The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  Rommel read it contemptuously at nine A.M. next day. His staff formally discounted it as “lies and exaggerations.” At noon Crüwell arrived and bluntly disagreed, but he was met with a chorus of jeers from Gause, Mellenthin and even Rommel. Over twenty-four hours had passed since the great British offensive, code-named “Crusader,” had begun. But not for another twenty-four hours would Rommel actually believe it.

  The Desperate Foray

  THE OPERATING TENT is a lean-to, set up behind a three-ton army truck. The surgeon, in his white coat and cap, is Major Ian Aird, a British officer. His field hospital near Sidi Omar, on the Egyptian frontier, has been overrun by German troops, but his surgery on the battle casualties—primarily Italians from the Sollum line and members of the Fourth Indian Division attacking it—must go on. He has explored a dozen abdominal wounds during the night, he is weary enough to drop, but still the casualties are being carried in.

  It is November 25,1941—a week since the British offensive, Crusader, began. Already the Libyan desert is littered with the blackened hulks of tanks. Once more the war has spilled over onto Egyptian soil, and Aird and all his hospital staff are prisoners of the Germans.

  Toward noon there is a flurry of excitement. A stretcher party hurries in with a bloodstained, groaning air attack victim. It is Fritz Stephan, commander of Rommel’s Fifth Panzer Regiment. Aird examines him rapidly—he notes in his diary that the panzer colonel has a large sucking wound in the chest. He has been hit by shrapnel and the right lung is all but severed from the heart. The Germans have applied a shell dressing to cut the bleeding, and they ask Aird to apply a pressure dressing so they can fly him back to base. Stephan is conscious, stalwart, but in deep shock. To Aird’s trained eye it is obvious that the colonel will not survive without immediate surgery. The German doctor accompanying Stephan hesitates, and hurries out to consult with the panzer officers waiting with their armor close by. Aird starts a transfusion and has the surgical equipment prepared for an immediate operation.

  Shells attracted by the German column are beginning to drop near the field hospital, making the sand under Aird’s feet shudder. The German doctor hurries back to Aird: “The Herr General asks you to be so good as to proceed with surgery.”

  The shells are getting closer. An anesthetist points out that the explosions are disturbing the other injured men. Aird, however, does not heed the shell bursts. The surgery already seems a hopeless task. During the operation Aird looks up once briefly and sees that a dozen panzer officers have slipped into the tent and are quietly watching him operate on their comrade. Among them is a general with the blue Pour le Mérite displayed at his throat—Erwin Rommel himself.

  A particularly near miss brings another appeal from the anesthetist. Without a word, the Germans return to their armored vehicles and pull back a safe distance from the hospital. Rommel’s doctor pauses to thank Aird and say, “We’ll return again tomorrow on our way back into Egypt.”

  But none of them met again. Nor did any of them forget this extraordinary desert encounter. Aird, impressed by Rommel’s humanity, later traced Stephan’s widow—the colonel died a few hours after the operation—and described it to her. And Rommel, asked by Goebbels in a broadcast a year later whether he did not perhaps take unnecessary risks, hesitated and gave a quite unexpected answer. The British fought fairly in the desert, he began. “I once paid a visit to a British field hospital . . .”

  Then he pulled himself together and said, “Uh, you don’t have to worry about my safety. I know how to look after myself.”

  STEPHAN DIED on the seventh day of the extended Crusader offensive. It was a long series of interlocking battles launched by the British to destroy Rommel before he could knock out the Tobruk garrison. The enemy were fielding 724 tanks against him, with 200 more in reserve, while he had only 260 (and the Italians 154). For three weeks the battles ebbed and flowed, pausing each day at dusk and resuming at dawn. They began on November 18 and had still not really ended by December 8, when Rommel angrily announced the retreat. The skies were low and overcast, the melee churned up turbid clouds of dust and smoke. Tanks dueled with tanks or guns over an area some fifty miles square, from the Egyptian frontier wire in the east to the road south out of Tobruk in the west. The tanks ranged across the high coastal plain, laboring up the escarpments and spilling down them like rodents running amok over a flight of stairs.

  It was not an easy battle for even the commanders to follow. The Rommel diary records him cursing on November 22: “Our signals networks could hardly be worse. This is war the way the ancient Teutons used to fight it. I don’t even know at this moment whether the Afrika Korps is on the attack or not.”

  Crusader conformed to no pattern, but proved Rommel’s own favorite dictum: “It is not possible to make any battle plan that holds good longer than the first day.” His opponents’ plan did not last even as long as that. Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham, commander of the Eighth Army, had intended to plant his armored brigades on the points of a triangle around a battleground of his own choosing—whereupon, he hoped, the Afrika Korps would duly oblige and present itself there for obliteration. For no particular reason, the site he chose was Gabr Saleh, a meaningless desert location sixty miles southeast of Tobruk. Cunningham hoped to deduce Rommel’s strategy from his reaction to the approach of the British Thirtieth Corps as it rounded Rommel’s Sollum line and headed for Gabr Saleh. But Rommel had not even noticed the British movement, and when Ravenstein finally proposed moving his Fifth Panzer Regiment—Colonel Stephan’s regiment—to Gabr Saleh, Rommel had instinctively stopped him. “We must not show our hand to the enemy too soon,” he explained: an astute decision that had the hallmark of the master.

  His failure to act on the earlier days had stupefied the enemy. The commander of the British Thirtieth Corps, Major General Willoughby Norrie, took matters partly into his own hands. He decided to thrust well beyond Gabr Saleh—indeed, to attack Sidi Rezegh, just south of Tobruk: Rommel would be forced to defend that. So Norrie fatefully varied the Cunningham plan. On November 19 he sent an armored brigade to Sidi Rezegh and two others to attack the intervening points of Gabr Saleh and Bir el Gubi. Merely by not reacting, therefore, Rommel had split his enemy’s main armored force into three diverging bodies.

  The events of the first four days of Crusader are quickly told. Rommel, perplexed and infuriated by this interference with his plans to take Tobruk, virtually abdicated all initiative to Crüwell, the Afrika Korps commander. For three days Rommel continued plotting the Tobruk attack—even though a British armored brigade seized Sidi Rezegh, a vital tableland only ten miles in his rear.

  On the afternoon of the nineteenth, the Germans bestirred themselves at last. Colonel Stephan’s panzer regiment probed southward to Gabr Saleh, bumped into another armored brigade there, and destroyed twenty-three American-built Stuart tanks for the loss of two of his own. This first mobile action of the campaign revealed strengths that augured well for Rommel. First, the panzer regiment dared to remain on the battlefield as dusk fell, while the British withdrew into defensive formation called a “night-leaguer.” This allowed the Germans to recover the disabled German tanks left about the field. Secondly, the Germans had developed the process of recovering tanks in mid-battle to a fine art. And above all they showed new skill at coordinating heavy mobile guns and tanks; as a result they had inflicted great slaughter on the enemy.

  The fighting of the next weeks revealed a curious relationship between Rommel and the new Afrika Korps commander, Crüwell. Technically, Crüwell was required to obey Rommel’s orders without question. But events often showed him acting with an independence bordering on disobedience, and in retrospect it is remarkable that the field marshal put up with it. His own hidden complexes partly explain his reticence. Crüwell was a real cavalier type, the son of a wealthy Dortmund family of printers whose fortunes rested on a church monopoly of hymnbook publishing. Intellectually he was head and shoulders above Rommel; and this fact, coup
led with the burning ambitions of his new chief of staff, Fritz Bayerlein—who had a powerful influence on him—put the Panzer Group commander at a psychological disadvantage.

  Initially, their differences concerned the enemy’s intentions. Rommel still believed on November 20 that the enemy thrusts were not a serious attempt to lift the siege of Tobruk. Crüwell was not deceived, however, and decided to concentrate his Afrika Korps forces to deal with each of the three enemy brigades in turn. He briefed his two panzer division commanders, the aristocratic General von Ravenstein and the dashing General Neumann-Silkow, at 2:35 P.M. They were to concentrate on Gabr Saleh. “I refuse,” said Crüwell, “to stand idly by and watch the enemy advance unmolested on Tobruk.”

  What opened Rommel’s eyes to the ugly truth was not the arguments of his generals or the air reconnaissance reports, but an open broadcast by the BBC in Cairo. “The Eighth Army,” said its evening news bulletin, “with about 75,000 men excellently armed and equipped, have started a general offensive in the Western Desert with the aim of destroying the German-Italian forces in Africa.”

  This stung Rommel into action. During the night he telephoned Crüwell about the “critical situation” and ordered the Afrika Korps’s two panzer divisions to begin rolling northward from Gabr Saleh toward Tobruk at the first light, following in the tracks churned up by the enemy armor. “Your objective,” rasped Rommel into the telephone, “will be the center of the airfield at Sidi Rezegh.” The enemy infantry, tanks and gun crews had already installed themselves on this airfield, and were winding up for a last heave to break through Rommel’s siege ring into Tobruk.

  At six-thirty—still before dawn—Rommel climbed out of his Kübel car at Belhamed hill, where General Boettcher’s artillery was dug in. This was about three miles north of the airfield. He ordered Boettcher to turn the guns around to bombard the airfield. Looking south through his binoculars at 7:45 A.M. as the light improved, Rommel could see the enemy infantry and tanks forming up on the airfield for their last push on Tobruk. They began to move soon after. Almost simultaneously, the enemy garrison in Tobruk itself, behind Rommel’s back, began a fierce tank assault on the siege ring, planning to break out and link up with the airfield force near El Duda, a hill weakly held by Rommel’s infantry. This really made Rommel’s force here the “meat in the sandwich.” But as he raised his binoculars over the airfield’s horizon to the south, he saw what he was looking for—the towering dust clouds raised by the fast approach of the entire Afrika Korps coming to the rescue.

  Twice that morning Rommel himself took command of the counterattacks between Belhamed and El Duda, thwarting the enemy’s attempts to hammer a corridor through to the Tobruk fortress. He drove about the battlefield, took temporary command of the armored cars of Baron Irnfried von Wechmar’s reconnaissance battalion, added four of the magnificent flak eighty-eights to this improvised task force and saw them shoot down tank after tank in flames.

  Meanwhile a holocaust had begun on the enemy-held airfield at Sidi Rezegh, on the desert side of the “sandwich.” Boettcher’s heavy guns were pounding and cratering the airfield. Rommel could see the dust and blaze as the Afrika Korps tanks charged to the airfield perimeter and opened fire at a range of 2,000 yards. By the morning’s end the British Seventh Armored Brigade had only ten tanks left. But another enemy armored brigade was believed to be coming north to join battle the next day—thus sandwiching the Afrika Korps in from the rear too.

  That night Rommel was unable to sleep. One slip, he knew, might cost him the battle and perhaps lose him the campaign too. At seven A.M. he was already back on Belhamed hill to check that Boettcher’s guns knew what they had to do. The hill was a good vantage point for the coming battle. Twice that morning he changed his battle plan, finally—at midday—ordering the Twenty-first Panzer’s rather jumpy commander, General von Ravenstein, to launch an immediate direct attack on the airfield. It began at 2:20 P.M., with the fifty-seven tanks of Colonel Stephan’s panzer regiment slamming the field from the west and the infantry trucking in from the north.

  This was the battle’s turning point. The British gunners put up a terrific fire as Stephan’s tanks charged them—most of the stalwart gunners fell where they fought. The photographs show their corpses draped unromantically across the wreckage of their twenty-five-pounders. Too late, the British Twenty-second Armored Brigade now arrived on the airfield from the south—about 107 tanks in all. How the surviving British gunners cheered—until Rommel’s powerful screen of antitank weapons began to bark. The enemy tanks were outgunned; the end was inevitable.

  By dusk the airfield at Sidi Rezegh was again in Rommel’s hands. His two panzer divisions still had 173 tanks in working order. The enemy’s Seventh Armored Division, the only force confronting him, had only 144. By superior tactics and with a lot of luck, he had more than turned the tables on the Eighth Army.

  THROUGH FIELD GLASSES that evening Rommel watched the battle end, and counted the charred and blackened enemy tanks until they disappeared into the darkness. The Germans used the phrase “shot down” to describe what happened when a shell pierced a tank and ignited all that it contained. The British phrase “brew up” was more descriptive. Long tongues of flame would curl out of every orifice. The shells and machine gun bullets inside would begin exploding until the whole hull seemed to bulge and convulse. Glistening rivulets of molten aluminum would run from the dead engine like tears, congealing on the desert sand in hard mirrors of spent metal. Then the rubber and oil would catch fire, and a spiral of funereal smoke would rise from the awesome pyre. Around the burned-out tank would lie the corpses of its crewmen, sometimes seeming just asleep, sometimes headless or limbless or scorched black. These were the men who preyed on every tank commander’s conscience. Rommel himself had no fear that one day this might happen to him—it always happened to “the other man”; but he had the burden of responsibility, and no man could take it from his shoulders.

  That evening, November 22, he congratulated Ravenstein at his command post. “Today’s victories have greatly eased our situation,” he said. But even now a further disaster awaited the enemy. Crüwell—out of contact with Rommel most of that day—had independently sent the Fifteenth Panzer marauding westward late that afternoon. By chance it rolled right into the night-leaguer of the enemy’s Fourth Armored Brigade. In the following melee, lit by headlights, blazing tanks, machine gun and cannon fire, Crüwell captured fifty armored fighting vehicles and the headquarters of the British brigade as well. Thus the enemy’s last coherent armored force was rendered leaderless.

  The next day saw the greatest of the tank battles so far. This, the last Sunday in November, was the day on which Germany’s war dead traditionally were remembered. It was called the “Sunday of the Dead”—Totensonntag—and by this forbidding name the baffle of November 23 came to be known.

  It was very much General Crüwell’s battle. He and his chief of staff, Colonel Bayerlein, had not seen Rommel for four days. The battle provided another example of a victory obtained in defiance of Rommel’s orders. As the Panzer Group commander, Rommel had sent Crüwell a long-winded command directive at 10:30 P.M. on the twenty-second, planning the coming battle. It boiled down to a southward push by Afrika Korps’s two panzer divisions, meeting a northward advance by the Italian armored division Ariete from Bir el Gubi: the enemy would be caught and destroyed between these two moving fists. Crüwell ignored this directive. At three A.M. he issued his own—for what was to be basically an encirclement. When Rommel’s overlong directive arrived, evidently around 4:30 A.M., Crüwell caustically noted that it contained a surfeit of “totally irrelevant” detail and tossed it aside. He left with Bayerlein about an hour later to fight the battle his way. He drove through the gathering morning mist to join the Fifteenth Panzer Division: they would move off to the southwest.

  Rommel spent most of the day at the Twenty-first Panzer’s fixed command post. Again he told General Boettcher that he expected the artillery to decide t
he day’s battle. His diary shows most interestingly that he was already thinking far beyond that day’s events: “His aim is to annihilate the armored forces encircled south of Sidi Rezegh today and tomorrow. After that he intends to strike fast toward Sidi Omar and then to prepare to attack Tobruk.” General Boettcher warned him that they would run into ammunition difficulties if they renewed their attack on Tobruk.

  By about eleven A.M., under leaden skies and icy winds, Crüwell had already massacred the thin-skinned supply echelons of the enemy. Then he began to concentrate his forces in a methodical, determined way until by 2:30 P.M. he had all three of his armored formations—Ariete, the Eighth and the Fifth Panzer regiments—parading abreast in a line near Bir el Gubi, facing north and ready to bully the enemy back toward Sidi Rezegh. Artillery and mobile eighty-eights would travel with them. What was unorthodox about Crüwell’s plan was his order that the two regiments of infantry were to be trucked close behind the tanks, and were not to dismount “until they come under heavy infantry fire.” It seemed like a recipe for mass suicide, almost, but his officers and men accepted it without question.

  Of all this Rommel had little or no inkling. At about two P.M. his diary had lamented, “Contact with Afrika Korps cannot be established.” Neither he nor Crüwell yet knew that at dawn that day the Afrika Korps’s mobile headquarters, complete with its irreplaceable radio trucks, had been overrun by an enemy force advancing undetected toward Sidi Rezegh.