Great Britain. Army. Middle East Forces - Operations in North Africa and the Middle East 1939-1942

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
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Copyright John Grehan and Martin Mace, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-78346-217-9
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Contents

List of Plates

Introduction

The Middle East Command was formed under General Sir Archibald Wavell in August 1939, having under its control the British and Commonwealth troops in Egypt, Palestine, Sudan, Cyprus, Kenya and, at the start of 1940, British Somaliland. At the outbreak of war the entire command, spread across all these countries, consisted of just twenty-one battalions of infantry with only sixty-four field guns. Reinforcements were received from as early as September 1939, and were continually added to, and these came predominantly from India, Australia and New Zealand, as well as Rhodesia, South Africa and even Malta, Mauritius and Poland. It was truly a multi-national force that had been assembled and was as prepared as could be when Italy declared war on France and Britain in June 1940 and the fighting in the Middle East began.

What Wavells mixed force faced were 215,000 Italian troops in Libya and over 200,000 in Italian East Africa. Though considerably outnumbered, Wavell immediately went onto the offensive, sending raids into Libya. Nevertheless, the Italians gradually built up their strength on the Libya-Egyptian frontier and launched an assault across the border. This assault was beaten off at the cost of just 150 men; the Italians suffering around 3,500 casualties.

These operations are described in Wavells first despatch as are those of General Platt in the Sudan. In this despatch Wavell refers to operations in British Somaliland which are covered in our volume on that theatre of war.

His second despatch deals exclusively with operations in the Western Desert. This saw his so-called Army of the Nile defeat the Italians at the Battle of Sidi Barrani and capture of the small port of Bardia and then of the more important port of Tobruk. Wavell followed this up with the almost total destruction of the enemy forces. During the two months from 7 December to 7 February 1940, Wavells men had advanced 500 miles. They had beaten and destroyed an Italian army of four Corps comprising nine divisions and part of a tenth, and had captured an astonishing 130,000 prisoners, 400 tanks and 1,290 guns, as well as vast quantities of other war material. In these operations Wavell never employed a larger force than two divisions, of which one was armoured.

Wavells third despatch deals with the British support for Greece and the defence and withdrawal from Crete. Despite Wavells well-known objection at having been forced to halt his offensive against the Italians in order to send troops to Greece, he later concedes that The losses inflicted on the enemy in Crete undoubtedly saved the general position in the Middle East by destroying the greater part of the enemys air-borne troops and a very large number of his aircraft.

During the period covered in this, his final despatch from the Middle East, Wavells Middle East Command was involved in six major operations in Greece, Cyrenaica (Libya), Crete, Iraq, Syria, and in Italian East Africa. As Wavell points out the theatres of these operations were several hundreds of miles apart and in some instances well over a thousand miles.

Because he had halted his offensive in Libya to send troops to Greece, the Italians, having been joined by Rommel and the Afrika Korps, had pushed the Western Desert Force back to the Egyptian border, leaving the key port of Tobruk surrounded and besieged by the Axis forces. This disappointed Churchill who decided to replace Wavell with General Claude Auchinleck who had previously held India Command.

Wavell had actually performed well and this was acknowledged by Auchinleck: In no sense do I wish to infer [sic] that I found an unsatisfactory situation on my arrival far from it. Not only was I greatly impressed by the solid foundations laid by my predecessor, but I was also able the better to appreciate the vastness of the problems with which he had been confronted and the greatness of his achievements, in a command in which some 40 different languages are spoken by the British and Allied Forces. In reality the two men simply swapped jobs as Wavell was appointed to Auchinlecks previous Indian Command.

One of the first problems that Auchinleck had to deal with was the conclusion of the operation to occupy Lebanon and Syria by the combined Anglo-Free French forces. De Gaulle wanted complete control over the former French Protectorate but, in view of the Free Frenchs limited military capacity this was impractical. Fortunately, after discussions with de Gaulle in Cairo, it was agreed that the Free French would take over the civil administration but that all Free French military forces would come under Middle East Command.

The next issue Auchinleck had to resolve was the situation in Iraq where anti-British sentiment was growing. It was decided that it was necessary to expel the Germans in that country and oust the nationalists that were opposed to Britain. This was accomplished along with Soviet troops entering Iraq from the north.

Auchinlecks main area of concern was, of course, with the Axis forces under Rommel and the siege of Tobruk. How Auchinleck intended to deal with the Germans and Italians was spelt out in a document issued to his corps commanders entitled Policy covering the defence of the Western Desert. This is reproduced as an appendix to the despatch. Auchinleck optimistically saw that the Axis forces could be held and that as more tanks were delivered to him he could move onto the offensive. In this respect, it was the relief of the garrison at Tobruk that was his principal objective. Those operations against the Axis forces in Libya form part of Auchinleks second despatch.

He believed that by the end of October, 1941, the land forces under his Command were strong enough and sufficiently well-equipped to warrant making an attack. However, he lacked the aerial support to make this possible which necessitated drawing together practically all the available air forces under his command, thus leaving Syria, Palestine and Cyprus unprotected. To help understand the situation in which he was placed, Auchinlek provides the Order of Battle for his entire command.

Auchinlek aimed to occupy the whole of Libya, firstly by trapping and destroying the Axis forces in Eastern Cyrenaica. This having been achieved he would then attempt to drive what remained of the enemy forces out of Tripolitania. The success of the second stage depended on how well he was able to overcome the difficulty of supplying his forces over such great distances.