The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  As the hot, stormy days of May 1942 paraded in languid sequence across the Cyrenaican desert, Rommel sensed the almost palpable nervousness that gripped the army. “The British are expecting us,” he commented. “And we are expecting them.” With Malta temporarily subdued by the might of Kesselring’s bombers, supplies were reaching Rommel on an unprecedented scale. At 9:40 A.M. on May 12, he briefed all his senior commanders. Again Böttcher stenographed a record for the diary: “The enemy army facing us consists of three or four divisions, of which the South African division and elements of the British divisions are in fixed field positions. The enemy is not all that mobile . . . their mobile forces consist of one or two armored divisions, echeloned well to the rear [in fact, tailing back to the area south of Tobruk itself]. Our job is to lure this British field army as far west as possible.”

  With his short, brisk hand movements he pointed about the map. “We’re going to achieve this by creating an impression that we are not going for an outflanking move to the south so much as a frontal breakthrough in the north. This will oblige the enemy to move up his armor. This is why each phase of our attack is staggered—the first feint by our forces will lure them up to the Gazala end of their line. That will begin at about two P.M. on X day. Our main force will go in around here at dawn the next day”—and he pointed to the desert end of the enemy line.

  “The main force will have begun moving down to its starting line after dark on X day, starting at nine P.M. Now, after Afrika Korps’s units have reached the start line I want all armored and mechanized units to get as much rest as possible. . . . During the night we are then going to simulate a big panzer buildup opposite the Gazala end of their front.” He then gave the commanders their separate objectives and jump-off times from the start line. The real tank force would start rolling at 4:30 A.M. By X plus 2, the enemy’s field army would have been encircled and wiped out—in his reckoning. “You will not stop to draw breath then, but go straight on to take Tobruk. You are to reach your start lines for the attack on Tobruk by X plus 3 at the latest.”

  Four days later Rommel briefed the commanders of the infantry. Now he uncovered some more of his planned tactics. Crüwell would command the two infantry corps at the northern end of the front. Their feint attack would begin at two P.M. on X day—that is, in broad daylight—and push about ten miles into the enemy positions; a “major tank attack” would then apparently begin: “A German panzer battalion and a unit of captured tanks will attack from Twenty-first Corps’s sector, but as soon as dusk falls the German battalion will withdraw and join up with our main armored push down here”—and he pointed around the desert flank. Seeing puzzled looks, Rommel explained the purpose of the daylight assault in the north. “It is of vital importance to stimulate a heavy tank attack here. What we want is for the enemy to abandon their present armored forces deployment, and move them up in front of your two infantry corps. That is why we have scheduled your attack as early as two P.M.”

  THE CALM BEFORE the storm. Rommel sat up late, peering shortsightedly at maps, checking distances with calipers and talking quietly with his staff. He tackled the rest of his mail—there were many, many letters to write to widows whose husbands would never return from Africa. Hausberg, his own adjutant in 1939–40, had been killed. Schraepler, his successor, had been run over by the Mammut. And he wrote a belated letter to Hans Keitel, the bespectacled school friend who had helped to build the glider in 1906. “Tell him about the sandstorms here and tell him we’re squaring up for the coming march,” Rommel instructed his secretary—“the standard reply.”

  Back in Wiener Neustadt, Lucie’s home seemed to have become something of a meeting point for most of the generals’ wives. They met for coffee, shared the latest news from North Africa and eagerly scanned news photos for pictures of their men. “How awful for Schraepler to have been killed in such a terrible way,” she wrote to Rommel. “Does his widow know how it happened? I’m thinking of inviting her down here . . . because all her thoughts are still in Africa.” Frau von Ravenstein, the captured general’s wife, also wrote to her, very sad that her husband would not command the Twenty-first Panzer Division in the advance. “She had a greetings telegram from him via Sweden at Christmas,” Lucie informed Rommel, “but she’s heard nothing from him since then and doesn’t even know where he is.” General Crüwell had passed through Wiener Neustadt on his way back to Africa from Hitler’s headquarters, his features still glazed with shock: his wife of only thirty-four had suddenly died, and he had just buried her. To Lucie it seemed that Crüwell now had only the coming battle to live for, and she wrote down her impressions for Rommel.

  Rommel at this time had duties to fulfill as a father. Manfred, now thirteen, had entered adolescence. He had progressed from boyhood Red Indian games to his swearing-in ceremony into the local Hitler Youth troop (Fähnlein), and his letters were full of the excitement of his brand new uniform, the camps, scoutcraft sessions and exploration. He went bicycling by himself around the town and had his first traffic mishap. “There has been a very stupid accident, Papa,” he confessed in one letter. “I ran down an old lady at Adolf-Hitler Platz . . .” She broke a leg, and Rommel’s insurance had to pay. Worse was to follow— Manfred’s next school report. In geography, mathematics and Latin he was barely satisfactory, in physical training and stenography quite inadequate. The teachers’ evaluations of Manfred were summed up by Lucie as “hair-raising. . . . ‘This pupil,’ ” she said, quoting one report, “‘does not make the slightest attempt to cooperate in the physical exercises. He talks out loud and lacks discipline.’ ” Rommel noticed that although Manfred had done well at his Hitler Youth sports, swimming and skiing classes, the school gym teacher was spiteful and insulting—the man had said that Manfred would never get anywhere in life except by string-pulling.

  “You expect these teachers to have a grain of common sense,” Rommel wrote in reply. “I only wish I could get away.” At his urging Lucie tackled the teachers about their unfavorable reports and they changed their tune. That satisfied Rommel. “In fact,” he observed, “the school ought to be pleased and proud that they can number a son of mine among its pupils. Other schools would scramble for the chance. But this whole institution has now fallen into the hands of priests and clerics. It’s not in the least pro-German, let alone National Socialist in outlook.”

  But Rommel realized that three years without a father were beginning to affect Manfred, and he sought to remedy the problem with a stern paternal letter. “As you can see, your teachers have had cause to complain about you. You must do your duty in all your subjects and behave properly. That is your main task in this war. I’m particularly pleased to hear that your Hitler Youth duty is to your liking. It will be of great value to you in later life.” What else could he say? Manfred too got the standard Africa commentary: “Our supplies have got much better, so my worries are that much less. Soon we shall be squaring up for the coming match.”

  The Glittering Prize

  ROMMEL FXED X DAY for May 26,1942. Everybody was in position at the right time, but after that everything went wrong.

  If ever Rommel thought back to this first phase of the new battle for Tobruk—despite the human memory’s happy faculty for blotting out what is unpalatable—he probably saw nightmare glimpses like a lantern slide lecture on a battle that is about to be catastrophically lost.

  The first flash is of General Rommel waiting for dusk on X day and then—about 8:30 P.M.—announcing: “Operation Venezia!” That is the signal for his entire striking force of 10,000 vehicles to begin its southward move. He moves his car right to the front. Behind him, the two Italian infantry corps have been steadily battering at the Gazala line since two P.M., and the enemy will have noticed tanks assembling there all afternoon, clattering and roaring and raising an immense pall of dust against the setting sun. Now, however, in the evening, the dust cloud is being churned up by aircraft engines with propellers, mounted on trucks which are slowly circling in the desert.
Only one Italian tank battalion is still there now, for the German panzer battalion has already slipped away at seven P.M. to join Rommel’s daring advance around the enemy’s desert flank.

  The next image is of Rommel one hour later, in his car jolting southward across the moonlit desert. Flickering flames from gasoline cans mark the routes. To his left is the Twentieth Corps, with 228 Italian tanks; to his right are the Afrika Korps and the Ninetieth Light Division. Frequently Rommel checks his compass, the car’s tachometer, the compass again and his watch. Throughout May he has hammered into his generals the importance of getting the timing right. El Adem, on the Axis bypass road south of Tobruk, is to be reached at 8:30 A.M. “By afternoon at the latest, the ring is to be closed around the enemy,” he has ordered.

  At three A.M. he reaches the first stop line for his force, near Bir Hacheim, a desert outpost forty miles below Tobruk. That means they have already successfully outflanked the British line—and there has been no opposition yet. Here the entire force rests. The Afrika Korps is in formation, with Bismarck’s Twenty-first Panzer Division on the left and Vaerst’s Fifteenth Panzer on the right. Each division is in “area formation”—332 tanks followed by sappers, artillery and signals, with the infantry (in trucks) and antitank units on the flanks. In the center is their “hump,” the thousands of trucks of the supply echelons. Everybody takes on extra gasoline, and at 4:30 A.M. the whole monster heads north. Now they are slicing up behind the enemy’s fortified Gazala line.

  What follows is chaos. Rommel’s intelligence staff has provided a fatally incomplete account of the enemy’s positions and strength. On the maps it prepared for him it has left out one enemy tank brigade and four brigade groups. The enemy has only partly fallen for his decoy tactics. There is enemy resistance, and for hours on end he makes little progress. It is 11:30 A.M. before the Ninetieth Light reaches El Adem, three hours late.

  Here is the next image: it is of Rommel, staring through field glasses at an enemy tank silhouette like none he has ever seen before. His intelligence men have not warned him about this new monster either. He barely has time to take in its high structure and the big gun in a side turret, before this tank and its fellows are hurling the first shells into the Twenty-first Panzer Division—at extreme range, and high-explosive shells at that. These are the American-built Grants, and their seventy-five-millimeter gun packs a bigger punch than any of Rommel’s tanks—better even than the nineteen new Panzer III Specials that he has obtained in time for this battle.

  Rommel’s interpreter scribbles in his diary, “It’s a massacre, our squad reels first to the left and then to the right, it’s terrible. Tanks are breaking through on our right flank.” A rout begins—Afrika Korps headquarters, divisional and regimental staffs hopelessly intermingled with towed guns and trucks. Walther Nehring, commander of the Afrika Korps, is conferring with a flak regiment commander, Alwin Wolz, as this stampede engulfs them. Colonel Wolz describes it: “In the midst of this avalanche I caught sight of some flak eighty-eights. We raced over to them and suddenly found Rommel there, completely hemmed in by panicking troops. He angrily rebuked me that my flak was to blame for all this, because it was not shooting back. I managed to stop three eighty-eights and then the other half of the heavy flak battery of the corps combat group. The armada of enemy tanks was closing in and only 1,500 yards away—twenty, thirty, forty big tanks.

  Ahead of them were the Afrika Korps’s fleeing supply trucks, all quite defenseless to tank attack, and in the midst of this chaos are Rommel, the headquarters of the Afrika Korps, regiments, signals trucks—in short the entire muscle and nerve center of the combat divisions up front.” The first eighty-eights open fire; the enemy tanks stop, and this first crisis is barely overcome.

  Here is another episode from that first day, May 27, described by the Fifteenth Panzer’s commander, Gustav von Vaerst. The northeastward advance of his armor is halted by enemy tanks, so Vaerst sends one of his two panzer battalions circling around to the right to surprise the enemy on their flank. After thirty minutes of give-and-take in which Vaerst loses thirty tanks and the enemy twenty, the enemy detects the flank danger and retires hastily, leaving the route of advance temporarily free again.

  Vaerst’s leading tank company commander calls to him by megaphone: “Which way ahead now?”

  Before Vaerst himself can reply, his adjutant shouts back: “That way! There’s Rommel! Follow him!”

  And there indeed is Rommel, standing upright in his car as it bounces across the smoking, wreckage-littered battlefield right at the head of his panzer troops.

  But by the end of this first day Rommel has advanced only as far as Bir Lefa. He has already lost one third of his tanks. Vaerst’s tanks are dry of fuel and low in ammunition. The Panzer Army’s supply columns have become detached. In fact, instead of encircling the enemy field army by his bold sweep around the Gazala line, Rommel’s own army is now virtually encircled.

  The cause, in Siegfried Westphal’s view, is the total lack of Italian combat effort. The two Italian infantry corps still west of the Gazala line have made no serious effort to assault it frontally, and this has allowed the enemy to move its armored reserve down to meet Rommel’s advance.

  The Italian armored divisions under his command are equally leery. “For two days we lost all contact with them,” Westphal recalls, “although we supplied them with German radio trucks. At the time we could not help believing that they were lying very low.”

  Rommel, careering around the battlefield, seems to have lost control of the fighting. The next day, the Luftwaffe commander General von Waldau begins his diary with the acid observation: “It is difficult to assess the situation owing to the complete absence of reports from Panzer Army’s headquarters.” Since Waldau does not know where the Axis front lines are, the air force is unable to go to Rommel’s help.

  On the day after that, Waldau repeats his complaint in his diary, but this time he does send in Luftwaffe dive bombers to attack. Often they mistakenly scream down on German tanks and guns and bracket them with bombs. Rommel, temporarily defeated, has to recall his tanks to the west, leaving their supporting infantry to dig in as best they can on the barren battlefield. Radio communication breaks down, and wild rumors sweep about in the vacuum created by the absence of higher command:

  “The Afrika Korps has been encircled and is about to capitulate.”

  “The Tommies have captured all our supplies.”

  “The British have surrounded us and taken Derna.”

  “Rommel, Nehring, Crüwell are all dead!”

  Not until May 30 does Rommel reestablish radio contact with Waldau. Now Waldau can safely commit his entire air strength. He sends 326 aircraft to sweep the battlefield, and the tide begins to turn in Rommel’s favor.

  And then the last lantern image. On June 2,1942, as this first phase ends in victory for Rommel after all, planes fly two heavily bandaged battle casualties back to Waldau’s airfield for immediate hospitalization—Alfred Gause and Siegfried Westphal, Rommel’s two top staff officers. Waldau regards their comments on Rommel as unprintable. “General Gause and Lieutenant Colonel Westphal came back with severe injuries,” says Waldau at the end of that day’s diary entry. “Their detailed report on command issues does not lend itself to setting down in this diary . . .”

  Rommel’s absence on the battlefield may have caused command problems, but there is no doubt that the example he thereby set to his men tilted the balance against the far less flexible enemy.

  The remarkable events of May 28 and 29,1942, demonstrated this. On the twenty-eighth—the day Waldau had called “totally obscure”—Rommel ought to have been a very worried man indeed. His army was widely dispersed, his headquarters had been scattered by shellfire and supplies were scant.

  Once again the ominous instruction had gone out forbidding all troops to wash or shave—water was running low. General Crüwell, now well enough to resume command of the Afrika Korps, was shot down when his Storch flew o
ver an unsuspected British strongpoint, and was taken prisoner.

  Rommel’s parents.

  His father was a stern and autocratic schoolmaster who decided his son should have an army career. (FROM THE ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)

  Erwin fell in love with Lucie Mollin, a dark eyed beauty who won prizes for dancing. In 1911 when he was twenty, he gave her a photo of himself in the uniform of the Officer Cadet School at Danzig. (FROM THE ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)

  In 1906 Rommel and a school friend built this glider. It flew, but not far. (FROM THE ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)

  Marital portraits taken before and after the galvanic achievement of the young Rommel’s career: the winning of the Pour le Mérite, Prussia’s highest honor. (FROM THE ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)

  Rommel at the Western Front in 1914. Auspiciously, he had a fox as a pet. (FROM THE ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)

  The Rommel’s only child, Manfred, was born in 1928. When Hitler’s war broke out, Rommel hardly had time to see his family. (FROM THE ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)

  September 30,1934: the first meeting between Hitler and Rommel. Hitler visits Goslar, and Rommel (helmeted, at right), leads the honor guard. (FROM THE ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)

  In the Polish campaign, Rommel commanded Hitler’s headquarters. As officers report here to the Führer at Kielce airfield on September 12,1939, Rommel finds himself between Hitler and the powerful Nazi party leader Martin Bormann (U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)