by David Irving
WHEN HIS PLANE brought him onto North African soil for the first time, at noon on February 12, 1941, the Italians were still in full retreat toward Tripoli. Rommel found them busy packing to catch what ships they could back to Italy before the British came.
Graziani had been replaced by General Italo Gariboldi as field commander. Gariboldi was a burly North Italian with a white moustache and not much more tact than the average noncommissioned officer.
When Rommel now talked of manning a forward defense line at Sirte, far to the east of Tripoli, he just shrugged and retorted that Rommel should go take a look out there for himself. Rommel climbed into a Heinkel bomber that afternoon and did just that.
From the Heinkel’s cockpit, Rommel could not see much sign of any field defenses around the port of Tripoli. East of it, he noticed a belt of sandy country that would probably be useful as a natural obstacle to enemy vehicles. He still had to find out the most elementary facts.
For example, could heavy tanks drive in the desert at all? Italian generals said that they could not.
A few days earlier, Rommel had asked Lieutenant Hans-Otto Behrendt, a lanky, mild-mannered Egyptologist assigned to him as an Arabic interpreter, whether even wheeled trucks could drive in sand. Behrendt was the author of a pamphlet entitled Tips for Desert Drivers in Egypt. He replied that the secret was to drive on slightly soft tires.
As Rommel flew east, he saw the Sirte desert himself—shimmering hot and inhospitable. He wondered how well his troops would survive the heat, assuming that the British allowed them time to acclimatize.
Along the Mediterranean coastline he could see the highway built by Marshal Balbo—the Via Balbia, extending from Tripoli right to the Egyptian frontier. He wondered what cooperation he would get from the Italians: his first impressions of both the generals and their men had been uniformly favorable.
Back in Tripoli he found General Gariboldi waiting with the Italian Chief of General Staff, Mario Roatta. After talking bluntly with them, Rommel sent this radio message to Germany: “First talks with Generals Gariboldi and Roatta have passed off satisfactorily. Our suggestions are being put into effect. Foremost fighting units are at Sirte. Personally flew reconnaissance mission out there myself.”
That evening he dined with the Italian generals at a Tripoli hotel. One inquired where he had won his Pour le Mérite. Rommel retorted without thinking: “Longarone!” That killed all further small talk that evening.
Two days later his first combat troops sailed into Tripoli—the vanguard of the Afrika Korps.
The Elite Corps
ON THE FOURTEENTH of February, 1941 a troopship sails past the wrecked hospital ship at the entrance to the port of Tripoli, the richest jewel in Italy’s colonial empire. Rommel’s soldiers line the decks for their first glimpse of Africa. They see glistening white modern buildings, palm trees, broad boulevards, and cool shadows. Some of the men even begin to think they are going to like it here. They belong to the Third Reconnaissance and Thirty-ninth Antitank battalions—the vanguard of Rommel’s force. Despite the risk of air attack, Rommel orders the ship to be unloaded by floodlight that same night. Six thousand tons of war equipment are put onto the dockside between dusk and dawn, breaking all records for the port: trucks, guns, ammunition, armored cars, tents, mosquito netting.
At eleven the next morning a military parade is held in front of Government House. Watched by curious Italians and Arabs, the German troops march past smartly in their new tropical uniforms and pith helmets under the baking African sun. Rommel, the Italian generals standing pompously at his side, takes the salute himself. He is stocky, fit and sharp-featured. One of his staff war correspondents, Hanns-Gert von Esebeck, wrote of him at this time: “He has a high, symmetrical forehead, a forceful nose, prominent cheekbones, a narrow mouth with tight lips and a chin that juts defiance. There are hard lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, but they are softened by something often akin to an artful smile. And in his clear blue eyes, too, cold and appraising, penetrating and keen, there is something of a cunning that brings real warmth to this man’s features when it breaks through.”
Rommel delivers a brisk speech, the German and Italian national anthems are played and the men drive off directly to the east.
This is only the first of many such parades, as the units of Rommel’s Afrika Korps begin to flow into Tripoli.
They are small in number, but they become a dedicated and professional elite which Rommel will lead with such skill and unorthodox methods that eighteen months later Winston Churchill will declaim: “Rommel! Rommel! Rommel!—What else matters but beating him!”
COLONEL RUDOLF SCHMUNDT, Hitler’s jug-eared chief adjutant, had been attached to Rommel’s party. Rommel sent him back to Germany with a report on Rommel’s initial impressions.
“If the British advance on Tripoli immediately without regard for casualties,” Rommel wrote, “our general situation will be very grave indeed.” Schmundt gave the document to Hitler two days later and wrote afterward to Rommel: “I reached the Berghof on Sunday and found the Führer already waiting feverishly for news! I briefed him just as you said, and the Führer was obviously delighted with the initiative you have shown in tackling the job, Herr General. He is deeply apprehensive about the Libyan war zone, and dreads the next two weeks.”
Hitler, said Schmundt, granted all Rommel’s requests. He agreed to ship antitank weapons, mines and the Fifth Light Division’s main armored fist—the Fifth Panzer Regiment—to Libya at once. Moreover, the Fifteenth Panzer division would follow in a few weeks’ time. Schmundt also touched on the prestige issue, so dear to Rommel’s heart. “On this much you can rest assured,” he informed Rommel. “The Führer will take care this time that there won’t be any historical distortion of where the credit goes.”
For Rommel, this initial buildup went agonizingly slowly. In a letter to Lucie on February 26, he described the first minor skirmish with a British tank, 470 miles east of Tripoli, and added: “The next two or three weeks are going to be crucial. After that things will even up. . . . The enemy know now that we’re here, and they have begun digging in.”
Two days later Hitler assured Mussolini: “If we get just fourteen more days, then any fresh British advance on Tripoli is bound to fail. . . . When our first panzer regiment arrives, I think it will tilt the balance very dramatically in our favor.”
Some days later the Fifth Light Division’s panzer regiment disembarked at Tripoli. Now Rommel was really in business. There was the usual propaganda parade. The sight of the squat, powerful German tanks rattling through the Libyan capital brought an awed silence, then gasps and cheers from the crowds. There seemed in fact no end to the number of tanks, partly because Rommel had cleverly ordered them to drive several times around the block, like a stage “army,” before rolling off to the east. “We’ve got to keep the enemy guessing about our strength—that is, about our weakness—until the rest of the Fifth Light Division gets here”—so he told the panzer regiment’s officers.
He had another trick up his sleeve. To fool the enemy’s air reconnaissance, he ordered his troops to manufacture hundreds of dummy tanks of wood and cardboard. Some were stationary, others were mounted on ordinary Volkswagen cars. Trucks and motorcyclists drove around between them, and real tanks methodically churned tracks across the sand for the enemy planes to photograph. According to the Fifth Light’s war diary, “Intercepted enemy radio messages report having sighted medium tanks. This shows that our deception has worked.”
Rommel’s information about the British early in March 1941 was sketchy. He reported one rather puzzling aspect about Tobruk, a port far behind the enemy lines. “Tobruk harbor is full of shipping, and there are big troop concentrations around Tobruk.” Were the British bringing in reinforcements by sea—or were troops being pulled right out of North Africa for some other campaign? Unknown to Rommel, the British were withdrawing their best units from Libya, to launch what was to prove a highly unprofitable e
xpedition in Greece. Too late the enemy would learn from radio intercepts of Luftwaffe signals that Hitler had actually sent a German expeditionary force to North Africa.
For the enemy to withdraw troops on the very eve of victory in Tripolitania, however, was so patently absurd that Rommel did not dwell on it. Instead he ordered General Johannes Streich—who had arrived a week later—to explore eastward along the coast from Sirte with advance units of his Fifth Light Division. Streich easily reached El Mugtaa, on March 4, without even seeing the enemy. From here a salt marsh—virtually impassable to vehicles—extended inland from the Via Balbia, creating a defensive position which materially strengthened Rommel’s hand. He wrote a buoyant letter home: “The front is now 480 miles east [of Tripoli]. . . . My troops are coming over. It’s the tempo that matters now.”
From the surviving documents, it is clear that this easy advance dazzled even Rommel. He began to daydream of great conquests. On March 5, at a gala showing of Victory in the West in Tripoli, he proclaimed to his audience that one day they would be seeing a film called Victory in Africa. When a young lieutenant—just driven out of Eritrea by the British army—reported to him as a staff officer, Rommel bragged: “We’re going to advance to the Nile. Then we’ll make a right turn and win it all back again!” And on March 9 he boldly predicted in a draft letter to Berlin that he would resume his drive early in May, and keep going eastward along the coast until the summer heat stifled all further operations. “My first objective,” he declared, “will be the reconquest of Cyrenaica; my second, northern Egypt and the Suez Canal.” The canal was 1,500 miles east of Tripoli, but Rommel meant every word of what he said.
Of course, he was far outnumbered by the British. He had altogether only one panzer regiment, two machine gun battalions, two reconnaissance battalions, three batteries of artillery and a flak battalion—only about the same force as he had commanded in France. But he had big ambitions. In his draft letter to Berlin he airily dismissed the most obvious drawback: “Organizing supplies for such operations will be extremely difficult—but the brunt of the fighting will come in Cyrenaica, and there is water in abundance there.” He hopefully mailed to Berlin this ambitious plan for conquest.
He himself flew to Berlin on March 19 and saw Hitler in person next day. Hitler began the audience by pinning on Rommel’s chest the Oak Leaves medal that he had been coveting ever since France.
It was the only pleasant moment. The General Staff threw cold water on Rommel’s plans. General Franz Halder, the acid and professional Chief of General Staff, firmly advised Hitler not to accept them. It is clear from remarks made by Halder in prison camp in August 1945—recorded by a concealed British microphone—that he hated Rommel:
“At the time I was constantly telling Field Marshal von Brauchitsch that with the enemy dominating the Mediterranean the very most we could send over and keep supplied were three or four divisions. . . . Sooner or later things were bound to go against the Italians, but the longer we could stave it off, perhaps even for several years, the better. . . . Rommel explained that he would soon conquer Egypt and the Suez Canal, and then he talked about German East Africa. I couldn’t restrain a somewhat impolite smile, and asked him what he would be needing for the purpose. He thought he would need another two panzer corps. I asked him, ‘Even if we had them, how are you going to supply them and feed them?’ To this I received the classic reply, ‘That’s quite immaterial to me. That’s your pigeon.’”
There was a momentous secret Rommel could not be told. Hitler was going to invade Russia, and he would need every available division for that. So Rommel was instructed merely to hold his present line and prepare a strictly limited attack. These verbal orders were reinforced by written instructions the next day, March 21. He flew back to North Africa disgruntled, disappointed and determined to disobey.
IN THE DESERT, the tank is the capital weapon of the war and the tank man is the chosen warrior. To the infantryman falls the exhausting, debilitating fighting in the open, naked to his enemies, digging for cover where the ground is too hard to dig, thirsting where there is no water, trudging to the fight and trudging back again. But the tank crewman has the exhilaration, even arrogance that comes from commanding twenty tons of snorting armor plate and steel, a fire-spewing monster that can rumble clean through brick walls or copses of trees, and here in the open desert can thrust die-straight across the wilderness as long as the going is reasonably firm and the gasoline lasts—110 miles in a Panzer III.
“Mount up!” Five men climb through the round entry hatch atop the thick steel turret, and thread their bodies into their assigned places. Driver, radio operator and commander cannot see each other’s faces, but all are connected to the tank’s radio receiver, and the gunner manning the high-velocity fifty-millimeter gun and his loader can also talk by intercom. The outside world is visible only through slits in the armor, narrow enough to keep out bullets. There is the stench of raw fuel and gun oil and sweat. The heat is stiffing when the turret hatch is bolted down, the metal already baking in the African sun, and the temperature climbs impossibly as the heat from the engine and the guns is added. The men wear black and work in shirt sleeves.
Their machine is a citadel unto itself, with two and a half inches of armor plate in front, a gun by Krupp’s of Essen that can throw a high-explosive or armor-piercing shot a mile or more, and two machine guns that can scythe away the enemy’s naked opposing infantry. But God help the five men if their machine should founder—trapped in a treacherous slough of sand or its track blown off by a mine or shell. They are inside a mechanized bomb, with hundreds of gallons of gasoline stowed behind them, 100 shells in the racks beside them, and 3,750 machine gun bullets in belts, all waiting to erupt and engulf them if one enemy projectile should explode inside this space. Only in front is their armor thick—to either side and in the rear it is only half as strong, and on top and below it is even thinner.
The tank surges across the battlefield. Its tracks churn up dense and choking plumes of sand. The noise inside is deafening. The 320-horsepower Maybach engine roars and races as the driver shifts up and down through the manual gears. The hot spent-shell cases clatter around the metal deck. The tank stops, the gun barks, and then again, continuing until the enemy is destroyed or the target is lost.
Here in the open desert the rules are the same for both sides. Every tank commander instinctively dreads the sight of enemy tanks appearing on his flank. He and his opponent both try to come up behind low rises, “bull down,” so that they can open fire while exposing nothing of their bulk. Both know the penalty of error—entombment in a blazing tank, with the hatch jammed and flames licking toward the ammunition racks.
A tank crew thirsts for battle but is immensely relieved when delivered from it. Then they can lever themselves up into the open air, emerging from their oven into the relative cool of the desert heat; they can stretch out in the tank’s shadow and brew coffee. They are an elite, men of high esprit, like submarine men—their comradeship forged by shared hazards and the shared intoxication of manning intricate, almost invincible machines.
IN LIBYA, Rommel found on his return, the tantalizing British retreat had continued. El Agheila, a dirty fort and watering point twenty miles east of El Mugtaa, had just fallen to Streich’s light forces with hardly a fight on March 24. The British withdrew thirty miles to Mersa Brega, an Arab village straddling sand hills near the coast; it was a tactical bottleneck relatively easy to defend. The speed of Streich’s advance put Rommel in a dilemma. As he explained in a letter to Lucie, “I’ve got to hold my troops back now to stop them from galloping on ahead.”
According to his directives from Berlin—and from General Gariboldi—he was not allowed to attack Mersa Brega until the end of May, when he would have the Fifteenth Panzer Division too. But his radio intercept company had arrived, with skilled English-speaking operators listening in to the enemy’s signals; and from these signals and Luftwaffe reconnaissance Rommel knew that the enemy wer
e digging in and bringing up reinforcements. By May, the enemy defenses might be impregnable. On March 31 he ordered Streich to attack Mersa Brega, regardless of the directives from Berlin. The British abandoned their positions, and Rommel ordered a strong belt of mines and antiaircraft guns installed to prevent them from coming back.
In a good humor, he drove forward to Streich’s command post at noon next day. “Na, when are we going to meet in Agedabia?” he called out. Agedabia was the next big town, fifty miles farther up the Via Balbia—far beyond the stop line ordered by Halder. Streich could not tell whether Rommel was serious or not, and purposely did not ask. “We’ll have to see about that,” he replied, matching his superior’s bantering tone as closely as he could. After Rommel had gone, Streich ordered his division to resume the advance next morning, April 2. He did not inform Rommel, and Rommel—most unusually—avoided contact with him until one P.M., when he caught up with the Fifth Light’s foremost troops, feigned surprise, and exclaimed: “What’s going on here?”
Streich evenly replied, I thought we ought not to give a retreating enemy any chance of digging in all over again. So I have moved my whole division forward to here, and I’m about to attack Agedabia.”
Rommel replied without a trace of anger, “Those weren’t my orders—but I approve.”
Thus Agedabia also fell at four P.M. that afternoon. Rommel reappeared in time to hear the great news. In his memoirs, War without Hate, he subsequently took full credit.
Several times afterward, Streich got a raw deal from Rommel, but he is not a man to bear grudges. When I ran him to ground for an interview, in an old peoples’ home outside Hamburg in northern Germany in 1976, he was a spry, slightly built, soldierly figure of eighty-five—neatly dressed, going deaf, eating dainty cakes in a circle of elderly ladies who cannot have asked him very often to recite these dramatic weeks with Rommel. The conversation was not very productive, but it did bear fruit later. Out of the blue came a lengthy sheaf of close typescript, written by Johannes Streich many years before but never published, entitled “Memoirs of Africa.” The war diary of his Fifth Light Division has also turned up in private hands, and bears out Streich’s version in every detail.