The desert in North Africa has been described as a tactician’s paradise and a quartermaster’s hell. For a progressive thinker like Rommel it was a paradise because of its vast, uninhabited emptiness, with no changing seasons, no partisans, no resistance groups and no urban centres to slow the movements of armoured divisions. But for the men in charge off logistical support it was a pure hell because everything – fuel, ammunition, food and weapons - had to pass along tortuously extended lines of supply which became ever more Stretched as the Afrika Korps stormed eastwards.
All of the supplies for Rommel’s army in terms of ammunition, petrol, food and so on had to be transported from Italy. The Italian merchant ships had to run the gauntlet, posed by the British island of Malta, with its submarines and shore-based aircraft. Although Rommel’s by-line was relatively short, a matter of a mere 60 miles, it was actually very vulnerable to British interdiction. The supplies then had to be transported over land on the one road in North Africa, the Via Balboa, built by the Italians. As Rommel’s army advanced eastwards his supply line stretched; once Rommel reached El Alamein, only 60 miles from Alexandria, his supply line was 1,300 miles long, all the way from Tripoli.
One of the great problems of operating over those great distances was that the trucks themselves used fuel. It has been estimated that somewhere between ten and fifteen per cent of all the fuel that the Afrika Korps needed was actually spent in sustaining vehicles for the supply route. In those conditions, over very rough roads, vehicle breakdowns were inevitable. At any one time up to about thirty per cent of Rommel’s vehicles were actually in for repair. The British helped him enormously and they seemed to abandon their tanks with careless regularity. Indeed, by the summer of 1942 virtually all of the Afrika Korps transport was composed of British trucks.
Like the Allies before them the Afrika Korps soon realised there were geographical limitations which would force them to operate within a band stretching approximately fifty miles south from the Mediterranean coast; further south than that lay the limitless sand dunes with deep desert, impassable to wheeled or tracked vehicles alike.
Within that 50-mile passable band of terrain the one road, the Via Balboa, skirted the coast, and along this tarmac artery ran Rommel’s armoured units and his columns of supply lorries. Petrol was one of the most precious commodities. From the outset it was always rationed and any unauthorised use of a vehicle was heavily punished.
A Panzer III negotiates the rudimentary roads of North Africa. The find sand and dust thrown up by the tanks had a disastrous effect on the engines and running gear.