by David Irving
Disenchanted with both the colorless General Streich and Colonel Olbrich, Rommel handed over command of the leading units reaching the highway from the desert to Major General Heinrich von Prittwitz, who had only just arrived in Libya in advance of his division, the Fifteenth Panzer. This was a slap in the face for Streich; but the successes that Rommel had achieved so easily against a startled and fumbling enemy had dangerously inflated his estimate of his own ability. Speed was all that mattered. His intention for April 9 was that an Italian infantry division should kick up dust west of Tobruk, while the Fifth Light Division circled around it inland and attacked unexpectedly from the southeast quarter. “I had imagined that the Fifth Light was already on the move,” he later wrote—forgetting that he himself had sanctioned the dismantling of the turrets for cleaning. When at 6:30 P.M. he found the panzer regiment still doing this at Mechili, way back, he again lost his temper at the inoffensive General Streich.
By his unexpected strike across the peninsula, Rommel had certainly caught the British on the wrong foot—for a reason that he never dreamed of. All his secret communications with the German High Command were being encoded by the Enigma machine, rather like a small, wooden-boxed electric typewriter. The Nazi code experts had pronounced this machine absolutely safe from enemy code breakers. The messages were radioed in this code to Rome, and transmitted by wire to Hitler’s headquarters. Deep in the English countryside, however, the enemy had constructed a far superior machine, as big as a house, capable of decoding the secret Enigma signals. Radio listening posts fed the German signals to the machine, a large multiservice organization translated and interpreted the fantastic results and they were transmitted back, marked “Ultra Secret,” to the enemy commanders facing Rommel. It was the biggest secret of the war.
However, more than once Rommel disobeyed the orders issued to him in Enigma code. For example, on this occasion, in April 1941, the British knew only of the orders issued to Rommel to stand fast at Benghazi; not yet knowing Rommel, they had assumed he would obey. This explains the surprised collapse of the British defense of Cyrenaica when he advanced. But now Winston Churchill had signaled from London that Tobruk was “to be held to the death without thought of retirement.” On the night of the eighth the main Australian force, retiring from Cyrenaica, had reached Tobruk and began manning its Italian-built fortifications, in pursuance of Churchill’s order.
Rommel did not realize this. Early on the tenth he was still confident, and he predicted: “The enemy is definitely retreating. We must pursue them with all we’ve got. Our objective is the Suez Canal, and every man is to be informed of this.”
As he was dictating these words into the Afrika Korps war diary, the machine gunners of Ponath’s battalion reached Kilometer Stone 18 on the Via Balbia, eleven miles short of Tobruk. Heavy artillery fire began to drop around them. By a supreme effort, Ponath managed to take his storm troops 2,000 yards closer, but here murderous antitank and machine gun fire swept the road.
The German troops dived for what little cover there was and waited for heavy artillery support.
Farther back down the asphalt highway, Prittwitz arrived at Schwerin’s command post in some perplexity. “Rommel has sent me to take command of the attack. But I’ve only just arrived in Africa—I don’t know the first thing about the troops or the terrain.” Schwerin briefed him and the general snatched some sleep.
At sunrise, Rommel stood at the new general’s tent flap, bawling to know why the attack on Tobruk was stagnating. “The British are escaping,” he bellowed. Prittwitz flushed pink with confusion. Schwerin loaned him his car and driver, and saw them drive off at high speed down the highway toward Tobruk. They were driving into the unknown. Rommel had no maps or air photos of the fortress. He had no notion of its defenses. He might have survived the next few minutes, but Prittwitz did not have Rommel’s nine lives. The astonished machine gunners, now at Kilometer 16, saw the car with the general’s pennant racing through them from the rear. A gun crew nearest to the highway screamed a warning: “Halt! Halt!” Prittwitz stood up in his speeding car and shouted back: “Come on! Forward! The enemy is getting away!” At that instant a British antitank shell slammed into his car and tore clean through him. He and his driver were killed outright.
Schwerin found out at once. “I saw red,” he said in 1976. “I marched straight over to the famous white house where Rommel had set up his headquarters. Rommel drove up, and I informed him that the general that he had just sent up front was already dead. That was the first time I saw him crack. He went pale, turned on his heel and drove off again without another word.”
Rommel drove south of Tobruk to inspect the lie of the land there. A number of trucks and a twenty-millimeter gun were in his party. A lookout spotted two small vehicles speeding and bumping along their wheel tracks, catching up from the rear. Through his telescope, Rommel saw that one was a British command car—the other looked like its German equivalent. He was a brave man, but also prudent. “Get the gun ready,” he ordered, and all the trucks halted. In no time the two strange cars were upon them and skidded to a halt. Out of one jumped General Streich, red-faced and angry, shouting the news of Prittwitz’s death. Rommel coldly interrupted him: “How dare you drive after me in a British car? I was about to have the gun open fire on you.”
Streich did not flinch. “In that case,” he retorted, “you would have managed to kill both your panzer division commanders in one day, Herr General.”
Kilometer 31
ROMMEL NEEDED TOBRUK for two good reasons. This grubby port was still the best harbor in Cyrenaica—in fact, in all North Africa. It blocked out a twenty-two-mile stretch of the coastal highway, forcing his supply convoys moving forward to the Egyptian frontier onto a fifty-mile inland detour along a desert trail of indescribable condition. With Tobruk in enemy hands, even Rommel dared not resume his offensive toward Egypt and the Nile valley, because the Tobruk garrison could lance down across his supply lines at any time.
At first it did not dawn on him that the enemy intended to fight there to the death. Until far into April 1941 he eagerly believed every morsel of radio or photographic intelligence that indicated that the British were pulling out—that they had only escaped from Cyrenaica into this port to stage a second Dunkirk-style evacuation. Rommel wasted many lives and much ammunition before he realized his mistake. In fact, this situation raised the most disturbing problems for Rommel, and at first he refused to address himself to them—above all, the problem of how to supply his own forces during the siege.
Initially this snag was easily overlooked by the German public. He was the hero of the press. The public liked to measure a general’s triumphs in simple terms, and as the Afrika Korps swept eastward toward Egypt the sheer distances he covered seemed to testify to his greatness. They had raced southward past Tobruk and captured Bardia on April 12, and next day Fort Capuzzo, barring the frontier road into Egypt itself, fell and the frontier wire was breached. Sollum, the first town on Egyptian soil, was captured too. But in the desert, as in war at sea, distances count for little; not even the capture of prisoners counts for much. What matters most is the destruction of the enemy’s hardware—their tanks and guns. Without them, in the desert, an army cannot fight.
The enemy’s material strength, particularly in the fortress of Tobruk, was intact. Before Rommel could permit his main forces to follow east along the “Rommelbahn,” as his staff sometimes dubbed the Via Balbia, he had to secure his lines of supply. “The prerequisite for this,” he said on April 13, “is the capture of Tobruk.” By that date his first attempts had failed, disastrously—the first rebuffs that any of Hitler’s commanders had ever suffered. Rommel blamed his generals, writing in his memoirs later: “Remarkably, some of my commanders kept wanting to pause so as to take on ammunition, fill up with gasoline and overhaul their vehicles, even when an immediate thrust by us would have had superb chances.” Years later, reading the book, General Streich scornfully scribbled in the margin: “Di
sgraceful nonsense!” and “What about fuel?” As Streich pointed out: “That was always the salient point, that there just wasn’t any gasoline for Rommel’s pipedreams. And that wasn’t the fault of ‘some of’ his commanders, but of Rommel himself.”
Standing on a high plain above the Mediterranean, facing toward Egypt, Rommel surveyed the landscape features that would dictate his battle tactics. To his left, a sheer cliffface fell away to the rim of the sea; the coast was like this virtually all the way to the Egyptian frontier. To his right the land rose in one-hundred-foot steps, until a maximum height above the sea level of 500 feet was reached about twenty miles inland. These steps, or escarpments, would become important battle objectives. Diagonally across this rising plain ran gentle riblike undulations, like waves in the sand, up to three miles apart and fifteen feet high. These would aid Rommel—he could advance between them, conceal his tanks “hull down” behind them. But there were also wadis—dry gulches or riverbeds where battle vehicles could negotiate crossings only in few places.
In the morning and late evening, visibility was unlimited; but by day the hot air shimmered and reflected and would play hell with the gunners’ aim. All around them appeared great lakes of water as mirages; but the real water had shriveled down into the bowels of this continent millennia before, and now there were only dried-up or poisoned cisterns built by the Arabs to capture the winter’s brief rainfalls.
All day long the sun grilled the soldiers’ bodies—dehydrating, blackening, peeling. The hot wind cracked lips, tangled hair, veined eyes with red. The whole nervous system was under excruciating strain, which exacerbated the depression and loneliness of the men who fought in Africa.
Rommel now lived in a small Italian-built trailer—protection against the sub-zero nights. He moved it, along with his battle headquarters, to a shallow stony gully just south of the Tobruk front line, where the increasingly troublesome enemy planes could not so easily find him. Every waking hour was taken up with preparing the assault on Tobruk. He did not even find time to write Lucie and detailed his batman to write to her instead. (“This morning Herr General has ordered me to write to you,” Corporal Günther began his compulsory letter to her on the eleventh; Lucie cannot have been much flattered.)
With his legs spread out beneath his stocky figure, his face blistering in the African sun, Rommel gripped his Zeiss binoculars and peered at Tobruk. He wondered just what and where its defenses were. He pushed his cap back to a jaunty angle so that the sun glinted on the big Perspex goggles that were to become a famous part of his image; he had seen them in the booty at Mechili and taken them for himself. Then he climbed back into his command vehicle, “Mammut,” and drove on to another vantage point.
Mammut (which means mammoth in German) was his name for the British ACV given him by Streich, who had captured three of these enormous conveyances at Mechili. A black and white Wehrmacht cross painted on its sides marked its change of owners. War reporter Fritz Lucke described it in a soldiers’ newspaper a few days later: “An armored box as big as a bus, on giant balloon tires as big and fat as the undercarriage wheels of a Junkers plane. A spent machine gun bullet is still embedded in it. The walls are windowless and painted in blue-gray camouflage tints. Only the driver and his co-driver have windshields, protected behind armored visors.” Rommel’s Mammut became a familiar sight to his troops in Libya.
What happened next, in this second week of April 1941, rattled Rommel and shook his soldiers’ faith in him. Tobruk defeated him. He learned the hard way—by bloody tactical biopsies—just how strong its defenses were.
He ordered Streich to make the first attack on the eleventh. Streich sent in Ponath’s weary Machine Gun Battalion Eight from the south, and all Olbrich’s available tanks—about twenty—on a parallel approach just to the right. Air reconnaissance somehow suggested that the British were evacuating Tobruk by sea. “You’ll have to move fast!” Rommel had ordered. “Raise a lot of dust!” At 4:45 P.M. the tanks began to roll. The machine gunners’ war diary tells the rest: “Close behind the last tanks our battalion leaps out and runs behind them and the advancing wall of fire. But to our horror the tanks suddenly turn around and come back at speed through our lines still accompanied by heavy shelling. One of their officers screams to our commander [Ponath], ‘There’s a very deep and wide antitank trench four hundred yards farther on! We can’t get over it!’ ” An hour later Colonel Ponath, a tall, handsome, now haggard man, was reporting this in person to Rommel and Streich. Behind the tank trap he had also seen an extensive barbed wire barrier. The attack was halted; his men were pinned down, unable to withdraw. His battalion had lost eleven dead, just to find out this most elementary information.
Next day, April 12, a furious sandstorm began. Rommel ordered a new assault, using the sandstorm as cover, to begin at 3:30 P.M. Just before then, however, the storm abated. Streich asked, “Are we still to attack?” Rommel ordered, “That attack must be carried out at all costs.” Streich ordered Rommel’s words recorded in his division’s diary, and sent in sappers to try to blow up the tank obstacles. A hail of artillery fire met them, at point-blank range. British bombers joined in. Nevertheless, later that day Rommel again decreed: “Your division is to take Tobruk!”
The result was the same. At six P.M. Olbrich, the tank regiment commander, reported back. Again his tanks had failed to breach the defenses, and the attempt had been costly, too. The Fifth Panzer Regiment had started these battles with 161 tanks. Now it was down to less than forty. Of the seventy-one best tanks, the Panzer IIIs, only nine were left. Streich accordingly refused Rommel’s demand for a new assault until it could be properly prepared: he wanted proper air photos, dive bomber attacks on the enemy guns, air cover and spotter planes for his own artillery. The war diary does not record Rommel’s reply.
However, the plight of Ponath’s machine gunners—only a few hundred yards from the enemy lines—left Rommel no option but to renew the attack; they had to be rescued soon. By night they froze; by day they had to lie motionless beneath the baking sun—the slightest movement attracted a hail of rifle fire. The ground was too hard to scoop out foxholes. The defenders seemed to be concealed in some kind of bunkers. “Our division cannot even inform us where the enemy positions are,” the machine gun battalion complained in its diary.
At midday on the thirteenth, Easter Sunday, Ponath was called back to Rommel’s headquarters. When Ponath crawled forward again to his machine gunners at five P.M., he dictated this order to his adjutant, lying full-length in the dust and sand next to him. “The general [Rommel] has ordered a new attack on Tobruk. Before that, from six to 6:05, six artillery battalions will pour concentrated shellfire onto the wire barrier ahead of us.” Sappers would then move forward and blow in the tank ditch, and Ponath’s battalion would infiltrate to the far side and establish a bridgehead for the tank regiment to exploit just before dawn. In effect, Rommel would be pitting 500 machine gunners and about twenty tanks against a fortress defended by 34,000 of the British Empire’s toughest troops.
That evening, as Ponath’s operation began, Rommel called all his assault commanders to his Mammut and set out his plan for the dawn attack. He told them that radio reconnaissance had again indicated that the enemy were pulling out of Tobruk by sea. “If the enemy do pull out,” he told General Streich, “then we’ll follow through with our tank regiments at once, tonight.”
He put Streich in command of the attack, and disappeared from the vehicle. Toward midnight Ponath’s adjutant appeared, hot and disheveled, and told Streich that his machine gun battalion had breached the tank ditch and wire without any enemy resistance at all—should they press on? Streich smelled an ambush and forbade any further move until first light.
The German bridgehead was about 500 yards wide. But as the assault troops quietly dug in—and how easy that sounds!—disturbing things began to happen. Shadows flitted against the moonlight and then vanished, leaving soldiers with their throats slit or stabbed by bayonets. Were t
here enemy defenders hidden just nearby?
An hour passed, then a mass of enemy troops suddenly rose out of the blackness, singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”; forty more Germans were cut down—then the enemy vanished back into their hidden bunkers. In fact, without realizing it, the Germans had penetrated right into the midst of the first line of enemy bunkers—they were built flush with ground level—and the Australian defenders were only waiting for the dawn to come to mow them down.
As yet it was still dark. At 3:30 A.M., an hour before the tank regiment was due to go into the breach, Rommel was still confident. “The battle for Tobruk will probably come to its conclusion today,” he informed Lucie. “The British are fighting stubbornly with a lot of artillery, but we’re still going to pull it off.”
An hour later Olbrich’s tanks roared into the breach. Rommel had given Streich the use of an Italian artillery regiment and a flak battery for close support. At first light, Rommel drove up the road from El Adem toward Tobruk: from the light signals and gunfire in the north he could see that Ponath’s machine gunners were well inside the tank ditch. But something alarmed Rommel. He now drove off to the Italian Armored Division Ariete and ordered it to follow Olbrich’s tanks through the breach. Ariete, however, had only just arrived and could not help.