It is arguable that the North African theatre, in its constant changes of fortune, was unlike any other during WW II. Both sides prolonged their campaigns there unintentionally, due to the demands of other theatres which were considered more important by their political masters—thus the British diverted forces to the Far East and Greece at crucial moments, as did the Germans to Russia. For both sides also, the campaign stressed the tensions of coalition warfare. The British effort from the start involved her whole empire, with South Africans, Indians, New Zealanders, and Australians fighting under British command, later joined by Free French and, after Operation TORCH in November 1942, Americans. The Germans had to contend with the wildly variable Italian army, and a highly political command structure based in Italy. As the Allied and Axis forces in North Africa relied on air cover to protect their Mediterranean shipping convoys and ground troops in the desert, at a strategic level joint co-operation was vital. The Allies eventually mastered this, but the Axis failed to effectively integrate an air campaign to support movement on the ground or across the Mediterranean.
With the Italian invasion from Libya eastwards into British-protected Egypt on 13 September 1940, the desert war began. The Italians halted at Sidi Barani after three days, establishing a series of colonial-type fortified camps which were too far apart to provide mutual assistance. Wavell's tiny Western Desert force of two divisions from Mersa Matruh counter-attacked on 9 December, and within two months—greatly to his surprise—pushed the Italians out of Egypt, and across Cyrenaica destroying 10 Italian divisions and taking 130, 000 prisoners, for a British loss of 2, 000 killed and wounded. Mussolini appealed to Hitler for help and a relatively unknown lieutenant general was despatched with two divisions to North Africa. Rommel's arrival in Tripoli on 12 February 1941 altered the course of the desert war. Without waiting to build up his forces, he attacked on 24 March, and over the next 30 days drove the British from El Agheila right back across Cyrenaica and into Egypt at the Halfaya Pass. The port of Benghazi fell on 4 April, but Rommel was unable to take Tobruk, which remained isolated 100 miles (161 km) behind the front, and whose continued resistance assumed a symbolic significance for the British when the war elsewhere was going appallingly. Rommel had actually been forced to pause before Tobruk due to petrol and other logistical shortages: such problems dogged the rest of his war in North Africa, and dominated the whole campaign over the waterless desert wastes for both sides. Wavell launched the unsuccessful Operation BATTLEAXE to relieve Tobruk in June, but by the time the British launched their next offensive, their commanders had changed. O'Connor, commanding the Western Desert Force, had been captured in April and was replaced by Cunningham (whose admiral brother commanded the RN Mediterranean fleet), whilst an impatient Churchill sacked the unfortunate Middle East commander, Wavell (who had also to contend with the abortive operations in Greece and Crete), replacing him with Auchinleck. With both sides reinforced, Cunningham's renamed Eighth Army struck back at Rommel's Afrika Korps on 18 November 1941 in Operation CRUSADER. The British outnumbered Rommel in CRUSADER, but individual German units within the Italo-German army were better led, and possessed much greater initiative and resourcefulness, with the result that the campaign subsided into a series of inconclusive battles between the Egyptian frontier and Tobruk. Whilst Rommel withdrew west all the way back to El Agheila, Cunningham was replaced by Ritchie.
With the arrival of fresh forces in Tripoli, Rommel immediately counter-attacked on 21 January 1942, retook Benghazi on the 29th, and in three weeks had rolled Ritchie's Eighth Army back east to Gazala, close to Tobruk. The British southern flank at Bir Hacheim was held by a Free French brigade under Koenig, which had fought its way up from Chad, and provided the first evidence that de Gaulle's Free French units could play a role in the war. Rommel again attacked at Gazala on 28 May, and with good Italian support eventually broke through after vicious fighting. Ritchie ordered a withdrawal into Egypt on 13 June, and on the 21st Tobruk fell, seeming to underline the British failure in North Africa. Churchill took the blow badly, whilst Rommel was rewarded with a field marshal's baton.
By this stage, Eighth Army morale was suspect, especially as regards the relationship between infantry and tank units, whilst reinforcements were being diverted to the Far East, and the logistical tail through the Mediterranean was under severe German and Italian air and U-boat attack. But Rommel, too, had outrun his lines of supply, and was surviving only on what had been captured in Benghazi and Tobruk. Auchinleck took the opportunity to remove Ritchie and assume command of the Eighth Army himself. However, he was still forced to retreat before Rommel, first at Mersa Matruh on 28 June, and thence on 7 July to a fortified line on the Alam Halfa ridge, between the railway station at Alamein and the Qattara depression 30 miles (48 km) to the south. The series of minor battles between the armies' arrival at Alam Halfa and 22 July, collectively known as first battle of Alamein, proved the exhaustion of both forces and Rommel's inability to advance further without substantial reinforcement. Consequently both sides paused, but now the British were able reinforce quicker, whilst Auchinleck was replaced by Alexander, and Gott was nominated to take over Eighth Army. The latter's death in a plane crash resulted in Montgomery assuming command of Eighth Army on 13 August. Rommel attacked the Alam Halfa ridge on 31 August, but was blocked from breaking through by 7th Armoured Division and, under aerial attack and short of fuel, withdrew. Rommel then departed for Germany with a catalogue of medical ailments, the result of exhaustion, whilst throughout September and October Montgomery built up an overwhelming force of tanks, artillery, and men. Second Alamein proved Montgomery's ability as a field commander, justified his elaborate and time-consuming logistic and deception plans, and was an important psychological blow both to Rommel (who quickly resumed command on 25 October), and to Berlin. As Alexandria lay only 60 miles (97 km) east of Alamein, Egypt and the Suez Canal had been in grave danger, but Montgomery's victory lifted this threat for good, and restored Eighth Army morale just when needed.
Although the British lost almost as many tanks as Panzer Army Africa, Rommel could not replace the losses he sustained at Alamein, and the TORCH landings at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers in French North Africa to his rear (which followed Montgomery's victory by a mere four days) altered completely the nature of the campaign (see North Africa campaign). By November 1942 Hitler was preoccupied exclusively with the struggle for Stalingrad which was nearing a climax, and the ‘stand-and-fight’ order issued to Rommel immediately after Alamein demonstrated Berlin's complete lack of understanding of the situation, or the nature of desert war. Rommel began his retreat on 4 November 1942 anyway. Thereafter his withdrawal westwards was swift, and Montgomery was slow to exploit the pursuit. Nevertheless by 17 December the Eighth Army had reached El Agheila, from whence Rommel had set out 21 months previously, in March 1941. The Axis supply base of Tripoli fell on 23 January 1943, and, although the port was partially wrecked, it started taking shipping within a week. Montgomery's logistics remained a nightmare, though, all the way into Tunisia, which he entered on 4 February, two days after Stalingrad fell.
In strategic terms the Western Desert campaigns were never going to affect the course of the war for either side. Both Hitler and Churchill realized this: the war would be decided by land battle in Europe and Russia. However, for the British the Western Desert battles initially provided cheap victories, when the news from elsewhere was grim, and were proof that Britain could hit back against the Axis. During 1941-2 when the commitment was greater, armed with ULTRA intercepts which indicated just how precarious Rommel's grip in the theatre was, the prospect of beating a high-profile German general provided the incentive to commit greater resources, which resulted in success at Alamein. As with many campaigns it was a combination of good intelligence work and the work of Bletchley Park that told against the Afrika Korps. For the Germans, North Africa was only ever a sideshow. Rommel never received the backing from Berlin in terms of resources that he really needed, and suffered from the continued interception of his supply convoys, courtesy of ULTRA. The defeat of Malta might well have altered this imbalance in his favour. Eventually, the eastern front absorbed German attention and resources and Rommel was effectively marginalized, leading to his inevitable defeat.
— Peter Caddick-Adams
