Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [115]
With Bir Hacheim secured and with his armor regrouped, while the British had frittered theirs away in piecemeal attacks on the Cauldron, Rommel was ready for the climax. On June 11 he broke through to the eastward. The British armor managed to hold him for two days while most of the infantry scooted out of their strongpoints, then the whole affair gathered momentum, and the pursuit dashed off to the eastward. Ritchie ended the battle losing more than 90 percent of his tanks. The Germans leaped forward and this time grabbed Tobruk before the British could organize it for a siege, gaining several thousand prisoners and immense amounts of stores. Hitler responded by promoting Rommel to field marshal, and it looked as if the end of the North African campaign were in sight.
As the British 8th Army streamed in disarray toward Alexandria, General Auchinleck moved in and took over the army command. His position was almost intolerable from several points of view. He was faced with disaster to his front, and to his rear, relations with Churchill were becoming increasingly acrimonious. Churchill constantly wanted to intervene in the course of the battle, he was the bane of his military advisors at home, and he was now falling out with Auchinleck as he had with Wavell; at one point he inspired an anguished Brooke to cry out, “I tell you you must either back your Commander-in-Chief or sack him!” and “to back him or sack him” became a constant problem. Just now Churchill would do neither the one nor the other.
In spite of this Auchinleck pulled the situation together. He slowed Rommel just across the frontier at Sollum, and more seriously with a stand at Mersa Matruh, and then stopped him definitively at El Alamein. The Germans had finally run out of steam, and the position stabilized at the end of June, with the British on a very strong line between El Alamein on the coast road and the Qattara Depression, a great impassable sinkhole thirty miles to the south. It was a far better anchor than Bir Hacheim, and they were safe for the moment. They were also a mere sixty miles from Alexandria.
Midsummer of 1942 brought alluring prospects for the Axis. For a few moments German troops gazed on the Caspian Sea, and at times it looked again as if Russia would collapse. Japanese carriers were raiding Ceylon, and Rommel was on the doorstep of the East. The situation has conjured retrospective visions of the three great Axis Powers meeting each other somewhere in the depths of south-central Asia. Such visions are of course but an illusion. The Japanese forays into the Indian Ocean were no more than diversions, the Russians recovered in the late summer, and Rommel never got past El Alamein. On a straight calculation of so much, energy, matériel, and manpower required per mile of conquest, the Axis simply did not have the goods. But that knowledge too is retrospective. At the moment, practically the whole world was locked in the throes of the greatest war ever seen, and the future boiled down to thousands of young men in cylinders in the sky, steel compartments in the sea, and holes in the ground.
For the British the supply buildup had to be done all over again. All the material so painfully shipped to Egypt, trucked and carted forward with such immense effort, was now being enjoyed by the Germans and the Italians. Once more the convoys made their way around the western hump of Africa, past the Cape of Good Hope—old Bartholomeu Diaz wanted to call it the Cape of Storms, but the fifteenth-century Portuguese had their public relations men too—up through the Red Sea, and into the teeming ports of Egypt. Malta was reinforced as well, the unsinkable aircraft carrier that became the single most-bombed target in the world, and every day the fighters and bombers sallied forth to harry