Thus politics and not military sense dictated the orders, shaped the plans, and dominated the strategy which moved Rommel and his men like pawns. That commander saw with bitterness that as the war against Russia went increasingly badly the High Command relegated Africa to the status of a side-show denying to the Africa Corps and its successors those supplies of men and material which might have enabled it to win victory for the Axis. Only when the tide had turned did Hitler realise the danger and tried to reverse the situation by sending across the Mediterranean fresh men and arms. But he was too late; he was only reinforcing defeat. Those men and that material which survived the double gauntlet of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, passed into Allied hands shortly after landing on African soil.
The principal battlefields during the years of war in the southern Mediterranean lay in the area between El Agheila and El Alamein, and through that region ran Via Balbia, the only all-weather coastal road. Possession of that highway dominated the fighting for the pattern of military operations was the same whether it was the Axis or the British who were attacking. The armour - ould come up out of the desert in an enveloping or encircling operation, while the infantry and the less mobile forces kept close to the Via Balbia, fighting to capture one of the three major ports into which would come the ships to nourish the next advance. The lack of originality in the strategy of the successive offensives was not due to the rigidity of military thinking but to the r'act that neither side had the capability to mount a seaborne landing behind the enemy front.
Peculiar to the war in North Africa was the fortunate fact that for most of :he time no great numbers of civilians were involved. The civil population was small and concentrated chiefly into a small coastal strip. The rival armies could, therefore, manoeuvre and fight in the southern deserts knowing that ±eir destructive operations were not endangering the great mass of the native population. A second factor of the desert war was that this was the first completely mechanised war to be fought by both sides in the western hemisphere. Because of the enormous length of the battle zone - only those of the Soviet Union were greater in extent — and the absence of railways, movement had to be by mechanical transport. With the exception of the stallion, upon which Mussolini intended to ride in a victory parade in Egypt, a few mounted patrols, and mule trains which were used at times in Tunisia, there were no -horses on active service in the African theatre of operations.
The third distinctive feature of the desert war was that no SS combat units fought there. A small SS security office was opened in Tunis but its personnel were not fighting troops and thus the area of the southern Mediterranean was spared the actions and reactions which were suffered in other places. German writers describe the fighting as chivalrous and this was not surprising for, through the war in the desert was hard, both sides had a common enemy, the resert itself, for this could be viciously cruel to the weak and helpless. A lefeated enemy had to be helped to overcome the hardships of that region and thus there grew up the legend of the 'gentlemen's war'. Certainly it had pace, scvle, and, above all, colour. The men of all armies which fought there emerged with a certain flair and, semper aliquid novi ex, Africa (as always something new comes from Africa), that continent was the fount of many new lieas on armoured warfare tactics, dress, and language which then gained currency and passed from the southern Mediterranean into other battle zones war was a drab and unromantic misery.
Chapter I Background to War
In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Second World War the political influence of Fascist Italy was at its peak and the period which Mussolini had spent in office had brought to the Italian people not only a certain stability and prosperity but also prestige, for in certain European political circles Mussolini's many years in office had given him the aura of a fairly young elder statesman, a role which he played to perfection during the Munich crisis of 1938. True, he had been responsible for a small number of short colonial wars in North Africa but these had been successful and had enlarged the Italian colonial empire.
Libya, the name given to the three territories adjoining each other in North Africa and all bordering the Mediterranean, was the oldest colony and had been conquered in 1912. Tripolitania, its most westerly region, was mostly desert and was consequently poor; its economic wealth was vested in two million date palms. Its greatest value lay in its strategic position, for it was only 250 miles removed from Sicily and thus could be regarded as a base from which an attack could be launched upon either the British in Egypt or the French in Tunisia. Marmarica, the eastern province, was also a poor desert territory. Only Cyrenaica had been extensively settled by Italian colonists and had, therefore, been subject to European influence in matters of agriculture, architecture, and attitudes. Running the entire length of the Libyan coastline was a thin strip of fertile land within which had grown up towns and harbours which were to be of greater or lesser importance to the future conduct of military operations.
Although Mussolini in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war had seemed to be in a very strong position his blatantly aggressive attitudes, his intervention in Spain, and his formation of a political Axis with the even more aggressive Third Reich had so alarmed those countries which bordered on, or had influence in, the Mediterranean that they took combined measures against him. Thus when Italy entered the war in June 1940, the two most powerful nations in the Mediterranean, France and Great Britain through their naval and military bases - the British at Gibraltar and at Alexandria, the French at Toulon, Corsica, and Tunisia - held Italy encircled and confined; a prisoner in the central Mediterranean.
Even though France fell the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force operating from the chain of British bases stopped supplies of arms and men reaching the Axis armies and thus starved them, for the deciding factors in the North African war were whose ships ruled the waves and whose aircraft dominated the skies. Until the middle of 1941 the Axis powers under the cover of the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica's air superiority had built up their armies almost unopposed, but from the last months of that year to the end of the war in Africa theirs was, for the greatest period of time, the inferior position. The bravest, most imaginative and brilliant commander leading an army in a theatre of operations overseas from his homeland is only as strong as his supply lines. Cut these and his brilliant, wide-ranging, strategic sweeps are halted: the tanks become static, immobile, and useless steel boxes; the guns, starved of shells, fall silent.
In an area as vast as North Africa losses of territory were not important and even casualties were relatively minor calculations in the military equation. The most important factor was which of the combatant powers had the resources to replace the losses and the ability to bring fresh men and supplies to the commanders in the field. The Axis powers were never able to increase significantly the numbers of men which they could put into action, neither could they equip them. The British, on the other hand, could and did reinforce their armies with new men and modern equipment even though the convoying of this material was carried through under the most difficult and dangerous conditions.
As a result of the Rome—Berlin axis which had been formed in 1939, Germany had been drawn, imperceptibly, almost against her will, and certainly against the inclinations of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) - the High Command of the Armed Forces — into Mediterranean affairs, and these were to have a profound influence upon the conduct of the war. It is a surprising fact that the Axis powers had not held joint consultations on military co-operation and in the only discussions which were held before the outbreak of war the Italians had requested not to be asked to undertake hostilities until 1943, by which year they anticipated that the expansion and modernisation of their armed forces would have been completed. The German delegation agreed, for their country too was undergoing a modernisation and expansion programme which would not be finished until the same year. The OKW hoped, rather naively, that Hitler would not embroil Germany in a war until that year. Thus both Axis partners, unprepared for war, went into hostilities without having had an exchange of ideas and certainly without having had discussions on joint military strategy, planning, or co-operation.