by David Irving
The story of the next three bloody hours can be briefly told. At dawn the British troops pinched off the breach behind the machine gunners, preventing their escape. At 7:45 A.M. Olbrich’s tanks were forced to turn back by the enemy guns; the enemy also threw aircraft and superior Matilda tanks into the battle. Olbrich drove to Rommel and spelled out the failure of his attack. He had seen the liquidation of virtually the entire machine gun battalion with his own eyes. Of 500 men only 116 were left to escape during the following night. The rest were dead or in enemy captivity. The flak battery had fought heroically but had lost most of its equipment. Olbrich himself had lost half his tanks, and the turrets of most of the others were jammed.
Rommel was angry and perplexed. In a rage he ordered Streich to attack again at four P.M.—if not to capture Tobruk, at least to help Ponath’s hapless surviving machine gunners to escape. Streich did not refuse, he merely declined to accept responsibility. Earlier he had told Rommel’s operations officer, Major Ehlers, “Herr General Rommel may not like to hear it, but it is my duty as next senior officer to point it out: if the British had had the least daring, they could have pushed out of their fortress through the breach and not only overrun the rest of my division, but captured the Afrika Korps headquarters and mine as well. That would have been the end of the German presence in Libya, and the end of Herr General’s reputation. Be so good as to tell your general that.” Ehlers returned with this message for Streich: “Rommel has instructed you to revert to an ‘offensive defense.’ ” Streich walked out, shaking his head.
Olbrich supported Streich’s refusal to attack again. Count von Schwerin said: “Over my dead body.” All considered that any further slaughter incurred in attacking defenses of which they knew nothing would be a crime. Rommel’s headquarters diary limply concludes, “A second attack was scheduled . . . but did not take place.”
He masked this ghastly defeat in his evening report to the General Staff (“casualties cannot yet be assessed”). But it could not be entirely concealed. The brave commander of the machine gun battalion, Gustav Ponath, was dead; so were most of his men. A crisis of confidence began: for the first time an anti-Rommel faction emerged among the troops. He had “burned” good men rather than prepare the assault properly, they said. Major Bolbrinker, Olbrich’s successor, subsequently criticized Rommel for ignoring his tank commander’s advice.
Rommel would not admit his own fault and continued to put the defeat down to other reasons. “During the offensive in Cyrenaica,” he explained to the War Office in July, “and particularly during the early part of the siege of Tobruk, there were numerous instances when my clear and specific orders were not obeyed by my commanders, or not promptly; there were instances bordering on disobedience, and some commanders broke down in face of the enemy.”
To Berlin he telegraphed an appeal for more troops. He lamented that he was now so preoccupied by Tobruk that “despite unique opportunities offered by the overall situation,” he could not resume his offensive to the east. The plaintive tone brought peals of unsympathetic laughter from the General Staff. At last Rommel had been taken down a peg or two! Franz Halder, chief of the General Staff, quoted Rommel’s words mockingly in his diary and added: “Now at last he is compelled to admit that his forces are just not strong enough. . . . We have had that impression here for quite some time.”
Over the next days, Rommel continued to salvage his self-esteem by finding scapegoats for the disaster. He blamed Streich and Olbrich for the slaughter of the machine-gun battalion. “I don’t get the support I need from all my commanders,” he confided to Lucie in one letter. “I’ve put in for some of them to be changed.” He fell out with his own chief of staff , Colonel von dem Borne—a calm, circumspect officer. He sent his operations officer Major Ehlers home and engineered his dismissal from the General Staff. (Ehlers had suggested in the corps diary that if Rommel had not gone gallivanting across the desert to Mechili on April 5, it might have been possible to reach Tobruk before the enemy instead of getting bogged down.)
Rommel even regained some of his lost confidence. On the sixteenth he assured Lucie, “The battle for Tobruk has calmed down a bit. The enemy are embarking. So we can expect to be taking over the fortress ourselves very shortly.” Visiting the shattered remnants of the machine gun battalion that day, he encouraged them: “We’ll be in Cairo eight days from now—pass the word around.” He made no attempt to call on General Streich’s nearby headquarters although it was his fiftieth birthday. Streich guessed his days there were numbered.
“Herr Lieutenant General Rommel regretted the casualties our battalion took,” a machine gun officer reported to Streich, “and told us: ‘You mustn’t let it get you down. It’s the soldier’s lot. Sacrifices have to be made.’”
Rommel blamed the battalion’s faulty leadership for not having first opened up a wider breach in the defenses. “He explained it to us on his map with short pencil marks. When Lieutenant Prahl pointed out that the battalion just did not have the means available to widen the breach, he replied: ‘Then the division should have taken care of it.’”
Already Rommel was planning new exploits. He exuded fresh optimism when two top Luftwaffe generals flew in two days later—General Hoffmann von Waldau, the deputy chief of Air Staff, and Field Marshal Milch, Hermann Göring’s deputy. While Waldau shivered in a bitterly cold tent, Milch shared Rommel’s warm trailer and later wrote this account—it is among his private papers:
“The time I spent with him was short but sweet, as we both got on well with each other. He was very happy about the increase in fighter plane strength”—elements of the Twenty-seventh Fighter Wing had just arrived at nearby Gazala—“as he was one of our more air-minded generals. He was quite starry-eyed about his prospects. Bending very close to his maps—he was desperately shortsighted—he exclaimed, ‘Look, Milch, there’s Tobruk. I’m going to take it. There’s the Halfaya Pass. I’ll take that too. There’s Cairo. I’ll take that. And there—there is the Suez Canal: I’m taking that as well.’ What else,” wrote Milch, “could I say to that except: ‘And here am I. Take me too!’”
Roars of laughter came from the trailer. But other, less congenial visitors were already on their way from Berlin to Rommel. On April 23 General Halder recorded sharply in his diary: “Rommel has not sent us a single clear-cut report all these days, and I have a feeling that things are in a mess. Reports from officers coming from his theater, as well as a personal letter, show that Rommel is in no way equal to his task. He rushes about the whole day between his widely scattered units, stages reconnaissance raids and fritters away his forces.”
Thus it came about that as Count von Schwerin lay prostrate in the desert, scanning Tobruk’s defenses through field glasses while enemy shells and machine gun bullets pierced the shimmering air above him, he felt a tugging at his sleeve and found Halder’s deputy, Paulus, lying next to him. Paulus had flown from Berlin, driven and finally crawled to this battlefield to try to find out what was happening. (Paulus and Rommel, both army captains at the time, had both been company commanders in the same regiment in 1927–29 in Stuttgart.) “He’s probably the only man,” reflected Halder, “with sufficient personal influence to head off this soldier gone raving mad.”
It was April 27 when Paulus arrived at Tobruk to see things for himself. Rommel’s nerve was already tattered. The terrible heat and the backbiting on all sides did not help. Twice in the last week he had missed death only by inches: an enemy salvo had dropped right on them as he stopped to talk to infantry officers digging in west of El Adem; one lieutenant was killed outright, another lost an arm. And on the twentieth, as he was returning from a visit to Bardia, Hurricane fighter planes had suddenly swooped out of the dying sun and machine-gunned his Mammut at zero altitude. His driver was hit before he could close the steel door. A truck driver and a dispatch rider were killed outright. The radio truck was destroyed. Rommel himself bandaged his driver’s bad head wound and climbed into the Mammut’s driving seat.
Rommel now had only puny forces left to hold Bardia and the Egyptian frontier, and they reeled under the blows of enemy tanks, bombers and even ships’ guns. On April 24, Rommel had sent renewed appeals for help to Berlin: “Situation at Bardia, Tobruk graver from day to day as British forces increase.” He demanded an airlift of the promised Fifteenth Panzer Division, the early expansion of the Fifth Light to a full-bodied panzer division, powerful Luftwaffe reinforcements and U-boat operations along the coast. He added briefly: “Italian troops unreliable.” When Hitler heard of Rommel’s plight next day, one of his staff jotted in a private diary: “Führer uses very strong language.” Two days later, the leading elements of the Fifteenth Panzer Division began to arrive by air in Benghazi.
Hitler’s language about the General Staff was mild compared with the oaths that rang out from Rommel’s officers now, as they at long last received from the Italian High Command detailed plans of the defenses of Tobruk: now they could see what they had been up against. Italian engineers had designed and built 128 interconnected strongpoints all along the thirty-mile-long perimeter. Like the tank ditch guarding each strongpoint, the gangways were all covered with wood and a thin layer of sand to conceal them; they housed antitank gun and machine gun positions and were all finished off flush with ground level to make them invisible to attackers until they were right on top of them. There were heavy barbed wire entanglements around them. Little wonder that Rommel’s last attempt to rush Tobruk had been repulsed so bloodily. Besides, as Paulus commented privately to Streich: “Can you give me one instance in history where a penetration of enemy lines that was begun in the evening was ever successfully exploited on the following morning?” As Streich had pointed out, the evening move gave the enemy all the advance warning they needed to be on guard when the main push began.
It was about this time that Rommel called the Italian commanders and Streich for a joint conference on his new battle plans. Streich interrupted. “A few days ago,” he said, “some of my officers and I had a look over the ground southeast of Tobruk. It’s level and offers us a good chance of moving our troops forward at night, right up to their fortifications, without being noticed; they can then attack at dawn.” Rommel scornfully rebuked him: “I don’t want to hear any ideas from you—I just want to hear how you intend to put my plan into effect.” (After all else had failed, it was Streich’s plan that he was to adopt successfully later on—once the general had left Africa.)
Rommel was still optimistic. He admitted privately to Lucie on April 25, “I’ve rarely had such military anxieties as over the last few days. But things will probably look very different soon. Probably Greece will be finished soon, and then I’ll get more help.” He repeated this hope some days later, so it is quite clear that even his old associate General Paulus had not revealed to him Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa,” the plan to hurl 200 divisions against Russia in June.
The relationship between Paulus and Rommel was awkward now. They were both lieutenant generals, but Paulus had a few months’ edge on him, and since he was Halder’s deputy he could pull both rank and station on Rommel. Rommel had no choice but to obey. He suspected that the general’s surprise visit was an intrigue by the General Staff. Probably he was right. He sent Paulus around the perimeter of the siege ring and told him he was planning a big new attack on Tobruk’s southwestern sector on the last day of April. Paulus was skeptical.
Dissatisfied with Streich, Rommel put General Heinrich Kirchheim in command. Kirchheim was a War Office tropical warfare expert who just happened to be in Libya at the time. (This appointment would have fateful consequences for Rommel, in October 1944.) The attack would be by night, focused at first on the shallow Hill 209, known to the long vanished local Arabs as Ras el Mdauuar. From 209, the enemy was harassing Rommel’s rear lines of communication. Again he had great expectations: “We’ve got high hopes,” he wrote to Lucie that morning. “The enemy artillery has fallen very silent, although we’re giving them hell ourselves.” Surprise was complete, thanks to Rommel’s well-planned deception tactics. But again the attack failed, and again it was because of German ignorance of Tobruk’s fortifications.
Rommel drove through to the first line to observe the battle from his Mammut. At one stage he crawled the last few hundred yards forward to where Kirchheim’s shock troops were pinned down near one bunker. By nine A.M. a machine gun battalion had taken Hill 209 from the rear, and the main attempt to drive northeastward toward Tobruk itself began; but the penetration was too narrow, and as the troops advanced they stumbled on yet more well-concealed strongpoints. On May 1 Baron Hans-Karl von Esebeck—Prittwitz’s successor in the Fifteenth Panzer Division—informed Rommel: “Our troops and particularly officers have suffered heavy casualties from infantry and antitank fire coming from numerous undetected bunkers and from saturation artillery fire. Most units have 50 percent casualties, some even more. Morale is still absolutely magnificent, both among our shock troops, who went in as planned to attack the objectives, and among the infantry companies, who followed them eastward in heavy close combat with the reviving bunker crews and held out despite artillery fire.”
A stinging sandstorm sprang up and stifled the rest of the battle. Rommel hung on to Hill 209, and to several hundred prisoners—including Australian troops, some of the largest, most muscular Australian troops he had ever seen. But Paulus ordered him peremptorily to call off the rest of the attack. Rommel’s soldiers had suffered further appalling casualties—over 1,200 men killed, injured and missing. More significant, his ammunition dumps had been so depleted by warding off enemy counterattacks that he found himself facing his first real crisis of supplies.
Rommel first hinted at these “supply difficulties” in a letter home on May 9. Paulus had rubbed it in: the fact was that Rommel’s brilliant but undisciplined advance to Tobruk had failed to bring decisive victory but had added another 700 miles to his already extended lines of supply.
Tobruk harbor was denied to him by the Australians. Benghazi was closer than Tripoli, but the Italians were refusing to send supply ships there for reasons of which Paulus thoroughly approved: the port had only limited capacity, the sea route was longer and the danger of British interference that much greater.
German navy officers sent to organize Rommel’s supply routes had returned to Italy having been unable to speak to him. (“General Rommel had flown off to the front with his chief of staff and had been out of contact with his operations staff for twenty-four hours.”)
This left only the long road from Tripoli harbor to Tobruk. It was 1,100 miles long—the distance from Hamburg to Rome; and this introduced another serious bottleneck, the truck transport itself.
The mathematics of his situation were plain enough. For bare survival, the Afrika Korps at this time needed 24,000 tons of supplies each month. To stockpile for a future offensive, it needed another 20,000 tons a month.
The Luftwaffe needed 9,000 tons of supplies. Add to this the 63,000 tons needed by the Italian troops and Italian civilian population in Libya, and a staggering monthly requirement of 116,000 tons arose. But the facilities at Tripoli could handle only 45,000 tons a month.
Juggle as they might with these hard facts, the German representatives in Rome could not find any way of providing Rommel with more than about 20,000 tons a month—less than bare survival.
It was a problem of Rommel’s own making, and the knowledge of this only angered him the more. How easy it had been to make that retort to Halder in March: “That’s your pigeon!” As the supply crisis worsened, his venom turned on the Italians—responsible for supply shipments across the Mediterranean—and he even suggested that Italy’s troops should withdraw, leaving the fighting to the Afrika Korps, as the Italians were “useless mouths” to be fed.
His injustices toward the Italians derived from the frustration of his hand-to-mouth existence. A temporary crisis in shipping occurred because the nearby British-held island of Malta, with its naval and air bases, had not been effectively n
eutralized. But over the whole period of the war in Africa, the Italian navy performed its convoy duties well.
The figures show that, on average, each transport ship had more than one naval escort—a ratio never reached by the Allies. Of 206,402 men shipped to Africa, 189,162 arrived safely (over 91 percent); of 599,338 tons of fuel, 476,703 tons arrived (80 percent); of trucks and tanks, 243,633 tons arrived of 275,310 tons sent (88 percent); 149,462 tons of arms and ammunition, of 171,060 tons sent (87 percent). As far as the German forces alone were concerned, Rommel got 82 percent of the fuel and 86 percent of the other supplies that were sent to him. This hardly justified the words he used with increasing amplitude to explain his supply crisis: “Italian treachery.”
For Rommel’s troops besieging Tobruk, stifling, static war began. More than once, in the scribbled pencil notes of his staff on the anxious talks with other commanders, explicit comparisons with Verdun crop up. But where were the trenches? Here there was just dirt, and hard rock, and ferocious sun and flies.
His men were ill and strained. The least graze—unavoidable when digging holes in this barren ground—and the slightest scratch from the camel thorn bushes stayed unhealed for months as a permanent running sore on arm or leg. Noses peeled, lips cracked and blistered. The tough commander of the forces holding the Egyptian frontier at Sollum, Colonel Maximilian von Herff, a man of ludicrous affectations, but a brave one, wrote in a letter to Berlin: “Gastric disorders—a kind of chill—are rife here. They occur about once a month and leave you very weak for a while. After three days of it recently I felt so bad that I fainted three times in one day . . . but I got over it without reporting sick. At any rate all of us Africa warriors, officers and men alike, will be glad to see the back of it. We say, Never again Africa!” Herff earned his ticket back to Berlin some weeks later and became chief of personnel in Himmler’s Waffen SS. Erwin Rommel had to endure Africa for two more years.