The Danger Zone (DZ)

The African campaign’s one of the most exciting of World War 2, even though it was just a side-show. It was on a small scale. So it’s easy to know the geography and the personalities. When you get to Russia the numbers and distances are so vast that it is nowhere as easy to get your heads around. In Rommel’s diary, of his experiences in World War 2, he gave his account about why he had failed in N...

Do you want to hear about the time when Adolf Hitler, the Führer, apologised to one of his generals? Tag words: Paul Carell; Foxes of the Desert; Field Marshall Erwin Rommel; Battle of El Alamein; Adolf Hitler; Führer; Panzerarmee Afrika; Field-Marshal Kesselring; James S Corum; Wolfram von Richthofen; Malta; Tobruk; Benghazi; Crete; General Auchinleck; Afrika Korps; General Jodl; Wolfsschanze; Wi...

Now I’ll tell you something that you might find hard to believe. Anti-Italian prejudices about their fighting spirit in North Africa abound, for people that know about the North African campaign, but it was the dogged fighting determination of the  Ariete  Division in early November 1942 that saved the  Panzerarmee Africa  possibly from annihilation. And this is a good time to tell you about Hitle...

By the time of the battles around El Alamein, July to August 1942, the best and newest Italian tanks, were woefully under gunned and under armoured compared to the new American made tanks that the British were getting. The Lee/Grant tanks first came into service in May 1942. By the time of the British Alamein offensive, those brand new 300 Sherman tanks that Marshall and Roosevelt had despatched t...

The fall of Tobruk to Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika was Rommel’s last absolute victory of the war. Certainly he would have great success in smashing the green American army at Kasserine Pass in 1943, but the split German command in Tunisia denied Rommel command of the 10th Panzer Division which might have allowed him to have delivered a major victory to the Axis.  So Tobruk was Rommel’s last undispu...

The big question now was, could Panzerarmée Afrika take Tobruk, that was something they had failed to do in 1941, and then, given its perilous petrol supplies and the distances that had to be covered to reach the Nile delta, how was it going to be possible to seize Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez Canal? From May 1942 things changed dramatically, and irreversibly, for the Italian armoured divisions...

Rommel was now ready to launch his 1942 summer offensive. The climax of the Third Reich was rapidly approaching. The Germans were fighting in the city of Stalingrad, its fall couldn’t be too far off. The Germans were advancing in the Caucasus with the Russian oil fields within reach. Maybe the German advance could continue through the Caucasus and link up with Rommel. He was about to unleash his t...

Italian battle honours in World War II. A contradiction in terms? Italian bravery. Italian tanks had 6 gears – 1 forward and 5 reverse. The Italian battle flag - a white lion rampant on a white background. But in this programme and a few of the following maybe, like me, you’re going to have second thoughts about these jokes that were and still are widely made at the expense of the Italians. In Eng...

When I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and even today, the contribution of the Italian armed forces in North Africa were/are the butt of many jokes. Nothing’s changed today as far as I can tell. But let me surprise you now with some of the remarkable feats of arms performed by the Italian armoured divisions serving under Rommel. Although it’s not part of the story of the supply nightmare that confront...

Rommel’s advance into Cyrenaica again in 1942 had once more stretched the ability of his quartermasters to keep him supplied. Martin Creveld, in his book,  Supplying War  says: On 9 February, 100 per cent supplies could no longer be guaranteed to the troops, and by the next day tactical developments had overtaken logistical possibilities to such an extent that, because of the enormous distances an...

Rommel’s silent preparations for an offensive had again caught the British completely by surprise. His new attack began on 21 January 1942. David Irving, in his book,  The Trail of the Fox  wrote: His enemy lacked battle experience. Rommel outwitted, outmaneuvered and outgunned them. "Our opponents have taken to their heels as if stung by a tarantula," he said in triumph. And Armbruster...

An Italian convoy to Tripoli to supply Rommel consisted of four merchant ships, escorted by four battleships, three light cruisers and twenty destroyers. That was 100,000 tons of warships escorting 20,000 tons of merchant ships. That’s what Rommel’s shipping supply lifeline needed. You have to ask the question: Was this sort of convoy escort sustainable? Tag words: Field Marshall Erwin Rommel; Deu...

Despite the apparent wisdom of the very limited scope of Rommel’s original role in North Africa, of stopping the British from conquering the Italian North African provinces, Rommel was the classic early war panzer commander. Nothing could tether him – nothing but the inevitable limitation of his logistics. They caught up with Guderian. And they caught up with Rommel. Tag words: Brendan Simms; Char...

If the Axis had taken Malta, would that have made it possible to Rommel to conquer Egypt and seize the Suez Canal? The answer will surprise you. What about Tobruk? If Rommel had taken it on his first offensive – would that have delivered the ultimate victory that he was seeking? Again, the answer’s not going to be what you expect. Tag words: Field Marshal Erwin Rommel; Malta; Tobruk; Martin Crevel...

Rommel had performed remarkably during the campaign in the West when the 7th Panzer Division that he led, moved at such lightning speed that the French called it  the Ghost Division . They never knew where it would appear next. The campaign in North Africa was actually uniquely different to anywhere that the Germans had waged war before. Rommel conducted himself with his usual drive and energy, bu...

Rommel arrived for the first time in North Africa when his plane touched down at noon on 12 February, 1941. At that time the Italians were still in full retreat toward Tripoli - the British hard on their heels. Rommel found the senior Italian officers and bureaucrats in Tripoli busy packing to catch whatever ship they could to get back to Italy and safety before the British arrived. There was defi...

Two of the great British military visionaries who contributed to the creation of modern armoured forces in World War II,  were JFC Fuller and Sir Basil Liddell Hart. Traditional conservative military types, not like the flamboyant, Hitler admiring David Irving. But both David Irving and Sir Basil Liddell Hart had spectacular falls – which I’ll talk about before Rommel fatally fired the starter gun...

Telling a real life story, like the story of Rommel and his campaigns in Libya and Egypt, is like a painting. What we the readers get to see depends on what the painter saw and how the painter interpreted what he saw – and whether the painter had an agenda. So the court painters of the 18thCentury were required to deliver portraits that their patrons wanted to see - flattering. The painter’s eye i...

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 o...

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 por...

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 Eg...

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, funni...

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 R...

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 th...

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 o...