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By Root 987 0

but the status of hero was accorded him by the British fairly early in the war. Much of this arose from the conditions of the war in the African desert. In peculiar ways it was a “pure” war, with both sides facing exactly the same problems of supply and local conditions, and with no civilians around to clutter up the battlefield. The armies went back and forth, back and forth, repetitiously over the same country, until it became familiar, and for all its harshness, almost friendly. It was a private war, fought, though that now seems either absurd or hopelessly romantic, without rancor, and both sides behaved with occasional touches of chivalry that at a later stage of the war would seem unthinkable. When they are not actively killing each other, soldiers have to live like other people, and it was not uncommon for patrols to share each others’ waterholes and even gas or rations once in a while.

The desert war was in many senses a naval war, and that accounts in good measure for its repetitive quality. Equally hostile to both sides, the terrain provided nothing. Everything to sustain life and war had to be brought in from the outside world and then had to be carried forward to the fighting front. The crucial aspect of the campaign was logistics. How far forward could you place your main supply points, and how much of your matériel would you have to devote to supply and sustenance? The main Axis supply port was Tripoli, but they could possibly leapfrog forward to the ports of Benghazi or even Tobruk. To go any farther would bring them under the British air control reaching out from Alexandria, so as they approached the Egyptian frontier their supply line necessarily got longer and in itself consumed more material. The main British port was Alexandria, but they could conceivably jump forward to Tobruk or even Benghazi. To go any farther than that put them under the Axis air umbrella, so as they got out past Benghazi to the Gulf of Sirte and El Agheila, their logistics problem too became insurmountable. The reasonable area for the fighting thus fell in Cyrenaica, roughly between El Agheila at the bottom of the Gulf of Sirte and Sidi Barrani, just past the Egyptian frontier. Depending upon whose supplies were coming in more frequently, the war swung back and forth across Cyrenaica like a pendulum.

When Wavell had been ordered to break off his operations in the Western Desert and go to the aid of Greece, he left only a small force out in Cyrenaica. In March of 1941, Luftwaffe units operating out of Sicily neutralized the port of Benghazi. Meanwhile, Hitler had offered Mussolini two divisions for Africa, commanded by Rommel, who had won laurels in France. Rommel arrived in March with orders to stand strictly on the defensive, and not make trouble for his superiors. Late in the month he launched a heavy raid against the advanced British post at El Agheila; the British fell back. Always one to exploit success, Rommel pushed on. The British fell back again. Early in April he captured Benghazi, and kept on going. Most of the British armored brigade was wiped out, and General O’Connor was captured. By the second week in April, Rommel was all the way to the frontier, regaining everything the Italians had lost the winter before. The British in Egypt, with most of their combat troops in Greece, were thoroughly scared by this turn of events; ironically, so was the German high command, which was distressed to find its field commander so cavalierly disobeying his orders.

The British had managed to build up a perimeter around the Libyan port of Tobruk, and Rommel attacked that on April 10, but was repulsed; gradually strengthened, Tobruk withstood an eight months’ siege and became a perpetual thorn in the Axis’ side. Meanwhile, Wavell was pressed by Churchill to regain the lost ground. In June, the British launched an ill-prepared counteroffensive that broke down with heavy losses. The Germans brought their big anti-tank guns right up alongside their tanks and knocked out the British armor piecemeal. Wavell, forced into the attack by Churchill