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By Michael Peck,The National Interest
Why were Rommel’s tanks blowing up?
As the Desert Fox’s panzers churned through the Libyan desert in May 1942, they were confident of victory. For more than a year, despite being outnumbered by the British Eighth Army, the German armor had time and again emerged victorious.
Now the Afrika Korps was on the offensive against the British fortified line at Gazala, aiming to capture the vital port of Tobruk, and then move on to seize the Suez Canal and perhaps even the vital Middle East old fields.
This first appeared in 2017.
But on May 27, the Afrika Korps ran into a deadly surprise. Its tanks were being destroyed from long range, something that had never happened before. Until Gazala, the Afrika Korps had only faced the 2-pounder (40-millimeter) guns on British tanks and 37-millimeter cannon on American Lend-Lease Stuarts used by Britain, both of which frequently bounced off the frontal armor of German Mark III and Mark IV tanks. Yet now the panzers were being picked off by 75-millimeter cannon that outranged their own 50-millimeter tank guns.
