WI Italy had undisputed control of the Central Med in 1940

Markus

Banned
Yes, and indeed the British had it much easier in Egypt. My point is that the 8th Army (much larger than the combined Army group Africa in late 1942 and fully motorized) eventually advanced all the way from Egypt to Tunesia.

But IIRC Rommel did not put up much resistance after the defeat at El Alamein and the US/UK landings in NW-Africa. He just pulled back to Tunesia and made a stand there. This was a far cry from 8th Army defending the Quatarra line.
 
That meant using existing port capacity in Libya and transporting supplies from those ports to the troops. If they could do that, it stands to reason that the Axis could have done so too, had they devoted the necessary resources to doing it.

In an alternative history, it is therefore possible (as the British showed) and claims that the Libyan port capacity can't handle more troops therefore make no sense.

By devoting the necessary resources do you mean building a rail line between Triploi-Benghazi-Tobruk? This is what the 8th Army did to gain their victory in 1942.
 

Cook

Banned
Cook, for the British Army there were distractions of expanding as rapidly as possible and throwing everything into France, after which virtually all the equipment were lost along with tens of thousands of men, followed by the trying to re-equip as fast as possible in the event Hitler actually tried to invade. Plus diversions into Norway, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Crete...which certainly involved another dozen or so divisions.

Norway occurred well before the North African Campaign and was an unmitigated disaster.

Following the withdraw at Dunkirk the British were able to deploy 200,000 troops in back in France within a matter of weeks; the 51st Highland division was part of those forces and unlike the rest, was not able to take part in the second evacuation of troops. All of which took place before the Mediterranean campaign started.


Greece and Crete only further highlight the shortcomings of the British Army at that time; Greece was the only time after the fall of France that the British Army engaged the Germans in force on the continent of Europe before 1943 and the result was a disaster. Force is probably a too generous a term; two infantry divisions (2nd N.Z. and 6th A.I.F.) and an armoured brigade (1st Armoured Brigade).

Crete’s defences included the New Zealand 2nd Division, an elite division of the army in the Mediterranean and a single brigade of the 6th A.I.F, likewise considered elite, but both of these had just been forced out of the Greek mainland, and they were unable to keep control of the island against an invasion force which they outnumbered.

Syria was part of the North African campaign and was led by the 7th A.I.F, which became the silent 7th because no campaign medal was ever awarded for Syria (wouldn’t look good, awarding medals for fighting the French). It was a two month operation against the Vichy French involving little more than a division.

Iraq involved a single infantry division sent from India.

The Army in North Africa prior to the arrival of Alexander and Montgomery had major shortcomings, not least of which was a repetitive habit by the armoured units to charge German and Italian positions like they were cavalry; straight into anti-tank guns. Other things like the complete absence of Opsec didn’t help; talking over the radio in ‘veiled’ speech “when should the ponies turn up for the polo game?” is hardly going to present a challenge to the German Army’s intelligence gathering capabilities.

During 1941 the Desert Air Force was constantly struggling against the Luftwaffe and short of aircraft, while at the same time the R.A.F. was conducting sweeps of Northern France with ‘big wings’, hoping to engage the Luftwaffe there with numerical superiority, the Germans declined to play that game, preferring to do their fighting where it would be useful.

The shortage ran to tanks as well; the British shipped barely 100 tanks to Greece and North Africa was constantly short of them, while following June 1941 the British were shipping 200 tanks to Russia per month. (The tanks sent were considered very poor quality by Stalin and anyway, Russia was producing nearly 2000 tanks per month at the time).

Far too much of the British forces were effectively unused in the ‘prison camp’ of the British Isles well after the threat of invasion had passed and had severe shortcomings which took until after 1942 to really be addressed. The raid on Dieppe is a small demonstration of that.

The British were so short of troops in North Africa, but so unwilling to release divisions from Britain for use, the 8th A.I.F. Division, defending Malaya was in late November 1941 ordered to transfer from Malaya to North Africa, regardless of the threat posed by the Japanese. It was only the Japanese attack on Malaya on 8th December ’41 that prevented this from taking place.
 
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Tobruk was thought to be able to handle 1500 tons per day but only occasionally reached 600 tons, compared to Benghazi's 2700 tons a day but only occasionally reached as high as 800 tons.

There was no narrow gauge railway that ran between Tripoli and Benghazi and this is the Axis' biggest problem, getting supplies from the biggest and safest port forward some 1000 miles to the front.

Yes, there were.

The first railways in Libya consisted of a little over 200km of narrow (960mm) gauge lines radiating from Tripoli, constructed in 1912 by the then Italian colonial government. A further group of narrow gauge lines emerged around Benghazi, and was later extended. The last of these lines closed in 1965. A standard gauge line was constructed from Egypt as far as Tobruk during World War II but closed in 1946

Tobruk was a great natural port 1939. It lacked in harbour equipment - dock workers, cranes, port infrastructure (such as warehouses, internal rail lines, pipelines, silos and oil storage etc), but were capable of much more before the British capture, the siege and the German capture - botht he Italians and the Commonwealth destroyed as much as they could to deny the port to the enemy, and the sinking of vessels in the harbour and constant bombardement by the air force to deny what was left did not help either.
 
Tobruk and the San Giorgio

A lot of discussion has gone on about the capacity of Tobruk harbor.

In re the inability of the Italians to make use of Tobruk, and the British 8th Army to advance to Tripoli: How much of a block was the San Giorgio, and how difficult was it to remove?
 
No patience or resources once the war started. They did build 40km onto the Benghazi-Barce line toward Derna.

The funny thing is that the few railways that were built went exactly the wrong way to support that war once it started. The longest line from Tripoli went west for 120km and the longest line from Benghazi went east 110km, this was the one that was extended by 40km during the war. The lines that were in the right direction to gap this distance were 10km and 56km, nothing in light of the 1016km distance between these 2 cities.

I wonder if the war would have gone differently if these little networks were reversed, and the longest lines were in the right direction to close the gap. The OTL 950km gap between railheads could have been 786km, which I think may have changed the minds of the people who IOTL only built 40km of track during the war.


Maybe a big part of that is that the Italians were expecting to fight France on the Libyan/Tunisian border. And they weren't expecting for France to be quickly knocked out by Germany.

The French were expecting to fight on that border too.

It's worth remembering that Tunisia had been an Italian objective since 1881 or earlier, and also contained a significant Italian population.
 
Not much point in building infrastructure in a town which gets bombed and shelled every day.

Like Mutruh?

I know that Italian doctrine called for tactical air support, not supply interdiction; but the idea that the Axis never tried to shut down the rail head and port there boggles the mind. Did they try that?
 
They sure did, the British even designed a fake Alexandria by laying out a lighting scheme about 5 miles out of Alex so the Axis would bomb that art night instead of the real Alex. But the Axis were more focused on close support and the Allies more on interdiction in general.

Mersa Matruh's infrastructure was already in place before the war, so it was a matter of repairing damage instead of finding resources to build stuff from scratch.
 

Cook

Banned
They sure did, the British even designed a fake Alexandria by laying out a lighting scheme about 5 miles out of Alex so the Axis would bomb that art night instead of the real Alex. But the Axis were more focused on close support and the Allies more on interdiction in general.



The French ships interned in Alexandria were in daily contact with Vichy and were reporting the effectiveness of Axis attacks on the harbour, reports which the Vichy govt. then passed onto the Axis.
 
They sure did, the British even designed a fake Alexandria by laying out a lighting scheme about 5 miles out of Alex so the Axis would bomb that art night instead of the real Alex. But the Axis were more focused on close support and the Allies more on interdiction in general.

Mersa Matruh's infrastructure was already in place before the war, so it was a matter of repairing damage instead of finding resources to build stuff from scratch.

Ah. OK, significant dif, thanks.
 
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