December 7, 1941. Four days later, Hitler declared war on the United States, dragging Mussolini along with him. It was another of Hitler’s foolish decisions, because—with American attention and anger focused on the “sneak attack” of the Japanese—it would have been difficult for President Roosevelt to get Congress unilaterally to declare war on Germany.
Six months before Hitler faced only Britain. Now, by deliberate choice, he had arrayed against him the three greatest industrial powers in the world, with a great preponderance of manpower.
German senior officers paid little notice to their new foe, because they were frantically trying to stave off Russian attacks. Halder did not even note in his diary on December 11 that Germany had declared war. Brauchitsch proposed that the army move back to a shortened “winter line” east of Yukhnov-Rzhev, a withdrawal of about a hundred miles. Hitler refused.
He accepted the resignation of Brauchitsch. Though ostensibly based on a severe heart attack Brauchitsch had suffered, it actually resulted from his and Hitler’s long-disturbed relationship. Hitler made himself commander in chief of the army, and ordered “fanatical resistance.” He authorized withdrawals only with his personal approval. Despite his orders, German forces fell back in numerous places to avoid being surrounded and destroyed.
Barbarossa had failed. Hitler never saw that he made any mistake. He blamed the defeat on the “unexpectedly early onset of severe winter.” Losses rose to 775,000 dead, wounded, and missing—almost one- fourth of the entire strength of the field armies.
A leadership crisis followed. Hitler had relieved Rundstedt because he wanted to withdraw to the Mius River. He now removed both other army group commanders—Bock, ostensibly for sickness, Leeb because Hitler rejected his proposal to withdraw from exposed positions around Leningrad. Three army commanders also departed— Maximilian von Weichs (2nd), Adolf Strauss (9th), and Karl Heinrich von Stulpnagel (17th)—along with thirty other general officers, including Hoepner, whom Hitler expelled from the army for an unauthorized retreat. Most significantly, he ousted Guderian. The best panzer leader in the German army went into the army officers reserve pool.
By January 1, 1942, Soviet forces had retaken Kalinin, a hundred miles northwest of Moscow, and Kaluga, a hundred miles southwest, and were besieging German strongholds that had been bypassed and surrounded. The threat to Moscow had ended.
At this point Hitler issued an order for all troops to stand fast. On January 7, Stalin launched a counteroffensive along the whole front, something the Red Army was too weak to accomplish. The Russians failed to eliminate the surrounded Germans, and made only limited advances elsewhere. The German army survived the winter of 1941–1942 because Stalin attempted too much. But Hitler thought the reason was his stand-fast order. For the rest of the war this encouraged him in his insistence to defend every inch of ground.
It was a pity for Germany that Adolf Hitler never heeded the advice of the Swiss military analyst Antoine- Henri Jomini, commenting on Napoleon’s 1812 invasion: “Russia is a country which is easy to get into, but very difficult to get out of.”
11 TO AND FRO IN THE DESERT
WITH THE FAILURE OF ROMMEL’S ATTACKS AGAINST TOBRUK AND THE REFUSAL of Hitler to reinforce Africa Corps, a stalemate descended over North Africa in the spring of 1941. Rommel didn’t have enough forces to advance beyond the Egyptian frontier, and the British didn’t have enough power to relieve Tobruk.
However, Winston Churchill, unlike the German high command, recognized the importance of the Suez Canal, and ran great risks to hold it. To improve the strength of the Middle East commander, General Sir Archibald Wavell, he directed that a five-ship convoy with 295 tanks and forty-three Hurricane fighter planes be run directly through the Mediterranean, instead of around the Cape of Good Hope. He wrote the British Chiefs of Staff on April 20, 1941, that the war in the Middle East and saving the Suez Canal “all may turn on a few hundred armored vehicles. They must if possible be carried there at all costs.” Aided by misty weather, the convoy got through to Alexandria on May 12 without Axis attacks, but lost one ship with fifty-seven tanks to a mine in the Sicilian Narrows.
Wavell didn’t wait for the tanks to get to the front. He launched his first effort to relieve Tobruk, Operation Brevity, on May 15, sending twenty-six Matilda tanks in support of the 22nd Guards Brigade in a direct assault against enemy forces guarding Sollum and Halfaya Pass along the coast. Sollum and Halfaya were the only places along the Libya-Egypt frontier where troops could cross the 600-foot escarpment that stretches from Sollum southeastward into Egypt. Meanwhile, twenty-nine cruiser tanks with a Support Group of motorized infantry and artillery moved around the desert flank to the south and tried to get on the Axis rear.
The British seized Halfaya Pass, losing seven Matildas in the process. However, threats of German counterattacks on the flank caused the British to withdraw, leaving a small garrison at the pass. Rommel launched a sudden converging attack on May 27 and recaptured the pass. He dug in four high-velocity 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns, which had emerged as Germany’s best tank-killers. The guns, their barrels horizontal with little visible above ground, were to be of great importance in the next British effort, Operation Battleaxe.
Wavell planned Battleaxe as two separate operations. In the first, an infantry force, supported by half the British armor, a brigade of Matildas, was to seize Halfaya, Sollum, and Fort Capuzzo, eight miles to the west. In the second, the remaining armor was to cover the desert flank to the south to guard against the panzer regiment Rommel had posted there. Rommel’s other panzer regiment was near Tobruk and could move as needed.
Wavell’s plan betrayed the ambivalence about armor that bedeviled the British in North Africa. He split his armor into two separate forces, neither of which could support the other. Yet Rommel could send his second panzer regiment quickly to reinforce his first.
Another mistake of the British was their misunderstanding of the role of the 88s at Halfaya. British doctrine was largely fixed on the idea of tank versus tank battles, whereas Rommel used antitank guns to the maximum degree possible, holding his tanks back for decisive strikes or movements.
When the Matildas attacked Halfaya—dubbed by British soldiers as “Hellfire Pass”—on June 15, 1941, the commander radioed back his last message: “They are tearing my tanks to bits.” Only one of thirteen Matildas survived the trap of the four 88s. The attack collapsed.
The Germans also mounted four 88s and 50-millimeter antitank guns on Hafid Ridge, a few miles southwest of Capuzzo. When the British cruiser tanks coming around the southern flank reached Hafid, the German gun trap stopped them cold. By now most of Rommel’s forward panzer regiment had arrived, and had threatened an attack on the flank of the armored brigade, inducing Wavell to pull it back into Egypt.
By nightfall, the British had lost more than half their tanks, mostly to fire from the 88s and antitank guns, while Rommel’s tank strength had been little affected.
Rommel had learned something the British had not grasped about desert warfare: that attrition or wearing down of an enemy force and destruction of the enemy’s organic cohesion had to be the tactical aims. In other environments where few units were mechanized, like Poland in 1939 and western Europe in 1940, the greatest danger a force could face was being surrounded. When encircled, and subjected to fire from all sides, a force tended to disintegrate, and could be destroyed or forced to surrender.
In the desert, surrounded motorized forces nearly always could mass at a single point and break out, thereby nullifying what elsewhere would be a devastating trap.
Rommel accordingly concentrated on winning battles of attrition and shattering the enemy’s organization. He came up with a five-point method of doing this. A commander, he wrote, must (1) concentrate his forces, while trying to split the enemy forces and destroy them at different times; (2) protect his supply lines, while cutting the enemy’s; (3) attack enemy armor with antitank guns, reserving his own tanks for the final blow; (4) operate near the front so as to make immediate decisions when tactical conditions change; (5) achieve surprise, maintain great speed of movement, and overrun disorganized enemy formations without delay. Speed is everything, Rommel wrote. And, after dislocating the enemy, he must be pursued at once and never be allowed to reorganize.
Rommel had only one “secret” weapon, the 88-millimeter antiaircraft (AA) gun that he and other German generals discovered in the 1940 campaign could blast through 83 millimeters of armor at 2,000 yards. This made
