the 88 the most formidable antitank weapon on either side. The British had a comparable high-velocity AA gun of about the same caliber (3.7 inches), which could have been as effective, but they did not use it against tanks.
Rommel also had the 50-millimeter antitank (AT) gun, which slowly replaced the poor 37-millimeter gun developed before the war. The 50-millimeter gun could penetrate 50 millimeters of armor at 1,000 yards. Although the Matilda with its heavy frontal armor was largely invulnerable to this gun, the more lightly armored cruisers could often be stopped, especially at close range. Both the 88 and the 50-millimeter AT gun could fire solid shot, to cut through armor, or high explosive, which could destroy or neutralize British AT weapons or crews.
By comparison, the British two-pounder (40-millimeter) AT gun was ineffective. It fired only solid shot, requiring a direct hit to destroy enemy AT weapons, and could penetrate merely the thinner side plates of armor at ranges below 200 yards. The British 25-pounder (87-millimeter) gun-howitzer, a superb field artillery piece, had to be pressed into service as an antitank weapon, though often at the expense of protecting infantry. Only in the spring of 1942 did the British begin to receive the six-pounder (57-millimeter) AT gun, which fired high-explosive as well as solid shot and had 30 percent greater penetration than the German 50-millimeter gun.
The British took a long time recognizing that Rommel was sending antitank guns against their tanks. In offensive or attack situations, Rommel leapfrogged the comparatively nimble 50-millimeter AT guns from one shielded vantage point to another, while keeping his tanks stationary and below the horizon. Once the AT guns were established, they protected the tanks as they swept forward.
In defensive situations, Rommel tried to bait or lure the British. He sent light tanks forward to contact the enemy, then retire. The typical British response was to mount a “cavalry” charge. But since visibility was obscured by stirred up dust and sand, British tankers usually did not see the 50-millimeter AT guns waiting in ambush in hollows and draws, nor the “gun line” of 88s drawn up at the rear. The 50s picked off British tanks that got within range, while the 88s took on the advancing enemy armor at distances far beyond the capacity of the tanks’ two- pounder (40-millimeter) guns to respond. The British added to the success of Rommel’s tactics by usually committing their armor piecemeal, mostly single units, instead of full brigades, and never massed brigades.
In addition to halving their armor by dividing their tanks between cruisers and infantry or “I” tanks, the British made two additional mistakes: they persisted in forming “support groups” and they dispersed their armor widely.
A support group of combined infantry and artillery units had successfully blocked the retreat of the Italians at Beda Fomm in February 1941. Its success led to repetition. The British saw no need to include tanks, as the Germans did with their
The British dispersed their tanks because it was impossible to conceal armor in the desert from the air. Rommel tried to practice the opposite policy, drawing together every possible tank and gun to work against a single objective—which, because of British dispersion, was often a fragment of total British armored strength.
Finally, the British failed to copy the Stuka dive-bomber, which was in effect mobile artillery that could deliver fire on the point a forward force wished to destroy, or through which it wished to advance. The dive- bomber offered the vanguard of an attacking force a way to eliminate an enemy strongpoint shortly after its discovery without having to bring up more weapons. If tanks could not knock out such a point, the only other way to break it was to advance field artillery, a time-consuming job that often gave the enemy the chance to strengthen his position or move.
Since the start of World War II and the unveiling of blitzkrieg with tanks and dive-bombers, the offensive had dominated the defensive. This period was now coming to a close. The inherent superiority of the defense over the offense was being reasserted. It had marked World War I and had been brought on by the great power of defensive weapons like field fortifications, artillery, and the machine gun.
The enormous offensive battles that burst upon the world in Russia in the summer and fall of 1941 obscured this point for a time. But the Tobruk battles and Operation Brevity foreshadowed what Battleaxe now demonstrated: when resolute troops held strong defensive positions, and possessed weapons that could immobilize tanks, they could prevail. This lesson, learned in the trenches of the western front 1914–1918, was going to be relearned on the battlefields of the Second World War.
As the giant caldron battles of Barbarossa slowly played out in the Soviet Union in the fall of 1941, the British prepared for their first major offensive against Rommel in North Africa.
Winston Churchill had been agitating for such an attack for months, and poured as many troops and as much equipment as he could find into Egypt. Four days after the end of Battleaxe, he relieved General Wavell and replaced him with General Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander in India, and immediately began pressing him to mount a major effort to wrest Libya from the Axis.
The campaign that opened on November 18, 1941, code-named Operation Crusader, developed into the most spectacular tank battle in history, a battle fought at extreme speed over a desert that allowed almost complete freedom of movement.
However, Crusader is notable because Auchinleck started with a false concept—he sought to destroy the enemy’s forces—and also dispersed his armor so widely that he never achieved decisive strength at any point. The result was that Rommel, though vastly outnumbered in tanks and other weapons, was able to block the British and turn what appeared to be certain defeat into almost a victory.
Armored forces are so fluid they are unsuited to be an objective. They usually can be destroyed only by indirect means. The British could have done this by throwing a strategic barrage or barrier across the Axis line of supply, requiring Rommel to commit his panzers to reopen the line under conditions favorable to the British.
Such a choke point existed: Acroma, on the Axis supply route twenty miles west of Tobruk. A concentrated attack on Acroma would have relieved the siege of Tobruk without a fight and forced Rommel to attack the barrier frontally or retreat for lack of fuel and supplies. Yet the British never aimed at Acroma or any other strategic point astride the Axis supply line. Instead, they crashed against Rommel’s gun-lined traps in direct, costly assaults that, moreover, were delivered by numerous individual units, and never by massed armor.
Consequently Rommel repeatedly caught British armor dispersed. As he remarked to a captured British officer after the battle: “What difference does it make if you have two tanks to my one, when you spread them out and let me smash them in detail?”
The British desert force had been renamed 8th Army, placed under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham, and divided into two corps: the 13th under Lieutenant General A. R. Godwin-Austen with the 2nd New Zealand and 4th Indian Divisions and a force of infantry or “I” tanks; and the 30th under Lieutenant General C. W. M. Norrie with the “Desert Rats” of the 7th Armored Division (7th and 22nd Armored Brigades, plus an infantry and artillery Support Group), 4th Armored Brigade, 22nd Guards Brigade, and 1st South African Division. In reserve was the 2nd South African Division.
The British plan was for 13th Corps to pin down Axis troops holding the frontier from Sollum and Halfaya Pass to Sidi Omar, twenty-five miles inland, while the 30th Corps swept around south of Sidi Omar, destroyed Rommel’s armor, then linked up with the Tobruk garrison, seventy miles beyond the frontier.
British perversity in splitting armor is shown in the fact that the three armored brigades of 30th Corps aimed from the outset at divergent objectives—although Auchinleck and Cunningham had identified the Sidi Rezegh airfield, atop an escarpment only twelve miles southeast of the Tobruk defensive perimeter, as their principal target. If the airfield could be seized, tanks there and tanks from Tobruk could open a link, relieve the siege, and endanger the Axis position.
On the night of November 18, 1941, 30th Corps swept around Rommel’s desert flank, without encountering any resistance. The next day Cunningham sent two of three regiments of the 7th Armored Brigade to capture Sidi Rezegh airfield. The third regiment and the division’s Support Group did not come up until the following morning, November 20. By then Rommel had rushed up part of 90th Light Division and a large number of antitank guns to block the advance.
Meanwhile, the other two British armored brigades drove off to widely separated places, and promptly ran into trouble. The 22nd, newly arrived from England, encountered the dug-in guns of Trieste Armored Division at Bir el Gubi, twenty-two miles south of Sidi Rezegh. Without waiting to call for assistance, the brigade launched a “charge of the Light Brigade” against the Italian guns, losing forty of 160 tanks within minutes, and completely bogging down.
