The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  “Streich,” he said, “I have asked for you to be replaced. You will continue in command, however, until your replacement arrives.”

  “Does Herr General have any further orders?” Streich coldly inquired, and hung up before Rommel could reply.

  The reason Rommel gave for sacking him was that he had questioned Rommel’s orders and embarked on “long-winded discussions.” His successor was Major General Johannes von Ravenstein, who arrived on May 31. Aristocratic, lean and good-looking, he was a bit of a dandy, but like Rommel he wore the Pour le Mérite. The sauna temperatures of Libya were too much for his constitution, and he spent his first few days lying exhausted on a camp bed.

  Streich left Africa a few days later, his career permanently blighted by his differences with Rommel. As they parted, Rommel gruffly rebuked him: “You were far too concerned with the well-being of your troops.”

  Streich saluted stiffly. “I can imagine no greater words of praise for a division commander,” he replied.

  As his Mammut bucked and jolted around the desert, Rommel developed a gut feeling that the British were about to launch a big offensive. He told the Italians that he had had “a premonition”—in fact, his radio monitors had intercepted enough evidence.

  On June 6 they warned him of a change in the enemy dispositions. A week later they identified messages from British armored red units at Habata calling for ammunition. Habata was the only place, apart from Sollum and Halfaya, where tanks could climb up to the Libyan desert plateau.

  Rommel wrote to Lucie: “The British have moved off forty miles into the desert. The trouble is, I don’t know if they’re falling back or preparing a new attack. We’re ready for them.”

  This was the enemy’s operation “Battleaxe.” On Churchill’s orders that Rommel was to be destroyed, a convoy had sailed the Mediterranean to deliver 238 new tanks to Alexandria. It was a colossal increase in strength. Sir Noel Beresford-Peirse, Commander of the British Western Desert Force, decided to attack promptly.

  On June 14 Rommel’s monitors heard every British unit being warned by radio that “Peter” would be next day. (A name like that had also preceded the attack in mid-May.) That evening, therefore, he alerted the Sollum front and ordered his mobile reserves to stand by.

  At 4:30 A.M. the next day a two-pronged British attack developed there, both down on the coastal plain and on the high plateau. By nine it was clear that this was a major enemy offensive. It was the first time that Rommel, the Afrika Korps—indeed, the entire modern Nazi Wehrmacht—was confronted by such an offensive, and the first time it had to fight a major defensive action. The eyes of the world were on him, and he was acutely conscious of the fact.

  Throughout the first day, June 15, 1941, violent and bloody tank and infantry battles raged under the scorching heat and choking dust clouds. Rommel’s prospects did not look good. He had fewer tanks than the enemy—about 150 to their 190—and only 95 of his were real battle tanks, Panzer IIIs and IVs. Of the enemy’s force, about 100 were the fierce Matildas—twice as heavily armored as the Germans’, and invulnerable to the thirty-seven-millimeter Pak (antitank) gun. The diary of Machine Gun Battalion Eight that day describes how eight Matildas came in to attack:

  Again our thirty-seven-millimeter Pak is powerless. Its shells just bounce off the tank’s thick armor; only a lucky shot in its tracks or turret bearings has any effect. So they rumble on to within 100 yards of our position, halt and then knock out our Paks one by one. We watch bitterly as one gun after another stops firing. Even individual acts of gallantry cannot help in this situation.

  Gunner Blank of Seven Company is still firing on a Matilda at five yards’ range: no good. The steel colossus rolls on over him and his gun. His comrades bring the brave young lad back to us, our surgeon has to amputate both legs on the battlefield because they are just pulp. Later he died of his injuries.

  An incident like this told a lot about the spirit that Rommel had already inculcated into the Afrika Korps. But spirit was not all. He had not been idle since the fighting at Tobruk. Knowing that only the eighty-eight-millimeter flak gun was a match for the Matilda, he had dug in five of these scarce weapons at Halfaya and four on the Hafid Ridge, and he had given his other four eighty-eights to the Fifteenth Panzer Division which was standing guard behind the Sollum front. In the other strongpoints along the Sollum line he installed the new Pak 38, a fifty-millimeter gun that was an improvement on the thirty-seven-millimeter. By the time of this battle, the line was admittedly only half completed and poorly provisioned with ammunition, food and water. But it was held by one of the most indomitable characters in North Africa, Captain Wilhelm Bach, the gangling, cigar-smoking commanding officer of the first battalion of the 104th Rifle Regiment. Bach was a former pastor, gentle and soft-spoken. He inspired a unique affection from his men.

  The fighting on June 15 was inconclusive, but that evening Rommel was optimistic. Not only had the Halfaya Pass held, but of the twelve big Matildas that had lumbered toward its upper (plateau) end, eleven had been picked off by Bach’s well-hidden eighty-eights, and four of the six Matildas that had approached from the coastal end were lying knocked out in the minefields Rommel had laid.

  That night Colonel Neumann-Silkow reported that the Fifteenth Panzer had destroyed sixty enemy tanks. He was now planning a counterattack. Rommel—who resisted the urge to rush to the Sollum battlefield, staying instead at his corps headquarters 100 miles away—radioed his approval and then spent a sleepless night. “The battle will be decided in a hard contest today,” he wrote to Lucie at 2:30 A.M.

  Neumann-Silkow’s tanks opened their counterattack at dawn, April 16. His plan had been to sweep past the crumbling ruins of Fort Capuzzo—which the British had captured the evening before—cross the frontier wire and then attack the enemy’s long flank. But he made little headway. At 7:45 A.M. Rommel’s radio monitors told him that a big tank battle was raging. Later that morning the Fifteenth Panzer Division had to disengage. Only thirty-five of its eighty tanks were still running. Shortly after noon the other panzer division, the Fifth Light, was also stalled by strong enemy armor near Sidi Omar on the frontier.

  Without doubt, as Rommel later wrote, this was the turning point of the battle. If the British now concentrated their forces and pressed on regardless, he would have to abandon the siege of Tobruk. So he made a decision—one of the great decisions of his career. Gambling on the evident British nervousness about their flanks, he radioed the Fifteenth Panzer at 12:35 P.M. to disengage at Capuzzo and advance south, paralleling the Fifth Light’s line of advance. Before dawn, these two divisions would cut right into the enemy’s flank and strike toward the coast at Halfaya, thus lifting the siege on Captain Bach and cutting off the entire British expedition. Meanwhile he sent a fighter plane to drop a thrilling message to the Halfaya defenders: “Our counterattack now making fine progress from the west. Enemy forced onto the defensive. Victory depends on your holding the Halfaya Pass and the coastal plain.”

  The Fifth Light set off on time, at 4:30 A.M. By six it had reached its first objective, Sidi Suleiman. The Fifteenth Panzer Division also arrived at its objective. Intercepted radio messages told Rommel—still at his headquarters 100 miles away—of the enemy’s frustration, surprise and then panic. At 7:45 A.M. the enemy’s Seventh Armored Brigade was monitored reporting that it had no ammunition left: “The situation’s desperate.” A British tank commander was heard calling for Sir Noel Beresford-Peirse to come from Cairo to the battlefield. Rommel repeated this great news to his panzer division commanders and urged them to act fast. They thundered into the Halfaya Pass in mid-afternoon, ending Bach’s heroic ordeal. Thus Rommel had won his first pitched tank battle.

  The next day, June 18, Rommel drove over to thank his exhausted German and Italian troops. Their faces were reward enough—and he found their new adulation exhilarating. Having rationed himself this time to only one terse message to Berlin each day of the battle, now he announced triumphantly his impressi
ve victory. He claimed to have destroyed 180 to 200 enemy tanks and a few days later revised the figure to 250. The real number was somewhat less than either figure, but as he had lost only twelve tanks there was no minimizing his own achievement. “The British,” he boasted to Lucie, “thought they could overwhelm us with their 400 superheavy tanks. We had nothing like that weight of armor to pit against them. But our dispositions and the stubborn resistance of German and Italian troops—although cut off for days on end—enabled me to mount the crucial operation with every combat group I still had mobile. Let the enemy come again—they’ll get an even sounder thrashing!”

  Rommel had won by his superior tactics and better training. He had lured the enemy armor onto his antitank guns; he had ambushed them; he had made moves by night and taken them in the flank. He had laid the bogey of the Matilda, too. (A captured British major asked to see the gun that had destroyed his tank. Shown the flak eighty-eight, he said, “That’s not fair, to use an antiaircraft gun against a tank!”) The enemy, who did not know the secret, assumed that the Panzer III and IV had delivered the knockout punches. Thus both Rommel and his tanks were now talked of with awe abroad.

  At home too his reputation was sky-high. Three times now—in April, May and June 1941—it had hung on a slender thread in the desert. Each time his nerves had proved stronger than his enemy’s. And as the fanfares announcing Rommel’s Sollum victory still blared from the Reich’s radio stations, several writers decided that Rommel now merited a full biography. “I want to create a work of lasting value,” a colonel wrote him. “It will show the typical young general of our times, offer him to coming generations as an example and thus provide something of a starting point for waves of military enthusiasm and exaltation.”

  Hitler proposed that Rommel should be promoted to full panzer general. But the General Staff rebelled at this. They were outraged at the prospect of Rommel’s being raised from lieutenant colonel to full general in less than two years. Their resentment of Rommel had by no means abated over the previous months. Halder was continuing his vendetta. In May he had commented in his diary, “Rommel cannot cope,” and he had secretly proposed to Brauchitsch that strong reins be put on Rommel. A second Chief of Staff, Halder suggested, Lieutenant General Alfred Gause, should be attached to the Italian High Command in Libya. There had also been talk of setting up a full army headquarters in Libya under Field Marshal Wilhelm List, the victor in Greece and a former superior of Rommel’s at Dresden.

  Whatever the designs, fate again played into Rommel’s hands. The full army headquarters was not authorized. General Gause was, in fact, sent to Africa, but he was a quiet, polite soul and anything but an intriguer. He chanced to arrive at Rommel’s trailer on June 15—the first day of the Sollum fighting. He marveled at Rommel’s grasp of the battle, decided that the Afrika Korps commander could “cope” very well and promptly placed his entire and impressive staff at Rommel’s disposal—forty-three officers, twenty civilians, 150 enlisted ranks and forty-six vehicles. Halder recalled Gause for consultations in Berlin, then wrote his own summary of Gause’s report. “Personal relationships are complicated by General Rommel’s peculiarities and his pathological ambition,” Halder claimed Gause had said. “Rommel’s faults make him appear a particularly unattractive character, but nobody dares to cross swords with him because of his brutal methods and the backing he has at the highest level.” How the generals envied Rommel’s easy access to Hitler!

  The upshot was that the Army High Command decided to set up a “Panzer Group Rommel.” A Panzergruppe was rather less than an Armee, but its establishment left no alternative but to promote Rommel to full general after all. He would command his old Afrika Korps and the Italian Twenty-first Corps of infantry divisions. A few days later he learned that it was his influential aide who had helped push the promotion through—to “the highest level.” He wrote Lucie: “As I have just found out from Lieutenant B[erndt], who visited the Führer and Goebbels, I have only the Führer to thank for my recent promotion. . . . You can imagine how pleased I am—to win his recognition for what I do and the way I do it is beyond my wildest dreams.”

  A full general at only forty-nine! That meant Rommel had really come up smelling like a rose despite the ugly disputes during the weeks of Tobruk. “It’s very nice to rise so high while still so young,” he reflected just after the promotion became effective. “But I’m stocking up with even more stars, just in case.”

  Meanwhile Rommel learned that Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. His commanders were astounded. Schwerin told his staff privately, “That’s that. Now we have lost the war!” Rommel as usual was optimistic. He expected a rapid victory and rejoiced at this blow to Churchill’s hopes. Of course, he conceded to Lucie, it would mean delaying his own proposed journey to Germany: “I can’t very well appear at the Führer’s HQ with my own problems at present.”

  Now at last it dawned on him why Hitler and the General Staff had refused to flood panzer divisions, heavy artillery and supplies into North Africa. The truth was that Hitler, the Wehrmacht High Command and the General Staff were looking ahead to the “post-Barbarossa” era—the time when, with Russia defeated, Hitler’s invincible Wehrmacht would begin a campaign of conquest along the roads that Alexander the Great and his hoplites had marched more than 2,000 years before. On a rainy day in early June at the Berghof, the Führer’s fortified Bavarian mountain home, he had confided to his intimates: “The Russians have massed their entire strength on their western frontier, the biggest concentration in history. If Barbarossa goes wrong, we are all lost anyway. As soon as that is all over, Iraq and Syria will take care of themselves. Then I’ll have a free hand, and I’ll be able to push on down through Turkey as well.”

  These dreams took concrete shape in a draft High Command directive secretly circulated three days later. It put Rommel’s job in Libya firmly into perspective. He would capture Tobruk first, then investigate ways of invading Egypt from the west; the Wehrmacht, after conquering the Caucasus, would come down and invade Egypt from the east. On June 28 Halder instructed Rommel to submit a draft plan for this. “We are making mighty progress in Russia,” Rommel commented to Lucie on the thirtieth, “probably much faster than we expected. This is most important to us here, as we’re going to have to hold on tight until the Russian campaign is over.” Was Rommel betraying a trace of anxiety, now that he realized that many of his assumptions that spring had been groundless, because of the campaign against the USSR?

  By this time Rommel’s personnel dossier in Berlin was bulging with angry letters and complaints from other officers. Many had been privately interviewed by the General Staff on their return from Africa: there was the mild-mannered General Streich, Kirchheim, Olbrich, Rommel’s chief of staff Colonel von dem Borne, a panzer battalion commander, Major Koehn, and Count von Schwerin. Schwerin warned that Tobruk was degenerating into “a mini-Verdun” and appealed for an active regiment elsewhere. “The wastage rate of generals and commanders out here is such that I can compute just when my turn will come,” he sardonically wrote. Colonel von Herff criticized Rommel’s “erratic leadership” and “grotesque decisions” and characterized as unacceptable Rommel’s habit of court-martialing any officer who in his view failed in action: “This has not been the way in the German army before. We are all horrified about it.” Streich called the habit “downright proletarian.” When army Commander in Chief Brauchitsch asked him, at Hitler’s headquarters, “Was it so hot down there that you all just got on each other’s nerves?” the general replied, “No, Herr Feldmarschall: But one thing’s got to be said—there’s a big difference between being a brave and adventurous company leader and a field commander of great genius.”

  General Bodewin Keitel, chief of army personnel, was generous enough to blame this rash of backbiting on the grueling African climate and the battle strains that all panzer commanders are subjected to. “But,” he said in a confidential memorandum in June, “in the Afrika Korps there is quite another b
urden too: that is the general’s personality, and his way of expressing it and of giving orders.”

  Indeed, Rommel frequently issued impossible orders—which nobody could take seriously—and then revoked them immediately. He thought nothing of insulting senior commanders like Kirchheim. Courts-martial ordered by Rommel mostly acquitted the officers he charged. “It is remarkable that in the case of one officer, a battalion commander in the Fifth Panzer Regiment,” Bodewin Keitel commented, “a recommendation for the Knight’s Cross, a cowardice charge and his dismissal followed one another in the briefest interval. While in another instance a senior general who had won the Pour le Mérite was wholly incomprehensibly threatened on the telephone with dismissal while the very next morning [Rommel] denied to his face ever having used such language to him.” (This must have been General Kirchheim.)

  Full general now or not, Rommel was sent a severely worded reprimand by Field Marshal von Brauchitsch on July 9. The commander in chief lectured him: “I think it my duty to tell you all this not only in the interest of the Afrika Korps, but in your own personal interest too.” Rommel’s reply showed no humility whatever.

  He probably relished this kind of controversy. “Through my new promotion I’ve leapfrogged over enormous numbers of my comrades,” he bragged in a letter on July 12. “And this is bound to attract a lot of envy—a lot.” And it did. The end of the year was to find Goebbels complaining at a secret staff conference that, while the birthday of a minor Luftwaffe civil servant had been fêted in the Nazi press, the Wehrmacht censorship authorities had forbidden any mention of Rommel’s fiftieth birthday.

  The General Staff ’s activation of his panzer group, now called Panzergruppe Afrika—effective from August 15—caused anomalies. Just what was a panzer group? And what would Rommel’s pay and entitlements as its commander be? “I don’t rightly know whether this makes me an Oberbefehlshaber [commander in chief] or not,” he puzzled on August 11. “Normally that only goes for a full army commander.” Being Rommel, he adopted both styles and waited for reactions. On his headed notepaper he was content with a mere “Befehlshaber,” but the very first order issued on August 15 went out with the pretentious headline: “Army Order No. 1.”