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November 1942.
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An armada of 200 British and American ships appears off
the coast of North Africa.
Operation Torch is about to begin.
Right before the eyes of the local people,
100,000 men pour onto the beaches of Morocco and Algeria.
It is this singular theater,
North Africa, that between 1940 and 1943
was written a famous chapter of the Second World War:
The Desert War.
Why have the great powers come to fight in
the challenging desert conditions of North Africa,
so far from the epicenter of the World War?
And how, there in the furnace of the desert,
will the allies manage to inflict one of the first major setbacks
on the forces of the Reich?
The Desert War, the war that nobody wanted,
was to turn the World War upside down.
It all begins with a big gamble by a little dictator
who dreams of greatness:
Benito Mussolini.
He proclaims,
"Italy is in truth a prisoner of the Mediterranean."
Il Duce wants to restore the splendors of the Roman Empire.
He dreams of controlling the Mediterranean Sea,
and expanding his empire into Africa.
Mussolini is suffocating in an Africa dominated by
the old imperial powers, France and the United Kingdom.
The modesty of his own empire is a very sore point.
In the east, it controls only Somalia,
Ethiopia and Eritrea.
In the north, Libya was conquered by iron and blood.
Italy's victory was won back in 1912 by means of multiple massacres and abuses.
In summer 1940,
World War II sets Europe on fire.
After taking over a part of Europe,
the Third Reich troops overrun France in a few weeks.
England, under siege,
fears succumbing to the Nazi threat as well.
German and Italians, united under the Axis banner,
are in a position of strength.
It's a chance that Il Duce doesn't intend to pass up on.
He wants to see the old colonial powers
that dominate Africa driven out.
Italy's time has come.
From Libya, he orders his troops to enter Egypt,
a kingdom controlled by Great Britain.
A force of 80,000 men advances about 60 miles
into Egyptian territory.
The Italian generals are hesitant.
In their eyes, their army is under-equipped,
and not ready for such an adventure.
Winston Churchill doesn't want to let go of Egypt.
Not at any price.
Ever since France surrendered,
the Reich has been extending its grip on Europe.
For the British Prime Minister,
another defeat would be unacceptable.
Especially since the Luftwaffe
is relentlessly pounding England.
Churchill knows that Britain's salvation depends more than
ever on the resources of its Empire.
The Suez Canal belongs to Egypt.
For London, it is a vital artery for transporting
its raw materials.
For Churchill, it's a very serious situation.
So the old bulldog sounds the alarm and mobilizes all
the Commonwealth's resources.
Thousands of Australian, New Zealand and South African soldiers
flock to Cairo and join the British.
These men left their families and their jobs to come and
fight in the desert sands.
In December, the British go on the attack.
To their great surprise,
it's like a stroll in the park.
The Italians are disorganized,
and have retreated 500 miles back into Libya.
The British even take Tobruk, a highly strategic port.
His Majesty's generals know that in these desert lands,
he who controls the ports, is master.
In a matter of just a few weeks,
Commonwealth troops have won an outright victory.
At the beginning of 1941, they occupy eastern Libya.
And the Muslim population celebrates its liberators.
It has not forgotten the 100,000 deaths
the Italian conquest was responsible for.
The Arabs and the British even come to an agreement.
Thousands of Libyans accept to fight for Great Britain.
Churchill promises them independence
once victory is achieved.
It's a good way to undermine the influence of Rome.
Il Duce was yearning for glory,
but now reaps nothing but shameful defeat.
He leaves 400 tanks and 130,000 prisons behind
on the battlefield.
Mussolini wanted to impose his law in Africa.
Now he has to call for help.
By the beginning of 1941,
Hitler has turned his gaze to the east.
Along with his generals,
he's devoting himself to his great project,
Operation Barbarossa,
the conquest of the Soviet Union.
In his eyes, his victory will be sealed out there
on the Russian Steppes.
Mussolini, devastated, knows that his timing is not good.
But he needs his ally's help
if he's not to lose Libya entirely.
Such a humiliation would ruin his reputation.
On the strategic plan, Hitler considers North Africa
as a secondary theater of operations.
But he fears that a weakened Mussolini will lose his grip on power.
The fall of Il Duce would threaten the security of
the southern flank of his European fortress.
He agrees to help his ally,
but on his terms.
Any German intervention must not,
under any circumstances,
disrupt its operation in the east,
which is expected to be launched in just a few months.
The Fuhrer sends only a small expeditionary force to Mussolini's rescue.
The Afrika Korps has only 45,000 men and 174 tanks.
It lands in Tripoli, the capital of the Italian colony.
Its mission is a limited one,
to help the Italians recapture eastern Libya,
and to protect it from a British onslaught.
But the real game changer is having General Rommel at
the head of those troops.
At 49, Rommel is young for a general,
but he's the Fuhrer's favorite.
He arrives in Tripoli, trailing clouds of glory
from the French campaign.
Officially, Rommel is under Italian command,
but he's ambitious,
and has no intention of playing a supporting role.
In Africa, Rommel dreams of glory,
even if it means disobeying his superiors.
The Afrika Korps has only been present on
the African soil for a few weeks.
But Rommel is already impatient.
On March 24, 1941,
without even warning either Rome or Berlin,
he suddenly launches an attack eastward.
His intentions are clear.
"My first objective," he says,
"Is the recapture of eastern Libya.
My second, northern Egypt
and the Suez Canal."
It's a grand plan.
From the land of the Pharaohs,
he can head for Baku in the Caucasus and
get his hands on the precious oil resources.
Then, he can rendezvous with the Wehrmacht troops
to strike at Russia.
It's pure megalomania,
and far from anything his leaders are expecting of him.
But his troops are all for it,
for the Afrika Korps is partly made up of volunteers,
all of them deeply committed to the Reich.
North Africa provides Rommel with the ideal setting
to rehearse it all.
On these vast expanses,
his Panzers can get up to full speed.
His technique is to push straight ahead,
and not worry about his flanks or his rear.
He counts on the element of surprise and
on his own intuition,
and that's what's earned him the Fuhrer's admiration.
Rommel's sudden offensive comes as a shock to the British.
The Germans aren't the same thing as the Italians at all.
Faced with such a formidable adversary,
the worrying weaknesses of the British army start to emerge.
The men are under-trained and
their equipment is dilapidated.
As the British doctor James Graham observes,
the Afrika Korps is wreaking havoc.
"It was a blitz.
We were devoured.
The whole area was marked by smoking remains,
bodies scattered around.
Some living, some not.
Our principal task was to relieve suffering.
There was little room for sentiment.
Interment being carried out near the fatal spot by
a man's comrades, enemy permitting."
Noticing that the British are retreating,
Rommel decides to advance towards Egypt heading deeper
into the desert.
He's well aware that he's now disobeying orders.
To his wife Lucie, he confesses,
"My darling Lucie,
we are attacking with remarkable success.
I've taken the risk of moving forward,
despite all previous orders and instructions,
in order to seize such a great opportunity."
Rommel's goal is Tobruk.
It's his modest aim to bring it down in a matter of days.
He considers it a mere formality.
To avoid disaster, the British retreat to the Egyptian border.
They abandon all the territory they've taken in Libya with
the exception of Tobruk.
Tobruk is defended by 25,000 Commonwealth soldiers.
Their supplies arrive by sea.
The British will never leave this deep-water port to Rommel.
If it were to fall into his hands,
he'd use it to supply his own troops,
which would allow them to advance into Egypt.
On the front line, life's hard when you're under siege.
The men shelter from the bombing in flea-infested holes.
"Like rats," as the German radio propaganda
is always saying.
So they defiantly refer to themselves as the Tobruk Rats.
They are daily raided.
For the time being, Tobruk's still holding on.
Rommel is struggling.
He spends his days visiting his units scattered around
Tobruk and on the Egyptian border.
Unlike the officers of the Wehrmacht,
he despises state duties.
He wants to see the battles from the front lines.
And tirelessly keeps ordering his men to break through,
whatever the cost.
German Lieutenant Robert Witzke is fighting on
the front line.
He writes to his wife,
"Dear Inge, every day there are attacks.
We can only ask ourselves every day who is still alive
from the comrades.
Many are dead, but even more are wounded.
Inge, keep thinking of me."
After a 15 day siege,
Rommel has consumed an astronomical amount of ammunition and
the fuel is about to run out.
It doesn't matter, to a battalion of machine guns,
he declares, "We will be in Cairo in eight days from now.
Pass the word around."
Rommel is waging an overly ambitious war without a care
for one decisive element:
fuel and supplies.
Yet delivering the 53,000 tons of monthly supplies that his
relentless attacks require is a daunting task,
because the Axis supply lines are long and dangerous.
In the Mediterranean, the British are tracking down
Italian cargo ships trying to reach Tripoli,
the only port controlled by the Afrika Korps.
All the same, 80% of supplies are still getting through.
Petrol, water, food, ammunition.
Every day once unloaded,
the supplies have to reach the front.
It's quite a challenge.
It takes 14 days to travel the 750 miles from Tripoli
to the front.
It's a real trial for the men.
Ironically, the trucks consume half of the petrol they carry.
Rommel is impatient with all these logistical constraints.
He exhausts his troops and fails to take Tobruk.
His attitude costs the lives of 53 officers,
and 1,200 men.
The Afrika Korps is very weakened,
but holds its ground.
It's far from its bases though,
and difficult to refuel.
It is dangerously exposed.
A counter attack by the enemy might well destroy it.
The Khamsin, the burning wind that can blow for long days at a time,
heralds the beginning of the strong heat.
From May to October, it is impossible to fight
between 12:00 am and 4:00 pm.
In daytime, the heat is overwhelming.
At night, the cold is glacial.
Lieutenant Witzke survived the hell of Tobruk,
and now he's facing fresh ordeals.
In June 1941, he confides to his wife,
"Hot is not the word.
For the past ten days,
we've had 58 to 60 degrees in the sun.
I've already lost 20 pounds.
If they don't get us out of here,
it'll drive us all mad."
"The biggest problem was water,"
laments another soldier.
"Drinking, always drinking.
That was the be-all and end-all of our desert existence."
The soldiers are also confronted with the scourge of the desert:
the flies.
Shortly after sunrise, they arrive in hordes,
attracted by human sweat,
the only moisture available in these arid lands.
There is no way to escape them.
Rommel's men find no comfort in the food.
It's insufficient in both quality and quantity.
They try to improve the quality of their meals by
buying from the Bedouins.
This trade may improve Robert Witzke's daily life,
but above all, it confirms his loathsome racism.
"These dogs are so wily, that they ask a fortune for an egg.
We all reckon they're spies."
"If you look at these filthy bastards,
then there is only one thing, away with the riff raff."
At the height of summer, in the Libyan desert,
the crushing heat immobilizes the armies.
While the men of the Afrika Korps suffer from
the lack of supplies, opposite,
in the British units camped on the Egyptian border,
it's depression that's tormenting the men.
They have been living in isolation in the desert for
eight months now and have no way to distract themselves.
Overwhelmed with boredom, a soldier writes in his diary,
"Every day it's the same old thing.
The desert's everywhere.
It drains your spirit.
There's nothing here to look at,
nothing to listen to.
The only thing that keeps us holding on is thoughts of home."
Churchill is exasperated.
Everything suggests that his worn-out troops are incapable
of beating Rommel.
So the Prime Minister decides to send the reinforcements
that have been called up over the months from all over the Empire.
From now on, North Africa has become a major theater of war.
Indians, Africans, Maltese,
Jews from Palestine,
Mauritians.
In the autumn of 1941 more than 150,000 men
come to swell the British ranks.
They are joined by the Free French.
Responding to the call of General De Gaulle,
they will carry on the fight to restore France's honor.
By engaging his massive forces,
Churchill forces Hitler to raise the stakes.
Nearly 2,000 miles from the burning sands of Africa,
the great offensive against the USSR is entering
a decisive phase.
At temperatures of minus 22 Fahrenheit
the Wehrmacht are trying to take Moscow.
At the very moment when the east is taking up all his attention however,
Hitler decides to send reinforcements to his protégé.
He can't afford to lose North Africa.
By entrusting command to an uncontrollable general,
the Fuhrer has turned the desert into a trap,
because Rommel hasn't given up on his fantasies.
On the contrary.
In January 1942, Hitler's promised reinforcements
finally arrive.
That's barely enough to solve his logistical problems,
but just enough to let him dream of a new raid on Cairo.
Once again, to everyone's surprise,
Rommel resumes his mad dash.
Overexcited, he writes to his wife Lucie,
"Dear Lucie, I have several plans in mind that I would
never dare talk to my officers about at the moment
or they might think I was going crazy.
You know me, it's the wee small hours that
my best plans come to me."
There is no guarantee that the British
will be able to stop it.
Their new General, Claude Auchinleck,
has a clear superiority in both men and equipment.
But Churchill's not betting on the right horse.
Auchinleck does not know how to surround himself with
the right people.
He had served for a long time in India,
and has chosen his subordinates poorly.
For months, he sends hundreds of tanks to the slaughterhouse
by charging frontal assaults worthy of
old fashioned cavalry charges.
In May 1942, Rommel tries an unprecedented and
very risky maneuver to put his enemy out of the game.
He decides to bypass the defense line protecting Tobruk
in order to catch him from behind and crush him.
But in a remote area,
he comes across an unexpected obstacle,
Bir Hakeim.
It's a position that the Free French under
General Koenig have been holding onto.
Just a handful of them:
3,700 men.
Despite the deluge of fire unleashed by the Panzers and Stukas,
they managed, by their heroic resistance,
to block the Afrika Korps for 15 days.
The British, grateful, salute the exploit.
Thanks to the precious hours gained by De Gaulle's men,
Auchinleck's 8th Army, in the midst of a debacle,
has avoided being surrounded.
It withdraws its troops behind the Egyptian border but,
for the second time,
abandons the east of Libya to the enemy.
Here is Tobruk.
Rommel has achieved his main objective,
to capture the port of Tobruk.
Robert Witzke plays a leading role
in this victory.
"Our battalion," he exults,
"Had once again the honorable task
to form the lead.
Jesus Christ, Tobruk is ours!
It's still hard to believe."
Two days after his triumph,
Robert Witzke is severely injured.
He is evacuated to Germany.
Marshal Rommel inspects positions in the city's harbor.
There are still dense clouds of smoke above Tobruk.
Marshal Rommel...
German war reporters followed Rommel's
every step during the last phase of the battle.
Their images give his exploit a global impact.
The Desert Fox myth has begun.
And while the cameras are all focused on Rommel,
they're careful not to film the vendetta of
the Italian settles.
The Arab people chose the British camp.
They pay the price.
The looting and the murders are multiplying.
One Italian rejoices,
"No sooner had the English fled than
any Arab we found got a bullet in the head or
a grenade in the stomach.
Our soldiers are here now,
finishing the job."
There's violence too against Libya's 30,000 Jews,
whether they supported the British or not.
Fascist racial laws have previously been applied only
mildly to these Italian citizens,
but military setbacks provoke a radicalization of
the fascist regime.
Il Duce decides to intern all the Jews in the region.
Entire families are being arrested,
loaded into trucks and dumped in concentration camps set up
on the edge of the desert.
The worst of these detention camps is in Giado,
150 miles south of Tripoli.
About 3,000 prisoners will be held there,
a quarter of them will die of undernourishment
and ill treatment.
The disaster of Tobruk strikes Churchill as he meets
Franklin Roosevelt at the White House.
"It is one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war.
Defeat is one thing, disgrace is another."
Churchill's way of ruling is openly questioned.
The British don't trust their Prime Minister to lead the war anymore.
As Mussolini did with Hitler,
Churchill must now win the support of his ally.
His political survival is at stake.
In meeting after meeting, he harasses Roosevelt to
help him annihilate the Afrika Korps.
His plan is to land in North Africa.
Like Hitler, the American generals have
no desire to intervene in this region.
They believe that to defeat Germany,
you have to strike at its heart, in Europe.
So they're planning a landing on the French coast
that could happen in barely a year's time.
To convince his host,
Churchill insists that it would be harmful to remain inactive for a year,
with public opinion in the U.S. impatient
and hungry for victories.
It's an argument that doesn't leave the American President indifferent,
and it's true that he is soon to face elections.
The Desert Fox ignores all this scheming.
At the end of June 1942, he decides to advance into Egypt,
with Hitler's blessing this time.
The Fuhrer now considers the conquest of Egypt as a
historic opportunity to bring down the British Empire.
El Alamein is a small railway station on the Egyptian coast.
Nobody could guess this lost place would soon go down in history.
Yet this is where the British will change
the course of the war.
Claude Auchinleck has chosen this position so as not to be
surrounded again by the Desert Fox.
It has impassable obstacles on every side.
The sea to the north,
a vast area of soft sand to the south.
In July 1942, Rommel launches what he hopes would
be a decisive offensive at El Alamein.
As soon as the German offensive was launched at El Alamein,
things go very wrong for the British soldiers.
Over the past year, they suffered defeat after defeat,
despite their superior numbers.
The inept strategies of their leaders and
their fear of Rommel have undermined their resolve.
In his field hospital,
Dr. James Graham is seeing a flood of soldiers,
all wounded and unable to continue the fight.
He discovers that some would rather mutilate themselves
than go back to the front line.
"The tricks used was to break up a rifle cartridge and
swallow the explosive, a poison for the liver.
After a few weeks in hospital,
there's a chance you might get a non-combatant job."
In the summer of 1942, Auchinleck sees his men
surrender in droves to the enemy.
Such defeatism is unacceptable.
He calls for the reintroduction of
the death penalty for deserters.
Auchinleck managed to contain the Axis offensive but falls into disgrace.
He is held responsible for
the collapse of his troops' morale.
Devoured by anxiety, Winston Churchill rushes to
Cairo in early August.
He abruptly dismisses Claude Auchinleck.
To replace him,
he opts for General Bernard Montgomery.
Churchill finds him proud,
but he chooses Montgomery because he has a precious quality:
an immense self confidence that
he is able to communicate to those around him.
James Graham is attached to Montgomery's headquarters.
He sees him scrambling to cure the ailments that
plague his men.
"Montgomery is out every day.
He goes assiduously around all the units to
introduce himself to the soldiers.
Never before has a commander done that."
Montgomery's message to his troops is simple but firm,
"The defense of Egypt lies here at Alamein.
Here we will stand and fight.
There will be no further withdrawal."
Clearly under him,
they'll not give an inch of ground to Rommel.
James Graham confirms it.
"That was enough to earn their loyalty.
Everyone likes to be on the winning side."
Strategically, Montgomery is the absolute opposite of Rommel.
The British strategist, for his part, likes to
prepare his plans meticulously.
At the end of August when Rommel goes on the offensive,
Montgomery is waiting for him.
Rather than gamble on an unlikely decisive battle,
Montgomery decides to wear his opponent out.
He does, after all, have a clear material superiority.
"My plan is to contain the enemy's tanks while we carry out
a methodical destruction of his defensive system.
The enemy will be cut from his supplies."
Montgomery's target is Rommel's weak point:
his petrol supply convoys.
Werner Mork drives a supply truck for the Afrika Korps.
He suffers another air attack that will mark him for
the rest of his life.
"The attack only lasted a few moments.
I'm pretty messed up."
"Ever since, I've been overwhelmed by a mindless sense of panic.
It's with me now, the war in all its cruelty,
all its horror."
Montgomery's wear and tear strategy has paid off.
After a month of fighting, the Afrika Korps has only
a few days of fuel left.
On October 27, 1942,
the Desert Fox is finally done for.
British intelligence intercepts a German message
indicating the imminent arrival of two Italian tankers
in the port of Tobruk.
As they prepare to drop anchor,
the ships are sunk by Royal Air Force bombers.
So, due to a lack of fuel,
Rommel can simply no longer afford to act.
Rommel has suffered a terrible defeat at El Alamein.
He knows that this will ruin
his Fuhrer's ambitions in Africa.
It's a broken man who writes to his wife.
"God only knows whether I will survive this defeat.
If I never return,
I would like from the bottom of my heart,
to thank you and our son for all the love and
happiness you have brought me."
The victory at El Alamein marks a turning point
in World War II.
Rommel's army has been defeated.
The British Prime Minister doesn't hide his pleasure.
Now, this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.
Churchill gloats.
He knows that the Reich's days in Africa are now numbered.
American troops have just disembarked in North Africa.
On the beaches of Morocco and Algeria,
two French colonies.
Despite opposition from his staff,
Roosevelt yields to Churchill.
The U.S. President wants to win the midterm elections.
He has promised his public an easy victory on the African continent.
Initially scheduled to last six weeks,
Operation Torch, the epilogue of the Desert War,
will in fact last for six long months.
The British and American forces and Montgomery's army
have planned to meet up in Tunisia.
It's an ideal springboard to hit Europe.
A project Hitler wants to prevent by all means.
The Fuhrer had hesitated to support the Afrika Korps.
He now sends heavy reinforcements to Tunisia,
and even transfers some of the Luftwaffe bombers from
the Russian front.
The ferocity of the fighting dulls the Americans' enthusiasm,
especially since their first clash with
the Wehrmacht in February 1943 in Kasserine.
It was a disaster.
But that terrible baptism of fire has toughened them up.
Now the battle-hardened American forces can
join up with Montgomery's British army.
With overwhelming superiority now,
the British and Americans launch their final offensive
in central Tunisia.
The British enter Tunis,
while the Americans enter Bizerte.
The Axis troops, crammed into their final refuge,
surrender unconditionally.
The Allies take 275,000 prisoners,
far more than the 90,000 men taken at the fall of Stalingrad.
These thousands of soldiers won't now be able to repel
the allies at the Normandy landing.
And so ends the Desert War.
It's a victory that drives the Germans out of Africa.
Now the Allies are ready to engage in
the great confrontation in western Europe.
Along with Montgomery, they've tamed modern warfare.
The lesson has been learned,
by the leaders as well as their men,
at the cost of unspeakable suffering.
The people celebrate their liberators,
but all the jubilation is ambiguous.
The Allied victory may have rid Africa of the plague of Nazism,
but despite all the promises,
it has not broken the chains of colonialism.
The Desert War will lead to the defeat of the Reich.
It will also herald a new era:
that of the liberation of colonized nation.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.