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This book covers the last year of the North African campaign, a period that saw two dramatic reversals of fortune. At the start of the book the Allies have just successfully forced the Axis back from Tobruk in Operation Crusader, but Rommel was ready to move first, and his attack at Gazala saw the British position almost collapse. Tobruk, which had held out successfully in 1941, fell almost without a fight. Attempts to stop the Axis advance just inside Egypt failed, and the British ended up at El Alamein, possibly the last defensive position before the Nile. However this was the highpoint of Axis success. Rommel’s attacks on the El Alamein position failed, and Montgomery famously won the second battle of El Alamein, giving Britain a much needed morale boost after an otherwise dreadful year. At almost the same time a joint Anglo-American force landed in French North Africa (Operation Torch), trapping the Axis forces between two powerful Allied armies. A rapid German buildup and Allied mistakes meant that the end didn’t come until May 1943, but when it did it saw a surrender on a similar scale to the earlier disaster at Stalingrad.
The author has done a good job of mingling the wider campaign histories with detailed examination of individual armoured battles. We see a period in which both sides had a wide range of different tanks in service, with many of them obsolescent by 1942. On the German side we see the Panzer III and most of the Italian tanks being outclassed by the best of the new Allied vehicles. On the Allied side the arrival of the Sherman gave both the British and Americans a good reliable tank armed with an effective 75mm gun in a fully rotating turret for the first time, but both still had plenty of older less effective tanks. On the British side older Valentine and Crusader tanks were now underarmed while on the American side the M3 suffered from the position of its main gun in the hull and its high profile. The American Tank Destroyer units were new to combat, and some of their early equipment proved to be ineffective. One interesting section looks at the number and type of tanks sent to Rommel in 1942 and shows that he was given more than his fair share of the most modern types, leaving units fighting on the far more important Eastern Front struggling with outdated models.
If I have one criticism of this book it is that the author tends to be overly negative. There are occasions where his criticisms are justified, but I’m not convinced by all of them. Montgomery’s handling of the battle of El Alamein wasn’t perfect, but he was aware that his army was still potentially rather fragile, having only recently suffered a series of defeats at Gazalla and Tobruk. He was also willing and able to change his plans when things didn’t go as he wanted, and in thirteen days inflicted a defeat on the Axis forces in Egypt that they never recovered from. The previous major British offensive, Operation Crusader of late 1941, had taken longer to inflict a much less severe defeat on Rommel, from which he soon recovered. The speed of the pursuit after El Alamein is also underplayed – although there were flaws and delays Tripoli was captured just two months after the Axis retreat began, a pursuit of around 1,400 miles! This compares well to Patton’s famous dash across France, where his army advanced 400 miles in a month, before coming to a halt outside Metz.
One theme is the criticism of many command appointments, in particular when officers without experience of commanding armour were given posts. However I’m not entirely sure where the British army of 1942 was meant to get these experienced officers from – at this point in the war the British Army had very little experience of large scale armoured warfare, almost all of which came from North Africa in 1940-41, so if you are looking to replace officers lost or judged to have failed in the desert there wasn’t a pool of armoured warfare veterans to call on. There were of course officers with experience of peacetime service with the early armoured units, but just how useful that would have been in the very changed circumstances of 1942 is hard to know.
I was more convinced by the comments on the commanders who took part in the first attempt to capture Tunisia, in the immediate aftermath of Operation Torch. Here we see inexperienced American commanders, fighting their first land campaign of the war against the Germans, and a mediocre British commander in General Anderson (although here we do have an acknowledgement that there weren’t many British officers with experience of large scale command). Patton, who did have combat experience with tanks (admittedly back in 1918) wasn’t assigned to the attack on Tunisia.
There were undoubtably big problems with the British handling of armoured forces during this period. The most significant of them was the lack of real cooperation between infantry and armour, with commanders on both sides often seeming to be glad when they were able to operate separately. The problem was that this left the armour vulnerably exposed when it ran ahead of the infantry, and the infantry without armoured support when needed. Neither side seems to have understood the needs, abilities or vulnerabilities of the other. As a result there are plenty of examples of British armoured units running into well located Axis ambushes and suffering very heavy losses.
On the German side the logistical situation was poor, and the arrival in large numbers of the Sherman tank meant that the Allies finally had a tank equal or better than the Panzer IVs. Rommel’s style of command didn’t really suit the sort of defensive warfare he now had to deal with, and he appears to have been worn down by his time in the desert. The rapid German buildup of forces in Tunisia after Operation Torch was an impressive achievement, and delayed the Allied victory in North Africa by several months, but really only served to increase the number of prisoners taken when the inevitable end came.
Overall this is an excellent book, and a good sequel to his earlier volume on the first year of tank warfare in the desert. The author has succesful balanced the need to provide a readable overview of events with the detailed examination of individual tank battles his topic requires to give us a detailed but readable examination of a period of significant change in armoured warfare.
Chapters
1: Desert Interregnum
2: The Road to Suez
3: Decision in the Desert
4: Broken Field Running
5: Last Stand of the Afrika Korps
Author: Robert Forczyk
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 384
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2023