What if Rommel instead of investing Tobruk had pushed the Afrika

>>2543580
>What if Rommel instead of investing Tobruk had pushed the Afrika Korps east after the retreating British and left primarily the Italians to just invest and pin the defenders in Tobruk?


No. For starters, you can't fully enclose Tobruk (they never fully enclosed Tobruk even with the Germans along), and letting the Italians alone just means that the Brits are almost certain to slip out and raid, if they don't break out in force. Secondly, there were British forces east of the city, which is what things like Battleaxe were all about. You kind of have to get past them somehow.

>Would they have been able to seize Egypt this way? As the british wouldn't have had the time to build the El-Alamein position.

No. For starters, your qualification doesn't even make sense. El Alamein was in late '42, during Rommel's second offensive, the one where he actually did take Tobruk; the one where it was invested was in '41.

Secondly, the logistical issues that plagued Rommel also hurt the British, although not quite as badly as they had better sealift and harbor capabilities. They were never able to project their entire force into Libya, and always had guys milling around in Egypt because they just didn't have the capability to move the supplies up out of the places with rail connections to the middle of the desert. Even at El-Alamein, only about 2/3 of the Mid-East command was actually fighting, the rest were backed up further behind for lack of transport and supply.

If you ignore the Tobruk defenses, and bypass the forces east of the city through magic, you will STILL run into defenders. The entire plan is nonsense.

>>2543580
Because Italians can't into war.

They
can
not
do
war.

>>2543627
I can understand what you say, but the main focus of what i said is that without the Italians (laying seige of Tobruk) that Rommel can dictate policy without worrying about the consequences of having the Italians in the mix, and also a pure German force although smaller can be moved and directed better, then all that fuel that the Italians would not need would be brought forward to supply the Germans, giving the Germans more fuel.

Also the German Luftwaffe would be in a better position as well, as the Italians realistically need no air cover, the RA could be sent to bolster the Luftwaffe, giving the Axis several hundred more planes to face the RAF.

>>2543580
Probably they would be halted at Alexandria or some other town and driven out by British reinforcements

>>2543703
>I can understand what you say, but the main focus of what i said is that without the Italians (laying seige of Tobruk) that Rommel can dictate policy without worrying about the consequences of having the Italians in the mix

He did that anyway.

>and also a pure German force although smaller can be moved and directed better, then all that fuel that the Italians would not need would be brought forward to supply the Germans, giving the Germans more fuel.

Most of the fuel that was consumed in the North African campaign was used...... bringing fuel to the front lines, which you will be extending even further.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a348413.pdf

Especially since that the Germans had the bulk of the motorized and mechanized assets, and the Italians were mostly tramping around on foot, the fuel saved will be minimal, if there are savings at all.

You have also left behind roughly half your force,, and there are still lots of Brits who will want to break your heads.

>Also the German Luftwaffe would be in a better position as well, as the Italians realistically need no air cover,

What the FUCK? Why would the Italians need no air cover? And how are you going to bring your SHORT RANGED 109's and Ju 87s even further foward without gulping enormous amounts of supplies, on an even longer logistical tether?

>the RA could be sent to bolster the Luftwaffe, giving the Axis several hundred more planes to face the RAF.

No, you can't. Air forces require a colossal fuckton of supply to keep moving. And your limitations are primarily

A) Harborage

B) Ability to move it up to the frontline. The reason that the Italians primarily operated out of Sicily is that they can move shit to Sicily in a way that they can't to Tobruk, or farther.


This plan doesn't even gain you anything.

>>2543733
Okay then what if the Axis captured Malta and Rommel arrived in Libya with plenty of resources in 1940, before the italians lost over 100,000 men, almost all their equipment and much of their navy, and when all of Libya was in Italian hands, the unprepared British would not have stood a chance.

>>2543695
Probably because they no longer pray to Mars

>>2543761
>Okay then what if the Axis captured Malta

Literally very little changes. Check out that link I brought up, on page 12 of the PDF. The amount of SLOC interdiction out of Malta is greatly overstated, and far less than the problems of just trying to move so much crap over so long a distance with such limited means.

>Rommel arrived in Libya with plenty of resources in 1940,

The problem isn't the resources. Rommel HAD plenty of resources. He couldn't get the resources from Tripoli where they were being unloaded, to places like Tobruk, let alone the much further he needed to go to attain a strategic objective.

Example; most of the attack on El Alamein was done on British supplies, which seized

>2,000 vehicles, 5,000 tons of supply, and above all, 1400 tons of fuel

(p 15), that same month, June of 1942, 32,300 tons of supplies were landed in Tripoli. If he had no trasnport difficulties, the amount of stolen stuff seized would be nice but hardly critical; as it was, they enabled him to push further.

>before the italians lost over 100,000 men, almost all their equipment and much of their navy, and when all of Libya was in Italian hands, the unprepared British would not have stood a chance.

The fundamental problem of desert warfare isn't preparedness, or even troop count, it's that you're going through a long stretch of area with no infrastructure, and the further away from your own base of support, the weaker you get. Attacking Egypt was orders of magnitude harder than even defeating the British in Libya, which was almost out of Rommel's reach as it is.

You should read this book if you want the basics on the subject. https://www.amazon.com/Path-Victory-Mediterranean-Theater-World/dp/0374529760

The idea that Rommel could have successfully invaded Egypt under realistic circumstances is absurd. Dividing his forces in the face of a superior enemy and opening up 2 points of failure where he just had 1 before is idiotic.

>>2543812
Hmm you seem knowledgable about this topic.
What do you think they should have done then to win in north africa?

>>2543882

They can't win in North Africa. Trying to is stupid. All of the long term advantages are in the British's (and later American's) hands.

Which, is of course why the original mission was never to drive the British into the sea and take Suez in the first place. Rommel's orders were to preserve an Italian presence in Cyrenica for as long as possible with the minimum force possible.

Germany has little interest in what's going on in North Africa except insofar as keeping proverbial daggers away from Italy's belly. Their real hope of winning the war lies in Russia, of knocking out the USSR and building a fortress Europe that the Western Allies can't or at least aren't willing to invade. It's somewhat (ok, very) fanciful, in all likelihood, they can't do that either. But that was The Plan, and given Germany's situation around 1941, it was probably the best they could do.

But you don't advance that plan by going on the offensive in North Africa; the reverse, actually. Attacks and pursuits like what Rommel was doing almost inevitably lead you to problems like that long, pointless investment of Tobruk culminating in Crusader and getting a third of your force killed or captured. You should have done a Sonnenblume, and then pulled back. And when the British stretch their fingers forward again, slap at them. Wreck ports like Bir Hakim and Benghazi when you swing through them, but don't waste time or energy trying to hold the towns themselves. Don't stay static tactically, but don't chase the British across the desert either; you are on the defensive, and you will fucking remain on the defensive. It's really, really fucking hard to use large forces in North Africa, so as long as you can be fighting there and not in Sicily and southern Italy, you can defend from that direction using 7-10ish divisions (most of them Italian) rather than 30-40, and a greater number of them needing to be German since the Italian government will start wavering at that point.

>>2543882

Actually, on further thought, I suppose >>2543970 doesn't answer the question, it just makes the case that attempting to do so isn't worth the effort.

Suppose, hypothetically, that we decide to call Barbarossa off and there are no consequences to doing this, or just Hitler has a strategic stroke and goes DIVERT EVERYTHING TO NORTH AFRICA. While this would probably cause trouble elsewhere, I suppose theoretically they could try this; and I'm going to include my chain of reasoning to show how I got there.

Problem: You want to take Suez, but it's 2,200 km by the coastal road to get there, and there's a gap of a few hundred KM where there's no road or rail infrastructure at all; you cannot reliably supply any sort of force that can overcome the British defenses with such a logistical handicap.

Interim solution: Short of building a railroad, which would take years you don't have, the only practicable solution is to ship supplies to ports closer to the action, so as to lower the amount of time and transit spent shipping supplies from your dumps to the front.

Secondary problem: The Italian fleet sucks about as hard as the Italian navy, and it's hard to ship supplies, as cargo transports are slow, combustible, and unarmed and unarmored. You can see right at that moment how much damage U-boats are doing to the merchant marine of the British, who have the entire fucking Royal Navy to try to stop them. You're going to need aircover, and lots of it, to secure your naval line of communication.

Secondary problem B: Ideally, the way to do this is to base lots of planes in North Africa itself, there's plenty of space for airbases. However, if the planes are based in North Africa, you run into the whole problem all over again, as you need to supply those Luftflottes. The main reason that the overwhelming bulk of supplies was delivered to Tripoli is that even with Malta in the way, you could cover that stretch of water (or most of it,) with airplanes from Sicily.
1/2

>>2543882
>>2544077


Possible solution: Take out Greece, and maybe even Crete. It's about 650 km from Heraklion to Alexandria, and about 1,000 from the southern Peloponnese. Both, however, are more than the 525 km from southern Sicily to Tripoli, and you're edging closer to British naval and airbases in the eastern Med that raiders launch out of .

However, you need to try; if you can control enough of the water in the Eastern Med, so that you can get cargo ships through, you can start supplying yourself further east, which then reduces the logistical problems by an order of magnitude. That is, however, an awfully big IF, and trying to win an air/naval war against the Brits is going to be tough.

Assuming you can do that, you still might lose the land war; the British can reinforce Egypt faster than you can reinforce with the rather lackluster sealift the Italians have. But at least you'd have a chance of making a decisive strike in Egypt proper. As said before though, this is an enormous investment of resources, especially limited air resources in the form of planes with long operational ranges that can control sea area far from shore; and is almost certainly a mis-use of them considering your other problems as Germany. It will also be slow going, assuming the British have the presence of mind and enough time to blow the harbors before they're driven out of port by port by your hopeful advance, which they did for Tobruk after Gazala, requiring you to stop after each port taken to fix it.

But it's about the only thing I can think of that would even give them a chance.

2/2

Taking Gibraltar would have been a good first step desu