out of fuel and so did not follow up their success.
Meanwhile, the RAF continued to pound the Afrikakorps, who were now caught in a large, wide-open expanse of desert that lay below the ridges of Alam Halfa and Alam Nayil, around 15–20 miles south of the coast. Medium bombers pummelled them without let-up, each bomb blast being made more effective as splinters from the stony desert floor lethally sprayed the air. Seven German officers were killed at Afrikakorps HQ that day.
The fighters were busy too. Billy Drake was scrambled at around two o’clock and led an entire wing to intercept a formation of some fifty Stukas and thirty Me109s. Ignoring the fighters, they tore into the Stukas, forcing them to jettison bombs early. Drake shot down two that day. This, however, was as nothing compared to the seventeen British fighters Jochen Marseille shot down that day out of a total of twenty-two. It was an astonishing achievement – yet it was bombers, not fighters, he should have been targeting. As it was, Billy Drake’s wing managed to return to base without a single casualty, and Marseille’s exploits completely failed to halt the RAF’s bombers getting through. In fact, not one bomber was shot down by Axis fighters that day. As night fell, Rommel’s forces were in disarray.
There was, however, to be no let-up. Soon it was once more the turn of the Wellingtons, who pasted the Afrikakorps until dawn; fires from these raids were still burning when the day-bombers took over. Rommel himself ventured into the forward area still held by his panzer divisions and came under attack six times in two hours between 10 a.m. and noon. ‘Swarms of low-flying fighter bombers were coming back to the attack again and again,’ he wrote, ‘and my troops suffered tremendous casualties.12 Vast numbers of vehicles stood burning in the desert.’
Luigi Marchese had seen Rommel pass by in his command car that day. For much of the battle, Marchese and his comrades in the 2 Regimento Paracadutisti had played a static, defensive role, holding a low plateau of higher ground to the south of the line. Later that day, they learned the battle had not gone well; they all felt their morale take a big blow. ‘Disappointment and dejection filled our hearts,’ he wrote, ‘and the thought that so many lives had been lost without achieving anything made the pain worse.’13 He was very clear about why they had lost: it was the shorter lines of supply for the British, combined with new tanks and artillery and the devastating power of the RAF. ‘It was clear many things had not gone right during our attack,’ he noted.14 ‘Too many.’
‘With the failure of this offensive,’ wrote Fritz Bayerlein, ‘our last chance to win in the Nile Delta had passed.’15 Rommel’s dream of seizing all of Egypt and the Middle East was now over – and for good. There was a chance for Eighth Army to rise up and take the attack to the enemy, but Montgomery refused to be drawn. This had been a defensive battle. He would go on the offensive when he felt ready – and that would be soon enough but not yet.
Alam Halfa was, in many ways, a small battle, but it was a significant one. The tide had turned. More and more materiel – British and American – was reaching the Middle East. The build-up of forces was unstoppable, and now there would be no more distractions, no more tugs from other theatres. How long it would take to clear those southern shores of the Mediterranean was not clear, but the outcome was no longer in doubt.
In the East, the German summer offensive was also running out of steam, while the Battle of the Atlantic was already lost. In all these theatres, there would be setbacks for the Allies, and moments of hope for the Axis, but it was hard now to see how Germany could ever win the war.
Ever since the start of the Second World War, much of the world has been rather too dazzled by the achievements of the German military machine, and particularly the Wehrmacht of the opening years – those days of conquest and lightning victories. It was, however, all based on the very shakiest of foundations – foundations that went back to the days of Frederick the Great. The German way of war had shiny new weapons when it crossed the Polish border on 1 September 1939 and new tactics for using them, but tactical flair was not enough. Strategically, the mistakes and misjudgements had been legion. Operationally, they simply did not have the resources to take on the world.
What was more, key to those early victories had been the spectacularly successful harnessing of air power. The Luftwaffe had always been a tactical air force, designed to support the ground troops, and without that strategic capability it had always been somewhat incomplete. Yet air power had become a crucial part of modern conflict. ‘An important lesson that was to influence all our later plans, especially the entire method of our conduct of the war, had been learned during this operation,’ wrote Bayerlein of the aftermath of Alam Halfa.16 ‘The operational and tactical capabilities are of little consequence if the enemy commands the air space with a powerful air force and can fly massive attack missions undisturbed.’ This was nothing less than the truth: Germany had proved it so in the Blitzkrieg years and now the RAF was doing the same in North Africa. Whether air power alone could deliver victory as men like Portal and Harris were advocating had yet to be proved, but it was becoming crystal clear that winning this current war was very unlikely without it. What the first three years of conflict had proved was this: the bigger and better the air force, the fewer men would be needed on the ground. In Britain, the current priority for manpower was not the Army, the Navy or even the RAF; it was the Ministry of Aircraft Production.17
The first three years of war, from 1 September 1939 to 1 September 1942, had witnessed the rise of Germany but also its fall – a failure that the slaughter off the Americas by the U-boats and the dazzling summer victories in the East and in North Africa could not hide.
For the Allies, the time had come at last to start clawing their way back and tightening the noose around the Axis. The first drive for victory was about to begin.