The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  Even men half his age found the going tough. The food was monotonous, the diet lopsided. His troops had to survive on biscuits, olive oil (because butter would go rancid), canned sardines, coffee, jam, soft cheese in “toothpaste” tubes and unidentifiable meat in Italian government cans embossed “AM”—the soldiers suspected it stood for Alter Mann [old man]. Of course there were no eggs, ham or milk, let alone fresh fruit or vegetables. All the greater was their envy of the British. “How pitiful our equipment is in every respect, compared with the British,” wrote Herff. “Just look at the supplies they get—mineral water, canned preserves and fruit, things that we sorely lack. This lack is becoming increasingly evident from the damage to our youngsters’ health as the days get hotter. Even our twenty-five-year-olds are already losing their teeth and their gums just won’t stop bleeding. It’s not going to be an easy summer.”

  It was by now so hot that Rommel drove around in shorts, a real concession in a general so stiff and formal. Every day began at six, as he began the intensive training of all ranks in the unfamiliar infantry tactics they would need to eliminate Tobruk’s defenses bunker by bunker. The knowledge that he had failed, and at such cost, oppressed him and he could guess the tone of Paulus’s report to Berlin.

  Everywhere he sensed the murmur of rising criticism. Even Herff had written to Berlin about the losses his regiment had suffered so far in the war: “In the west we had already lost over 1,000 men, then the sinking of a convoy cost me 250 more and my gun company, and Tobruk alone has already cost me nearly 450 men. Nobody here understood these first attacks on Tobruk: although the strength and garrison of the fortress were well known, each newly arrived battalion was sent in to attack and naturally enough didn’t get through. The upshot is that there isn’t a unit at Tobruk that hasn’t taken a mauling. . . . A lot of the more impulsive commands issued by the Afrika Korps we junior officers just don’t make head or tail of.”

  Herff’s telling letter was placed in Rommel’s personnel file, like a permanent black mark.

  THERE WAS A German army cemetery near Tobruk, beside the Via Balbia. Many times Rommel paused there to read the names on the newest graves.

  “I remember,” said one of the war correspondents assigned to him, “seeing General Rommel stand there one day, at Kilometer 31 outside Tobruk—the last kilometer in so many brave soldiers’ lives—and I watched him meditating. That long summer of 1941 the war cemetery here swelled to quite a size, and in the eerie twilight of a sandstorm it seemed to us, in all its cruel loneliness, something of a symbol of man’s transience. We were looking at the grave of an officer. For a while he stood there, absolutely motionless. Then he turned away without a word and left. But in his eyes I believe I saw what moved him—there was deep sorrow in them. It was the sorrow of a man saying farewell to an old friend and comrade.”

  THE HIGH AFRICAN summer was upon them. Tanks standing in the open—and in the desert there was nowhere else for tanks to stand—heated up to 160° F. They were too hot to touch. Rommel ordered his movie cameraman to take pictures of eggs being fried on the tanks, to impress the public in Germany. The eggs refused to fry, so Rommel sparked an acetylene burner and applied the flame to the metal. His old genius had not left him yet.

  The Commanders’ Revolt

  TAKE THE ROAD that Marshal Balbo built, as Rommel does so often now—from Tobruk eastward along the Via Balbia to the next big town, Bardia. It is an hour’s fast drive, with the sea never far away to the left and the tall escarpment to the right. After Bardia the road climbs ten miles until it meets the Trigh Capuzzo, the old camel route across the high plateau. Here the Italians have built a stone fort, Ridotta Capuzzo, to guard the frontier with Egypt just two miles farther on. The frontier is a broad barbed wire entanglement originally built to keep the rebellious Sanusi warriors out of Libya. It stretches into the desert, as far as the eye can see.

  A few hundred yards beyond the frontier, into Egypt, the road begins a steep, tortuous descent of the escarpment toward the town of Sollum. Its untidy quays are silhouetted against the deep blue of the Mediterranean. Left of the coast road that runs on from here are dazzling white sand and sea. To the right the escarpment again rises, steep and uneven, to heights of 600 feet and more. This road goes on to Cairo, but a few miles after Sollum another road forks off to the right and scales the escarpment in a series of hairpin bends—serpentines, the Germans call them. This is the Halfaya Pass, which Rommel’s troops under Colonel von Herff have captured late in April 1941. Only at Sollum and Halfaya can tanks easily climb the escarpment to the desert plateau and thus gain access to Libya. This is the importance of the Sollum front: if it caves in, Rommel is vulnerable to a British attack from Egypt; he will have to abandon the siege of Tobruk, and fall back on a line at El Gazala or retreat even farther west. Obeying Paulus, he has issued blueprints early in May for the fortification of the Sollum front—he has sketched the designs himself, based on Tobruk bunkers that he himself inspected under fire some days before.

  On May 22, he takes this road in his Mammut to visit Herff and his troops. Hermann Aldinger, his aide, writes that day a portrait of life in the Afrika Korps:

  After days of tough fighting on the Sollum/Capuzzo front the general has today paid a visit to this sector and called on the troops. We leave his headquarters at dawn and set out over forty-five miles of roadless, pathless desert across boulders and camel thorn shrubs. The ACV rolls about as though we are on the high seas, and we are thrown about inside however tight we hold on. The general and I climb up and sit on the roof—there are three exit hatches on top—and keep a lookout on all sides, because enemy aircraft can be a real menace. Convoys of trucks, swathed in clouds of dust, are moving hither and thither. Day and night the drivers have to go about their arduous and not unrisky duty, because the front is by no means closed and the enemy’s armored cars and sabotage units are also moving about.

  The troops stand to attention and salute, and are delighted when the general speaks to them. We reach the Via Balbia and have to go on more miles to the east. The road is badly worn and there are potholes big enough to swallow half a car. Soon we reach the Sollum front and we have one conference after another. But then the general feels the urge to meet the men actually face to face with the enemy, he has to speak with them, crawl right forward to them in their foxholes and have a chat with them. You can see the real pleasure on their faces, when these ordinary soldiers are allowed to speak in person to their general and tell him about the hard fighting here over the last few days. The ground is hard rock, impossible to dig in; cover can only be made by heaping up rocks, and a canvas sheet is stretched out over them to provide some shelter from the scorching sun. This is why the soldiers don’t wear much either—often just a pair of shorts. The lads are as brown as Negroes. And so we move from position to position—infantry, artillery, tanks, observers, etc. Our victories over the last few days, and defensive successes, give them all great hope.

  When Rommel saw this front on May 22, Colonel von Herff had just inflicted a crushing rebuff to the British. (“Rommel told me when he visited us,” wrote Herff, “that he was scared stiff for us as there wasn’t anything he could have done to help us.”) Rommel had ordered Herff one month earlier to adopt an aggressive and fluid defense, sending raiding parties far behind the enemy lines. The colonel showed great initiative. He exploited the first sandstorm to attack the British and steal their trucks. He dug positions. He trained his joint German/Italian force of some 6,000 men. For the Italians he had high praise: “With patience and energy,” he recorded some weeks later, “I succeeded in making useful and brave soldiers out of them; they held out to the end against the enemy and knew how to die without fear.”

  This was just as well, because the British decided to strike here with fifty-five tanks of the Seventh Armored Division and the Twenty-second Guards Brigade before Rommel’s new panzer division, the Fifteenth, could arrive. The blow fell at dawn on May 15. At least ten of the enemy’s tanks
were the dreaded Matildas, all but impervious to the German antitank guns. It was obvious to Rommel from the radio intercepts obtained by his intelligence staff that this was a major enemy attempt at relieving Tobruk from the rear. He admitted a few days later: “It hung by a thread.”

  However, Herff made the right decision, to roll with the enemy’s initial punch—although this meant abandoning ground—and then sidestep after dark to strike unexpectedly on the enemy flank the next morning. Herff’s narrative continues: “By afternoon [May 15] I had things under control again. I withdrew that night with all the German troops and early on the sixteenth I struck back with eight tanks into the enemy’s flank. By evening I had recaptured all the lost ground except the Halfaya Pass.”

  This first battle of Sollum had given Rommel a nasty fight, and he sent a string of jumpy signals to Berlin at two- or three-hour intervals as it ebbed and flowed, cajoling, beseeching, reassuring, warning, appealing and then triumphing as Herff—aided by a battalion of the Eighth Panzer Regiment—restored the situation. Rommel’s nervousness nearly brought an abrupt end to his African career, already under a cloud because of protest letters reaching Berlin over the slaughter in Tobruk.

  Field Marshal von Brauchitsch himself sent a six-page signal to him on May 25, demanding that in the future the general’s signals be “sober” and show a “certain continuity”: he was not to get rattled when the enemy threw surprises at him. “You are to avoid reporting too optimistically or too pessimistically under the immediate influence of events,” Brauchitsch directed. Rommel petulantly dismissed the commander in chief’s telegram as “a colossal rocket, the reason for which is completely beyond me.”

  Fortunately for his prestige, Rommel’s Sollum front commander now launched a counterattack that proved a stinging blow to the enemy. The British had left the Twenty-second Guards Brigade to garrison the Halfaya Pass. Late on May 26 Herff, again supported by the Eighth Panzer Regiment, decided to spring a surprise attack on this garrison next morning. “We rolled into action at 4:30 A.M. [first light] on May 27,” Herff said, “and by 6:15 the pass was in our hands. The British took to their heels along the coastal plain toward Sidi Barrani. We picked up a lot of booty, above all artillery [nine guns], tanks [seven Matildas, including three in working order] and the trucks we so badly need.”

  This was a useful boost to Rommel’s reputation. He wrote a jaunty and aggressive reply to Brauchitsch’s telegram—the reply is not in the files but it was clearly a threat to shake the dust of Africa off his feet. He wrote Lucie ironically on May 29: “I had a big rocket from the Army High Command—to my mind quite unjustified—in gratitude for all we have achieved so far. I’m not going to take it lying down, and a letter is already on its way to von B.” A few days later he amplified on this: “My affair with the High Command is still extant. Either they do have confidence in me, or they don’t. And if they don’t, then I have asked them to draw the appropriate conclusions. I’m curious to see what will come of that. . . . Bellyaching is so easy if you’re not having to sweat things out here.”

  In the Reich, Rommel’s fame was spreading—assiduously fanned by the corps of news- and cameramen he had attached to his staff . It was no coincidence that his chief aide was, like his predecessor Karl Hanke, one of the senior officials of the Nazi propaganda ministry: the thirty-six-year-old Lieutenant Alfred Berndt. Burly, wavy-haired and dark-skinned, Berndt had the lumbering gait of a bear and a physiological oddity—six toes on one foot. He was literate and personable, poked his nose in everywhere, and was put in charge of keeping the Rommel diary. Before joining Rommel’s staff as a kind of Party “commissar,” he was already a tough, ambitious Nazi zealot. Berndt had a brash frankness that Rommel readily accepted, fearing otherwise to slight his feelings. In April, for instance, Berndt had advised him with a cheeky grin: “Mein Lieber, I would not advance too far if I were you!” In return, Berndt skillfully nourished the Rommel legend. And when anything unpleasant needed saying to Adolf Hitler, then Rommel sent Alfred Berndt, because he was a brave man. Berndt died proving it in Hungary in 1945.

  An avalanche of letters descended on Rommel. The Nazi women’s organization sent him parcels of chocolate—though how it fared in the desert heat defies imagination. A ten-year-old girl saw her idol in a newsreel and wrote to him from Augsburg: “. . . I don’t have to be frightened of getting a cold reply from you like from the others. To you, General Rommel, I can speak from the bottom of my heart. I admire you and your Afrika Korps so much, and dearly hope you will win through to victory.” Rommel, the People’s General, replied to the child with equal warmth.

  He knew, however, that victory was a long way off. The air force was doing what it could to destroy Tobruk’s water supply and prevent British supply ships from coming in. But he acknowledged that the Afrika Korps had met its match: “The Australian troops are fighting magnificently and their training is far superior to ours,” he privately told Lucie. “Tobruk can’t be taken by force, given our present means.” So he settled down for a long, exhausting siege and began to retrain his troops in the “old-fashioned” infantry tactics that had succeeded in similar situations in World War I. He taught his men how to dig in, and how to prevent unnecessary bloodshed.

  “He’s a master of deception and disguises,” said Lieutenant Berndt in a propaganda broadcast, “and always does what one least expects. If the enemy believe we are particularly strong at one place, then you can be sure we are weak. If they think we are weak, and venture close to us, then we are definitely strong. ‘With your general we just didn’t know where we were!’—that’s what one British prisoner complained. If he stages attacks coupled with feint attacks, then the enemy virtually always think the wrong one is the real one, and lay down their entire artillery fire on that. If the enemy act on what they regard as the typical signs of feint attacks, then next time it is different and then they are wrong again. If they think they are dummies and ignore them, then they’re the real ones!

  “For a time,” Berndt continued, “the enemy at Tobruk were annoying us by shelling our observation posts. So Rommel orders the erection of observation towers: whole streets of telegraph poles are sawed down and thirty such towers are erected during the night around Tobruk, complete with uniformed dummy soldiers intently keeping watch on the enemy and now and again climbing up and down the ladders—on ropes operated from a dugout.

  “The enemy are puzzled and open up a murderous bombardment on them. For days on end they give these towers every shell they’ve got. Some are knocked down, others remain. After a while they give up the effort—and that is when we replace the dummy soldiers with real flesh-and-blood observers.”

  What was the secret of Rommel’s success in North Africa? He was a born desert warrior, discovering talents that not even he had previously suspected. In terrain often devoid of landmarks he developed an uncanny sense of location. His memory seemed to have registered every empty oil drum, broken cairn or burned-out tank littering the sands. He had acquired the desert dweller’s sixth sense, too. Driving far out in the desert one day with his chief of staff , he suddenly cried, “Let’s pull out! In half an hour the enemy will be here!” Soon a dust cloud appeared on the distant horizon, betraying the approach of enemy armored cars.

  In this new environment he developed a new style of battle command. He liked to leave a fixed operations staff in the rear, in permanent contact with his Italian superiors and with the lower echelons, and then drive off himself with a small command staff in a few open cars, followed by mobile radio trucks to keep him in touch with the operations staff and combat units. This did produce problems, because radio sets often failed under the extraordinary climatic conditions, and batteries rapidly ran down. With its black, white and red command flag on its fender, his own Volkswagen “Kübel” car was clearly visible. From it, he set the angle and tempo of the attack. If his car was shot up or ran over a mine, he simply commandeered another. Thus he could appear in the thick of any battle and take personal
command, without the time-consuming waiting for messages that bedeviled other—and particularly the enemy—commanders.

  When battle began, Rommel rarely slept and seldom ate. He could survive for days on a few pieces of bread or a quick cold snack served up by his orderly, Corporal Herbert Günther. Uncompromising, hard and realistic with himself, he demanded endurance and courage from his commanders. Once he found a general still breakfasting at 6:30 A.M.: “You will return to Germany!” he barked at him. The number of commanders who failed to meet his standards was, at the beginning, very high, and their turnover was great. Italian troops who fought under him came to worship him. They had rarely seen an Italian general on the battlefield. They relished the brusqueness with which he treated those of the porky and indifferent Italian generals who fell foul of him. Above all, he humanely recognized that the Italians had their limitations, and that it was callous and foolish to dictate impossible battle tasks to them. “There are more virtues in life than just being a soldier,” he reminded his aide Lieutenant Behrendt that summer. In October 1943 a German intelligence report noted the astounding fact that Italian soldiers were expressing the view that Italy should be governed by a leading German “like Göring or Rommel.”

  THE FIRST HALF of June 1941 saw Rommel reshuffling his commanders and preparing for even harder challenges. The rest of the Fifteenth Panzer Division had arrived. Under the youthful Colonel Walter Neumann-Silkow’s command, it was sent to the Sollum front. In the other panzer division, the Fifth Light, Rommel had taken harsh steps to eliminate what he termed “the crisis in the officer corps.” He had court-martialed a tank battalion commander for bursting into tears during the last vain attack on Tobruk—on May 1—and refusing to attack the “impregnable” Matilda tanks. He had made Major Ernst Bolbrinker the panzer regiment’s new commander after Colonel Olbrich reported sick to avoid what he described as “further flattery” from Rommel. And he had got rid of Streich. One day at the end of May he telephoned Streich’s command truck.