WI: O'Connor & Rommel both get captured--on the same night!!

What it says on the tin.;)

How does that change the course & outcome of the Desert War?

Auchinlek defeated? Monty held up for months? Winston persuaded the Italian campaign is a non-starter?:cool: Neptune delayed?:eek:
 
For odd some reason both manage to excape at about the same time and make it back to their respective armies two days later. ;)
 
For odd some reason both manage to excape at about the same time and make it back to their respective armies two days later. ;)

That makes sense, although if it was a deliberate trade by their subordinates, I imagine their superiors would be rather upset.
 
jmc247 said:
For odd some reason both manage to excape at about the same time and make it back to their respective armies two days later. ;)
I'm not sure if that falls under limited butterfly effect, ASB, or pure handwavium...:rolleyes::p
 
John Farson said:
How about a trade-off? "We'll give you back yours if you give us ours.":D
That's actually pretty likely, I think.

Tho I do kind of like the idea of O'Connor & Rommel ending up in the same Italian prison camp in Rome.:p Somehow, I picture it being run by Marcello Mastroianni & his mistress, Sophia Loren...:p
 
Ok assume they do the in field exchange, how does this affect the course of the campaign, O'Connor seemed to be an able commander with a firm grasp of logistics.

Although with a name like O'Connor Churchill would probably be looking for the smallest excuse to have him replaced.
 
Ok assume they do the in field exchange, how does this affect the course of the campaign, O'Connor seemed to be an able commander with a firm grasp of logistics.

Although with a name like O'Connor Churchill would probably be looking for the smallest excuse to have him replaced.

Obviously, Wawell remains in command and selects someone else to run the show. Wilson, maybe?

AFAIK, Churchill wasn't that much aware of o'Connor's importance for the Compass success and most of the laurels were placed on Wavell's head.

Fact is, anyone from the German side replacing Rommel would in all probability be better than his British counterpart. Very little could actually improve British performance in the Desert, for their problem was not an individual commander, but rather an entire system. They've managed to properly integrate their arms (infantry, armor and artillery) only in 1942. Till then the armor and infantry fought their own battle with little or no cooperation.
 
Perhaps but with the Battle of the Camps and Operation Compass there was some cooperation (if on an improvised level) which may be built upon.
 
I'm not sure if that falls under limited butterfly effect, ASB, or pure handwavium...:rolleyes::p

No what I was saying would be in the press it would be reported that each man daringly escaped capture. The reality would be the trade you are discussing.
 
I vaguely remember a story about Rommel inspecting a British field hospital by mistake at one point in N Africa - I almost certainly read it here.

It's quite possible for Rommel to be captured by wandering into a British checkpoint, he used to bimble about all over the place. For minimum effort by ASB's you'd only have to change the date, and the timing of a British patrol, for him to be captured at that hospital.
 
I vaguely remember a story about Rommel inspecting a British field hospital by mistake at one point in N Africa - I almost certainly read it here.

It's quite possible for Rommel to be captured by wandering into a British checkpoint, he used to bimble about all over the place. For minimum effort by ASB's you'd only have to change the date, and the timing of a British patrol, for him to be captured at that hospital.

You think that is bad. Rommel every so often when he was touring the front lines would see a group of British troops and decide its a nice day to have a conversation with them.

In the summer of 1941, two groups of German and British soldiers met deep in the Libyan desert. Instead of shooting at each other, the enemies chatted and exchanged cigarettes before going their separate ways. What made the encounter all the more remarkable was that Erwin Rommel, the German commander in North Africa, was among them.

Speaking in the fluent English he learned as a sub-tropical agriculture student, Mr Schneider told The Independent that the chance rendezvous between Rommel, aka Desert Fox, and a British reconnaissance unit was one of two incidents that summed up both the humanity and the ruthlessness of the battle for North Africa. Mr Schneider, now 86, said: "The common soldiers did not act out of hate. When we met the English soldiers in the desert that time, we were far, far from anywhere. There was no reason to shoot. We swapped cigarettes and I talked with the English officers.

The extent to which the ferocity of a war fought by young men has been replaced by comradeship among former enemies was underlined this weekend when Mr Schneider met five former Desert Rats, including an ambulance driver who accidentally drove into a German tank position while it was being inspected by Rommel and was promptly sent back to his lines by the field marshal with Mr Schneider at his side.

"We are now friends, very good friends," he said. "I was once a German soldier and they were English soldiers but now we find it difficult to understand why we had to fight against each other. Rommel was always first a soldier. We did not forget that we were fighting fellow human beings."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/rudolf-schneider-i-was-rommels-driver-1706924.html

Could you imagine Von Manstein or Guderian deciding to have a nice talk with a few dozen Russian soldiers who were camped out with their weapons by their side?

I have noticed in the modern era, especially as all the vets from the desert war are all dead or close to it that its really hard for modern people including alot of modern historians to understand or believe the desert war wasn't the same war as was fought in Russia only with different weather and different terrain, instead of being almost like a seperate reality from the war in the East.

The people who seem to have the biggest trouble understanding it I have found are modern Germans themselves, but then again they have been force fed that the goal of the fighting was genocide not imperialism... and while that may have been known and practiced by people in certain parts of Eurasia at the time. It certainly wasn't understood or thought about in those terms by the combatants in Africa at the time nor their leaders.

To most of the combatants in Africa they were there fighting over worthless strips of other peoples land simply because their governments told them to. To that end I suspect Rommel's view on the issue was shared by quite a few on both sides, "Rivers of blood were poured out over miserable strips of land which, in normal times, not even the poorest Arab would have bothered his head about."
 
That makes sense, although if it was a deliberate trade by their subordinates, I imagine their superiors would be rather upset.

Well, I guess it could go that way, alot of what happened in Africa was done without the ok of either Churchill or Hitler. It was far enough away that they got away with alot with alot and it would be hard to prove who ordered their release as it would just happen. ;)

By the way someone just sent me this which was sent to vets of the DAK after the war.

0B9891CBB.jpg
 
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