Lewin - The Life and Death of the Afrika Korps: A Biography

Ronald Lewin

The Life and Death of
THE AFRIKA KORPS

By the same author

ROMMEL AS MILITARY COMMANDER

MONTGOMERY AS MILITARY COMMANDER

CHURCHILL AS WAR LORD

MAN OF ARMOUR:
Lieut.-General Vyvyan Pope and
the development of armoured warfare

SLIM THE STANDARD-BEARER:
the official biography of
Field Marshal the Viscount Slim

FREEDOMS BATTLE:
the war on land 19391945 (Ed.)

Originally published in 1977 by B.T. Batsford Ltd
Published in 2003, in this format, by
P E N & S W O R D M I L I T A R Y C L A S S I C S
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Limited,
47, Church Street,
Barnsley,
S. Yorkshire,
S70 2AS

Ronald Lewin 1977, 2003

ISBN 0 85052 931 X

A CIP record for this book is
available from the British Library

Printed in England by
CPI UK

For
Major Ted Andrews

MAPS

The Author and Publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce the maps in this book: Major General J.M. Strawson, CB, OBE, for nos 1, 5, 6 and 8; General Sir William Jackson, GBE, KCB, MC, for nos 2a, 2b, 2c and 3; Field Marshall Sir Michael Carver, GCB, CBE, DSO, MC, for no 4. The maps are drawn by Arthur Banks except for nos 2 and 3 which are by Carolyn Metcalf-Gibson.

Some time in 1972 I received an unexpected letter from New Zealand. It came from a Major Ted Andrews, who had been reading with approval my Rommel as Military Commander. Rommel was no stranger to Major Andrews, who served with the famous New Zealand Division throughout the bad and the good days of the desert war. There was a natural pleasure in receiving a friendly signal from one who could judge out of hard experience.

But I was particularly interested to learn from Major Andrews that in the course of the campaign he had acquired a unique stock of photographs of the Afrika Korps. During the final advance westwards from El Alamein, at the point where Montgomery feared that Rommel would make a stand in the region of El Agheila, the New Zealand Division in one of its characteristic left hooks attempted to cut off the retreat of the Axis troops. While they were carrying out this manoeuvre Andrews and his men over-ran a German position, in which he came across a substantial quantity of undeveloped film. When he later obtained prints from the negatives he realised just what he had found.

He sent me the bulk of the collection which is now, with his approval, lodged in the Imperial War Museum. What struck me immediately was its authenticity. There are, of course, many photographs of the Afrika Korps, but a considerable portion perhaps particularly those of Rommel has a slightly staged air, like studio portraits. These new ones were natural most interestingly so because they tended to be concerned with the humdrum rather than the grandiose: with the domestic life of the Afrika Korps rather than with martial glory and themes for Dr Goebbels propaganda machine.

One saw the Afrika Korps behind the lines, en pantoufles: at sick-parade, at the canteen, using a makeshift shower, celebrating Christmas. And if there were shots of action they were cinma vrit, the casual transient moment caught by a man who (though not identified) may have been an amateur rather than one of the Propaganda Ministrys professionals. I found myself becoming grateful to Major Andrews for a most valuable reminder.

For what the photographs vividly brought home was the fact that at the time we tended to think of the Afrika Korps merely in terms of men in panzers, men behind the guns, men who laid minefields: belligerents. But here were images of a different way of life. In the 8th Army we created our own modus vivendi very like that of a well-knit family, with our own language, our own private jokes, our own idiosyncrasies. But here was another family living in the same neighbourhood, as it were, but with a style recognisably its own.

And this led me to observe that the Afrika Korps possessed not only the social characteristics of a family well adapted to its environment, as well as a passionate sense of self-identity, but also that inner unity, that cohesion of part with part, which makes such a smooth-functioning organism not only biologically but also militarily efficient. These were thoughts to carry further, and I am grateful to Major Andrews for having started me on my journey.

RONALD LEWIN

___________________________________________________________

German troops fighting shoulder to shoulder with our allies
in the Mediterranean must be conscious of their lofty
military and political mission.

Hitler, Conduct of German Troops in Italian
Theatres of War, 5 February 1941

The Afrika Korps was a child of chance. At no point before 1939 did Hitler contemplate fighting a colonial war even a war to recover Germanys lost colonies. It is true that the question of the colonies cropped up in negotiations with Britain, but in so far as the Fhrer hoped to regain them for the Reich he expected to do so as a result of bargaining or threats. Military planning was always restricted to a larger, European purpose which however one interprets its methodology and its time-scale consisted in separating Russia from the West, then overwhelming the West, then subduing Russia. Since the thinking of the German High Command was canalised in these continental directions, which were in any case traditional for the German armed forces, the consequence was that by 1940 the Wehrmacht possessed not a single unit specifically trained for an African campaign. No attention had been given to research and development of appropriate equipment. No war games or even more modest exercises had examined the tactical problems. The orientation, the training and the armament of the force that finally disembarked at Tripoli were entirely those of a formation designed for European conditions.

The British in North Africa, by contrast, were the heirs of many years experience. The techniques of moving modern formations and employing modern weapons in this difficult theatre had been studied and practised in one way or another since the First World War which in itself had supplied useful precedents, in Palestine for example; in the Duke of Westminsters operations against the Senussi: in T.E. Lawrences armoured cars; in the work of the Light Car Patrols between 1915 and 1918, which in their T model Fords identified and named many desert features and resulted, in 1919, in Report on the Military Geography of the North Western Desert of Egypt, by Captain Claud Williams, MC, of the Pembroke Yeomanry. Later, the extensive use of the armoured car for peace-keeping in the many overseas areas of British interest built up during the 20s and 30s a valuable expertise. Moreover, the permanent British presence in Egypt meant that units and commanders regularly acquired the habit, at however rudimentary a level, of manoeuvring in desert conditions. Reports were often filed on the viability or hazards of particular routes, and the performance of tanks and vehicles in a world of rock and sand. In particular, the Abyssinian crisis gave Britain coincidentally an opportunity denied to Germany, for the establishment of a Mobile Force at Mersa Matruh in 1936 an insurance against the Italians beyond the frontier was in fact the first operational assembly of a mobile task force with modern weapons prepared to fight in desert conditions. Much was learned, and it is significant that the chief units in this ad hoc combination later became the basis of the Desert Rats, 7 Armoured Division.