Desert complications

The question whether an Axis advance into the Middle East could have won the war for Hitler is still one of the most controversial in the history of World War II. Whereas earlier writers claimed that by supporting Rommel in a drive from Libya through Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Iraq to the Persian Gulf, Hitler could have gone far towards winning the war against Britain, more recent scholars have questioned this view and assert that, in the final analysis, the Fiihrer was right in refusing to regard the Mediterranean as anything but a secondary theatre. Whatever their differences, both schools agree that the problem was essentially one of Hitler's volition. That is, the question was not whether he could have sent more forces to the Mediterranean but whether he should have done so. This, however, is by no means self-evident. While Rommel in his memoirs has cast the blame for failing to solve his supply problem very widely, the man responsible for coordinating those supplies - the German military attache in Rome - has written an article claiming that the problem was insoluble in the first place. Since, however, both accounts are cursory, and their authors hardly disinterested, the question remains whether the aforementioned objectives were within reach of the Axis forces.

To begin with, the problem itself needs to be clearly defined. First, although Hitler and his staff did in fact have plans for the occupation of Gibraltar and even for seizing French North-West Africa with the adjacent islands, we shall assume that it was in the eastern Mediterranean, if at all, that the war against Britain could have been won. Second, it is assumed that any Axis advance into the Middle East would have been limited to the south, i.e. Libya and Egypt, because an attempt to go through Turkey would have met with Soviet resistance and developed into a German-Soviet war. These two assumptions enable us to ignore most of the political difficulties involved in Germany's cooperation with Italy, France, Spain and Turkey, and to focus on the question whether a German-Italian advance from Libya into Egypt and the Middle East was militarily feasible.