The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  Yet the last days of November 1941 were still to show Rommel at his best. On paper, his outlook was dim. The Afrika Korps had only forty good battle tanks left (and twenty Panzer IIs); the enemy outnumbered him seven to one in battle tanks. The New Zealand division advancing on Tobruk from Bardia had eighty Valentines and Matildas; the enemy’s Seventh Armored Division had had two days to replenish and now fielded 130 tanks. And the Tobruk garrison, which finally established a frail corridor through the siege ring to the New Zealanders on November 26, had seventy tanks as well.

  Despite the odds, Rommel again won an astonishing success by December 1.

  How did he do it? The factors were perhaps largely psychological. He had established a personal reputation for doing the unexpected—one of the few profits from his dash to the frontier wire. But he also had good tanks, fine commanders and brave men. The cooperation between his tanks and the mobile guns was well drilled, his tactics were flexible. The British commanders were in his view ponderous and orthodox. There was one example of this when his operation began the next day, November 27. The Fifteenth Panzer’s fifty tanks made a fast start west toward Tobruk, but after about twenty miles they were blocked by the forty-five tanks of the Twenty-second Armored Brigade; and when the Fourth Armored Brigade also arrived with seventy-seven tanks in Neumann-Silkow’s flank at four P.M., the panzer division was in a really tight corner. Several of his tanks were soon “brewing”—but to his surprise the enemy suddenly called off the action and withdrew to the south. It was dusk and time for the traditional tank night-leaguer. The bewildered panzer division resumed its westward drive.

  Another factor was that unlike that of several enemy commanders, Rommel’s personal morale was high. He felt that he had regained the lost initiative. “I think we are over the worst,” he wrote irrepressibly to Lucie on November 27. “I’m okay myself. I’ve been in the thick of a running counterattack by us in the desert the last four days, without even a thing to wash with. But our successes have been brilliant. . . . The new operation has already begun.” It is easy to understand that this self-deception infuriated more sober generals.

  Rommel asked that day for a staff officer from Afrika Korps headquarters to come and brief him—he was now back at Gambut airfield. Crüwell grabbed Bayerlein and a car and drove to Gambut himself, meaning to tell Rommel some home truths about the ugly situation at Tobruk. They arrived and found no sign of Rommel. After much searching they spotted a British truck on the airfield and cautiously approached. “Inside,” Bayerlein recalls, “were Rommel and his chief of staff, both unshaven, worn out from lack of sleep and caked with dust. In the truck were a heap of straw as a bed, a can of stale drinking water and a few cans of food. Close by were two radio trucks and a few dispatch riders. Rommel now gave his instructions for the coming operation.”

  Once again Crüwell ignored Rommel’s tactical ideas. Rommel proposed encircling the New Zealanders from their rear. Crüwell wanted to avoid splitting up his panzer divisions for this, and he decided to launch them in one grand slam from the east, toppling the New Zealanders forward into Tobruk. He spent the next day reconnoitering the terrain. At about nine P.M. Rommel sent him a new plan, but Crüwell ignored it as “too late” and summoned both his panzer division commanders, Neumann-Silkow and Ravenstein, to see him at eight A.M. the next day to make sure they followed his plan.

  General von Ravenstein never arrived. His Mercedes-Benz car was found empty, showing signs of gunplay. “The British have nabbed Ravenstein,” Rommel concluded without emotion. He never had liked aristocrats.

  On November 29 the desert once again rang to the sound of tank turret hatches clanging shut as the Afrika Korps rolled into action. In mid-morning the Fifteenth Panzer Division again moved off west along the Trigh Capuzzo, followed by the Twenty-first Panzer on its right. The objectives Crüwell had assigned them were the commanding “heights”—in fact barely 150 feet—of El Duda and Belhamed. With only nine battle tanks left, the Twenty-first Panzer was soon halted. But Neumann-Silkow’s Fifteenth, with thirty-one battle tanks and twelve Panzer IIs, made good progress. In a curious way, it was in fact Rommel’s plan rather than Crüwell’s that was being put into effect: Neumann-Silkow had intercepted Rommel’s amended plan to Crüwell on the evening before, and decided to follow that. Truly the Afrika Korps was an agglomeration of free spirits.

  Rommel went forward just before noon with several Italian generals to watch the battle with Crüwell “The decision will probably come today,” he confidently wrote to Lucie. But it did not. Days of heavy fighting, disappointments, misunderstandings and biting winds, which even the thickest blankets and greatcoats could not keep out, still lay ahead. Even the first day went poorly, and by nightfall he was not at all well pleased. Neumann-Silkow had taken El Duda from the west but lost it again, while the Twenty-first Panzer had barely moved at all from the east.

  Crüwell was gloomy when Rommel again visited his headquarters next morning. Rommel afterward scribbled to Lucie, “The outlook’s good, but the troops are dog-tired after twelve days of all this. I myself am well, I’m fresh and I feel enormously fit.” In the end it was his enormous resilience, and the enemy’s corresponding lack of a strong and unified leadership (on which Rommel’s own battle report passed comment), that sealed the fate of the New Zealand division. He persisted with his encirclement action, and at ten-thirty opened a five-hour artillery barrage on the enemy stronghold at Sidi Rezegh. The enemy failed to concentrate their armor fast enough to help the hard-pressed New Zealanders. At 1:40 P.M. Rommel again went to Afrika Korps headquarters, to watch the jaws close on the enemy. The large-caliber guns were tearing huge craters in the enemy positions at Sidi Rezegh; the ridge and airfield were obscured by dust and smoke. The enemy’s twenty-five-pounders were running out of ammunition, and at 3:40 Neumann-Silkow moved in. It was a hard and violent fight, and it was ten at night before the Fifteenth Panzer could confirm that Sidi Rezegh was once again in German hands.

  The final act took place next day, the first of December. Neumann-Silkow’s infantry battalions got a foothold on the shallow slope of Belhamed before dawn. Then Colonel Hans Cramer’s Eighth Panzer Regiment passed through them; by 8:30 A.M. they had fought their way through to the other side. The encirclement was complete. Only armor could save the New Zealanders now. An armored division did arrive from the south at this time, but in the confusion of battle it mistakenly withdrew the way it had come. Rommel wrote in a letter on the second: “This eases the situation, but if I am any judge of the British they will not give up yet.”

  His troops were weary beyond measure. One trained enemy eye saw them as practically sleepwalkers, men who certainly did not regard themselves as victorious. The Germans had taken heavy casualties in November—473 dead, 1,680 injured and 962 missing. They had also lost 142 tanks and a large amount of other equipment, and supplies were not getting through to Libya. Rommel, however, still felt on top of the situation. He described December 2 as a “somewhat calmer” day, and hinted to Lucie: “There are certain indications that the enemy is throwing in the sponge.”

  He wanted to fight one last big battle, to liberate the Sollum front. But first, he knew, he must restore his soldiers’ morale. That evening he ordered a proclamation to be issued to all troops: “The battle . . . has been brought to its first victorious conclusion. In unremitting heavy fighting with a vastly superior enemy we destroyed by December the first 814 tanks and armored cars, 127 aircraft; we captured enormous booty and took over 9,000 prisoners. Soldiers! This great triumph is due to your courage, endurance and perseverance. But the battle is not yet over. Forward, then, to the final knockout blow for the enemy!”

  For a third time Rommel and Crüwell dramatically differed on how to deliver this “knockout” blow. Rommel suggested splitting his forces—Neumann-Silkow taking nonpanzer elements of both panzer divisions to relieve the frontier garrisons, while other formations tackled the enemy at El Duda and far to the south. Crüwell hotly protested t
hat first and foremost the Afrika Korps ought to deal with the critical situation southeast of Tobruk. He added caustically, “We must not repeat the error of giving up to the enemy the battlefield on which the Afrika Korps has won repeated victories, and embarking on a new far-flung operation before destroying the enemy completely.” If, however, Rommel had some good reason, Crüwell said, for making what amounted to yet another foray to the frontier wire, then they should commit the whole Afrika Korps (apart from its tanks, which needed repair). Rommel ignored Crüwell’s logic and suffered the corresponding punishment the next day, December 3. Attempting three operations with inadequate forces, he prospered in none.

  At last, reality caught up with Rommel. Late that day, he took the first grave decision to abandon all ground east of Tobruk: the Afrika Korps headquarters was evacuated from Gambut, and steps were initiated to salvage Rommel’s extensive depots and materiel in that area. In a much darker mood he told all this to Lucie: “The battle continues, but as it is shifting more to the west we have had to regroup during last night. I hope we have pulled it off. The battle is too difficult for words . . .”

  Whatever the cause, he had made up his mind on December 3. On the fourth, he claimed to have radio intercepts and air reconnaissance evidence of a strong enemy force approaching from the deep south. He reacted by sending south the whole Afrika Korps, and meanwhile he quietly thinned out and dismantled his siege apparatus east of Tobruk. Tractors hauled the big artillery westward. Depots and half-repaired tanks were blown up. On the fifth, the Afrika infantry division, now renamed the Ninetieth Light, was first briefed to hold the siege line as long as it could, then informed at 10:15 P.M. that it too would be pulled out.

  A discussion earlier that evening had precipitated this final slump in Rommel’s hopes. A quiet, objective Italian staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Giuseppe Montezemolo, had arrived with a message from the Italian High Command in Rome. The message was that Rommel had no hope of getting fresh supplies or reinforcements across the Mediterranean for at least a month. Rommel equally bluntly admitted that the Afrika Korps had only forty of its 250 tanks left, and wholly inadequate ammunition stocks. He proposed abandoning the whole peninsula of Cyrenaica, not just Tobruk.

  The attempt to hold at the Egyptian frontier was over too. He had already ordered the Italian Savona Division to withdraw into the coastal fortress of Bardia, twenty miles from Sollum, since the ammunition and food in the Sollum line had been used up. Rommel told Colonel Montezemolo that his losses were 4,000, including sixteen commanders. The next day, as if to lend emphasis, word came that Neumann-Silkow himself had been mortally wounded by a bursting shell.

  Bastico was dumbfounded at the colonel’s grave report, and he reported in turn to his superior in Rome, General Cavallero. Cavallero reluctantly agreed to forfeit the stranglehold on Tobruk, but directed that Rommel must not throw away the whole of Cyrenaica without good reason—and he must retain Benghazi as a supply port as long as possible.

  Bastico sent for Rommel late on December 7.

  Rommel had withdrawn his headquarters westward to a ravine near Gazala, some miles west of Tobruk, the interim line that he proposed to defend. He churlishly refused Bastico’s invitation, claiming he was too busy to get away. So Bastico drove over by car to see him. According to all the diaries it was a stormy meeting. The colorful Italian record leaves no doubt of that either. Rommel deliberately kept his esteemed Italian superior waiting for fifteen minutes, then called him into the trailer that he was using as his headquarters and, “very excitedly and in an uncontrolled and impetuous manner,” put the entire blame for his defeat on the Italian generals—they were inefficient and had not cooperated with him. Bastico angrily interrupted him, whereupon Rommel, “very heatedly, and acting like an overbearing and uncouth boor, yelled that he had struggled for victory for three weeks and had now decided to withdraw his divisions to Tripoli—and to have himself interned in [neutral] Tunisia!” A few moments later he snapped, “We haven’t won the battle, so now there is nothing to do but retreat.”

  Turning the Tables

  FOR THE FRST TIME in his life, Rommel is on the retreat—a mortifying experience. “How humble one learns to be,” he says in a letter to Lucie. His first halt is at the Gazala line, but the slow and panicky Italians, largely unmotorized, are an encumbrance. He does not have the gasoline or ammunition to fight back, and his best men are failing him. Neumann-Silkow lies in a soldier’s grave. Sümmermann of the Ninetieth Light Division has also been killed, by an RAF attack. Some of his surviving commanders are succumbing to desert plagues. Even Crüwell is sick, infected by jaundice. And what will become of the 14,000 troops he has left in strongpoints along the Sollum front and in the Bardia fortress, now that the Panzer Group is moving ever farther away from them toward the west? “Don’t worry,” he writes to Lucie, “I’m feeling okay and hope my lucky star won’t leave me.”

  For one general, the uncertainty of war is over: Ravenstein will soon begin the long journey from Cairo to Canada as a prisoner. He was a good general, but he makes a poor prisoner. He is a gourmet and officer of high breeding, and he misses the captured delicacies that were stowed in the glove compartment of his Mercedes: the Aulsebrook’s biscuits, the South African cigarettes, the Crosse & Blackwell’s canned preserves, the Greek brandy and the rum. However, the British look after him well, and their director of military intelligence is even chivalrous enough to invite him over once for tea. The brigadier confides to him that the invitation has aroused a storm of protest, but to Ravenstein it seems a natural courtesy between officers and gentlemen. How is he in his naïveté to know that the only purpose of luring him from his tent is to enable a microphone to be installed in it? (Rommel’s generals turn out to be garrulous in captivity. Crüwell and his successor at Afrika Korps headquarters—both of whom are captured in 1942—will tell British microphones, in the civilized comfort of their English country house surroundings, that Hitler is developing a secret long-range rocket to use on England.) In his conversation now with other prisoners, Ravenstein unwittingly reveals much that the British do not know—about the Panzer Group’s heavy losses, its mismanagement and, above all, about the widespread “dissatisfaction over Rommel’s leadership.”

  And yet Rommel has by no means shot his bolt. During December 1941 he proves that he is a master of the obstinate retreat. And in January it turns out that he can spring surprises of which a Ravenstein would never have dreamed.

  SOMEHOW, ROMMEL survived the first half of December and thwarted every enemy attempt at outflanking the Gazala line although it was only a dozen miles long and ended in the open, defenseless desert. He was living in a proper house again, with live chickens cackling and scratching the muddy ground outside. By day he toured his fatigued troops. Rain poured down incessantly, and the desert was sometimes a bottomless morass. The bushes were tinged with green—a sign that in the protected valleys of Cyrenaica the African spring would soon arrive. It was good to be out of range of Tobruk’s artillery, but at night it was cold and for some weeks he slept in his uniform and greatcoat—unwilling to bathe or change his underwear.

  What kept his spirits up even now? First, he knew he still enjoyed Hitler’s confidence, even if the Italians had no trust in him at all. As recently as December 11 Hitler had mentioned him by name in an important speech. (In that speech Hitler declared war on the United States—an ominous action that Rommel never referred to in his diaries.) Secondly, Rommel felt on top of the crisis. Ravenstein might have written him off in Cairo, but the Panzer Group was still able to inflict severe losses on the attackers. He had little ammunition or gasoline, but a railroad ferry did reach Benghazi on the nineteenth and unload twenty-two precious tanks for the Afrika Korps. Two days later he cajoled Lucie, “Don’t let your head hang down—I’m not doing that here!”

  He did not intend to remain long at the Gazala position. He had hinted at this to Bastico on the eighth, and he warned Berlin a few days later that he was planning to
withdraw right across Cyrenaica shortly. To the world it looked as though the British had Rommel on the run; in fact he was always one step ahead of them. The Italians felt that he should stand and fight at Gazala, and they suspected that if Rommel pulled back, the largely nonmotorized Italian troops would be left to the mercies of the enemy. That was not the way Rommel was secretly planning it, however. The Italians would be sent back on the easy coastal road, while the Afrika Korps and the Italian general Gambara’s Twentieth Corps would fight a delaying action to keep the enemy from outflanking them across the desert.

  His own generals were as perplexed at first as the Italians. When his preparatory withdrawal order hit the Afrika Korps on the afternoon of December 14, Crüwell sharply replied that they had inflicted such losses on the British that it was “totally unnecessary” to withdraw now. Gambara was furious. Bastico flew into a rage because Rommel was not consulting him. The Chief of the Italian High Command, Cavallero, felt that Rommel might be acting overhastily, that he was ignoring the larger implications of the entry of Japan into the war: there were already signs that Britain was having to shift combat units from North Africa to the Far East. When Cavallero flew to Libya on the sixteenth, the Italian commanders poured out their hearts to him.

  Gambara wailed, “If you knew how much we have suffered being practically at Rommel’s beck and call!”