home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
/
TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
/
1940
/
40africa
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1994-02-27
|
12KB
|
270 lines
<text>
<title>
(1940s) Rommel In Africa
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights
</history>
<link 00080><article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
Rommel in Africa
</hdr>
<body>
<p> [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.]
</p>
<p>(June 29, 1942)
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(July 13, 1942)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> Full-steaming into the funnel's neck, Rommel hesitated, then
massed his forces and launched them at El Alamein.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(September 14, 1942)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> A specific, carefully planned mode of attack, by which he had
expected to break the British line, had failed.
</p>
<p>(October 12, 1942)
</p>
<p> "We are preparing now for the next round," So spoke Lieut.
General Bernard Law Montgomery, field chief of General Sir
Harold Alexander.
</p>
<p> "We did not advance into Egypt merely to be thrown out again."
So spoke Field Marshal Erwin Rommel."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> [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.]
</p>
<p>(November 16, 1942)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>(November 23, 1942)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> [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.]
</p>
<p>(March 1, 1943)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> U.S. armor courageously tried to stop the German onrush along
the road to Sbeitla.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> In the end U.S. forces had to abandon Gafsa, Feriana and
Sbeitla, swinging their whole line north and westward to escape
annihilation.
</p>
<p> By midweek thousands of Allied vehicles were rolling west over
sand hills and cactus patches.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> In their first major encounter with the Germans, U.S. troops
had taken a thorough shellacking.
</p>
<p>(March 8, 1943)
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> Next morning, as suddenly as they had started their drive ten
days before the Faid Pass, the Germans turned tail and withdrew.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> Back across the littered valley they went.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> At week's end the Axis was still in flight.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>