Sunday, 18 May 2014
The American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan pointed out that Egypt was exceptionally valuable for Britain's world position, which Napoleon identified comparatively early.
Egypt's value stemmed from many factors which shall be discussed below.
The first and most important factor is that it had communications connecting it with Britain from three separate directions. Supplies could be brought from England by way of the Mediterranean, or from the Red Sea, or from the Persian Gulf overland through Mesopotamia and Palestine.
In order to eject the British fleet from Alexandria all three would have to be severed, which would be difficult for any single power to achieve.
The second factor was Egypt's own highly defensible topography, especially from the west. The British were able to prevent the "Desert Fox" from breaking through to the Nile almost entirely on account of this factor.
The British had never really grasped Blitzkrieg during the war, and were consistently outfought by it. Rommel was able to time and again puncture Britain's lines and destroy portions of it, such as at Tobruk.
Montgomery was equally incapable of contending with this from an operational perspective, so he instead countered it with geography.
They established a powerful position at Al Alamein on the Mediterranean coast. Only forty miles to the south of this position lay the Qattara Depression. What was the Qattara Depression, then?
The Qattara Depression is a very low pit in the Libyan Desert filled with salt pans, salt marshes, sand dunes, and cliffs. Vehicles and tanks could not pass through it, the sand and salt would eat through tires and tracks like butter. Vehicles would sink as there's dry lakes and marshes that sometimes fill with water unexpectedly. It was a no go.
By necessity Rommel was therefore forced to push into the narrow gap between Al Alamein and the depression which greatly limited his ability to maneuvre. The Germans could mass at one point and break through, but the British supporting units were so close that they could arrive in time to counterattack and throw the Germans back.
Unable to go around this position, Rommel was forced to assault it head on multiple times, which predictably failed, and the war in the desert was lost by the Axis.
The reason Rommel could not go around will be explained now. Both the Axis and the British depended completely upon fuel, food, water, and ammunition brought from Europe by sea. There was nothing at all in the desert for an army. This limited the number of forces that could be engaged, but it also tied them to the coastal ports and coastal roads. Circumventing the Qattara Depression would put enormous wear and tear on the German vehicles who could not use trains or other transport, nor even spare their vehicles the merciless sands by using roads, but would have to endure the erosion of the desert direct on their own wheels. This would also place them much farther away from their supplies than the British, who could thereby rush forward to seize their ports and leave the Germans in the desert to die of thirst and hunger.
The second reason was because the Axis had not the naval power to circumvent the British lines. The British Mediterranean Fleet under Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham lay docked in nearby Alexandria, and any attempt at a landing behind Al Alamein would be frustrated by this highly gifted and energetic commander, whom the Italians came rightly to fear during the war.
This unforunately precluded any repeat of Napoleon's invasion in 1798. In that year the British had no bases in the Mediterranean, as Egypt was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, but practically independent. As Egypt had no fleet and the Turkish fleet was decadent, the only opposition to the French fleet of Admiral François-Paul Brueys was the British fleet of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, which was based on distant Sardinia.
Nelson attempted to intercept Brueys when he sailed from France, but failed. The French therefore cast anchor at Aboukir Bay to the east of Alexandria.
Napoleon was able to rapidly march up the Nile to capture Cairo and destroy the Mameluke army at the Battle of the Pyramids. This fate might have befallen the British in WWII had their fleet not been present in Alexandria.
Fortunately for them, the Axis were unable to sever Britain's communications by way of the Cape of Good Hope or the Persian Gulf, and the British fleet could remain fed and fuelled. Unable to remove Cunningham, the Axis had no choice but to forego any hope of an amphibious landing in Montgomery's rear.
And this brought Rommel back to his problem of breaking through at Al Alamein. It could not be done, the front was too short. The Germans did not have enough time to secure and exploit their breakthrough before the British could contain it. And in this way their Blitzkrieg strategy was defeated by geography.
From this we realise certain pertinent factors. Even without control of the Mediterranean the British could retain their foothold in Egypt and maintain their forces based there, thanks to Egypt's connexion to other seas which could not be cut.
That being so, with their fleet at Alexandria, the British could prevent any attempt by their enemies to take advantage of maritime weakness behind Alamein or at the mouth of the Nile, forcing them to advance by way of the bottleneck between the Qattara Depression and the Mediterranean which narrows to only about forty miles just west of Alexandria.
Even with a greatly outnumbered force they could have held this narrow stretch of ground, but increasingly they became the more numerous by a considerable margin and Rommel's hopes for a decisive breakthrough became consequently more remote.
With the British still in control of Suez and still based on Alexandria, breaking into the Middle-East was impossible for the Axis. India could not be threatened, and contact with Japan could not be established.
Egypt therefore constituted the lynch-pin of the British Empire. By cutting the Mediterranean route the Axis only achieved one-third of the work. They needed to cut the Red Sea route and the route from Palestine in order to force the British fleet to evacuate. Or else they needed to establish naval supremacy around Alexandria by defeating the British fleet in battle. They were never able to do either, and so they hit the brick wall of Alamein and went no further.
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