The Danger Zone (DZ)

Rommel’s nickname, picked up at some time during the desert campaigns he conducted, was the Desert Fox. But his first African offensive, begun in March 1941, he appeared to be more the hound than the fox.

Rommel was quite the remarkable man. A good place to get a feel for Rommel is the opening chapter of David Irving’s biography of him - The Trail of the Fox.

Tag words: David Irving; The Trail of the Fox; Field Marshall Erwin Rommel; Desert Fox; Infantry Attacks; Bernard Montgomery; Dwight Eisenhower; General Sir Claude Auchinleck; General Enno von Rintelen; General Gerhard von Schwerin; Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt; General Heinz Guderian;

Saving Mussolini from the consequences of the loss of the last remaining Italian colonies in Africa was the purpose of the despatch of Rommel with a single division, the 5th Light Division, in early 1941.

The logistical consequences of Rommel launching a major offensive would be to overstretch the capacity of the Italians to be able to supply their forces and the German forces through the main port of Tripoli. Benghazi and Tobruk also had some capacity too. If they were available, they would enable the supply of the Axis armed forces in North Africa to be improved, but both of those ports were vulnerable to air attack by the Royal Air Force – more vulnerable than Tripoli.

What follows is what Adolf Hitler and the German High Command at first expected of Rommel – which grew into something bigger than the German High Command liked.

Tag words: Benito Mussolini; 5th Light Division; Field Marshall Erwin Rommel; Royal Air Force; Adolf Hitler; Operation Felix; Operation Sealion; Operation Attila; Operation Marita; David Irving; The Trail of the Fox; War Directive 22; Afrika Korps; 15th Panzer Division; Erich von Manstein; X Luftwaffe Korps; Marshal Graziani; General Gariboldi;

Despite the fact that modern armies are maintained by sophisticated logistic support, that should be delivering everything to them that they needed to fight, to advance, if they were the army on the offensive, or to hold their ground or retreat, if they were on the defensive, even modern armies still live off the land to some extent.

But not the armies fighting in North Africa (in Cyrenaica and Egypt). The only thing that was found in abundance there was camel dung. A modern mobile army can fight for a short time without food or water, but its virtually useless without fuel and ammunition. Logistics are vital.

The distances to be travelled in North Africa made even the distances on the Russian front look small.

Tag words: North Africa; Cyrenaica; Lilli Marlen; Rommel; Malta; Via Balbia; General Ritter von Thoma; Ariete armoured division; General Archibald Wavell; Fascists; Adolf Hitler; Führer; BenitoMussolini; Tripoli; Benghazi; Tobruk; General Enno von Rintelen; 5th Light Division; 15th Panzer Division; Deutsches Afrika Korps; Africa Corp; Vichy France; Admiral Darlan; Mers-el-Kébir; War Directive No.22;

In 2012 a movie called Iron Sky was released. It tells the true story, well the complete fiction, of how, in the dying days of World War 2, the Nazis fled to the far side of the moon and established a base there where they could safely stay until the time was ripe to bring the Fourth Reich back to earth - this time succeed where the Third Reich had failed before.

The landscape on the moon, funnily enough, was perhaps an easier landscape than what General (Later Field Marshall) Rommel was to find himself fighting over for about 2 years between 1941 and 1943 – the desert of North Africa. 

Rommel had proven himself a remarkably bold panzer commander, a natural master of the new style of war known as Blitzkrieg when in France in 1940 he commanded the 7th Panzer Division, named by his French adversaries the Ghost Division because they never knew where or when it would appear. Season 59, Parts 10 to 13 on my Danger Zone podcast tells that story.

But the challenges of fighting in the desert of North Africa proved much more akin to fighting on the moon – only worse. Well not worse, but challenging. In fact, in this series of programmes I look at whether it was even going to be possible for Rommel to win his North African campaign with his legendary Deutsche Afrika Korp and his much, and often unfairly maligned Italian allies.

Tag words: Martin van Creveld; Supplying War; Dick Taylor; The Second World War Tank Crisis; Iron Sky; General Rommel; Field Marshall Rommel; North Africa; Libya; Cyrenaica; Western Desert; 7thPanzer Division; Deutsche Afrika Korp; Africa Corp; Blitzkrieg; Qattara Depression; Ice Cold in Alex; Mungo Melvin; Hannibal; Cannae; Franz von Halder; Graziani; Sidi Barani;

In Antony Beevor’s book, The Battle for Spain, he writes of Germany’s, perhaps the world’s, top tactical air force commander, Wolfram von Richthofen in these terms:

Richthofen, a cousin of the famous Red Baron air ace, was a hard, arrogant man, disliked by German and Spanish officers alike. He was to become infamous as the destroyer of many towns and cities: Durango and Guernica in Spain, then Rotterdam, Belgrade, Canea and Heraklion in Crete, followed by many cities in the Soviet Union, most notably of all, Stalingrad, where 40,000 civilians were killed.

I get the feeling that Antony Beevor almost has a personal hatred of Wolfram von Richthofen – perhaps because he sees him as the man who came up with the concept of terror bombing. Beevor left out of his list one of von Richthofen’s most famous city bombing raids, Warsaw, perhaps the first raid described as a terror bombing in World War II. At the time, the bombing of Warsaw was classified as a terror bombing.

Were these attacks terror bombings or were they something else?

Tag words: Antony Beevor; The Battle for Spain; Wolfram von Richthofen; Warsaw Uprising; James S. Corum; Junkers Ju 52; Douglas C-47; Douglas DC 3; Communism; Nazism; Stalingrad; Bombing of Dresden; Bombingof Hamburg; Josef Goebbels; Vasily Grossman; A Writer at War;

The lies told by the Republican forces to the media after the bombing of Guernica on 26 April 1938 caused World War II in Europe. Proving the old saying Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

And now I’ll tell you why that happened.

Tag words: Guernica; Malcolm Gladwell; World War II; Antony Beevor; Wolfram von Richthofen; David & Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants; HG Wells; The Shape of Things to Come; Things to Come; Basque; James Corum; Condor Legion; Bombing of Hamburg; bombing of Dresden; Munich Crisis; Herman Göring; Adolf Hitler; Pablo Picasso;

When von Richthofen ordered, and had carried out, the bombing of Guernica, he knew what he wanted from the bombing. It wasn’t to terrorise his opponents, the Republicans, or the people of Basque, or even just the people of Guernica. What he wanted to do was to block the roads through the town so that when the Nationalist Army attacked, soon after the bombing raid, the 23 Basque battalions, whose only escape route was through Guernica and over its bridge, would be destroyed. Did he get what he wanted?

The world wrongly came to believe that his aim was to inflict mind numbing terror on his opponents. Why did the world think that?

Tag words: Antony Beevor; Wolfram von Richthofen; Basque; Guernica; Condor Legion; Spanish Civil War; Eric Blair; George Orwell; Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty Four; Homage to Catalonia; Victor Gollancz; Graham Greene; The Quiet American; José Antonio Aguirre;

The bombing of Guernica in Spain by the German Condor Legion, on 26 April 1937, was one of the first uses of modern aircraft to bomb a town. The bombing of Guernica captured the world’s imagination.

The headline of The New York Times the next day clumsily covered what had happened. Perhaps there were no words then for what the German Condor Legion had done. Journalist G.L. Steer struggled to do the impossible, to describe to his readers something that no one had ever seen before and perhaps their imaginations would run riot. His headline, in many ways tells it all.

Historic Basque Town Wiped Out; Rebel Fliers Machine-Gun Civilians

Waves of German-Type Planes Fling Thousands of Bombs and Incendiary Projectiles on Guernica, BehindLines, as Priests Bless Peasants Filling Town on Market Day

G.L. Steer saw, arriving the day after the air raid, had the events described to him by the survivors, and clearly people from the Republican propaganda ministry, judging from the whoppers that were contained in his news report. Luckily, or probably not, I live in a world where those sites are common place. Let me tell you what happened leading up to that day, and on that day.

Tag words: Antony Beevor; James S Corum; Pablo Picasso; Condor Legion; Guernica; Spanish Civil War; Wolfram von Richthofen; Nationalists; Republicans; Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land; Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War;Heinkel 111; Francisco Franco; Savoia Marchetti SM-79 bombers;