[cowofzot]

After 1st attack on Tobruk...

After the Battle of the Salient, Rommel reflected on the difference between mobile and positional warfare in the desert. He stated:

In this assault we lost more than 1,200 men killed, wounded and missing. This shows how sharply the curve of casualties rises when one reverts from mobile to position warfare. In a mobile action, what counts is material, as the essential complement to the soldier. The finest fighting man has no value in mobile warfare without tanks, guns, and vehicles. Thus a mobile force can be rendered unfit for action by destruction of its tanks, without having suffered any serious casualties in manpower. This is not the case with position warfare, where the infantryman with rifle and hand grenade has lost little of his value, provided, of course, he is protected by antitank guns or obstacles against the enemy's armour. For him enemy number one is the attacking infantrymen. Hence, position warfare is always a struggle for the destruction of men-in contrast to mobile warfare, where everything turns on the destruction of enemy material.8

[Tailz]

Rommel fought the Desert war along a number of different principles, one of the main ones being: Local superiority.

This is a method of fighting a series of running skirmishes against a larger foe where at each skirmish you hold the local superiority in numbers or mobility compared to your enemy who may, in the whole theatre, hold strategic superiority in numbers.

That was how Rommel fought the mobile aspect of the war, for he knew he didn't have the assets to crack a well dug in defended and supplied by the sea port garrison. Thus that is where his analysis is so telling.

[cicero91]

rommel, the 'desert fox' as he was named, could never win in africa, cause germany didn't get malta as a military station to create military ressources by charging there weapons and preserve their military power...so the germans were not supplied with arms any more, rendering damage to the military plans concerning the africa invasion, and the only ones to back it were unprepared...hence the nazis returned, to make their military machine available for the russian drive, but did not work, their weakness, the cold winter harmed the war machine of the nazis, so te turning point and end of the regime was reached and even passed...