When it comes to the history of World War II, as long as you talk about the North African battlefield, you must not bypass Marshal Elwin Rommel. Reputations such as "Desert Fox", "African Eagle", etc., almost touted Rommel as the Greek myth of the god of war Ares, British wartime Cabinet Prime Minister Churchill, and even said to the MPs when questioned by the House of Commons -
"In the North African battlefield, although the British army did not face many German troops, the commander Erwin Rommel, who was a famous general comparable to Napoleon!"
Erwin Rommel, is he really a world-class player who can rival Napoleon Bonaparte?
Actually, he's not!
Key points – in the North African theater of 1941-1942, winston Churchill had no intention of defeating Erwin Rommel since the German army joined.
Before 1943, Churchill did not want to win the German war in North Africa at all, he only hoped that the longer it dragged on, the better. The so-called "Desert Fox", "African Eagle", is nothing more than gold that Churchill deliberately pasted on Rommel's face!
At the end of May 1940, when the British exhausted all means, not even fishing boats, and almost exhausted everything that could float on the sea, they finally took 336,000 Anglo-French troops back to their homeland from Dunkirk.
At that time, if these troops could not return, the British Isles would have to fight Adolf with the Boy Scouts for the rest of the day...
From the "Battle of Britain" in July 1940 until the outbreak of the "Soviet-German War" on June 22, 1941, the British army was the only army on the European continent that did not give up resistance and was still fighting the German army.
Prior to this, in the First World War, the British suffered millions of casualties, almost wiping out an entire generation. At this time, the pressure on British Prime Minister Winston Churchill can be imagined!
After the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, Britain and the Soviet Union became allies, and Stalin, in order to minimize the pressure on the Soviet Union, almost immediately proposed to Churchill to "open a second battlefield"!
(Note: In September 1941, Stalin demanded a second front in Western Europe from Churchill, a full year and four months before Roosevelt proposed plans to open a second front at the Casablanca Conference in Morocco in January 1943.) ）
But at this time, Britain had just experienced the "Battle of Britain", and the country was devastated and full of ruins. Britain's national strength was limited, and in order to avoid multi-front warfare, Churchill certainly could not have acceded to Stalin's request to "open a second front." But since it is an ally, it is obviously inappropriate to reject it directly, and a reasonable excuse must be found...
So, what are the excuses?
Churchill told Stalin in awe: The British army is fighting in the north African battlefield, that is the "second battlefield" you want, but not in Europe!
However, in the North African battlefield in 1941, the Italians had long since been beaten to the point of losing their armor. The German army that Erwin Rommel brought to North Africa was initially only one division and one regiment.
On February 12, 1941, the Germans formed the African Army, and Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel was appointed commander of the German African Army, and rushed to Libya to help the Italian army that had been beaten by the British army.
The first German Afro-Army to reach Libya consisted of the 5th Light Division and the 90th Infantry Regiment.
The 5th Light Armor Division is under the jurisdiction of:
5th Panzer Regiment (2 tank battalions, 150 tanks in total)
104th Motorized Infantry Regiment (2 Panzergrenadier Battalions)
3rd Motorized Reconnaissance Battalion
2 anti-tank battalions
1 artillery battalion
The 90th Infantry Regiment has 3 battalions
At this time, the German African Army had only 22,000 men.
In April 1941, Erwin Rommel integrated the only German force stationed in Libya in 1940, several armored companies, several artillery companies, several anti-aircraft companies, and all miscellaneous personnel into one regiment.
An artillery battalion was drawn from the 5th Light Division and merged into the 90th Infantry Regiment. As a result, the 90th Infantry Regiment was upgraded to the 90th Infantry Division.
But this move only gave the German African Army two divisions, with a strength of 25,000 troops. At this time, although the Italian army still had more than 60,000 people, it was already demoralized, like a bird of fright, and its combat effectiveness was not mentioned...
It was not until 2 May 1941, at the repeated request of Erwin Rommel, that Adolf transferred the 15th Panzer Division to north Africa under the Afrika Korps, and Rommel finally had a real main force.
Subsequently, Rommel allocated a tank battalion and an armored artillery battalion from the 15th Panzer Division to the 5th Light Division. At the same time, the 5th Light Division was abolished and renamed the 21st Armored Division.
An Panzergrenadier regiment of the 15th Panzer Division was assigned to the 90th Light Division. Since then, Rommel has finally cobbled together 3 more divisions, with a strength of more than 35,000 troops.
Until March 9, 1943, when Rommel left Africa, the German army had not increased any troops in the North African battlefield, and with the Italian army specializing in soy sauce, the total number of German-Italian troops was only more than 100,000 people, while the British army had 11 divisions and 4 brigades, with a strength of 230,000 troops, more than twice that of the German-Italian army.
Since the North African battlefield was Churchill's excuse for rejecting Stalin's proposal to open a "second battlefield", it was not easy to find such a grandiose reason, of course, to be desperately defended.
If the Germans are quickly wiped out, there will be no excuses!
But British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's good intentions are not understandable to all Britons. In early 1942, British parliamentarians were so indignant at the ineffectual performance of the British army in North Africa that the House of Commons launched a questioning question of Wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
"With the strength of the British Empire, how could it not defeat the three German divisions of more than 30,000 people?"
Churchill, who was questioned, entered the House of Commons with a cigar, his attitude was dismissive, the explanation was perfunctory, and he said: "Erwin Rommel is a famous general who can match Napoleon Bonaparte, so our generals can't beat him!" ”
I don't know if the members of the British House of Commons really believed Churchill's lies, but this set of statements allowed Churchill to successfully pass the questioning of the House of Commons.
At the same time, Elwin Rommel became famous in Britain through Churchill's big mouth smoking a cigar cigarette, and became a generation of "famous generals" in Germany in World War II...
In 1935, Major General Guderian became commander of the 2nd Panzer Division, and Major General Manstein was head of the Training Department of the German Army General Staff.
Major Rommel had just been promoted to lieutenant colonel and was serving as a tactical instructor at the Malidhea Military School. Major General Guderian and Major General Manstein did not expect anything, and in the future the two of them would be on a par with Lieutenant Colonel Rommel, who served as a teacher, and called them the "three famous generals of the German army".
In 1938, Guderian was director of the German Army's Panzer Corps, in charge of all organizational and training matters of the Panzer Corps. Manstein, who had also been transferred to the 18th Division, was personally leading his forces to capture Sudetenland.
At this time, Lieutenant Colonel Rommel, who was a tactical instructor at the Malidhea Military School, had just been promoted to principal of the school.
In September 1939, Lieutenant General Guderian, who had been promoted to commander of the 19th Army, was blitzing Poland, and Lieutenant General Manstein, chief of staff of Army Group South, was also shining like a rising star in the "Polish Campaign".
Colonel Rommel, the "famous general of the generation", was now serving as the captain of the guard brigade at the Prime Minister's residence. Since the task of defending Adolf was almost completed by the SS commanded by Himmler and Dietrich, the Wehrmacht guard brigade commanded by Rommel had nothing to do all day, and the future "god of war" was depressed.
In February 1940, the "famous general" Rommel finally found an opportunity to talk with Adolf sincerely, and after some high discussion, Rommel, who had never served as the commander of the combat forces at the battalion level or above, was promoted by Adolf to the commander of the 7th Panzer Division, and participated in the "Battle of France" in May.
This was the second time since 1919 that Rommel had commanded combat units as a lieutenant company commander, after a lapse of 21 years, truly participated in combat as the commander of a combat force.
Until February 1941, lieutenant general Rommel, who was appointed commander of the German Afro-Army, achieved almost nothing in the first half of his military career, except for a book called "On Infantry Attack".
The North African theater where Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel wanted to make a big splash happened to be where Prime Minister Winston Churchill deliberately did not want to win.
As a result, Rommel, who only led one company in world war and commanded only one division in the "Battle of France", became a "strategic master", became a "military genius", and won the reputation of "desert fox", "African eagle" and so on...
But once the United States is drawn into war and the Allies are strengthened, Prime Minister Winston Churchill will change his mind!
On December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan, and on December 11, Germany declared war on the United States. President Roosevelt, who led the United States into World War II, did not believe British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's lies at all.
Roosevelt believed that the Afrika Korps were commanded by Rommel, who had been a teacher and had basically not even fought much. And it's still a patchwork force that can't even be supported by logistics. If the Allies could not even win such a German army, then what else could they talk about winning the final victory in the war?
After more than half a year of preparation, in November 1942, U.S. troops led by George Patton landed in North Africa, and as soon as they landed, they were invincible, and the German-Italian coalition fled in the wind.
The addition of the US military, so that the calculating Churchill of course saw that there was a bargain to take advantage of, Montgomery made a force, the "king" immediately became "bronze", "Desert Fox" Rommel simply ignored the ethics of professional soldiers, irresponsibly handed over the command to his deputy General Stumm, and escaped from Africa with a rolling belt!
At the crucial moment, Rommel was not on the battlefield, so that after the Battle of El Alamein, the nickname "Long is not there" became famous!
Winston Churchill used the North African battlefield as an excuse to prevaricate Stalin's request to "open a second battlefield" in 1941, and accidentally let three famous generals emerge on the North African battlefield. They were Rommel, Montgomery and Patton, but in the eyes of posterity, the real "king" was only Patton, and the other two were "bronze".
In July 1943, fleeing Africa, Rommel became commander-in-chief of Army Group B on the Western Front, responsible for defending the long coastline from the Netherlands to France. Rommel not only misjudged the Allied landing sites, but also did not have a basic estimate of when the Allies would launch the landing operation.
On June 2, 1944, the enemy was still in a fog, and despite the fact that Rommel flew home from Normandy, he went to celebrate his wife's birthday. The big battle is coming, and the commander has once again left the battlefield.
On June 5, the Allies successfully landed in Normandy, and the German commander Rommel continued to "long away", which led to the rout of the German army on the entire Western Front!
In the Battle of Alamein, relying on strong logistics to defeat montgomery in the "Long's absence", but also 3 months after the successful landing in Normandy, according to the wrong intelligence and imagination, measured a paper distance with a ruler on a large military map, it was very optimistic to launch the "Market Garden Operation", which finally caused heavy casualties among allied officers and soldiers, and the loss of personnel and equipment exceeded twice that of the "Battle of Normandy"...
However, in the face of such a bloody fiasco, Montgomery went so far as to proclaim that "Operation City Garden" was 90% successful!
Conclusion ——
So, Erwin Rommel was lucky, arguably the luckiest general of World War II.
An "office general" who has only cared about teaching and educating people for more than twenty years, burying his head in writing books, and in addition to bringing more than one hundred and ten people when he was a company commander, he has not led a soldier for a long time, and when he needs to make meritorious achievements the most, he meets Churchill, who does not want to defeat him the most...
Thus, a generation of famous generals, the "Desert Fox", was created!