The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  Bastico chimed in, “He made me wait fifteen minutes!”

  Cavallero asked them if they could suggest any alternative, and curtly snapped: “We are all in the same boat. You will just have to grin and bear it.”

  Then Cavallero called on Rommel himself, and blurted out that the loss of Cyrenaica would be a political bombshell for Italy. Rommel outbid him on that: “The loss of all Tripolitania as well would be an even bigger one!” Later that day Cavallero called on him again. Rommel noted in his diary, “In a voice charged with emotion he demanded that the order for the retreat must be withdrawn.” Bastico and Gambara reacted violently but could propose no alternative. The Rommel diary smugly observes, “Their delegation left my headquarters having accomplished nothing.” The withdrawal formally began at midnight.

  Crossing the uncharted Cyrenaican desert by night was no easier now than during the exhilarating April offensive. Trucks and tanks bogged down and had to be winched clear. By day enemy planes harried and strafed them. Fuel and ammunition were running low. The local Luftwaffe commander Waldau commented on December 20 in his private diary, “Rommel has decided on a further withdrawal, to Agedabia. We cannot judge if he is right. It is all a question of supplies. We are losing a lot of equipment, particularly transport planes—yesterday alone twenty Junkers! (And fourteen of them through bad gasoline.)” On the same day the new commander of the Ninetieth Light Division discussed their plight with his staff: “Nobody can see any escape. The British outnumber us enormously. The puzzle is, why are they following so slowly? Time and again they have enabled us to dodge encirclement. There is only one explanation: their awe of General Rommel, and his capacity to surprise—that’s why they’re following so hesitantly.”

  Benghazi, the sprawling, long-suffering capital of Cyrenaica, with its untidy quays, noisy street markets and ever-open brothels, was once more evacuated by the Axis troops and abandoned to the enemy. Before the British marched in, all the Axis supply dumps were thrown open to Rommel’s troops. (One German official refused to release warm blankets and clothing from his depot; his orders were to burn them!) After that, the Via Balbia, the highway along the coast, was thronged with army trucks overloaded with crates of canned meat, butter, preserves, fruit, chocolate, beer, cigarettes and even fresh potatoes. Morale in the Panzer Group began to climb, and Rommel said wryly in one letter: “The British were very disappointed not to have cut us off in B [enghazi], and not to have found any gasoline or food there either.”

  For a time, Rommel hoped to make a stand at Agedabia, south of Benghazi—it was tactically the key to Cyrenaica. “If I give it up, I am giving up all Cyrenaica,” he told Crüwell, now fighting obstinately with jaundice. “Because here I’ve got my hand on the enemy’s throat, and I can return and slice clear back to Gazala at any time again.” He jolted around the battle lines in his Mammut, checking gun positions and trying to stabilize the Panzer Group’s defenses. The Italians were a major headache. Their High Command had little sympathy with his retreat, the generals mistrusted him, the troops showed every sign of imminent disintegration—the looting and gunplay in Benghazi were only one symptom of this. Italian unreliability was the main reason he gave when he requested Mussolini’s authorization to withdraw still farther west if need be, and to surrender the distant besieged garrisons at Bardia, Sollum and Halfaya if their food and ammunition ran out. Rommel’s language to Mussolini well displays his humanity and moral courage: “. . . I will not be responsible for the useless sacrifice of some 15,000 German and Italian soldiers there” (meaning in the Egyptian frontier garrisons).

  Since he had here at Agedabia less than a dozen of the deadly flak eighty-eights—each one could spell death to an entire tank company—he ordered the Italians to manufacture dummy guns and told them to dig in the real eighty-eights well and far apart, just as at Halfaya. But a few days later, when he again toured this sector, he found the eighty-eights prominently displayed and attracting heavy shelling. He lost his temper and drove off to find out who was responsible for this “sabotage.” He returned rather abashed. “They are dummies,” he admitted. “The Italians have knocked them together from telegraph poles. It’s the camouflage paint that fooled me.” He congratulated the Italian commander: “If and when we fall back farther west, take the decoys with you. There’s no need for the enemy to rumble us yet, before we can dream up new dodges.”

  On December 28 and again two days later Rommel sprang a nasty surprise on the enemy. Crüwell had noticed an inviting gap between the two enemy brigades closest to Agedabia, and threw the Afrika Korps at one of them, the Twenty-second Armored Brigade. In two professional and smoothly executed attacks the Germans destroyed sixty of the tanks that the brigade had painfully brought across the desert—two thirds of its force.

  This setback to the British gave Rommel breathing space. He now ordered his forces to disengage surreptitiously and abandon Cyrenaica. He told one division commander on New Year’s Day that he was going to rehabilitate and reorganize his forces in a new line running inland from Mersa Brega, and to “train them for an attack in the spring.” His commanders all needed rest and recuperation. General Gause had left for Rome and Germany—ostensibly to report to Hitler, but in fact because his nerves were badly tattered. The entire staff of the Twenty-first Panzer Division was undergoing an overhaul, after it apparently suffered a mass nervous breakdown at the end of November. Like Crüwell, Colonel Westphal had now also contracted jaundice. “I’ll soon be the only German officer to have fought here from start to finish,” said Rommel.

  He visited Crüwell on January 2, as the withdrawal stealthily gained momentum. Crüwell’s open, boyish face was pallid and tinged an ominous yellow. He was so weak with jaundice that he was bedridden. Rommel told him that he planned to lay 100,000 mines in the new line—they would be brought over by submarine. “I’m going to build a kind of East Wall to protect Tripolitania,” he said. A tough force of Luftwaffe paratroopers was coming, and Hitler had finally lifted the embargo on the army’s important antitank secret weapon—the Redhead hollow-charge shell (the only answer to the crisis caused by Stalin’s T-34 tank and the Russian winter on the eastern front).

  Hitler had sent Rommel a personal New Year’s message, telling of his admiration for the Panzer Group.

  “I know I can rely on my Panzer Group in the New Year too,” he wrote.

  The nights were cold and damp. Rommel lay in bed and looked at the light of the full moon playing through the window. His final retreat was going according to plan. Sadly, the Bardia fortress had had to surrender after a ferocious battle. “Soon the enemy forces that this has released will be another millstone around my neck,” he wrote. “I am preparing for them. We are working day and night.” Under cover of a raging sandstorm—a gift of Providence that lasted for two days—Rommel pulled his last rear guards out of Agedabia. All his forces, German and Italian, were now in the Mersa Brega line, on the frontier of Tripolitania. “The violent storm,” he cheered up Lucie, “seems to be over. The skies are turning blue.”

  PROBABLY ONLY combat soldiers can appreciate the size of Rommel’s achievement in having retreated across nearly 300 miles in one month without serious loss to his force, while still inflicting savage wounds on his tormentors. Yet although he had salvaged the largely nonmotorized Italian troops, Bastico and his comrades did not render appreciation. “Understandably,” mocked Rommel in a letter, “these would-be warlords have pulled wry faces. It’s easy to criticize.”

  Praise for Rommel reached him from an unusual quarter. The Afrika Korps diary for December 17 had stated: “According to subsequent dispatches of the U.S. ambassador in Cairo, we had driven straight through the British Twenty-second Armored Brigade. He describes it as a masterpiece.”

  How did Rommel know what the American ambassador to Egypt was putting in his dispatches? In September, Italian agents had burglarized the U.S. Embassy in Rome and photographed its copy of the “Black Code.” For many months thereafter, Italian and Germ
an code breakers could eavesdrop on top secret American communications. Of sensational value were the reports sent to the War Department in Washington by the military attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner Fellers, because he was a perceptive battlefield observer and kept himself abreast of all the English army’s plans against Rommel and its expectations of the Panzer Group’s next moves. This was a tremendous advantage to Rommel and helps explain his coming triumph.

  Rommel—normally not overly security conscious—kept these “little fellers,” as he engagingly termed the American dispatches, close to his chest. There is no mention of them in his diaries (or even his memoirs). Hitler knew about them, however. “Let’s hope that the U.S. legation in Cairo keeps us well posted about Britain’s military planning, thanks to their poorly encoded telegrams,” he wisecracked to Hermann Göring over lunch one day in June 1942. One of Rommel’s intelligence staff recalls now: “Rommel used to wait for the dispatches each evening. We just knew them as the ‘Good Source.’ When Fellers reported to Washington, ‘The British are preparing to retreat, they are burning secret papers,’ then Rommel would really see red—there was no holding him.”

  As yet Rommel’s preoccupation in January 1942 was survival. But he was growing ever more sanguine. He knew that time was now in his favor. Under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, a new air force had arrived in the Mediterranean, and squadrons based in Sicily were neutralizing Malta by air raids. U-boats were harassing the British fleet. Rommel wrote approvingly on January 4, “Kesselring’s coming to see me again today. We’re both now working hand in glove.” And the next day: “We’re gradually getting more materiel over here. He’s really knocking the stuffing out of Malta.” That was the day, January 5,1942, that nine merchant ships—escorted by no less than four Italian battleships—safely docked at Tripoli and unloaded over fifty tanks for Rommel, and 2,000 tons of aviation fuel. This was Hitler’s New Year’s gift to his favorite commander. “If today’s convoy succeeds in getting through,” Hitler told General Gause—his guest for lunch in his bunker headquarters—“then the British are going to have to look out!” A few minutes later Gause commented, “It was a relief for us to learn of Japan’s entry into the war.” Hitler was at that time unperturbed by the fact that he was also at war with the United States, and commented to Gause: “Yes, a relief. But also a turning point in history. It means the loss of a whole continent, India. And that we must regret, because it is the white race that is the loser.”

  For several days Rommel toured his units, digging in along the line at Mersa Brega. He was now accompanied by his new interpreter, Wilfried Armbruster, a bright young lieutenant with an Italian mother and a talent for mimicry: when Rommel barked insults and orders at the Italian generals, Lieutenant Armbruster barked the translation at them in precisely the same tone of voice.

  Luck is an important weapon in the historian’s armory. I had driven to Milan, to meet Armbruster because he had mentioned to me in a letter that he still had some papers. He was German born, but with the dark round eyes and mobile features of a typical Italian. The “papers” turned out to be press clippings, and I was beginning to regret the journey when, after several hours’ discussion, I asked for a certain date. “I’ll just check my diaries,” he said. Diaries! He had never shown them to anyone before. Eventually he did part with them, but not willingly. They were invaluable in the study of the next phase of Rommel’s campaign.

  Rommel’s tireless inspections went on. “We drive back and forth across the desert,” wrote Armbruster, “at a hellish tempo.” On January 15, with Armbruster still in tow, Rommel twice flew up and down the line in his Storch observation plane. He told Colonel Westphal that the terrain did not please him, and he instructed the Afrika Korps to prepare itself to “make forays in every possible direction.” He expected the next clash to come soon. The British were still obviously stockpiling for a new offensive, and radio intercepts showed they were experiencing cruel supply difficulties.

  These shortages were what Rommel now gambled on. He knew that the British supply line extended over 1,000 miles, while he himself was now only 500 miles from Tripoli. And he knew too that the enemy air force would be weak—because the “little fellers” told him so: “The RAF is transferring aircraft to the Far East,” Fellers had radioed to Washington, also giving the details of the damage Malta was suffering.

  For several nights, Rommel sat up late and brooded over the maps, photos, “little fellers” and quartermaster reports. He demanded that the new tanks coming to him from Tripoli move forward at over 200 miles per day. He estimated that the Panzer Group would now have 150 battle tanks, against the enemy’s 360, but this did not deter him. He knew that there comes a point in every retreat when the hunted quarry can round on its pursuers as they filter through some hindering obstacle—like a desert wilderness—and take them on individually and in turn. If he waited any longer, the enemy would regain numerical superiority.

  The moment for decision came. He wrote to Lucie on January 17 these graphic words: “Things are going our way—and my head is chockfull of plans: plans I dare not say anything about to the people around me—otherwise they’ll think I’ve gone stark raving mad. But I haven’t. It’s just that I see farther ahead than they do. You know me,” he added. “It’s in the small hours that my best new plans are hatched.”

  What was his new plan? He sent for Heinz Heggenreiner, his liaison officer to the Italians. “I feel,” he announced with a grin, “that I’ve got an attack coming on.” Heggenreiner was forbidden to say anything to Bastico, however. On the contrary, he was to give the impression that Rommel was planning to retreat still farther.

  The next morning he briefed Crüwell—still bedridden with jaundice—and Bayerlein about his “new intention.” “The Panzer Group will tackle the enemy buildup southwest of Agedabia,” he announced. “At this moment they are fewer in number than we are. We will surprise them—and annihilate them.” Armbruster burst with the news and unloaded it into his diary: “Our plans have undergone a radical change. The Tommies are in for the surprise of their lives.”

  But how to preserve that vital element of surprise? Rommel listed by name the only commanders to be let into the secret. He forbade his artillery to reply with more than desultory shelling. He forbade all truck movements toward the enemy by day—on the contrary, he ostentatiously ran truck convoys westward until dusk, then switched them under cover of darkness toward the enemy. The tanks and guns were expertly camouflaged. He kept the secret from the German High Command in Berlin and above all from the Italian High Command. (So no Enigma signals went by radio either.) Instead, he arranged for the Panzer Group attack order to be posted on notice boards at roadhouses all along the Via Balbia to the front—after zero hour. Zero hour would be 8:30 A.M. on January 21. As that hour approached, the skies lit up with the fires of buildings and ships along the coast deliberately ignited by Rommel to suggest that a major Axis retreat had again begun.

  ZERO HOUR. Rommel himself took the lead as he conducted the battle group on the coastal highway through the minefields. On his left was the empty sea; on his right, the barren desert. It was 8:30 A.M. Two hours earlier, he had penned his usual letter home: “I firmly believe that God is keeping a protective hand over me and will grant me victory.” His men were in fine fettle. Crüwell’s Afrika Korps attacked simultaneously, some miles to the right but parallel. He hit heavy going, but Rommel’s group jumped the enemy and rolled into Agedabia the next morning. His enemy lacked battle experience. Rommel outwitted, out-maneuvered and outgunned them. “Our opponents have taken to their heels as if stung by a tarantula,” he said in triumph. And Armbruster echoed this: “The Tommies don’t stand and fight. They have just turned and fled.”

  The enemy fell back so fast that Rommel’s first attempt at encircling them misfired; but not the second. The Afrika Korps totted up its score for the first five days as 299 enemy tanks and AFVs (armored fighting vehicles), 147 guns and 935 prisoners. “Against these our own losses
have been very slight: three officers and eleven enlisted men killed . . . three tanks total losses.”

  Rommel’s high-handed behavior infuriated the Italians. On January 23 the chief of their High Command, General Cavallero, flew with Kesselring to see Rommel. Armed with a directive from Mussolini himself, Cavallero admonished Rommel: “Make this no more than a sortie; then you must go straight back to Mersa Brega.” Rommel rebelled. He knew he had Hitler’s personal backing now, because just a few days before the Führer had awarded him the Swords to his Oak Leaves and Knight’s Cross—the first such award to a German army officer. (The Panzer Group had been formally raised to army status, and Rommel himself to Oberbefehlshaber, or commander in chief.) Rommel effectively thumbed his nose at the Italians after that. He told the glowering General Cavallero, “I intend to keep up the attack as long as I can. And only the Führer can stop me, as most of the fighting will be done by German troops.” Cavallero departed, growling, according to Rommel’s diary.

  For a time, his quartermaster staff did give him second thoughts. Major Otto, the Panzer Group quartermaster, flew to Crüwell’s headquarters on January 25 with word that Rommel would not be able to continue the offensive since the Duce could not promise the same supply effort in February. Rommel ordered the Afrika Korps not to press its advantage but to limit itself to salvaging booty. But the “little fellers” and radio intercept reports were so alluring—the enemy commanders were rattled and bickering among themselves; there was talk of abandoning even Benghazi—that he saw red again next day. “Now the tables are turned with a vengeance,” he wrote to his son. “We’ve got the British by the short hairs, and I’m going to tear their hair out by the roots.”

  By noon on January 26 he had decided to throw caution to the winds and continue the attack. He radioed Fritz Bayerlein, Crüwell’s chief of staff, to fly to the headquarters of Panzer Army Afrika. There Rommel disclosed that he was going to do just what the enemy did not expect—go straight for Benghazi while the enemy believed he was heading the other way, toward Mechili, as in April 1941. Benghazi would then be looted of all enemy equipment and stores, and then abandoned again: such was Rommel’s intention as he set out at the head of a small force from Msus at dusk on January 27. A sandstorm blew up, and then heavy rain. Twenty-four hours of grueling country lay ahead of Rommel. But the prospects were promising. Bayerlein’s decoy force feinting toward Mechili had attracted enemy fire, and a radio intercept confirmed that it had been noticed—which was very satisfying for Rommel. His plan was working well.