by David Irving
At three P.M. tank turret hatches clanged shut. A thin drizzle was falling. The trucks were loaded with crouching infantrymen; clips were snapped into rifles, ammunition belts were fed into machine guns, and Crüwell’s triple-headed hammer began swinging northward toward Rommel’s anvil—the fixed artillery and infantry holding the escarpments at Sidi Rezegh. Between them was the enemy, by now well dug in and waiting for them. Crüwell’s tanks rolled north, gathering speed, spewing armor-piercing and machine gun fire. A company commander looked back and saw an unforgettable scene: “There were armored troop carriers, cars of various kinds, caterpillars hauling mobile guns, heavy trucks with infantry, motorized flak units.”
A hail of enemy fire met them—shells and bullets whining horizontally past them. The smoke from shells and burning vehicles darkened this infernal scene. The tanks were heavily hit, but most still rolled on, converging on the enemy. As the infantry trucks bumped and jounced over the hard, wet gravel, intense fire greeted them.
The German officers stood erect in their cars and trucks, to encourage their men. Lieutenant Colonel Zintel, commander of a rifle regiment, twisted sideways, a bullet having passed through his brain, and toppled from his car. Moments later his battalion commander, Major von Grolmann, was killed by a direct hit on his truck. Officer after officer was mortally wounded. The regiment’s adjutant, a mere lieutenant, took command.
By now they were squarely among the enemy positions. At six P.M., the hammer reached the anvil and the enemy’s morale cracked. Crüwell’s costly brute-force tactics had resulted in the annihilation of the rest of the British Seventh Armored Division and most of the First South African Division. The news of this great victory was passed to Rommel, at Ravenstein’s headquarters, at 6:50 P.M. He turned a blind eye on Crüwell’s defiance of his own battle directive. He broke his three-day silence in a letter to Lucie: “The battle seems to be the worst crisis. I’m okay, in fine spirits and good heart. Over 200 tanks shot down so far. Our fronts have held.”
AT DUSK, as fires from blazing tanks flung fantastic shadows across the desert south of Tobruk and medics moved from wreck to wreck to tend the injured and ease the pain of the dying, Rommel returned to his own headquarters. His diary relates that he had “briefly discussed” the order he intended issuing to Crüwell next day. Rommel had decided on a raid so audacious and spectacular that even now he kept half of it to himself: Beginning at ten A.M. the next day he was going to hurl his two panzer divisions down the Trigh el Abd—the desert track running parallel to the coast, forty miles inland—to the frontier wire at Sidi Omar—the desert end of the Sollum front.
He would destroy the enemy believed to be massing there, and he would then stand astride the supply lines of the British units that had invaded Libya to relieve Tobruk. This would give him total victory—the Eighth Army would be done for. He issued the first orders in the hour before midnight. He informed Colonel Westphal and his apprehensive staff, “I will put myself at the head of the Afrika Korps, and begin the pursuit. I’ll probably be away from here until tomorrow evening—or the morning after at the latest.”
There is no doubt that Rommel ignored the presence of a large New Zealand force advancing on Bardia from Tobruk. (His own hand-colored sketches indicate that he was obviously uncertain that such a force even existed.) He also overestimated the enemy’s disorganization—and overlooked his own.
Crüwell, fresh from the battlefield, did not. His Afrika Korps had lost its own headquarters unit and seventy-two of his 162 tanks that day. The Fifteenth Panzer Division had also lost its radio trucks, and many of Rommel’s most outstanding officers had been butchered in the frontal assault on the enemy’s guns that afternoon. Crüwell was a forceful and thoughtful commander. He first heard of Rommel’s desperate plan at sunup on November 24, when he gate-crashed a meeting called by Rommel on the Tobruk bypass road. He objected and suggested to Rommel a routine mopping-up operation first. “We have got to clean up the battlefield and salvage the immense booty before the enemy has time to come and fetch it himself,” he said emphatically.
Rommel disagreed. He told Ravenstein, “You have the chance of ending this campaign tonight!”
At 10:30 that morning the spectacular operation, Rommel’s dash for the frontier wire, began. Rommel stood straight up in his open car, the raw wind biting his face, as he piloted the Twenty-first Panzer Division from the Sidi Rezegh airfield. Crüwell was some way behind with all that was left of his headquarters unit—his own Mammut, one radio truck, two dispatch riders and two cars. Neumann-Silkow’s Fifteenth Panzer spent the morning patching its injuries, refueling and ammunitioning; at noon it followed in Ravenstein’s tracks, heading for the frontier. The sun was breaking through the wet clouds as this, the most erratic act in Rommel’s African campaign, began.
“I’ll be back this evening!” With Rommel’s cheery words ringing in their ears, the appalled Panzer Group staff watched him go. He meant it, too: he didn’t even take his toothbrush. His chief of staff, Gause, went with him, and so the Panzer Group responsibilities devolved on Siegfried Westphal, his youthful operations officer. For many days afterward Westphal tried frantically to contact Rommel for instructions. Nobody knew where Rommel was, sometimes Rommel least of all. Westphal’s intelligence officer, Mellenthin, remembers: “Huddled in our greatcoats, in the wooden bus that served as our headquarters at El Adem, Westphal and I viewed the situation with increasing apprehension.” Because now, with Rommel gone, the real effort of the British to break the siege ring around Tobruk was about to begin.
FOR ROMMEL the dash to the wire was a grand adventure. Faster and faster he drove toward the frontier, looking neither left nor right as he charged down the very axis of the enemy’s Thirtieth Corps. Like picnickers before an angry swarm of bees, the enemy began to flee eastward and southeastward as the Afrika Korps made its unannounced and desperate foray. Near Gabr Saleh, halfway to the wire, tanks, armored cars, trucks and guns were caught in the rush, while the German armor charged among them and blasted them at will. Brigadiers, corporals, black drivers, typists, cipher clerks, mechanics, war correspondents—panic gripped them all regardless of rank. The enemy air force scrambled from its landing grounds—the sky was full of Hurricanes and Tomahawks retreating east. The Eighth Army commander, Cunningham himself, just barely escaped in a Blenheim bomber, taking off through herds of trucks stampeding across the rough Gabr Saleh airstrip.
At four P.M. Rommel and Ravenstein reached the frontier, at Bir Sheferzen, twenty-five miles in from the sea. Like a monster caterpillar, the barbed wire entanglement rolled north and south as far as they could gaze. Thus far the gamble had paid off. Recklessly, Rommel dispatched Ravenstein northeast into Egypt with orders to establish himself southeast of Halfaya, the pass through the Mediterranean escarpment overlooking Sollum, before dusk. This would expose Ravenstein to great danger. He had only the truck he stood in—he had neither tanks nor artillery as yet, for his division’s 2,000 vehicles were still strung out behind him along the Trigh el Abd, striving to catch up. But gamely Ravenstein obeyed.
An hour later, at five, Crüwell’s Mammut jolted to a halt near the wire. Rommel boisterously announced: “I’ve just sent Ravenstein on up to Halfaya.”
Crüwell was appalled. His proud Afrika Korps, yesterday’s awesome victor, was now sprinkled across the sixty miles of desert from Gabr Saleh to Halfaya. Rommel told him that the Afrika Korps and the Italian Twentieth Corps were going to “encircle and destroy” the enemy. He had not troubled to ask the Italian division here—Savona—just where the enemy was. He assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that they were all in the outer zone of the frontier fortifications. “The panzer divisions will drive the enemy onto the minefields of our Sollum front and will force them to surrender,” he announced. Crüwell dutifully drove on into Egypt.
For a while Rommel stayed at the wire, waiting for his striking forces to catch up. Colonel Stephan’s Fifth Panzer Regiment, however, with only thirty tanks still runni
ng, was stranded in Libya, temporarily out of gasoline and ammunition. Ariete was being held up by opposition from a South African brigade. Nor had the Fifteenth Panzer arrived, with its fifty-six tanks. Rommel had also ordered a reconnaissance battalion to occupy Habata that night to plug this, the “defeated” enemy’s only other escape route from the Libyan plateau to the Egyptian coastal plain. But the battalion pleaded lack of gasoline and ammunition and lay low.
Undeterred by these frustrations, Rommel took Gause across the wire into Egypt after dusk. His aide, Alfred Berndt, later described the venture: “His car’s steering column snapped. His escort car had been left behind somewhere, and the last trucks of the panzer division were vanishing into the distance. His driver had to get out every 100 yards and kick the front wheels into the correct angle.” Then the engine died on them. It was bitter cold, and Rommel and Gause were shivering. At this moment Crüwell, no less, drove by in his Mammut and graciously offered them a lift.
Thus it came to pass that ten German officers and five enlisted men, representing Hitler’s Panzergruppe Afrika, were packed into a Mammut on the enemy side of the wire. Nor did the black comedy end there. They could not find the gap through the wire to get back into Libya. Rommel himself took the wheel. After battering the wire fruitlessly, like a demented insect against a windowpane, he switched off the engine and gave up for the night; they went to sleep. In fact they were just north of Fort Maddalena—the British commander’s advance headquarters! During the night they could hear enemy dispatch riders and trucks rattling past the stationary Mammut. But the Mammut, which was a captured British vehicle, looked unextraordinary to the passersby and they paid it no attention. At the first light Rommel started up the engine. Soon he found a gap in the wire and slipped gratefully back into Libya.
A thin crescent moon was rising in the morning sky when Rommel rejoined his forces. After a while a lieutenant from a machine gun battalion was brought to Rommel. His name was Borchardt, he said, and he had been sent by his battalion—some way down the wire to the south—to find Stephan’s Fifth Panzer Regiment.
“Where is the regiment?” Rommel asked impatiently.
“They must have reached the wire about six miles north of here by now,” replied Borchardt.
Rommel set off there at once, past ghostly skeletons of wrecked trucks. He found Stephan and gave him his orders, then returned to Lieutenant Borchardt. “How many cars have you left in your company?” he inquired abruptly.
Borchardt was taken aback; he had expected appreciation. “Uh, three, Herr General!”
“Good,” Rommel barked. “If you’ve any luggage in your car you had better get it out at once. I’m taking your car and driver.”
The next day, November 25, was like a nightmare for Westphal, who was at headquarters, seventy miles away. But Rommel enjoyed it. It was like being a company commander all over again, rounding up straggling troops and pointing them toward the enemy.
He omitted to issue any orders at all to the Trieste Division, so it moved—on whose volition?—not to the frontier but to El Adem, where Westphal’s staff were headquartered. He ordained that a fast raiding force was to be rushed down past Maddalena to Giarabub oasis, 120 miles to the south. But nobody could spare the troops, vehicles, gasoline or ammunition, so nobody went. Rommel obviously believed that the same cowboy tactics he had used at Mechili in April would work again here—that speed and surprise would always triumph over planning and preparation.
He visited Neumann-Silkow’s Fifteenth Panzer Division that morning. It had just arrived at the wire. He ordered it to push northward and “seal off the enemy at Sollum from the west.” He explained that Ravenstein’s Twenty-first Panzer was doing the same from the east. “Kick up dust,” he suggested. (He repeated this to Crüwell next day: “We must use every truck and supply convoy we’ve got to kick up dust; that will deceive the enemy as to our real strength and lead them to surrender.” Crüwell expressed “serious reservations.”)
The day’s fighting was not glorious. One of Neumann-Silkow’s panzer regiments beat up a British tank repair workshop of largely derelict and immobile tanks. Meanwhile, Rommel instructed the Fifth Panzer Regiment—now commanded by Major Mildebrath; Stephan had just been mortally wounded—to forget about joining up with Ravenstein and to attack Sidi Omar instead. The regiment had less than twenty tanks and no artillery support. Rommel’s order forced them to advance across a minefield he had himself laid, and attack enemy field guns that had been well dug in.
At 800 yards’ range the British twenty-five-pounders opened fire. The gunners cheered madly as salvo followed salvo. By dusk the German regiment had ten tanks left, of which only three had guns in working order. Neither gasoline nor ammunition reached them—“because a higher headquarters had directed all our supply trucks to simulate an attack elsewhere,” the regiment bitterly reported.
Late that morning the machine gun battalion that had dispatched Lieutenant Borchardt had reached the coast east of the Halfaya Pass—still held by the indomitable Major Bach, the ex-pastor. “In theory our motor transport should have stopped dead long before,” Borchardt later wrote, “because the gasoline we had on paper ran out long ago. But we were driving on the difference between what we reported and what we actually had: our maintenance officers, troop leaders and drivers were always smart enough to have a few jerrycans tucked away. Our real shortage was in water and food.” Suddenly Rommel appeared and ordered them to dig in. “For the next forty-eight hours, it turned out, we were the last soldiers to see General Rommel.”
It is not easy to follow the Fox’s trail after this. Crüwell was not to see him until the next day, November 26. Rommel, a dynamo of energy, appears to have driven from one tired unit to the next. If they had orders from others, he usually revoked or reversed them. The Afrika Korps diary refers scathingly to “misunderstandings and errors” and to Rommel’s “interference.” Just how acid were the feelings against him is indicated by one enigmatic fact: certain pages of the diary from November 25 onward were removed and retyped (evidently in 1942; one of the retyped pages is even carelessly headed “26.11.1942”). One possible conclusion is that at the time, Crüwell, Westphal and perhaps Ravenstein, too, had started to conspire against Rommel so as to salvage what they could from the wreck of his erratic grand strategy.
The upshot of all this was the entirely unexpected return of Ravenstein’s force from Egypt to Libya on November 26. Who ordered it is a mystery. Rommel furiously ordered an inquiry. His battle report, printed months later, tartly observes: “The affair has still not been satisfactorily cleared up.” But the sequence of events is clear. Throughout the previous day, Westphal had frantically tried to raise Rommel by radio to tell him that a real crisis was threatening their Tobruk front.
What had happened was greatly alarming. A large force of New Zealanders had come from the Bardia area and captured most of the key points south of Tobruk—including the hard-won Sidi Rezegh airfield and Belhamed hill. Westphal appealed to Crüwell and Rommel to send a panzer division to attack this New Zealand force in the rear.
This was the desperate situation when Rommel arrived at Crüwell’s Mammut at the frontier at ten-thirty The sheaf of frantic messages from Westphal made no impression on him; nor did the fact that planes sent to drop the relevant maps to him had been shot down. He did admit that he had not realized how grim the situation at Tobruk was, but he stubbornly insisted on destroying the enemy here at the frontier first. He again advised Crüwell to “kick up dust” to dupe the defenders. Then he drove north to the coast with Neumann-Silkow’s Fifteenth Panzer Division, reaching Bardia at about one P.M. The panzer division replenished with gasoline and ammunition from Bardia’s fortress reserves.
He was still at Bardia that evening when Ravenstein appeared: “Herr General, I am happy to announce that I have arrived with my division.”
Rommel was astounded: he had believed the Twenty-first Panzer was on the Egyptian side of the frontier. “What are you doing
here?” he demanded. Ravenstein showed him a signal from Westphal, ordering the recall. “A fake!” shouted Rommel. “The British must have our codes.”
This was not so. Westphal had indeed sent this bold order—an act of no mean courage for a half colonel of thirty-nine. It is not in the files (evidently willing hands destroyed it later), but Ravenstein’s battle report tells us: “In the afternoon [of November 26] my division is ordered to break through to Bardia.” He had moved off at five, as dusk was falling, and broke through into Libya. His infantry and machine gunners suffered cruel losses. During the night Westphal had also radioed the Fifteenth Panzer Division—and this signal has survived—“C in C cannot be raised at present. Panzer Group headquarters orders you to advance at once to relieve our Tobruk front. Situation very precarious. Achtung!”
Rommel must have known that Ravenstein’s premature return spelled the end of his desperate foray. He was still furious when he eventually got back to Westphal’s bus at El Adem. “He greeted nobody,” one of Rommel’s personal staff recalled, “but stalked silently into the operations bus and looked at the battle maps. Gause stood behind him. We tried to signal Gause to talk to Rommel to explain Westphal’s decision. But it was not necessary. Rommel suddenly announced that he was tired and was going to lie down.” When he reappeared from his trailer, he made no further mention of the affair—to everybody’s relief.
IT WAS AN ELOQUENT silence. In fact, by failing to take an intelligence officer with him, Rommel had contributed to his own defeat. His notion of the enemy’s strength and dispositions was completely wrong. A blind man could scarcely have shown less interest than Rommel did in the main supply dumps—six miles square—established by the enemy right under his nose before Crusader. Field Maintenance Centers 62 and 65 were only a dozen miles south of Gabr Saleh. They were clearly marked on documents that were captured by the Fifteenth Panzer Division on November 20 and sent up to Rommel’s headquarters. Another dump, FMC 50, lay right across the route taken by Stephan’s panzer regiment on the twenty-fourth; the tanks scattered the staff but ignored the stocks, gasoline and a cage of 900 Axis prisoners. “Gott im Himmel,” exclaimed Bayerlein after the war. “If we had known about those dumps we could have won the battle.”