by David Irving
The snag was, as the shrewd little General Bastico—Rommel called him “Bombastico”—pointed out, that the British were not going to stand idly by and let Rommel get away with it. They would strike from Egypt into his rear, after he attacked, or even try and scoop him altogether by launching a major offensive before he was ready to go into Tobruk. Rommel’s strategic answer was twofold. He would locate a mobile reserve in the desert, well placed to scotch any such move by the British. And by lengthening the Sollum line of fortifications into the desert, he hoped to force the enemy to make such a lengthy detour that they could not arrive in his rear for at least three days—by which time he would already have dealt with Tobruk. In fact, he was convinced that the British were too heavily committed elsewhere in the Middle East to launch any such offensive here.
His prestige enhanced by the great June 1941 victory, he got on well with all his lesser Italian commanders. “They try their hardest to get everything right,” commented Rommel, “and they are extraordinarily polite.” But this politeness was absent in Bastico and Bastico’s superiors. “The Italian High Command here is annoyed that it has so little say,” Rommel observed with satisfaction. “We are always being spited in petty ways. But we’re not going to stand for it. Perhaps they’re casting around for some way of getting rid of me.”
The truth was that Bastico still regarded Rommel’s interest in Tobruk as an unhealthy obsession. In an exchange of letters on September 6 he recommended attacking Egypt without bothering about Tobruk. Rommel sent Gause—behind Bastico’s back—directly to Rome, where it was quite simply ruled that since Hitler and Mussolini had both decided that Tobruk was to be captured first, the matter was settled. It was an “absolute necessity,” Rome said, before any advance by Rommel on the Nile. Rome promised to send supplies to Rommel so that he could attack in early November. He was to draft a suitable plan, and Bastico would then authorize it and fix the date. Weeks later Rommel was still gloating over this rebuff to Bastico. “His letters are getting downright insulting,” he chuckled. “Evidently he’s trying to provoke a row. Okay by me. He’ll come off worse.”
To consolidate his position, however, Rommel did take some precaution. He invited a close friend of Mussolini, a Major Melchiori, to visit Panzergruppe Afrika. “I have high hopes of this visit, as feelings against us are running high at present,” Rommel wrote. “Well, nobody’s going to pull any fast ones on me.” He took the major—a dapper figure, in neat, tailor-made uniform—hunting in the desert. Rommel’s shooting was done with a machine gun from fast-moving open cars. The targets were fleet-footed gazelles; their livers, Rommel told Lucie, tasted delicious. Then he arranged a real spectacular for Melchiori—a day trip into Egypt at the head of a panzer division.
This was the operation code-named “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Rommel wanted to boost morale after months of idleness. His target was a “huge British supply dump” believed to be just fifteen miles beyond the frontier wire. There is a German saying, “Your appetite comes with eating,” and the entire Afrika Korps had developed a healthy appetite for items of British-made uniforms (minus insignia); for Dodge, Ford and Rover cars and trucks; for Argentine corned beef, Canadian canned butter, American canned milk and English bacon. So the Twenty-first Panzer Division—the old Fifth Light—rolled through the barbed wire into Egypt at dawn on September 14, to envelop the enemy supply dump and meet at Deir el Hamra many miles beyond. Sixty empty trucks followed to pick up the choicest booty. To his aide, Lieutenant Schmidt, Rommel looked more like a U-boat commander as he gave the signal from his tank turret to get moving and shouted: “We’re off to Egypt.”
General von Ravenstein’s tanks and trucks dragged brushwood with them to simulate a huge tank force. A reconnaissance battalion cruised up and down the frontier and raised bogus radio traffic to simulate an attack by the entire Afrika Korps. But there was no enemy to be blinded by these deceits. Probably forewarned by code breaking, the enemy had simply ordered their forces here to fall back across the plateau, far enough for the Germans to run out of gasoline. Müller-Gebhard later wrote, “Our three battle groups pushed about sixty miles into enemy territory and then rendezvoused, without any combat at all. I was stunned to find General Rommel waiting for us at the rendezvous—he had driven on ahead of us all.” For nearly three hours they milled around in hungry disappointment; the tanks refueled as best they could. Rommel was puzzled. Then, at 12:55 P.M.—like the moment in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when the lone crop-spraying plane turns nasty—the RAF bombers suddenly arrived.
Even the newly found war diary of the Twenty-first Panzer Division does not disclose how many tanks were hit. Two trucks laden with gasoline blew up at once; the panzer regiment had six men killed, and a flak gunner died too. Rommel’s Mammut was hit, his boot heel was blown off by a bomb blast and his driver badly injured. It was a thoroughly unsettling experience. He ordered the pursuit abandoned, and the whole force beat an undignified retreat back into Libya. The enemy lost only two prisoners and one disabled armored car—apparently the Orderly Room truck of a South African armored car regiment. In the truck were secret documents. “Herr General,” said the Twenty-first Panzer’s commander, Ravenstein, “the capture of these documents alone is enough to justify the outlay.” The documents included an Eighth Army order of battle which—together with the emptiness of the desert he had just invaded—led Rommel to a fateful conclusion: that the enemy was not currently planning any offensive against him. There is evidence that the British had arranged to have Rommel capture these documents.
“It all went very smoothly,” he lied to Lucie.
Later in September, warnings began reaching Rommel from both Berlin and Rome that a major British offensive was in the cards. He disregarded them. The almost illegible pencil notes his aide took of a speech Rommel made to his commanders contain the sentences: “One thing our sortie of the fourteenth has shown is that the enemy has no offensive intentions. It is to be presumed that he will not be able to launch any attack over the next few weeks, or months.”
Of all his problems, obtaining the supplies needed for the attack on Tobruk caused most difficulties. British air attacks from Malta presented a renewed risk to the convoy route, because many of the German planes that would have fended them off had been sent in June to Russia. The port of Benghazi was now being used as well as Tripoli, but its capacity was low. October brought little improvement. The same shipping losses were suffered as in September, 23 percent. Once again it was Hitler who came to Rommel’s rescue. Warned by his generals that Britain’s only chance of reversing its declining fortunes quickly would be to attack Rommel soon, Hitler decided to transfer an entire Luftflotte—air force—to the Mediterranean. He put one of the Luftwaffe’s best field marshals, Albert Kesselring, in command and designated him “Commander in Chief, South.” On October 27 he went even further, instructing the navy to move two dozen U-boats from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean—stifling navy protests by saying this was necessary to stave off “a catastrophe” in Africa. So the independent strategy Rommel had pushed since April was beginning to have far-reaching consequences on other theaters.
All this wild talk of a “British offensive” annoyed Rommel. It conflicted with his own wishes—therefore he ignored it. One is reminded of a famous verse by the German humorist Christian Morgenstern:
And thus, in his considered view,
What did not suit—could not be true.
He was timetabling three important events for November. He would fly to Lucie in Rome in the first week, celebrate his fiftieth birthday in the second week, destroy Tobruk in the third. There was no room for any British offensive in this timetable. Since early September no letter had passed between Erwin and Lucie without his making some mention of these plans.
Several times during October, German and Italian intelligence nonetheless warned that Britain was reinforcing its army in Egypt. Rommel refused to panic. He reassured Lucie: “The British have other worries just right
now.” When General Max Sümmermann (of the new Afrika infantry division) suggested an armed reconnaissance behind enemy lines, Rommel’s headquarters retorted that Midsummer Night’s Dream had already established that the British had no intention of attacking.
Probably this willful disregard of the accumulating evidence derived from Rommel’s fixation on Tobruk—the first objective that had so far defeated him. An artillery commander, Major General Karl Boettcher, had just arrived to direct the German firepower against Tobruk.
By mid-November Rommel would have altogether 461 German and Italian big guns ready to rain shells on the city. He directed minor operations to improve the Bologna and Pavia divisional sectors, and, well schooled now in Rommel’s tactics, the Italian infantry moved effectively and suffered no casualties.
“All quiet,” he reported to Lucie on October 19. “The British barely reacted to our latest gain in ground. Either they are too weak to, or they’re shamming. . . Anyway—rendezvous at Hotel Eden in Rome, November 1!”
Bastico had lapsed into a sullen silence. But not his chief of staff , General Gastone Gambara, who also commanded Italy’s independent motorized force, the Twentieth Corps. Rommel badly wanted his corps too, but Gambara put him firmly in his place. Rommel flared out in his next letter home: “I never did think much of these fine gentlemen. Shits they are and shits they always have been.”
Censure of this ferocity was reserved by Rommel only for the Italian officer caste. He blamed the Italian army’s misfortunes solely on their officers and their poor weapons; their enlisted men he described frequently—for example, to Milch—as “Magnificent soldier material.” His interpreter Ernst Franz recalls how, after even an elite Bersaglieri position was overrun, their commander tearfully pleaded with Rommel: “Believe me, my men are not cowards.” And Rommel replied, “Who said anything about cowards? It’s your superiors in Rome who are to blame—sending you into action with such miserable weapons.” (Some units in the Sollum line were equipped with artillery captured from the Austrians in the First World War: quite useless against modern armor.)
Still Rommel ignored the clamor of warning voices. On October 20 the Italian High Command sent an explicit warning to Bastico about a possible British offensive. But six days later Rommel issued his “army order” for the attack on Tobruk. “In my opinion,” he told a resigned Gambara on the twenty-ninth, “The attack can begin on November 20 without our running any risk,”
His own High Command made one last attempt to change Rommel’s mind. Given Britain’s growing air supremacy in Africa, they asked, would it not be better to wait until 1942? Rommel’s headquarters replied that it would not: the Axis land superiority was so great that Tobruk would probably surrender within two days. Having sent this reply to Berlin, Rommel flew to Rome.
He was waiting for Lucie at the railroad station there next morning as her sleeping car pulled in. They spent two happy weeks sightseeing in the autumn sun and rain. General von Ravenstein was also there on furlough with his wife. Like typical tourists, they visited Saint Peter’s. Rommel was not impressed by the architecture—he gripped Ravenstein’s arm and said, “That reminds me: we’ve got to insert another battalion on Hill 209.”
Their rooms at the Hotel Eden were ice-cold, but he did not notice. His mind was with his troops and on Tobruk. The maps of the fortifications were already being printed and corrected. Air photographs of each bunker to be stormed were being obtained. Several times he called on the attaché and on the Italian High Command: the conferences revolved around the knotty problem of supplies. As if to rub it in, late on November 8 an entire Axis convoy with 40,000 tons of supplies was sunk. The Italians halted further convoy operations, and no more ships reached Libya until mid-December. (None had arrived there since October 16.)
Cavallero, chief of the Italian High Command, became even more apprehensive. Rommel assured him that Tobruk would fall after forty-eight hours at most, and that the British would never dare to attack if they risked having their retreat cut off. Cavallero acquiesced, but there were level-headed Italians in Libya who were not so easily fobbed off. Bastico’s intelligence officer, a Major Revetria, was one. On November 11 Rommel’s intelligence officer, Mellenthin, accosted the Italians’ liaison officer. “Tell your Major Revetria he’s much too nervous,” he said. “Tell him not to worry—because the British aren’t going to attack.” Nonetheless, that same day Bastico urgently warned Cavallero that an enemy attack was looming up. He had photographs of the desert railroad, of new supply dumps and airfields, and reports of radio traffic showing that the British were about to launch “a heavy offensive aimed at forcing a final decision.”
Similar data definitely reached Rommel’s headquarters. There was an aerial photograph of a new British airfield south of the Qattara Depression, packed with over 100 planes: dated November 11, it was forwarded to headquarters by the chief Luftwaffe reconnaissance officer, Colonel Augustin. Other photographs showed the military railroad being built across the desert from Mersa Matruh toward the frontier wire. Some of these photos were even shown to Rommel in Rome, and Ravenstein saw him snatch the photographs away and irritably dash them to the floor, exclaiming: “I refuse even to look at them!”
Rommel visited Cavallero on November 13 and again argued that his attack on Tobruk must get the green light, despite the supply snags. Two days later—his fiftieth birthday—Rommel had an audience with Mussolini. The Fascist dictator confirmed that Tobruk must be attacked as soon as possible. Afterward his hosts showed him their new film, Onward from Benghazi. Rommel particularly liked the scenes showing Italian troops storming the city. (In fact, one of Rommel’s smaller units had captured it.) “Very interesting and informative,” he told the Italians sardonically. “I often wondered what happened in that battle.”
Outside Tobruk, his storm troops had now moved forward to their starting points. His radio intercept company reported to headquarters on November 17 that a South African division had been identified moving off from Mersa Matruh into the desert. Intoxicated with their coming victory, Rommel’s headquarters staff paid no heed to this report.
Where was Rommel now? He had left Rome early on November 16, but a thunderstorm forced his plane to land for the night at the devastated city of Belgrade. Next day engine trouble necessitated a further overnight stop at Athens. Not until the eighteenth did he land back in Libya. The news there was that a band of commandos had raided his former headquarters at Beda Littoria. The airfields—indeed, the whole countryside—were awash with rain. Apparently for this reason no reconnaissance sorties were being flown.
Rommel believed that he still had several days to prepare his great attack on Tobruk. But he did not, for the enemy’s army—now reorganized as the Eighth Army—had that very morning forced the frontier wire, unseen, and was many miles inside Libya. Over 100,000 troops and more than 700 tanks were about to teach Rommel a lesson.
ROMMEL’S HEADQUARTERS staff , in his absence, had not tipped off the lower echelons about the gathering evidence of a coming enemy offensive. Thus, when on the eighteenth the enemy suddenly commenced radio silence, nobody had inquired why. Behind this veil of silence, the enemy’s infantry had advanced to the Sollum line, while a powerful armored force had already outflanked the Sollum line on the desert plateau and was approaching Rommel’s domain from the southeast.
Here, along the Trigh el Abd—a desert track—the Twenty-first Panzer Division had thrown out only a thin screen of armored cars, the Third and Thirty-third Reconnaissance battalions, united under Lieutenant Colonel Irnfried von Wechmar. At 5:30 P.M. on the eighteenth Wechmar informed Afrika Korps headquarters that seven hours earlier the Thirty-third had run into an “enemy reconnaissance in force” and that earlier, at five P.M., the Third had been attacked by “200 armored vehicles.” Vague rumors flew. During the afternoon the Fifteenth Panzer Division informed the nearby Afrika division: “British attack intentions are possible in the south.”
In consequence of all this, Ravenstein
proposed sending his panzer regiment down toward Gabr Saleh that night, to meet the developing threat. Gabr Saleh was just a mark on the map, on the Trigh el Abd, forty miles south of Gambut. Crüwell, the Afrika Korps’s solemn, ponderous Rhinelander commander, found himself in an awkward dilemma and discussed it with his chief of staff , Bayerlein. On the one hand, he said, Rommel had always dismissed any idea of an enemy offensive as “absolutely impossible.” On the other, aircraft had now sighted 1,650 enemy vehicles massing along the frontier wire, from Sidi Omar south toward Fort Maddalena. At seven P.M. Bayerlein privately oriented his divisions. “We cannot exclude the possibility of an operation to outflank us from the south.” Together, Crüwell and Bayerlein decided to alert the Fifteenth Panzer, and to send Ravenstein’s panzer regiment south to Gabr Saleh as proposed.
First, however, at eight P.M. they phoned Rommel for permission. Rommel snapped at Crüwell “We mustn’t lose our nerve.” He added that Ravenstein was not to send his panzer regiment south: “We must not show our hand to the enemy too soon.” He invited Crüwell to meet him—at noon the next day.
This was a display of coolness which the Italians refused to emulate. Although reassured by the Germans at ten P.M. that there was “no cause for anxiety,” Gambara knew better and issued orders before midnight alerting both his divisions on the Bir el Gubi end of the Trigh el Abd (the Ariete and Trieste divisions).
There followed an even more glaring example of Rommel’s obstinacy. At eleven P.M. Afrika Korps headquarters telephoned that an Italian patrol had picked up a British soldier near Sidi Omar, and the man was claiming convincingly that a large part of the enemy’s Eighth Army was already on the move into Libya. Rommel’s staff dismissed this prisoner as “untrustworthy.” Despite this, Crüwell rushed a full interrogation report by dispatch rider overnight to Rommel. The prisoner was Driver A. J. Hayes, chauffeur of the commander of one of the crack field batteries attached to the Fourth Indian Division. “He says Hitler has on several occasions offered Britain good peace terms. But Churchill, inspired by malice and ruthlessness, is leading the British people toward the abyss. The prisoner’s manner of speaking makes his testimony seem trustworthy.”