1088 Ch. 26 • World War IIIn the meantime, Germany’s day-to-day operation of the war effort
remained chaotic, as ministries, military branches, and Hitler’s favored
henchmen competed against each other. In the spring of 1942, Hitler
named the architect Albert Speer to be minister of armaments produc
tion. Speer’s organizational skill helped triple German production within
two years. But not until 1944 did Hitler grant Speer responsibility for the
needs of the air force, Goring’s personal preserve. Hitler then awarded
Goring “plenipotentiary powers’’ over the entire war effort. German war
supplies remained inadequate to the enormous goals Hitler had set. Real
ists like Speer began to see a German military victory as difficult, even
improbable.
As in World War I, German military commanders placed their hopes on
closing Allied shipping lanes across the Atlantic, thereby preventing sup
plies from reaching Britain. Many American ships and crews went down in
the icy Atlantic. However, most got through. German U-boats, the hunters,
became the hunted. New submarine-detecting devices enabled airplanes and
destroyers to sink German submarines with depth charges.
The War in North Africa
With the failure of the submarine campaign against Allied shipping, Ger
many now had to depend on its army’s success on land. In North Africa, the
German tank division commanded by Erwin Rommel, known as the “Desert
Fox” because of his quick judgment and daring tactical improvisations, had
forced British troops back from Libya into Egypt. Victories in the spring of
1942 at Bir Hacheim and Tobruk, where the Germans captured a garrison of
35,000 British troops, put Rommel only sixty miles from Alexandria. How
ever, at the end of August 1942, the British tank force of General Bernard
Montgomery (1887-1976) pushed back another Rommel offensive. Mont
gomery knew his enemy’s plan of attack in advance through reports from
British intelligence services. The Allied forces, enjoying superior strength
and controlling the skies, then broke through the German and Italian
defenses at El Alamein (in Egypt) in early November 1942. For the next ten
weeks they pursued the German armored division across the desert all the
way to Tunisia.
The Allies now faced major strategic decisions. Churchill wanted to
strike at what he called the “soft underbelly” of the axis through Italy, the
Balkans, and the Danube Basin after driving Hitler’s armies from North
Africa. This would leave British forces in an excellent position to protect
British interests in the Middle East. Stalin, however, continued to insist on
a major Allied attack against Germany in the west to force Hitler to divert
resources from the Russian campaign. Stalin pointed out that the Red
Army had borne the brunt of the war against Hitler, inflicting 90 percent
of the losses the German armed forces had suffered in battle since June
- Churchill, however, feared that a direct confrontation with the