by David Irving
In London, Winston Churchill lumbered to his feet in Parliament to answer angry questions about the crisis in North Africa. His own earlier boast that they would soon be in Tripoli rang very hollow now. The hero of the world’s press was not Churchill but that accursed panzer general with the Perspex goggles and the Pour le Mérite: “I cannot tell you,” said Churchill to the House, “what the position at the present moment is on the western front in Cyrenaica. We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general . . .”
“North of Benghazi,” said Lieutenant Alfred Berndt in a later broadcast, “there are long columns of an Indian division wending their way along the highway leading out to Derna. They believe that our forces are only slowly moving up from Agedabia. Then, suddenly, like a clap of thunder, General Rommel bursts upon them from the east—having approached through those mountains in pouring rain with just a few tanks and armored cars!” He had hit the coastal highway at Coefia at six P.M. on the twenty-eighth. Here the Via Balbia was elevated, with a ditch on either side. Thus the Indian motor transport attempting to escape Benghazi was trapped. “In less than an hour,” continued Berndt, “the Indian division has been smashed. Our troops capture hundreds of trucks: we have done the seemingly impossible—we have overcome every obstacle, driven by our commander’s spirit through the marshy wilderness and across the red and slippery mountains of Cyrenaica; and we have struck right into the enemy’s flank just as they think that they are safe at last.”
Down the road, flames and explosions lit the sky over the port. The British were demolishing and preparing to retreat. Once again Benghazi changed hands. Rommel’s booty was immense, including 1,300 urgently needed trucks. That night German radio stations interrupted their programs with the news of his victory. The next day Hitler too heaped praise on him in a speech and promoted him to colonel general. Nobody else had ever made that rank so young. When General Walther Nehring—fresh from the Russian front—saw Hitler a few days later on his way to North Africa, the Führer commanded: “Tell Rommel that I admire him.” Rommel was jubilant and privately wrote of his pleasure to have been able to “do my bit for the Führer, the nation and the New Idea.” As for the old idea, of falling back after sacking Benghazi, Rommel never mentioned it again.
From Lucie came an ecstatic letter. All she could think of now was that the Lord must have wanted His general to secure this great victory and new honor. “We’re all so mighty proud of you, my darling Erwin,” she wrote, “and with us the entire German nation, as the storms of applause proved when the Führer mentioned your name yesterday in his big speech and spoke of ‘our Colonel General Rommel.’ It was so marvelous for us two here to listen to the speech yesterday afternoon and again in the evening.” Her house was full of flowers from admirers, her telephone rang itself off the hook, the front door bell kept chiming. Rommel’s picture was splashed across all the newspapers. “Today,” Lucie wrote him some days later, “they paid special tribute to your name in the evening music broadcast—they played bits of music and the composers’ initials spelled out a name backward, ‘the name of our popular hero Colonel General Rommel.’ You can imagine how my head reels with all this. It’s all like some kind of dream, and all my prayers go only to the Lord to be with you and keep helping you toward your goal for the Führer, the nation and the fatherland. This is my waking thought every morning and it’s my prayer when I go to sleep at night, my dearest Erwin!”
Now Rommel was making grand plans again. Whereas Hitler had once again prescribed the Panzer Army’s mission in terms of merely tying down as many British troops as possible, the Fox had notions of his own. Cyrenaica, thrusting like a balcony into the Mediterranean, with vital airfields dominating Malta and the eastern Mediterranean, must come next. Rommel was going to reconquer all Cyrenaica, capture Tobruk and then advance on Egypt and the Nile.
The Italians, who would have to organize the necessary supplies, were not enthusiastic even about what Rommel had already accomplished. “Rome is putting on the brakes,” said Rommel—and added pointedly, “That being so, I think I’m going to have to fly quite soon to the Führer’s headquarters.” His frustration was again evident in a letter of February 10. “Rome,” he wrote, “would like nothing better than to abandon all Cyrenaica again.”
But after a triumph like this, his elated troops were willing to go to the ends of the earth with Rommel. Once again he had shown that by his personal presence—by the mere appearance of the Mammut with its waving radio aerial and the familiar stocky figure standing up in its well, bawling orders to other officers with short, characteristic gestures—he could bring punch to just that place in an operation where punch was needed. Here is one voice, Major Carl Cranz, writing in the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter on January 24,1942: “After we have been driving in scorching heat from four in the morning until dusk, ever onward, getting reports from generals and battery and company commanders, he calls a ‘halt for forty winks’ in the middle of the desert. And there we sleep, the general and his officers and NCOs and enlisted men, side by side as comfortably as we can in our various vehicles. At the first flush of dawn the column starts moving again.”
And here is the war reporter Baron von Esebeck, writing in July 1944: “As we sweep forward to the Egyptian frontier, we find him everywhere, and always there is this strange magic strength that this soldier radiates to his troops, right down to the last rifleman. The privates call him ‘Erwin’—just that: ‘Erwin,’ short and to the point. Not that they intend any disrespect by using his Christian name—it is a mark of profound admiration. Because the guys can understand their commander in chief: when he talks with them he calls a spade a spade; he doesn’t sentimentalize with them, but meets them man to man, often uses hard language with them, but also knows how to praise and encourage them and make suggestions, and make complicated subjects easily comprehensible to them. Of course, to start with there were only a few of us—everybody knew everybody else and there was a desert camaraderie: the rifleman saw his general, and for that matter the general his rifleman, eating the same classical Libyan diet of sardines.”
Not that the Panzer Army was only “a few” now. Reinforcements were slowly coming. Major General Georg von Bismarck had arrived to take over the Twenty-first Panzer Division; Lieutenant General Gustav von Vaerst, the Fifteenth Panzer. Both were fine and talented commanders. And 1,300 Luftwaffe paratroopers—veterans of the murderous Crete invasion—flew in, armed to the teeth with the most modern weapons and equipment that Rommel’s officers had ever seen.
The captured enemy trucks were distributed, the captured tanks and armored fighting vehicles were repainted in Afrika Korps colors, and the palm tree and swastika motif was stenciled on. Rommel drove about the peninsula, chivvying and harrying. On February 11 he moved his headquarters to the hub of this desert peninsula. It was still cold, but in Africa spring was coming. His interpreter wrote that day, “It was a wonderful drive. Here in Cyrenaica the almond trees are in blossom, and the entire population flocked to the highways to greet us as we passed.”
Then suddenly this dynamo was gone. Rommel, whose superhuman energy was the despair of his more mortal staff, drove to the airfield on February 15 and took off for Rome. The tempo slackened, the atmosphere at every level of the Panzer Army eased. The Ninetieth Light Division probably spoke for everybody in its diary: “C in C has left on furlough, three to four weeks. Everybody breathes a huge sigh of relief, and looks forward to the coming days of calm.”
Three evenings later Rommel was in Hitler’s secret headquarters in East Prussia. There is no record of their conference, but afterward Martin Bormann’s adjutant wrote down Hitler’s remarks over dinner—an ungenerous portrait of Winston Churchill: “Churchill is the very archetype of a corrupt journalist,” sneered the Führer. “He himself has written that it’s incredible how far you can get in war with the help of the common lie. He’s an utterly amoral, repulsive creature. I’m convinced
he has a refuge prepared for himself across the Atlantic. . . He’ll go to his friends, the Yanks.” Rommel seems to have made no reply.
A month would pass before he returned to North Africa. “Manfred is now as tall as his mother, soon he will overtake me too,” he wrote to a relative. But the general was not good company to either Lucie or their son. “I just could not settle down at home,” he explained in a letter to a colonel. To know that his army was once again within striking distance of Tobruk, but to have to wait until he had regrouped and stockpiled enough supplies—he was on edge throughout his furlough in Austria.
Back in Libya, he wrote this to a cousin: “The big question is, who will make the first move?” And to an uncle’s inquiry as to whether Erwin himself was allowed to decide whether to retreat or launch a counterattack, Rommel made this reply: “I take all such decisions myself, and I’m glad not to have my hands tied in this connection. This war theater is so remote, besides, that it would be quite impossible for any other authority to get involved in the daily conduct of operations.”
These letters have survived because he dictated them to his secretary, Corporal Albert Böttcher, and Böttcher dutifully preserved his shorthand pads. The same pads contain the long-lost portion of the Rommel diary. Over the next two months Böttcher filled 140 pages with his tight shorthand, while the Desert Fox drove hectically around Cyrenaica in his swastika-decked Kübel car, exhorting the troops, instructing them in tactics and gun site construction and conferring with their commanders. He found time to inspect the rear areas, too—the quays in bomb-shattered Benghazi, the workshops repairing tanks and decrepit trucks supplied by the Vichy French to help drive the Allies out of Africa. He watched tractor and firing trials with the excellent 76.2-millimeter antitank guns captured in Russia. He organized lines of listening posts to protect the long desert flank against British infiltration.
For one brief month the sandy brown had given way to green, as Cyrenaica succumbed to spring. Lieutenant Armbruster, his accompanying interpreter, wrote: “I have never seen colors like these: the desert is a coast-to-coast carpet of vivid reds, lemon yellows, purples, lilacs, greens, oranges, violets and white.” Rommel was to be seen with a movie camera pressed to his sun-blistered face, filming the extraordinary spectacle for Lucie.
His own picture was everywhere that spring. He made the front page of the magazine Illustrierter Beobachter, and fan letters cascaded in. At one stage he had just finished reading 150 and another 100 awaitwd his attention. “One secretary is not enough,” he told Lucie. And: “Lovelorn letters from all shapes and sizes of females are on the increase.” He sent her some: “The newsreels have brought the younger females particularly out of their composure.”
He had two months to prepare his next move. But his Afrika Korps alone was under strength so there was bound to be some delay. Visiting the Axis air commanders Vittorio Marchese and Otto Hoffmann von Waldau, he announced, “We are going to attack in about two months’ time. Our objectives will be first to defeat and destroy the British field arm and prevent its escape into Tobruk, and then to capture Tobruk itself. These are the only forces that the enemy has available for the defense of Egypt. We can follow through into Egypt a suitable time after taking Tobruk.”
At the end of March he moved house to a stone building at Umm er Rzem, near Derna. It was not spacious (Armbruster wrote: “A fine Schweinerei there’s going to be if the enemy bombers find us!”) but it offered protection from the sun and sandstorms. The enemy had also been in residence, because a parting British soldier had chalked on the front door: “Please keep tidy. Back soon.” The cheeky words brought a smile to Rommel’s face.
A week later he reshuffled his Panzer Army. He was still careful not to reveal to the enemy whether he was merely improving his defenses or preparing a new attack. Rommel knew that the attack on the Gazala line established by the enemy commanders—running down from the coast into the desert, forty miles west of Tobruk—would not be easy. Along that line, from Gazala on the water down to Bir Hacheim, the British had already laid half a million mines—an achievement that astounded and frustrated Rommel. The enemy line cut across all the good desert tracks. The tactical alternative facing him was either a straightforward frontal attack or a long move circling around the desert end at Bir Hacheim. The British would outnumber him (by about 50 percent) in tanks. As he considered, perhaps he remembered General Schmidt’s whispered advice to him, while they stood in line waiting for Hitler in February 1940: “Take whichever decision is bolder—it’s always best.” Rommel took the boldest decision of his life. Alfred Gause, his chief of staff, was to write in 1957: “His decision to send his army’s entire tank strength on an outflanking move around the southern end was one of exceptional daring, particularly since his supply lines would also have to go around that flank. But if he lost this battle, he stood to lose all Africa.”
He had decided on his basic tactics by April 15, when he met General Enea Navarrini, commander of the Italian Twenty-first Corps. “We are going to use decoy tactics to cause the enemy to switch the bulk of his forces up to Gazala,” he told Navarrini. “We’ll also be using some elements of the Italian motorized corps for this, but most of the corps will stand by to move down south, around the enemy’s flank and rear. The killer blow is going to be dealt to them in the south. We have got to prevent them falling back on Tobruk, therefore fast columns of troops are going to push ahead to Tobruk. . . . The British field army must be destroyed, and Tobruk must fall!”
Intensive training began. The new infantry had to learn how to attack enemy field positions with tanks in support, under smoke screens; officers had to learn how to act as artillery observers in tanks, calling down gunfire from the rear; decoys and dummies had to be built. The Rommel diary finds him inspecting a tank-repair company temporarily busy converting trucks into tank dummies. He visits Luftwaffe workshops and is shown a mysterious vehicle indeed—a truck with an airplane engine and a propeller mounted on it like a giant rear-facing fan. To what purpose? Rommel knew. “C in C is delighted with this design and orders ten such trucks from the Luftwaffe,” says the diary. Everywhere there were shortages, from gasoline, ammunition and trucks down to radio sets, panoramic gunsights, sandbags and smoke generators; most of the shortages—except for the swastika flags he needed—Rommel expected to overcome by capturing the rich supply dumps that the British were building up for their own forthcoming offensive. The question was, who would start first—Rommel or the enemy?
His troops’ morale was high, despite the atrocious heat, the thirst and the hard work. Their skin was like brown leather caked with the hard gray dust of the desert in which the brave spring flowers had already withered. “The German and Italian soldiers just light up when Rommel comes,” wrote Armbruster on April 25. And on the same day Rommel described the “moonscape” around them thus: “Dawn has a fairy-tale beauty in this region of table mountains. Temperatures around freezing point, but it soon gets warm.” He added, “I had a couple of lively meetings yesterday with [Admiral Eberhard] Weichold and with General [Curio] Barbasetti [Gambara’s successor as chief of staff to the High Command in North Africa].
Apparently Gambara was sent packing because in the presence of some officers he said he only hoped to see the day when he might lead an Italian army against us Germans. The idiot!” The next day Armbruster related: “We went hunting a British reconnaissance unit with the C in C this morning, but the guys beat it. In the afternoon the Führer spoke—we all stopped with Rommel in the middle of the desert and listened to the speech. We got back at 7:30 P.M.” (This was the last speech Hitler ever made to the Reichstag—he announced that henceforth he was assuming absolute power.)
At the end of April, Mussolini and Hitler met at Berchtesgaden to discuss Mediterranean operations. At a secret conference on the thirteenth, they ruled that Rommel’s attack on the British should come before “Hercules”—a planned German-Italian invasion of Malta, the main thorn in the flesh to Rommel’s seaborne
supply lines. This fit in with Rommel’s own concept. On May 5 he outlined it to his corps commanders at El Cherima and showed them on a map the moves he planned to make: Operation Alpha—the encirclement and destruction of the enemy field army—and Beta, the seizure of Tobruk. They were instructed to brief their division commanders and to have all written orders burned after receipt. A dense sandstorm blew up as they left—Rommel could hardly see even the hood of his car. He longed for his native Swabia. “How beautiful is home, compared with this barren land,” he wrote.
Not everybody shared his confidence. Alfred Gause, his chief of staff, had warned him: “You will be risking your entire reputation!” But Siegfried Westphal, his operations officer, argued that on balance they had no option but to attack—to wait any longer on the defensive might put the entire Panzer Army in danger. Once, early that May, Rommel sent for Fritz Bayerlein, the skilled chief of staff of the Afrika Korps: ‘What would you do if you were the British commander?” he asked, after showing him the battle plan.
Bayerlein did not mince his language. “If I was the British C in C,” he said, “I wouldn’t be so dumb as to peg all my mechanized forces up here at Gazala and just wait for you to encircle them. The moment I saw what you were up to, I would pull them back down here”—he pointed to a spot southwest of Tobruk. “Then I would fight a running battle with you. I’d strike right into your lengthening flank as you headed no toward the coast!” Bayerlein could see that Rommel was not pleased by his reply.