TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0209> <link 93XP0169> <title> 1940s: Rommel In Africa </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Rommel in Africa </hdr> <body> [From the spring of 1941 on, the tide of battle in North Africa had shifted back and forth between the British and the Italian and German Axis troops, now commanded by General Erwin Rommel. But with his supply lines secure, Rommel began a real push.] (June 29, 1942) For the British it was utter, humiliating defeat. Toburk, the same battle-scarred port that last year held out for eight months against the Axis besiegers, succumbed to one day's attack. Tobruk fell quickly, squashily, to the planes, tanks and guns of Germany's Erwin Rommel. The Axis announced that it took 28,000 Allied prisoners in the garrison, including "several generals." Rommel apparently let the British exhaust themselves winning their victories," then threw in his reserves to take the real victory. Moreover, he changed the pattern of desert warfare by stepping up the role of artillery. Before Tobruk's fall, when the British, confident of equal armor and equal or greater air strength, attacked Rommel's line south of the port, the German surprised them with a massive assembly of 88-mm. anti-tank guns and the British tanks took a dismal mauling--suffering losses which were at least partially responsible for the British defeat. (July 13, 1942) Germany's Rommel had chased the broken, retreating British 325 miles in eleven days, had rammed his armored spearheads down the coastal desert from Matruh, taking the flyspeck towns on the railroad to Alexandria like peas ripped from a pod. Now for four days Rommel had not advanced. The mercurial people of Alexandria, who had shivered and shaken while Rommel rolled, smiled again and went back to their nightclubs. Those who had fled Alexandria talked of coming back "within a few days." The British Commander in Chief of the Middle East, General Sir Claude John Eyre ("The Auk") Auchinleck, decided to plug Rommel at the neck of a funnel--the 35-mile gap between El Alamein on the coast and the northern tongue of the steep-sided, marshbedded Quattara Depression. El Alamein is 70 miles from Alexandria. Full-steaming into the funnel's neck, Rommel hesitated, then massed his forces and launched them at El Alamein. Meanwhile, from the south a British light force sped around to harry Rommel's flank. After eleven successive days of relentless attack, Rommel's weary battalions had to withdraw to reform and prepare for a new attack. (September 14, 1942) Rommel began his action with feints towards the north, then a jab at the southern front. With his entire Afrika Korps of four divisions--tank columns and light infantry--he swept along the edge of the Qattara Depression, struck at the British lines, penetrated some distance into British mine fields, swung toward the seacoast. This as Rommel's Sturm, Schwung, Wucht. (Attack, impetus, weight.) The operation was reminiscent of the wide sweep he had made around Bir Hacheim in May. But Alexander and Montgomery were ready for him. This time the British broke Rommel's Schwung before it got fully under way. For the British had before them a real wall of steel and men and mines, stretching from Qattara to the sea. They stopped Rommel against that wall, in the valley between the ridges of El Hemeimat and El Ruweisat. There they kept pressing him back on his heels until he grudgingly gave way, edged back from a battlefield littered with his demolished tanks and motor vehicles. A specific, carefully planned mode of attack, by which he had expected to break the British line, had failed. (October 12, 1942) "We are preparing now for the next round," So spoke Lieut. General Bernard Law Montgomery, field chief of General Sir Harold Alexander. "We did not advance into Egypt merely to be thrown out again." So spoke Field Marshal Erwin Rommel." There were incidents to bear out the interpretation that the British had become offensive-minded, Rommel defensive. The British advanced. In a short, fierce infantry attack they nipped off a small wedge which Rommel was holding near the center of the El Alamein line. This was Montgomery's first round. His troops were ready. Their victory a month ago, when they hurled Rommel back, hurt and bloody, had bucked up the sick, sore, tired Imperials. The Eighth Army wanted to get moving. [The desert fighting settled into artillery duels and air battles over Rommel's supply lines. Then, at the other end of the Mediterranean came an event which spelled Rommel's dome: U.S. troops landed at Algiers.] (November 16, 1942) Algiers in the dawn of Nov. 8 was a white, triangular wound against the dun hills behind the harbor. Beyond its jetties, well out in the Mediterranean, a great naval concentration stood in from Gibraltar: the Royal Navy's battleships Nelson and Rodney, the aircraft carrier Argus, cruisers, destroyers and transports laden with U.S. troops. The first Allied bombers bore leaflets imprinted with the American flag and a proclamation from Lieut. General Dwight David Eisenhower to the 252,000 Frenchmen, Arabs and Berbers of the town. Unfolding at Algiers that morning was a plan for the conquest of French North Africa. It was thorough and simple. Its initial objective was the seizure of the principal ports of French North Africa, Algiers and Oran on the Mediterranean, the keys to the political control of French Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Typified at Algiers was the plan of local attack which the U.S. forces carried out everywhere they landed. Most of their armored, snub-nosed barges from the convoys came, not to the port itself, but to the sandy beaches a few miles from the city. There they disgorged Rangers (U.S. commandomen) for initial landings, infantry, artillery and tanks to consolidate and widen the landings. Their purposed were to pincer the city itself, and to seize Blida and Maison-Blanche, Algiers' two main airdromes. Soon the rail, highway and air approaches to Algiers from east and west on the land, and from Sardinia or Sicily by air, were commanded by the invaders. (November 23, 1942) Exactly 339 days after the U.S. declaration of war on Germany, U.S. and German land troops met in battle for the first time in World War II. The place was the oak groves and citrus valleys of Tunisia, once the breadbasket of Carthage, where Scipio in the Battle of Zama finally destroyed Carthage's power. News accounts were unable to keep pace with the Anglo-American invasion that took French Morocco and Algeria in 76 hours--and moved into Tunisia in 76 more. An attack and quick counter-attack near Bizerte was the first clash of arms. New thousands of U.S. troops landed along the 1,500-mile Moroccan-Algerian coastline. They picked up the cry: "Let's head east!" "East" meant Tunisia first, and after that a juncture with the British Eighth Army for the final mop-up somewhere in Libya of General Rommel's bedraggled Afrika Korps. Five or six fresh Italian divisions apparently are also intact and ready for battle somewhere in the Tripoli-Bengazi area. As long as the Axis was in Tunis, the way to Rommel's forces was barred. The first blow at Tunisia was struck by twin-engined bombers soaring over "Death Alley" from Malta. On the same day that Eisenhower announced the capitulation of Morocco and Algeria the bombers destroyed 19 others on the el-Aouina airfield outside Tunis. The Nazis, for once having to worry about too little and too late, poured additional planes into the French Protectorate from bases in Sardinia and Sicily. German paratroops captured and held the airfield after French scattered garrisons under the leadership of the ubiquitous General Henri Giraud fired on the Nazis and Italians. Drawing on "flying Panzer divisions," supposedly held for an invasion of Britain, Hitler air-ferried twelve- and 15-ton tanks to protect the approached to Bizerte harbor. Italian marines were reported landed by sea. Axis subs swarmed like sharks off the coasts. [As the U.S. and other Allied forces pressed eastward into Tunisia, the British under General Bernard Montgomery, the eventual victor at El Alamein, in 13 weeks rolled the Germans 1,300 miles westward out of Egypt, across the Libya and into Tunisia, where the climactic battles of the North African campaign were to be fought. They were not all victories.] (March 1, 1943) Thirty German tanks poured out of Faid Pass. Artillery, infantry and 50 German tanks moved out of a point north of the pass. South around Maknassy the Germans rolled toward the road that connects Sidi bou Zid with Gafsa. Another column pounded toward Gafsa itself. Mark IVs and some of the new, giant Mark VIs overran the positions of green U.S. artillerymen, who sometimes scarcely had time to fire one round. U.S. armor courageously tried to stop the German onrush along the road to Sbeitla. But the weight of Rommel's suddenly concentrated assault was too heavy. The old hands of Rommel's desert army were too smart for freshmen U.S. troops. U.S. tanks charged blindly into German ambushers. German 88-mm, cannon blasted them to bits. Swift-moving German columns surrounded and cut them off. In the end U.S. forces had to abandon Gafsa, Feriana and Sbeitla, swinging their whole line north and westward to escape annihilation. By midweek thousands of Allied vehicles were rolling west over sand hills and cactus patches. Great columns of smoke rose over abandoned and burning munition dumps. From Thelepte airport near Feriana, flames licked into the air as retreating troops fired 60,000 gallons of aviation gasoline. Three airports were abandoned. In the valleys of olive groves around Sbeitla lay more than 100 wrecked U.S. tanks, numbers of jeeps, motor transports, huge quantities of ammunition. Toward the German rear lines field long lines of weary Allied prisoners. Valiant Allied air support kept the retreat from turning into a rout. In their first major encounter with the Germans, U.S. troops had taken a thorough shellacking. (March 8, 1943) The story of the next few days was the story of a desperate Allied stand. British artillery and lumbering new Churchill tanks rolled up to block the pass at Sbiba. In the area of Tebessa--the Allied base for Central Tunisia--U.S. cannon and armor, supported by strong air units operating in dubious flying weather, pounded and slashed at the German onrush. In the critical Thala sector British armor, probably drawn from the First Army's reserves, and fresh U.S. artillery fought through the afternoon and into the night. Next morning, as suddenly as they had started their drive ten days before the Faid Pass, the Germans turned tail and withdrew. In the Bottleneck. Rommel had met more resistance than he apparently bargained for. His troops had become exhausted, overextended and over-taxed. The Eighth Army in the south was showing signs of opening its assault. And perhaps there was another explanation for the turnabout: Fredendall's young men had learned their lessons fast. Said Eisenhower of the U.S. troops: "All complacency has now been dropped." Back across the littered valley they went. Rommel left Italians to fight a rearguard action, pulled his precious Panzer troops out and south along the road to Feriana and Gafsa, east towards Faid Pass--the roads over which Fredendall's U.S. troops had beat a hasty retreat northward only two weeks before. At week's end the Axis was still in flight. </body> </article> </text>