Section 4: Conclusion; supply and operations in Africa
Main purpose:
This section summarizes logistics in Rommel’s North African campaigns. It consists mostly of Van Creveld using statistics to dismiss claims made by other writers, especially by a bitter and defeated Rommel, that Rommel’s failure was all everybody else’s fault.Questions you may need to answer before reading:
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Summary:
Van Creveld starts with the aftermath of Rommel’s failure. Hitler desperately poured forces and resources on Tunisia, trying to prevent a total defeat in Africa. Rommel whined that if he’d only been supported with a fraction of what Hitler put into Tunisia, he could have easily beaten the British. Van Creveld rejects this by showing that the ability to put all these forces into Tunisia was only a result of developments that came after Rommel’s defeat (the seizure of the entire French merchant fleet, additional ports at Bizerta and Toulon, etc.). After this first jab at Rommel, Van Creveld starts ticking off the things we’ve learned from looking at his campaigns in North Africa. He mentions a lot of things, but they really amount to only two problems.
First, Rommel’s supply problems were mainly the result of the size of his ports. Even when the sinking of ships became an issue, there were still roughly enough supplies reaching Africa (including fuel) to support Rommel’s troops. The fact that Malta was preying on Axis shipping wasn’t nearly as important as the small size of Tobruk or the ability of British aircraft to limit Tobruk’s capacity.
Second, the distances between the ports and the front lines were too big to be covered by the limited motor vehicles available to the Germans. Coastal shipping wasn’t a solution due to both capacity and the danger from air attack, so the only proper solution would have been a railway. However, the Italians didn’t think to build one, and, even if they had, nothing we know about Rommel suggests that he would have waited for it to be finished.
Finally, Van Creveld returns to Rommel’s claim that Hitler didn’t support him with enough forces, and basically laughs at it, pointing out that, in addition to what we know about the logistics problems that would have resulted from adding more forces, in August of 1942 Rommel’s own G-2 estimated that Rommel had more tanks and heavy artillery than the British.
Van Creveld concludes by saying that, due to the German army’s limited number of trucks, the political requirement to carry the useless Italians, and the low capacity of the ports in Libya, Hitler’s decision to send a very limited force to protect a very limited area in North Africa was the right one, especially since his main effort was Operation Barbarossa. Unfortunately for Hitler, Rommel either didn’t have the grasp of logistics to understand why his objectives were limited, or didn’t have the humility to execute those limited objectives (or both).
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