The front at Gazala

In the first days of February 1942 Colonel General Erwin Rommel’s second offensive in Cyrenaica came to an end. General Neil Ritchie’s British Eighth Army, which a week earlier had given up Benghazi, was withdrawing eastwards through the Jebel Akhdar hills and the desert. On 1 February its columns were still on the move, followed only by weak German pursuit groups. By 4 February the British had occupied, and by 6 February had put in order, a position running from the coastal settlement of Ain el Gazala, some 60 km west of Tobruk, to the old fort and wells of Bir Hakeim (Bir al-Hakim) in the desert. The Axis forces halted several dozen kilometres further west. The front, which was not to move again until 26 May, froze for almost four months.

Three corrections

War chronologies record under 1 February that Rommel’s forces reached El Gazala in Libya, “near the Egyptian border”, and would remain there during a “winter lull”. This version needs three corrections. First, Rommel did not reach Gazala: it was the British line, and the Axis spearheads stopped in front of it, on a stretch from Timimi on the coast to Mechili deep in the desert. Second, Gazala is not near the Egyptian border. It was still more than 150 km from the Egyptian–Libyan border at Sollum, and between them lay Tobruk, still in British hands. Third, on 1 February the front had not yet settled: the Germans took Timimi on 3 February, and the two sides came to face each other between 4 and 6 February. The term “lull” is accurate only on land. At sea and in the air over Malta, the hardest phase of the struggle for supplies was being fought out at precisely this time.

Two further facts belong to this date. On 1 February Mussolini signed a directive which General Ettore Bastico passed on to Rommel on 4 February: supply by sea was extremely difficult, and the main task of the Axis forces remained the defence of Tripolitania. Some sources also date to 1 February Rommel’s promotion to Colonel General, which according to most accounts took place on 30 January.

Why Rommel stopped

Rommel wanted to go on. On 2 February he considered striking again, as the British seemed to him weak and disorganised, but his second offensive, begun on 21 January as a reconnaissance in force, had exhausted his supplies. Immediately after the capture of Benghazi the supply of ammunition failed, and there was barely enough fuel for local movements. From Tripoli, the Axis’s main port in Libya, to Timimi was some 1,400 km by road. Benghazi, though back in Axis hands, could take only part of the supplies, because the British had wrecked the port installations before leaving. The Italians did not want a further advance and insisted that Rommel should not move too far from Tripolitania. By mid-February Rommel had accepted that he would go no further for the time being, although – contrary to the letter of the directive from Rome – he left strong mobile units far to the east, in the area of Mechili and Temrad.

The British could not resume the attack either. Their supply line stretched from the Nile Delta through Mersa Matruh and Tobruk, and some of the stocks accumulated in Cyrenaica for a future offensive had fallen into enemy hands. In January and February, moreover, the Middle East was losing troops to the war with Japan: the 7th Armoured Brigade sailed for Burma, the 70th Division for India, and the Australian government was bringing its 6th and 7th Divisions home.

The Gazala Line

The position at Gazala had been chosen in the last days of January, when the commander of XIII Corps, Lieutenant General Alfred Godwin-Austen, persuaded Ritchie that the retreat had to be halted somewhere. On 2 February, however, Godwin-Austen himself asked to be relieved, and the corps was taken over by Lieutenant General William Gott. Under his command, in the weeks that followed, work began on turning the improvised line into a system of fortifications stretching some 70–80 km from the coast into the desert.

It was not a continuous line of trenches. The British built so-called boxes: all-round strongpoints held by an infantry brigade with artillery, surrounded by barbed wire and minefields and able to hold out for a time when encircled. Between them ran extensive minefields, steadily widened through the winter and spring, while the gaps between the boxes were watched by patrols. The north, through which ran the coast road to Tobruk, was held most strongly; here the 1st South African Division took up position, and in time the British 50th Division to the south of it. Behind the main line further boxes were built, among them at the crossroads known as Knightsbridge and at Acroma and El Adem, with the armoured divisions in reserve. The exposed southern flank was closed by the box at Bir Hakeim, which in mid-February was taken over by General Marie-Pierre Kœnig’s 1st Free French Brigade.

In those first weeks Poles, too, stood on the Gazala Line. Brigadier General Stanisław Kopański’s Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade, withdrawn from Mechili, took over on 4 February a sector in the hills it had captured in December during the pursuit of Rommel. It held it until mid-March, when it was moved to Egypt.

In the spring Eighth Army received new equipment: 6-pounder anti-tank guns, markedly more effective than the existing 2-pounders, and American M3 medium tanks delivered under Lend-Lease, known in their British version as the Grant, with a 75 mm gun. The line itself, however, as May was to show, had a serious flaw: it was designed for static defence, and its southern end could be turned through the open desert.

Malta and the race for supplies

Throughout the stalemate it was the Mediterranean that decided who would be ready to attack first. The loss of western Cyrenaica had deprived the British of the airfields from which convoys from Alexandria to Malta were covered. The effects were immediate. Convoy MW 9, which left Alexandria on 12 February, was attacked from the air on 14 February: the Clan Chattan caught fire and was sunk, the damaged Rowallan Castle was scuttled by her own side, and the Clan Campbell took refuge in Tobruk. None of the three ships reached Malta.

Meanwhile Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 continued from Sicily the raids that in January had already extended to the island’s airfields and reached their greatest intensity in March and April. For several months Malta was almost knocked out of the fight as a base for submarines and aircraft striking at Axis convoys, and supplies to the forces in Libya, some 50,000 tons in January, rose to an average of about 60,000 tons a month.

This success gave birth to a plan to take the island. The Italian high command, General Ugo Cavallero’s Comando Supremo, returned to old studies for a landing, named Operation C3; the Germans gave it the code name Herkules. Kesselring and the head of the Kriegsmarine, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, favoured a strike at Malta, and the airborne landing was to be prepared by General Kurt Student, the conqueror of Crete. At a meeting between Hitler and Mussolini on 29–30 April the order of events was settled: at the end of May Rommel would attack the Gazala Line and take Tobruk, then halt at the Egyptian border, and the air forces would be transferred for the landing on Malta, planned for July. Only then was the march on Egypt, later named Operation Aida, to follow.

Churchill presses Auchinleck

In London the stalemate at Gazala was met with growing impatience. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who in January had had to defend the government in the House of Commons and in February lived through the fall of Singapore, needed a victory and believed that only an offensive in Libya, the recovery of the Cyrenaican airfields and the relief of Malta could turn the tide in the Mediterranean. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, saw things differently. He believed that Eighth Army must first gain a clear superiority in tanks, that British equipment and the handling of armoured units were inferior to the German, and that he also had to watch the northern flank of his command in case the Germans broke through in Russia and advanced through the Caucasus towards Persia.

At the end of February Auchinleck warned London that Eighth Army would not be ready for an offensive before June. On 26 February Churchill accused him of a lack of offensive spirit, and at the beginning of March summoned him to London for consultations. Auchinleck refused, explaining that he could not leave his command. So on 20 March Sir Stafford Cripps, on his way to India, flew into Cairo together with the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Archibald Nye. Cripps afterwards assured Churchill of Auchinleck’s offensive intent, but the dispute dragged on until May. On 10 May Churchill sent a signal that was in effect an order: Eighth Army was to attack in such a way as to cover the June convoy to Malta. Malta, Churchill wrote at the time, was an island whose loss would be “a disaster of the first magnitude” for the British Empire and would probably, in the long run, decide the fate of the defence of the Nile Delta. Auchinleck gave way only on 19 May.

Place in the war

The four months of stalemate at Gazala decided who would strike the first blow. The British were preparing an offensive for June, but Rommel forestalled them. On 26 May 1942 Panzer Army Africa opened the Battle of Gazala: the German and Italian mobile divisions swung round the line from the south, the Free French held Bir Hakeim for two weeks, and in mid-June Eighth Army, beaten in successive engagements, abandoned its boxes. On 21 June Rommel took Tobruk and received his field marshal’s baton. Instead of halting at the border, as agreed in April, he persuaded Hitler to postpone the landing on Malta and let him pursue the British deep into Egypt. Operation Herkules was never carried out. The pursuit came to a halt in July at El Alamein, and a revived Malta again began sinking Axis convoys.

The stalemate of February 1942 was thus in essence a race: for fuel, for tanks and for command of the air over the central Mediterranean. In the spring the German-Italian side won it, thanks to the neutralisation of Malta, but Rommel’s victory at Gazala and his decision to march on Egypt meant that the island survived, while the Axis army came to a halt on the threshold of the Nile Delta at the end of a supply line even longer than the one that had stopped it near Timimi in February.