The Danger Zone (DZ)

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...

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...

26 April 1937 is a fateful day for the Spanish Republicans, the Spanish Nationalists. The Germans and the whole world really.  The German Condor Legion was the away team of the Luftwaffe (Hitler didn’t want to be seen as getting involved in a war in Europe). It led by Hugo Sperrle and his chief of staff was Wolfram von Richthofen. Von Richthofen was the highly controversial cousin of the most famo...

That well known left newspaper, the Guardian, used a word normally forbidden in its pages. The word’s a Christian word. Especially known to be associated with Jesus Christ. That word is miracle. But the story of what happened at Dunkirk forced the hand of the reviewer Mark Kermode, in his review of Christopher Nolan’s 2017 movie  Dunkirk . The reviewer tells us: Intertitles tell us that British an...

Over the previous 22 programmes I’ve covered the amazing campaign launched by Germany against France. It produced Germany’s most spectacular victory of World War II. From my analysis it could have led to Hitler winning World War II, as William Shakespeare put it, as surely as night follows day. Karl-Heinz Freiser, at the end of the previous part, took the view that Germany could never have won Wor...

It had been 786 days from the time of Guderian’s meeting with Erich von Manstein in October 1939 about Manstein’s incredible plan of how to exploit to the full the potential of the panzers, to the Fall of France, with the greatest military power in the world smashed in a matter of days, using the unplanned tactics for fighting the blitzkrieg that Manstein had conceived, which succeeded brilliantly...

On 20th December 1941, at the Wolfschanze, the 5 hour meeting between Hitler and Guderian began. The belief at all times in the Third Reich, when things were going badly, was almost always put down to decisions or actions taken by people surrounding Hitler. If only Hitler knew truth he would put things right. Guderian in his memoirs repeats this view, while taking a dig at the creature comforts en...

Guderian had been headstrong as a victorious panzer commander leading the charge across France from the Ardennes to the English Channel. The next year he had been the same in leading the charge into Russia. But was Guderian, now having failed to bring the Russian blitzkrieg to a successful conclusion, still that same man? The failure to take Moscow in December, partly caused because the Germans we...

Adolf Hitler said to his generals of the invasion of Russia:   We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down. When I first heard that I thought what a boastful little dick. But now that I’ve looked closely at what happened during the Blitzkrieg invasion of France, maybe he wasn’t. So let’s join Hitler’s top panzer general, one of the geniuses behind the ca...

Assuming that Britain had come to terms with Germany in May or June 1940, after the loss of its Army, failing to escape from Dunkirk, and wondering if America would have continued to provide lend lease aid to the Soviet Union alone, and if it did, could the Soviet Union have survived the German Blitzkrieg unleashed on it on 22 June 1941 or more likely earlier. Let’s have a look at the evidence. Ta...

In my last programme I looked at what Britain would do if the miracle of Dunkirk hadn’t happened. I concluded that Britain would most likely have come to terms with Hitler. Probably some time in June 1940.  In just 12 months time, at the latest on 22 June, 1941, although probably much earlier without England involved in the war any longer, Hitler would turn on Russia. British Historian, Alistair H...