World War 2
North African Battle
For three years after the fall of France, the only theatre in which the ground forces of the Western Allies were able to come to grips with the Axis Powers were in North Africa. Commanders in the Western Desert of Egypt and Libya were as much prisoners of geography and climate as their counterparts on the Eastern Front.
The Western Desert was an arid waste yielding nothing. Over long stretches, the landward edge of the coastal plain was bounded by high ground or a steep depression which confined the movement of armies to a narrow 40-mile strip. The war in North Africa was characterized by a series of advances and retreats along this 1'200-mile-long strip, stretching from Tripoli in the west to Alexandra in the east, along which a chain of small ports were the only points of military value. The war took the form of dashes from one point of maritime supply to the next, with the aim of depriving the enemy of water, fuel, ammunition, food, and reinforcements which, in that order, were the essentials of desert warfare.
The desert might seem a clean environment for warfare, but it was a cruel one for the men who fought in it. They endured intense heat throughout the days, and freezing temperatures at nights, thay had to endure sand flies, grit, sweat-soaked clothing and nasty desert sores. A shower of rain could turn the desert sands into the consistancy of mud as deep and as treturos clingy as any on the Eastern Front.
A knocked-out German Mk3 tank is captured on the 29th of October - a week into the second Battle of El Alamein, the decisive battle of the Desert War. The British victory was qualified by a slow pursuit of the retreating Germans, hampered by heavy rain, fuel shortages and Montgomery's characteristic caution
In 1940 the British had things their own way in North Africa. Italy had declared war on Britain on the 10th of June 1940, and in September launched a ponderous offensive into Egypt from its North African colony in Libya. Although heavily outnumbered, the British fought a brilliant campaign to drive the Italians back some 500 miles to Benghazi.
The situation underwent a rapid change in February 1941 with the arrival of the German Afrika Korps commanded by General Erwin Rommel. His brilliant handling of armour and tactic of drawing British tanks on to his formidable 88mm anti-tank guns made him a constant threat until, starved of supplies, he was bludgeoned into defeat by General Montgomery at the second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942.
The second Battle of El Alamein was a bitter slogging match which opened on the 23rd of October 1942 by a massive bombardment from 800 British guns. The commander of the British Eighth Army; General Montgomery, enjoyed a big material advantage over his Axis opponents, and by the evening of the 3rd of November had reduced the German Afrika Korps to only 30 operational tanks. Shortly before dawn on the 4th of November Rommel began the long withdrawal of German troops into Tunisia.
Rommel's defeat was secured by the virtual strangling of the Axis supply lines across the Mediterranean and the superiority in quantities in materials which the British Eighth Army was able to achieve by the autumn of 1942. Rommel's difficulties were all the more, by the fact that, in Hitler's eyes, the North African campaign was always a sideshow. Nevertheless, it was not until May 1943 that the German and Italian forces in North Africa surrendered, a process hastened by the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942.