Reconnaissance Battalion to drive into the town. It arrived on the night of April 3.
On the morning of April 4, Rommel directed the main body of 5th Light Division to move through Ben Gania and on to the sea at Derna, while Ariete Division following the same route turned north to seize El Mechili, south of Jebel el Akdar, the mountain range along the coast. Speed was now everything. Rommel wanted to bring at least part of the British army to battle before it withdrew from Cyrenaica and escaped danger.
During the night, Rommel learned that British forces were still holding Msus, about seventy miles southeast of Benghazi and fifty miles northwest of Ben Gania. He also learned that the best route for his supply trucks was through Msus.
On the morning of April 5, Rommel ordered most of his armor—5th Panzer Regiment and forty Italian tanks—to head straight for Msus, destroy the enemy there, and press on to Mechili. Though held up by sandstorms, the tanks took Msus on the evening of April 6, but got lost on the way to Mechili, moved far to the north, and were only discovered by Rommel flying in his light Storch reconnaissance plane on the evening of April 7.
Meanwhile, a newly arrived British motorized brigade had occupied Mechili. While Rommel sent a small force to the sea at Derna to close the Via Balbia in both directions, he sent his main force from east and west against the British brigade at Mechili on April 8, forcing its surrender. He then rushed tanks on to Derna, where German forces captured many more prisoners, including General Neame and General O’Connor, who had come back from Egypt to assist Neame. Their unescorted car had run into Germans on the Via Balbia.
By April 11, 1941, the British had been swept entirely out of Cyrenaica and over the frontier into Egypt, except for two divisions that shut themselves up in the port of Tobruk, which the Italians had built into a fortress before the war, and which the Royal Navy could supply by sea.
Rommel had won by deceiving the British into believing his forces were much stronger than they were, and he moved with great speed, bewildering the British and causing their forces to disintegrate.
Rommel had too little power to undertake a heavy assault against Tobruk, yet he insisted on mounting several attacks, all of which failed against the resolute Australian and British garrison.
The date of Rommel’s eviction of the British from Libya, except Tobruk, is significant. The campaign against Yugoslavia and Greece had been launched on April 6, and German forces were already scoring decisive successes, indicating that the campaign would soon be completed.
Rommel had handed Hitler an entirely unexpected victory that left the Africa Corps poised within striking distance of the Suez Canal. All that would now be required to win Egypt would be the swift transfer, as soon as the Greek campaign ended, of two panzer divisions to reinforce Rommel. The British were reeling from defeats in Greece and Libya, and could not have withstood a concerted attack.
The garrison at Tobruk could have been blocked by Italian divisions, braced by a few German tanks. With an offensive launched against the Egyptian delta, the British could not have mounted an offensive from that fortress.
Admiral Raeder and the naval staff recognized what Rommel had achieved, and proposed to Hitler “a decisive Egypt-Suez offensive.” If Rommel had been reinforced, he almost surely would have occupied Egypt long before the end of 1941.
Unfortunately for the Germans, none of this happened. Hitler didn’t recognize the gift that Rommel had handed him and turned his gaze once more on the Soviet Union.
In his appraisal of his first campaign, Rommel came to virtually the same conclusions that Admiral Raeder had reached half a year previously.
“It is my view,” he wrote, “that it would have been better if we had kept our hands off Greece altogether, and rather created a concentration of strength in North Africa to drive the British right out of the Mediterranean area.”
The air forces employed in Greece should have been used to protect convoys to Africa, he added. Malta should have been taken instead of Crete. Powerful German motorized forces in North Africa could then have seized the whole of the British-occupied Mediterranean coastline, as well as the Middle East as sources for oil and bases for attack on Russia.
“This would have isolated southeastern Europe. Greece, Yugoslavia, and Crete would have had no choice but to submit, for supplies and support from the British Empire would have been impossible.”
Rommel blamed his superiors in the army high command. He was right in noting the reluctance of the senior generals to endorse a full-scale operation in Libya. But at the time Rommel didn’t know it was Hitler who had rejected a Mediterranean strategy, and Brauchitsch and Halder had adjusted their viewpoint to conform. The silence of Brauchitsch, Halder, Jodl, and Keitel in the presence of Rommel’s incredible gift speaks volumes, either about their lack of vision or about their fear of Hitler.
8 BARBAROSSA
THE PURPOSE OF MILITARY STRATEGY IS TO DIMINISH THE POSSIBILITY OF RESISTANCE. It should be the aim of every leader to discover the weaknesses of the enemy and to pierce his Achilles’ heel. This is how battles and wars are best won.
Such advice goes back at least to Sun Tzu in the fifth century B.C., but it is extraordinarily difficult for human beings to follow. The attack against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, is the most powerful example in the twentieth century of how a leader and a nation—in this case Adolf Hitler and Germany—can ignore clear, eternal rules of successful warfare, and pursue a course that leads straight to destruction.
Attacking Russia head-on was wrong to begin with, because it guaranteed the greatest resistance, not the least. A direct attack also forces an enemy back on his reserves and supplies, while it constantly lengthens the supply and reinforcement lines of the attacker. The better strategy is to separate the enemy from his supplies and reserves. That is why an attack on the flank is more likely to be successful.
Nevertheless Hitler could still have won if he had struck at the Soviet Union’s weakness, instead of its strength.
His most disastrous error was to go into the Soviet Union as a conqueror instead of a liberator. The Soviet people had suffered enormously at the hands of the Communist autocracy for two decades. Millions died when the Reds forced people off their land to create collective farms. Millions more were obliged to move great distances and work long hours under terrible conditions in factories and construction projects. The secret police punished any resistance with death or transportation to horrible prison gulags in Siberia. In the gruesome purges of the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had systematically killed all leaders and all military officers who, in his paranoid mind, posed the slightest threat to his dictatorship. Life for the ordinary Russian was drab, full of exhausting work, and dangerous. At the same time, the Soviet Union was an empire ruling over a collection of subjugated peoples who were violently opposed to rule from the Kremlin.
Vast numbers of these people would have risen in rebellion if Hitler’s legions had entered with the promise of freedom and elimination of Soviet oppression. Had Hitler done this, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.
Such a policy would not have given Hitler his
Hitler followed precisely the opposite course of action. His “commissar order” called for the instant shooting down of Communist party agents in the army. He sent
Two days before the Germans struck, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s commissioner for the regions to be conquered, told his closest collaborators: “The job of feeding the German people stands at the top of the list of Germany’s claims in the east…. We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people.”
