by David Irving
Rommel’s first panzer drive ended at Saint-Valéry, on the English Channel. A British division surrendered to him; there was bitterness on the face of its commander, Major General Victor Fortune. (ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)
Karl Hanke – a lieutenant in Rommel’s panzer division but also one of the most powerful Nazis in the Goebbels propaganda ministry – reports to Hitler during the French campaign (U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)
Rommel’s troops arrive in Africa: on March 31,1941, he and the Italian field commander, General Gariboldi, inspect the Afrika Korps. (GERMAN OFFICIAL PHOTO, FROM THE ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)
Rommel in Africa. His chief aide was Lieutenant Alfred Berndt. He too was a top Nazi, often dealing with Hitler in Rommel’s behalf. (FROM FILM CAPTURED BY BRITISH TROOPS; U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES)
Rommel’s scribes: Interpreter Wilfried Armbruster kept a private diary that is revealing about Rommel’s operations.
Albert Böttcher, Rommel’s secretary took down the Rommel diary in shorthand, now transcribed by the author; Hellmuth Lang kept the Rommel diary in 1944. (FROM GERMAN NEWSREEL FOOTAGE; ANTONIE BöTTCHER; HELLMUTH LANG.)
Rommel and Fritz Bayerlein of the Afrika Korps confer between his Mammut command truck and a Panzer III. (TROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)
After the defeat, Christmas 1941: Rommel, General Alfred Gause, Colonel Siegfried Westphal and Major Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin wait outside their headquarters for Italian generals to arrive. (FROM BARON CONSTANTIN VON NEURATH.)
Bayerlein with Rommel during the fighting at Kasserine.
Major Wilhelm Bach, the ex-pastor who directed the heroic defence of the Halfaya Pass. (ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)
General Georg von Bismarck, panzer division commander, studies the battle plan prepared by Rommel – whose lips are blistering in the sun. (ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)
General Johannes Streich, who fell afoul of Rommel and retuned to Germany.
Lieutenant General Ludwig Cr¸well, Rommel’s successor as Afrika Korps commander. Captured by the British, he, like von Thoma, talked volubly. In November 1942 the Afrika Korps commander General Wilhelm von Thoma surrendered to the British at El Alamein. Some say he deserted. (FROM JOHANNES STREICH; U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)
Hitler bestows the field marshal’s baton upon Rommel in September’1942 in his Reich Chancellery in Berlin. His entire staff looks on – Army Adjutant Gerhard Engel, Chief Adjutant Rudolf Schmundt, Navy Adjutant Karl Jesco von Puttkamer, Chief of the High Command Wilhelm Keitel, SS Adjutant Richard Schulze. Rommel, as always is accompanied by his aide Alfred Berndt (FAR RIGHT) (U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)
The same day, Rommel is the hero of a huge public rally in Berlin. Next to him is Field Marshal Keitel (ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)
Markings on this map are Rommel’s own sketches of his plan to seize Cairo and the Suez Canal. (FROM THE ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS.)
The rutted desert. Low ridges such as the one at the rear were of tactical importance during the battles. (FROM CAPTURED FILM.)
A typical empty desert battle scene, with the crew of a German half-track watching an enemy vehicle burning on the horizon. The Panzer III – here in the earlier short-barreled form – was the backbone of Rommel’s battle tank force.’ A Panzer IV, with Rommel aloft, advancing through the camelthorn scrub. (FROM CAPTURED FILM, AND HANS-ASMUS VON ESEBECK’S NEGATIVES.)
German infantrymen – in foxholes burrowed into the desert – wait for an attack. (FROM CAPTURED FILM.)
Uneasy about what was happening to his two panzer divisions, Rommel drove late on the twenty-eighth onto a hill from which he could see the desert battle. Black smoke clouds rolled up into the scorching sky, giving the landscape, in Rommel’s eye, a curious, sinister beauty. He decided to concentrate his forces the next day and truck emergency supplies through to them somehow, using the same route that he himself had just taken. There were about 1,500 truckloads waiting south of the battlefield.
After dark a huge convoy of supply trucks was organized. Here is Armbruster’s account, in his diary of May 29: “At four A.M. I drove off with the C in C and we piloted the supply column up behind Ariete’s line, heading for the Afrika Korps. . . . Tanks were again attacking us in the flank. Rommel ordered them to be encircled. We found Westphal again and took him along with us. Ariete fell back slightly, and again there was chaos. . . . Shelling began again and Schneider was injured standing next to me. Rommel then led the whole bunch right up to the Afrika Korps. It was a fantastic drive—we were surrounded for a time—but everything came off terrifically.”
Thus he had the Afrika Korps back in business.
Rommel set up his Panzer Army headquarters and took stock with Westphal, Gause and Bayerlein. It was obvious that Crüwell’s relief attack toward them from the west had not materialized. Rommel decided to abandon his original battle plan: he would screen off the British tanks on the east of his force with antitank guns, and himself smash a wide gap through the minefields to the west to restore a main supply route to his troops.
Operations next morning, May 30, began badly for Rommel. His headquarters came under heavy artillery and air bombardment and three men were killed. His attempt to smash a breach in the enemy line ran slap into a strongly fortified “box”—a pattern of minefields and entanglements heavily defended by infantry and guns—between the two trails Trigh el Abd and Trigh Capuzzo.
The local Arabs called this shallow saucerlike depression the Got el Ualeb; Rommel’s troops later called it The Cauldron. He had lost eleven tanks before he realized that his intelligence maps were wrong. A desperate battle began with the enemy brigade holding the “box.”
It was now that Field Marshal Albert Kesselring dropped in on Rommel. They were very opposite characters. Kesselring was at fifty-six one of the best staff officers and administrators produced by any service. His courage as a Luftwaffe commander was legendary; his optimism was well known—some said it was inborn cheerfulness, others saw it as just an obligatory façade. His permanent toothy grin was his trademark, and he was as popular as Rommel with the troops. He was a soldier’s general. He knew ordinary soldiers by name, he was affable and fatherly. Hitler had sent him out to Rome as “Commander in Chief, South,” with orders to see that Rommel got his supplies, and he had got the Luftwaffe moving, where Major General Stefan Fröhlich, the lazy Austrian-born commander in North Africa, had failed.
By mid-May 1942, however, Rommel suspected Kesselring of adopting the airs of a supreme Wehrmacht commander in the south. “He can run his head against a brick wall for all I care,” was Rommel’s unhelpful commentary on this. But “Smiling Albert,” as he was known, was an officer of integrity and not an intriguer. His attitude toward Rommel was one of admiration, tinged with real concern. He had stepped temporarily into the missing General Crüwell’s shoes as commander of the field forces west of the Gazala line, and was astounded at Rommel’s loose battlefield control. “From what eye witnesses told me about the goings-on at Rommel’s headquarters on the first day of the tank battle,” he later wrote, “they just beggared all description.” He now demanded a face-to-face meeting with Rommel, and took off—piloting his own Storch as always—for the southern end of the front.
Rommel drove westward out through the minefield and met Kesselring at Tenth Corps headquarters. Rommel calmly munched a sandwich, to express his disrespect for Kesselring. Kesselring’s first act was one of characteristic pragmatism and tact: he voluntarily placed himself under Rommel’s command, although he was a field marshal himself and six years older than Rommel. In private, out of earshot of the Italians, Kesselring told Rommel to get a grip on his army. Then they discussed tactics. He found Rommel’s plan quite good. Basically, it was for the Panzer Army to stay put, behind an antitank gun screen, let the enemy batter itself to pieces on the screen and then counterattack.
On May 31, Rommel renewed the attack on the enemy brigade “box” at The Cauldron. The next day Waldau’s bomber squadrons joined in, and Rommel scrambled from platoon to platoon as the main assault f
orce worked its way toward the British positions. The enemy was well dug in, and fought as usual to the last round. Counterfire was intense. Westphal was badly hit by mortar fragments. But after a while Rommel shouted to a panzer-grenadier battalion commander near him, “I think they’ve had enough, Reissmann! Wave to them with white flags—they’ll surrender.” Werner Reissmann was skeptical, but his men did as Rommel had suggested—one man pulled off his shirt, others took handkerchiefs or scarves. And the miracle happened. The firing died away, and the enemy wearily crawled out of their foxholes and trenches with their hands in the air. Three thousand troops marched into captivity. More important, a considerable breach—five miles wide—could now be torn in the British line of fortifications from Gazala down to Bir Hacheim. Thus Rommel had his bridgehead.
Later that afternoon heavy artillery fire began to drop around his headquarters. The operations bus was wrecked, and Alfred Gause was severely injured, to Rommel’s very real regret—he had begun to find his chief of staff quite irreplaceable. (Even months after, when Gause returned, he still suffered bad headaches and needed repeated furloughs.) Three of Rommel’s other officers were killed. “We could have spared ourselves all this if we had only moved off earlier,” was Armbruster’s diary comment.
Rommel wondered how much Lucie and Manfred knew of this desperate battle. In Lucie’s letter of May 28 she had written: “I’ve got to admit that I listen to the Wehrmacht’s news communiqué every day with thumping heart, and I’m always relieved whenever you’re having a relatively quiet time.” On the thirtieth, the general sent Corporal Böttcher to Wiener Neustadt laden with mysterious parcels and packets for her marked: “Not to be opened until June 6.” That was her birthday. The packets contained beautiful Arab bracelets, ear pendants and other trinkets, and the latest battle photographs. “Oh, Erwin,” she wrote to him after opening the gifts, “how happy I could be from the bottom of my heart about all this, if only I knew that you were in safety!” The letter took many days to reach the battlefield.
Meanwhile, Rommel’s armor reorganized and repaired its wounds, and he planned his next move. Enemy artillery was pounding the breach he had torn through the minefields, trying to halt his supply convoys. “I can hardly put pen to paper,” wrote Armbruster on June 2. “Today was appallingly hot, and we had sandstorms too. Men could go crazy in such conditions. Bayerlein is now our chief of staff and Mellenthin is operations officer.” Rommel drafted a special announcement to proclaim the fall of the Gazala line, but the next day he had to shelve it—there still seemed to be some fight left in the enemy.
The world speculated. Newspapers debated whether victory was his or the Allies’. On June 2 Moscow declared that Rommel had been captured; no doubt it had confused him with Crüwell. Crüwell had arrived in Cairo, and was shown the famous Shepheard’s Hotel. He remarked on its luxury and said: “It will make a grand headquarters for Rommel!” His irony pleased Hitler, and the words went around the world.
Rommel decided to deal next with the fort at Bir Hacheim—the strongpoint at the line’s southernmost end—and announced that two nonpanzer divisions and dive bomber attacks would do the job. He did not rate the fort as worth much attention. Alfred Berndt later contemptuously referred to its garrison of 4,000 French troops (including a Jewish brigade and many legionnaires) as “Gaullists, swashbucklers and criminals of twenty different nations.” But in seven days the battle would still be raging, and the fort’s heroic resistance to Rommel and the German air force has gone down in the annals of military history. Many months afterward Rommel was shown the diary of a British prisoner taken at Hacheim; it graphically described the battle:
May 30. Light enemy shelling. We’ve no stretchers and there are 236 injured friends lying all around, Free French troops. Their moaning fills the silence of the night, it’s just unbearable to hear. They’ve given us only ten gallons of water and the French fifty. The heat is oppressive and we’re tortured by thirst. . . .
June 1. At noon there was a terrible hail of bombs from wave after wave of dive bombers. The trenches and walls of the fort caved in, burying men alive. It’s a horrific sight. . . .
June 2. Another hail of bombs from twenty airplanes. They come right down low and machine-gun us. We can’t hold on. More men are killed, many more. To round off this hellish day the RAF comes and bombs us twice—so much for the help they promised us. . . .
June 3. This afternoon we were bombed three times by German and Italian airplanes. We couldn’t get any water until evening. There are more injured everywhere. Their screams of agony ring around the ruins of the fort. We just don’t know what to do with them. They beg for water, but there’s no water to be had.
On June 4, the diary records endless bombing attacks, but still the fort at Bir Hacheim held out. “The air is full of smoke, and in this motionless hot air it just lies in coils around us. I’m dying of thirst, but nobody’s got any water to give. . . . At 6:20 P.M. the RAF again flies over and drops some bombs on us.” And the next day there were new air attacks. “We don’t have any stretchers, we’ve got no water, we can’t even bury our dead. The choking stink of the exploding bombs mingles with the foul smell of rotting bodies—just to see them leaves our nerves in shreds.”
Early that day, June 5, 1942, the British launched their only serious attempt to evict Rommel from his bridgehead through the minefields. But thanks to faulty British planning and coordination, fifty-eight of the seventy heavy tanks in the attack were lost to Rommel’s guns and an unsuspected minefield. Another force of enemy armor and infantry attacked the eastern rim of Rommel’s bridgehead; it fared no better. Rommel counterattacked that afternoon and overran the tactical headquarters of both the attacking enemy divisions in the confusion.
The next day, he repeated the slaughter on the enemy forces that had managed to penetrate The Cauldron. Armbruster wrote: “We knocked out fifty-six tanks yesterday. First class. And on top of that we closed the second pocket during the night and took in 4,000 prisoners and several hundred guns.”
The materiel losses that Rommel had inflicted on the British in these two actions were the turning point of the whole offensive. Six months later, when the tide of battle again passed close by the same Cauldron battlefield, a British artillery officer felt drawn to revisit the scene. “The guns were still in position, surrounded by burned-out vehicles. The gunners lay where they had fallen, the faithful gunlayers still crouched over their sights.”
During the Cauldron battle, the fighting at Bir Hacheim had ebbed. The tenacity of the defense astonished and vexed Rommel. There were 4,000 French troops, well protected by a complex system of pillboxes, bunkers and foxholes; and there were 1,000 volunteers of the Jewish brigade as well. All were commanded by Colonel Pierre Koenig, one of the French army’s finest officers. (He later became governor of France’s occupation zone in Germany.) Their ferocious defense was raising problems for the whole Mediterranean campaign. Marshal Kesselring watched with mounting impatience—knowing that the battle was using Luftwaffe planes he would soon need for his German-Italian assault on Malta. Rommel, however, still refused to commit his tanks against the fort, because the ground around it was heavily mined.
On June 7 Kesselring flew by Stuka dive bomber to Rommel’s headquarters. The heat was unbearable. There was a new, violent argument. By the time he left, Kesselring had extracted a firm timetable from Rommel: he would wipe out Bir Hacheim the next day, thrust through to the coast on the ninth or tenth, pry open the Gazala line, let the infantry divisions pour through to the east and then—the long-sought prize itself: “From June 18 to 22 the attack on Tobruk—in which connection C in C South [Kesselring] rules that June 25 is the very last date possible for the attack to be concluded.”
At 6:21 A.M. the next day the cruel attack on Bir Hacheim began. Stuka dive bombers screamed down on the fort, forty-five of them, supported by three Junker 88s and ten twin-engined Messerschmitt 110s escorted by fifty-four single-engined fighters. But Rommel’s men were not r
eady to attack, so the Luftwaffe effort was wasted. Twice—at noon and again at 5:30 P.M.— Rommel called for fresh dive bomber attacks and each time the infantry failed to follow through. In his diary Waldau raged: “The army still completely misapprehends the air force’s capabilities!” Waldau himself climbed into a dive bomber and flew over to Rommel’s headquarters.
When he landed neither Rommel nor Bayerlein, the new chief of staff, was available—they were on the battlefield commanding an assault group! Armbruster recorded: “Hacheim is still on our menu tomorrow—those guys are damned tough.”
Waldau was shocked to receive a fresh demand that evening from Rommel, for a dive bomber attack next day. Just after sunup the bleary fort defenders once again heard the Stuka scream. “There is a thunder like an artillery barrage,” wrote Armbruster. “But still we can’t smoke them out of their confounded nest.” Rommel’s infantry were weary, too, and had no desire to die on this hot and barren desert, storming across minefields toward an enemy they could not even see. Rommel now brought up a tank battalion and artillery, and again called for “one last attack” by the dive bombers that evening.
Waldau retorted that he had flown 1,030 sorties against the fort already. Kesselring reproached the Panzer Army in a signal: “I am unhappy that the heavy and successful Stuka attacks have not been followed up by panzer/infantry assaults of similar intensity. The Luftwaffe is being prevented from carrying out other important tasks.”
He followed this with something of an ultimatum. The next morning, June 11, there would be a dive bomber assault on the fort. “I expect tomorrow’s full-scale Luftwaffe attack to be followed by a panzer attack of sufficient strength to deal once and for all with Hacheim.”