by David Irving
As usual, he got away with it. Six days later, he drew the obvious corollary: “All my colleagues in equivalent positions are colonel [four-star] generals. If all goes according to plan here, I’ll probably be one too by the time the war’s over.” Studying his first pay slip late in September, he found that he was getting an army commander’s expense allowance. “Sometimes I think I’m dreaming,” he exulted to Lucie. Rommel’s “smash and grab” tactics worked because by now everybody knew that he had Hitler’s backing. Besides, Libya was far away and the leaders of the Wehrmacht were hypnotized by the pace of their advance into Russia.
Among the Italian generals, however, Rommel’s rapid advancement struck raw nerves. Somehow this officer, who had arrived with one light division in February to tide them over their misfortunes, was now virtually Axis Land Commander, North Africa, and vested with considerable territorial and administrative powers as well. The consequence was an undisguised hostility between Rommel and the Italian High Command, which was presently based in a marble-pillared palace far to the rear in ancient Cyrene. On July 12 Gariboldi, the Italian field commander, whom Rommel had come to like for the affable, pliable and avuncular old duffer that he was, was suddenly replaced by General Ettore Bastico, a trim, moustached man, a personal friend of Mussolini. Bastico was described by one German as “difficult, autocratic and violent”—so it was clear that there was no room for both him and Rommel in the same desert theater.
Formally Rommel’s superior, he summoned the dusty and disheveled Desert Fox to his palace at Cyrene later in July and made it plain he proposed to muzzle him.
“A journey to Berlin is becoming imperative,” said Rommel, fuming, in his next letter home.
He flew back to the Reich on July 28. For two days he stayed with Lucie at the war academy in Wiener Neustadt. Lucie thought he looked unwell and urged him to go see a doctor. Rommel knew she was right but refused to go. “I don’t trust doctors,” he said, chuckling. “In 1915 they wanted to amputate my leg!” So he flew on to Hitler’s headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, on the thirty-first.
Hitler’s handshake was itself a tonic. The Führer congratulated him on the Sollum victory and showed him the battle maps of the Russian front, where huge encirclement operations were breaking the back of Stalin’s army. This set Rommel’s own mind thinking along these lines: How could he trap and encircle the British army in North Africa?
Before Rommel left, Hitler granted all his demands for special measures against Tobruk—except one: German scientists had developed a “hollow charge” shell of immense penetrating power. It was codenamed “Redhead,” and stocks were already in Libya. However, it was still top secret and Hitler refused permission to Rommel to use it yet. But he did order the Luftwaffe to throw the first of its new two-and-a-half-ton bombs at Tobruk when Rommel’s big attack began. He instructed the navy to move half a dozen U-boats and some motor torpedo boats to the Mediterranean to help blockade Tobruk. He asked the Foreign Ministry to explore ways of using Bizerta and other ports in Tunisia—still controlled by Vichy France—and he proposed that the vanishing Axis shipping tonnage in the Mediterranean should be replenished by the construction of hundreds of simple war transports of 400 to 600 tons displacement—although Hitler admitted to Rommel that he saw no prospect whatever of persuading Italian shipyards to build them.
After that, he sent Rommel to see Mussolini and General Ugo Cavallero, the pompous, ineffectual chief of the Italian High Command in Rome. Cavallero always looked more like a poor family lawyer than a general. Rintelen, the German attaché, wrote this account:
General Rommel spoke in my presence with General Cavallero and the Duce on the morning of August 6. Evidently going on a report from General Bastico, they took the view that no attack on Tobruk will be possible in the foreseeable future because of transport difficulties and our exclusion from Bizerta. They examined the possibility of abandoning Sollum and the Tobruk front instead, and falling back onto a reserve line west of Tobruk.
But the Duce was very impressed by General Rommel’s confident description of the Sollum front, and of our prospects of holding it even against superior forces, provided he is assured of adequate supplies. The Duce believes that Britain’s next moves will depend on how the situation develops on the Russian front.
As usual, Rommel had got his way: his big set-piece attack on Tobruk was to go ahead when he was ready. Mussolini instructed Cavallero and Rintelen to fly to Libya at once to make the necessary plans.
Before he left Rome, Rommel noticed in the mirror that his eyes and skin were turning yellow. He spoke of this to no one, fearing that the General Staff or his Italian friends would use it as a pretext to stop him from flying back to Libya.
On the return flight his Luftwaffe plane developed engine trouble, and it had to land at Athens for repairs. An enemy air raid kept him awake all night at his hotel. He was still complaining about the “bugs” in the plane’s engines when it finally touched down safely on Bardia airfield, near his new stone-built headquarters, on August 8. Next day—as Rommel was thrashing out with Cavallero and Bastico their common strategy in Libya—he heard that the same Luftwaffe plane had just crashed in flames, killing everybody aboard.
He was sorry about the crew, of course, but shrugged off the accident philosophically. “Just goes to show how quickly it can come to you,” he told Lucie.
The Coming of Crusader
IT IS A RAINY night three months later—in mid-November 1941. Libya is having one of the worst rainstorms in years. Long, dry wadis have become torrential rivers that roll boulders onto the troops bivouacking in them and wash away tanks and trucks; airfields are flooded and telephone lines torn down.
At thirty minutes past midnight, half a dozen shadowy figures run toward the squat two-story Prefettura building at Beda Littoria, built on the coast near Cyrene, in a cypress grove. They jump the German sentry guarding the entrance and force their way in. They are British commandos. A British officer living in the town in the disguise of an Arab has identified the building to them as the headquarters of Rommel’s Panzergruppe Afrika. The sentry tries to raise the alarm. A salvo of shots spread-eagles him in the corridor, but the shots wake the men in the ground floor office of the chief armorer’s section.
Technical Sergeant Kurt Lentzen looks out with a flashlight—a burst of Sten gun fire hits him. Lieutenant Kaufholz draws his revolver, but the Sten gun splatters him in the chest and arms. Hand grenades are tossed into the room and explode with a shattering roar. The lights of the whole building go out—its electricity generator has also been blown up.
The noise has alerted the Panzer Group’s chief engineer, Major Barthel, and Rommel’s assistant quartermaster, Captain Weiz, both in conference upstairs. They sound the alarm, lock away their secret files and grab revolvers. By flashlight they can see a body lying outside the office downstairs—so they both report later in writing to Rommel—and firing is still going on around the building. They wait awhile, until the firing and shouting cease.
By the time they get downstairs, the body has gone, leaving a trail of blood. The chief armorer’s office is a shambles—water from a shattered radiator is already an inch deep on the floor, mingling with the blood of the other men. Here is Private Kovacic, his stomach torn open by the blast. There is Kaufholz, moaning barely audibly: “I’m bleeding—bleeding to death.” Both men die soon after. Outside, patrols find Lieutenant Jäger—shot dead as he jumped out of the window. Farther away is the body of a British major. The blood trail evidently came from him. Nearby is an injured British army captain, dressed, like the dead major, in khaki overalls and crepe-soled shoes. Of the other intruders there is no trace.
Rommel’s staff examine the contents of the two men’s knapsacks—more explosives, fuses, detonators, grenades. On the major’s body they also find Egyptian and Italian money, a girl’s photograph, a leather diary—which identifies him as Major Geoffrey Keyes, leader of a twelve-man commando killer squad—and other
trappings of his trade. Both he and the prisoner have several days’ growth of beard.
The Panzer Group’s investigations establish that they and their companions were landed some days back from British submarines, with orders to eliminate Rommel and Bastico and to blow up an important telegraph mast on the eve of a major British offensive. Keyes was killed by one of his own men in the confusion, and the daring raid collapsed.
ROMMEL SCANNED the reports and shook his head in puzzlement. Why Beda Littoria, of all places? Did the enemy really believe that he, Rommel, would lead his troops from a safe headquarters 200 miles to the rear? The Italians had, admittedly, given him the austere Prefettura building, and he had dutifully set up his Panzer Group headquarters there on August 14, 1941, but he had instantly disliked it. The food was too good—he remarked that he felt like a real “military plutocrat”—and the scenery, 2,000 feet above sea level, was too lush. Beda Littoria was “well out of danger—well out,” he impatiently told Lucie. After just ten days there he handed the Prefettura over to his quartermaster’s staff , and loaded his own grumbling officers onto trucks to take them to a new headquarters much closer to the battlefields, in the square, white-painted cantoniera—roadhouse—at Gazala. “From there I’ll have more influence on the course of events,” he wrote.
Major Keyes was buried with full military honors a few days after the fiasco, side by side with the four men from Rommel’s quartermaster staff who also died. The joint military funeral was symbolic of the chivalry that Rommel encouraged in his men.
Rommel’s own manuscripts fall silent after Sollum and do not resume their narrative until the spring of 1942. But I shortly chanced on a fascinating, very useful document. In an archive guide I saw a reference to a “notebook of an adjutant at an African headquarters” and asked to see it. An hour later it was lying before me, still dusty and unopened these last thirty years or more—a grubby, Italian-made notebook with a black calico cover. Its 270 pages were covered with shorthand writing, but isolated words stood out—Tobruk, commander in chief, the names of Rommel’s generals.
It proved impossible to find anybody conversant with both this shorthand system (in Germany there are half a dozen systems) and Second World War terminology. A sample transcript of two pages, done by a specialist firm in Bavaria, proved unacceptable. The heap of shorthand pages tantalized me for many months, until my own secretary, a woman born in Düsseldorf, caught sight of them and announced: “I think I can transcribe them!” It’s not easy to interpret a stranger’s shorthand, but for 200 hours she worked at it, dictating her transcript to me while I typed it. Over the next year we kept going back to the more stubborn portions, until we had cracked the whole document. It turned out to be the long-lost Rommel diary. It had been dictated by Rommel and his staff each day and taken down by his secretary, Corporal Albert Böttcher. This was a find of considerable significance, and it yielded many surprises.
On Rommel’s return to Bardia from Rome in August, his doctors had diagnosed jaundice and prescribed a bland diet and much rest. He adopted the diet but ignored the other advice. Remarkably he survived his own obstinacy—but he was not well, and he knew it, suffering particularly from the gastric disorders that plagued both friend and foe. (In September he wrote to Lucie with a forced humor that he had been stricken again: “It’s going to be the usual three-day race,” he said.) His troops heard that he was ill and sent him gifts of fruit, eggs, potatoes and live chickens, bought after hard bargaining with haggling Arabs.
His commanders might grumble, but his troops loved him. They were not a hand-picked elite, but somehow he gave them the feeling that they were. Major Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, the amiable cavalry officer who was his new intelligence officer, put it like this: “Between Rommel and his troops there was that mutual understanding that cannot be explained and analyzed, but which is the gift of the gods. . . . The men knew that ‘Rommel’ was the last man Rommel spared; they saw him in their midst, and they felt, ‘This is our leader.’ ” He knew how to make them feel somehow immortal. Take this spontaneous remark by Rommel to the cameramen of a propaganda company, recorded by his interpreter Wilfried Armbruster in his diary: “Tell your men to shave off their beards. We want young soldiers—we’re never going to grow old!”
But Libya attacked the young men’s health too, and the mounting sick rate caused Rommel permanent alarm. One division suffered a serious epidemic of diphtheria and jaundice that September. The health of the officers seemed particularly fragile. General Ferdinand Schaal, Rommel’s successor at Afrika Korps headquarters, was too ill to take over. Rommel put the next senior general in Africa, Philip Müller-Gebhard, in temporary command, but dysentery forced this general to leave Libya in mid-September. And since Lieutenant General Ludwig Crüwell did not finally arrive to take command of the Afrika Korps until October—having been first on furlough and then in the hospital—the corps was effectively “orphaned” for two months.
That summer the Libyan stage gradually filled with the cast for the winter battles. Troops were arriving in large numbers—in late August a new division, Special Service Afrika, had begun to arrive (it became the Ninetieth Light). And the big names who were to dominate Rommel’s career came too—he had appropriated most of them with Alfred Gause’s staff . “My new staff is much better than the old one,” he said of them in one letter.
At Panzer Group headquarters his new operations officer was a tall, elegant lieutenant colonel of thirty-nine—the aristocratic, arrogant Siegfried Westphal. U.S. officers examining him in 1945 defined him as a typical militarist, highly intelligent and conceited. “War is his métier.” Westphal would probably have liked the description. “He was brilliant and he knew the chief of staff , Gause, who won Rommel’s favor.” Like a small boy who has found a new friend, Rommel kept telling Lucie how much Gause was to his liking. He was an engineer general, a good, dry staff officer from East Prussia. Gause confided in him—telling him for instance that Streich had tipped him off, “You won’t stand Rommel for long!”
Finally, in early October, a forty-two-year-old colonel arrived to act as new chief of staff to Rommel’s beloved Afrika Korps, which was still the main striking force in his Panzer Army. He was Fritz Bayerlein, a private and noncommissioned officer in the First World War who in this war would become one of Rommel’s best-known commanders. Bayerlein had an obsequious manner, but he was good. He had garnered his tank warfare experience under Heinz Guderian on the shell-scarred road to Moscow. He also apparently confided in Rommel immediately. The day he arrived, Rommel wrote: “Guderian and he had the same trouble with Streich as I did.” He took an instant liking to Bayerlein.
Rommel moved out of Beda Littoria and set up his forward headquarters at Gambut—bug-infested, flyblown and unclean, but midway between the two places where the coming great battles would be fought—Tobruk and the frontier. Here at Gambut the Germans and Italians painstakingly built up their supply dumps and repair workshops—large, well-camouflaged factories excellently provided with machine tools, heavy lifting tackle and vast stocks of spare tank parts. Even badly damaged trucks could be hauled off the field in mid-battle and returned, fighting fit, within days. Meanwhile Rommel waged war on the insects in his bed. The war was ruthless, and went on until he exterminated the “Last of the Mohicans”—as he called these tenacious vermin—by drenching his iron bedframe in gasoline and cremating them alive. “Now only their bites on my body are left to remind me of these loathsome pests,” he wrote to his son Manfred at the end of August.
At Gambut, his headquarters was well within range of the enemy’s guns at Tobruk. But every day that summer Rommel rode forth in his Mammut, jolting across the desert from outpost to outpost, following ancient camel trails to where German and Italian gangs armed with jackhammers and explosives were building the Tobruk bypass road. Then he would drive back again to the Sollum front to watch the work on the new strongpoints; he ensured that each position was provisioned with enough food and ammunition fo
r eight days’ battle, and he put extra muscle into the line with reconditioned Italian guns that had been lying rusting and derelict about the desert ever since the winter retreat. Everywhere the troops were training and drilling—with live ammunition, because there was no other in Libya—for the big setpiece attack that he was going to mount against Tobruk as soon as all his artillery and ammunition had arrived from Germany.
Not that he took only a parochial view of the war. He devoured intelligence reports on the navy’s fighting in the Atlantic. He marveled at the victories in the USSR. “On my walls hang all kinds of maps, above all one of Russia,” he wrote to young Manfred, now twelve. “And on that map every advance we make is immediately drawn in.” He was torn between remorse—that it was the panzer divisions of his rivals that were encircling Kiev or besieging Leningrad (“A shame that I can’t be there, and have to mark time down here”)—and admiration: “Four Russian armies encircled,” he wrote jubilantly on September 20. “I bet that wipes the grins off the Russians’ faces!” For reasons of prestige alone, he now had to take Tobruk—and soon.
His plan remained essentially unchanged from July 1941, when he submitted it to the General Staff, through October, when it was issued (as an “army order”) to his commanders, to the following June, when he was finally able to try it out. Days of heavy bombing would soften Tobruk’s defenses. After a heavy artillery bombardment the Afrika infantry division would open a breach in the southeastern perimeter for the Fifteenth Panzer Division—just where General Streich had suggested. The left flank of this German assault force would be secured by the Italian infantry divisions commanded by General Enea Navarrini’s Twenty-First Corps. The German push would go straight up to the port, and Tobruk would then have to surrender or starve. Rommel privately reckoned with a two-day battle.