Codebreakers Victory (24 page)

Accompanying this failure was the generals' reluctance to break down the walls of interservice rivalries. Rommel excelled in combined operations, in which infantry supported tanks, artillery and antiaircraft units worked together and Luftwaffe planes were closely coordinated with ground forces. These tactics the British commanders were slow to adopt. Their units moved into battle splendidly independent of one another—and the Germans picked them to pieces.

So it was with Wavell's next big offensive, code-named Battleaxe. His multiple responsibilities as commander in chief of the entire Middle East kept him tethered in Cairo while his subordinate generals carried out his Battleaxe plans. They were no match for Rommel. Wavell came forward at the last minute to take control, but it was too late. His carefully amassed infantry battalions and armor had been shattered. The best he could do was keep the defeat from turning into a rout that would deliver Egypt into Rommel's hands.
      

In historians' eyes, Winston Churchill shared the onus for catastrophes in North Africa. Avid for victories that could strengthen world opinion about Britain's power to fight, and armed with BP decrypts that informed him of reinforcements headed for the Afrika Korps, he coerced his commanders into attacking before they were ready. Then, when the offensive stumbled, he peremptorily sacked his commander in chief and replaced him with another.

Having failed, in Churchill's estimation, to "save our situation in
Egypt
from the wreck" of Greece and Crete, Wavell was transferred to a less demanding post in India. Claude Auchinleck took over in Cairo. Although the Auk, too, was considered a sound leader, he had one crucial failing. He was a poor judge in choosing his frontline generals, and he was slow to remove them even when their deficiencies were glaring.

He withstood Churchill's impatience and reorganized what now became known as the Eighth Army. Freed from the threat of invasion as Hitler focused on his Russian offensive, Britain was pouring men, guns, armor and planes into North Africa in numbers that exceeded those going to the Afrika Korps. Auchinleck's field general, Alan Cunningham, should have had the edge when he attacked Rommel. But he made the same mistakes of sending his unescorted tanks against entrenched 88s and allowing infantry, armor, artillery and aircraft units to act too autonomously. The result was another disaster. The strain of command reduced Cunningham to a nervous wreck; he had to be relieved and sent to recuperate at a Cairo hospital. Auchinleck, like Wavell, hurried to the front, took over, held off another Rommel surge into Egypt and forced him to retreat—a narrow standoff victory for the Eighth Army.

The Auk did little better in his next choice of command, Neil Ritchie. In January 1942, when Rommel counterattacked and confronted Ritchie with the myriad decisions of combat, the new general went "all haywire," as one of his subordinates put it. Auchinleck flew in to stabilize the situation and stave off the Germans, but he left Ritchie in place.

The war settled into stalemate as each side prepared for new initiatives. It was the kind of seemingly stagnant situation Churchill couldn't abide. Relying strictly on the numbers of men and armor delivered to Auchinleck, he determined that the Eighth Army had a comfortable superiority that justitled an early offensive. What the prime minister overlooked was the operational capability of those numbers. Although the British were receiving a steady inflow of American-made Grant tanks that were more than a match for most of Rommel's armor, the machines had to be prepared for desert warfare, and the crews trained in their use. Similarly, the new infusions of troops and armor from distant comers of the Commonwealth had to be organized and trained. The Auk was diligently handling these preparations when he received Churchill's ultimatum: either attack by June or resign.

Ultra decrypts, however, told Auchinleck that the issue was to be taken out of his hands. Rommel had decided to attack late in May. Auchinleck advised Ritchie of two points where Rommel was most likely to strike and insisted that Ritchie position his two divisions of armor at those points. Ritchie ignored the advice. When Rommel drove forward, the British armor was dispersed, ready to be destroyed one unit at a time. When Ritchie tried to counterattack with what was left of his tanks, he sent them, unescorted, to be smashed by the 88s.

This time Rommel even took Tobruk—at the embarrassing moment when Churchill was meeting with Franklin Roosevelt and trying to convince FDR that Britain was not a lost cause.

Rushing forward once again, Auchinleck withdrew his battered army to Matruh. When the Afrika Korps also took that strongpoint, Rommel wrote to his wife, "We're already 60 miles to the east. Less than 100 miles to Alexandria." All that stood in his way were the remnants of the Eighth, which Auchinleck was reorganizing at El Alamein. Rommel stopped for twenty-four hours to prepare his next attack.

Auchinleck, however, did the better preparing. He studied the Ultra decrypts and learned where Rommel would strike. Dispensing with interservice noncooperation, he faced the Desert Fox with his own version of a combined force. When Rommel, having to operate with little benefit from signals intelligence, grouped his tanks for a frontal strike, he was met by Auchinleck's massed artillery. Knowing that his adversary was starving for reinforcements of German troops and having to depend on Italian divisions, the Auk chose the Italian sector for his counterattack. His coordinated infantry and armor fell on the Italians and routed them.

Correlli Barnett, historian and author of
The Desert Generals,
has claimed that July 2, 1942, was the pivotal moment of the war in North Africa. On that day Auchinleck stopped Rommel, and on the days following he forced the German to change from an offensive into a defensive frame of mind. In the First Battle of El Alamein, Auchinleck turned back the last great Nazi thrust to conquer Egypt.

For Churchill, however, the Auk's effort was too little too late. He sacked Auchinleck and brought in Harold Alexander to be his Middle East chief of staff. Bernard Montgomery became the new commander of the Eighth Army.

 

 

Monty: Sigint Helps Make a Hero

 

Assigned to take over in North Africa in mid-August 1942, Alexander and Montgomery benefited from impeccable timing. Allied strength in the theater was on a mighty upsurge while Rommel's was in swift decline.

By then, U.S. war production had shifted into high gear. The supply of Grant tanks to Egypt was being supplemented by the arrival of thirty-six-ton but swift-moving Shermans whose 75-millimeter guns were, unlike the fixed weapons of the Grants, mounted on power-driven turrets. Britain was pouring reinforcements into the Eighth Army. By the time Montgomery was ready to go on the offensive, he had almost a two-to-one superiority over Rommel in men, tanks, antitank guns and artillery. In the air, the Royal Air Force was dominant over the Luftwaffe. Nor did Montgomery have any lack of gasoline to power his vast machine.

Monty profited from another tremendous advantage: Bletchley Park was breaking the ciphers Rommel most depended on. Four days after Montgomery took command, the complete details of Rommel's order of battle were handed to him. In his
Memoirs,
published well before the Ultra secrets were made public, Monty made much of his "intuition" for directing the winning moves in combat, intimating that his genius alone had crushed Rommel in North Africa. His chief intelligence officer's reply was, "Montgomery won his first battle by believing the intelligence with which he was furnished."

Montgomery's critics also point out that he exaggerated the poor state of affairs in the desert before he took over. His picture of the Eighth Army under Auchinleck was one of incompetence and ruin. He told Churchill, and repeated in his autobiography, the untruth that the Auk was ready to give up El Alamein and retreat to the delta if Rommel launched another attack in strength.

The more accurate description is that Auchinleck bequeathed to him a veteran staff settling down after their first defeat of Rommel to develop plans for a new attack. Their ideas formed the basis for Montgomery's self-touted "Master Plan."

Monty's many detractors, though, can't deny that he was a leader who inspired confidence and respect in his men. Dressed casually in a pullover sweater and the medallion-decorated beret that became his trademark, he went into the front lines to have tea with his troops, give them pep talks and exude a sense of sureness that the Goddess of Victory, not to mention the God in heaven, were on his side. His intelligence officer Edgar Williams's reaction after hearing Monty's first address to his headquarters staff was, "Thank God this chap has got a grip." Staffer William Mather told Monty's biographer Nigel Hamilton in an interview, "Monty absolutely deserves all the credit he could get for the way he changed us. I mean, we were different people. We suddenly had a spring in our step."

British codebreakers were doing him another service. Daily they were breaking some two thousand Hagelin-encoded Italian messages, many of them relating to shipments to Rommel. Decrypts of German air force and Fish signals were rising toward ninety thousand a month. All of these inside glimpses, put together, were providing so complete a picture of Axis shipping plans that Britain's Mediterranean forces were able to pick and choose which transports would go through—those with supplies for British POWs, for example—and which ones, especially the tankers carrying gasoline to Rommel, would be sunk. As Monty was preparing his El Alamein offensive, the Royal Navy and Air Force were sinking more than forty-five percent of the shipping meant to supply the Afrika Korps.

The British were careful, in carrying out this ravaging of the Axis marine, to preserve the security of Ultra. When decrypts specified the course of an Axis transport, an RAF reconnaissance plane would take off from Malta and seem, as merely part of a routine patrol, to happen upon the vessel. Meanwhile, a Malta-based submarine or bomber would already be on its way to intercept the ship. As Hinsley recalled the results in a 1996 reminiscence, "The Germans and the Italians assumed that we had 400 submarines whereas we had 25. And they assumed that we had a huge reconnaissance airforce on Malta, whereas we had three aeroplanes!"

A man with the sharp intelligence of Albert Kesselring, Hitler's commander in chief in Italy, was suspicious of the "extraordinary losses incurred during sea transport." He "suspected that the times of our convoy sailings were betrayed." But instead of questioning broken codes, he blamed the sinkings on "the efficiency and wide ramifications of the enemy system of sabotage."

The results for Rommel were catastrophic. He faced the Eighth Army short of ammunition, with rations for his troops at a low level, and so deprived of gasoline that he was robbed of freedom of movement. As he commented in
The Rommel Papers,
which his wife and son put together after his death, "The battle is fought and decided by the Quartermasters before the shooting begins." He leaves no doubt that with adequate supplies, including a sufficient tonnage of gasoline, he could still have defeated an enemy that was "operating with astonishing hesitancy and caution." As it was, El Alamein became, as he entitled one of his chapters, the "Battle Without Hope."

Added to his troubles was his vulnerability to the sort of deception he had earlier used against the British. Wanting Rommel to believe Eighth Army forces were being built up in the south, Montgomery ordered the creation of dummy battalions, with fake tanks, bogus artillery and troop simulations that went so far as to have balloon soldiers sitting on inflatable latrines. A masterstroke was a mock water pipeline made up of discarded gasoline cans. It was left unfinished to fool the Germans into believing the attack would not come until the line was completed.

Rommel, a sick man, lulled by Monty's trickery, had actually returned to Germany for treatment when the Eighth Army struck. His second-in-command, fat General Georg Stumme, trying to cope with the complexities of combat, died of a heart attack. Healthy or not, Rommel flew back to resume command.

Montgomery's critics can't deny that he divined the most likely point of Rommel's attack: the Alam al-Halfa ridge. He prepared to meet and destroy Rommel's armor there. Four days after he'd made this decision, Ultra decrypts confirmed that a thrust against the ridge was exactly what Rommel intended. Monty's acute military analysis, backed by the codebreakers, gave him the victory in the defensive phase of El Alamein.

When the Eighth Army went on the offensive, however, Montgomery's Master Plan turned out to have serious flaws. Needing to break through in-depth minefields, Monty planned to have sappers clear a narrow channel through which his infantry and armored divisions would pour during the first hours of the offensive. The plan went awry when the minefields proved to be a tougher, more time-consuming problem than he'd anticipated. His infantry and armor had to wait until a defile was cleared. Then the mass of troops and tanks trying to crowd through it created confusion, causing further delays and heavy losses. He had, in effect, to throw away his Master Plan and improvise his further moves, but he did this with calm authority and, in the end, carried the day.

Rommel, his armor all but immobilized by lack of fuel, had no choice but to concentrate on evacuating his armies to avoid annihilation.

Here that "astonishing hesitancy and caution" he had observed of Montgomery came to Rommel's rescue. To the amazement and dismay of the onlookers at Bletchley Park, Montgomery made no move for three days after Rommel had started his retreat. He seemed so dazzled by his victory that he could not bring himself to order the end runs that could have trapped the exhausted, near-helpless Afrika Korps, and send them into prisoner-of-war camps. In his memoir Monty blamed heavy rains for his failure to overtake Rommel, even though the rains did not begin until after those first three days of idleness. However it was, the Afrika Korps kept ahead of belated British sorties and reached Tripoli. They were headed there at the time of Anglo-American landings in French North Africa and were available to continue the war in North Africa for four more months of brutal fighting.