by David Irving
From the captured British prisoner’s diary, Waldau and Rommel later learned that the fort’s defenders were by now almost deranged with terror from the air raids. “We’re alone and abandoned,” wrote this soldier on June 7. “Only God can help. In the eyes of my friends I can see a new gleam—they look like madmen. All of us keep looking involuntarily at the sky. I’d never have believed that air raids could kill so many men.” Again the RAF came and bombed them by mistake. Now, on June 10, the man wrote: “Another hellish day. Water, water, water!! That’s the scream of the injured, the cry of the survivors. How are we expected to carry on? A bombing raid at nine A.M., another at ten and the rattle of machine gun fire all day long. The stink of corpses is just unbearable and saps all our powers of resistance. The RAF are as good as gone, and it’s just as well because they’ve caused us enough casualties as it is. At 11:30 P.M. we get orders to hand in our heavy trucks and artillery, we’re going to see if we can get away. But where to? Nobody bothers about us anymore. We’re finished.”
The next day, June 11, the diary ends, with these words: “I’m a prisoner, and in good hands.”
During the night Colonel Koenig had ordered the garrison to sneak out of the fort under cover of darkness. Trucks were waiting to pick them up. Some 2,700 of the surviving defenders made it to the enemy lines.
Thus, three days behind Kesselring’s tight schedule, Rommel had finally taken Bir Hacheim. For Rommel, the self-professed master of infantry assaults on defended positions, the stubborn stand at this fort had left a bitter taste.
The fighting of these days produced a nasty revelation. Rommel’s troops had captured secret British documents which included instructions on prisoner interrogation. Captured Axis soldiers, said the orders, were to be grilled while still upset and distracted. “They are not to be given food, drink or sleep or other comforts.” Rommel’s staff sent this text to Berlin on June 5.
The next day, Armbruster recorded the repercussion: “On the Führer’s orders, British prisoners are to be given no water, meals or sleep until the [British] order is canceled. So our radio message has caused quite a stir.”
The British then complied, and Rommel was not faced with an agonizing crisis of conscience.
The capture of part of the Jewish brigade at Bir Hacheim raised more sinister issues. On June 9, the German High Command sent a secret message to the Panzer Army. There were reports, it said, that “numerous German political refugees” were fighting on the side of the Free French. “The Führer has ordered that they are to be terminated with extreme prejudice. They are to be liquidated mercilessly in combat. Where they are not, they are to be shot afterward, immediately and forthwith, on the orders of the nearest German officer, insofar as they are not temporarily reprieved for the extraction of intelligence. The communication of this order in writing is forbidden. Commanders are to be given oral briefing.”
There is no copy of this message in Rommel’s files, and none of his staff alive today remembers hearing of it. Given his record of clean fighting, it is possible to assume that he destroyed it and made no mention whatever of it to his commanders.
THE BELATED CAPTURE of Bir Hacheim released Rommel’s forces to cope with the Gazala line. He had regained the initiative and could counterattack. He still had some 124 battle tanks besides the sixty Italian tanks and twenty-five Panzer IIs, but his infantry strength was low. The enemy had only an ill-assorted mélange of tanks left. And among Rommel’s tanks were, in addition to the long-gunned Panzer III Specials, several of the Panzer IV Specials with the vicious, long seventy-five-millimeter main armament.
On June 12 and 13, prior to his main assault on the rear of the enemy Gazala line, Rommel fought two big tank battles. By the end of the second day, the enemy had lost nearly 140 more tanks and Rommel was master of this sector of the battlefield. The British now in fact had only about seventy tanks left, and they could not hope to salvage any of those left lying disabled about the desert. These pawns were swept off the desert board in Rommel’s favor. Early the next morning the enemy began to pull their remaining troops out of the Gazala line, and to evacuate the rich forward supply base that they had established at huge expense at Belhamed, southeast of Tobruk.
The Arabs needed no Nazi radio communiqués to know who was winning now. Vagrants clad in fragments of British, German and Italian uniforms-robbed from the bodies lying about the desert—began to appear and led the German commanders to the last hideouts and field stores of the scattered British troops. “Last winter they led the Tommies to our hidden caches,” commented a German war diary contemptuously. “They applauded in April 1941 as we drove into Derna, they cheered the British when they began advancing to the west in December, they were hysterical with praise when we returned to Derna again two months ago—and they will be out there cheering again if . . . and who can blame them? Our war is no concern of theirs.”
Rommel informed Lucie: “The battle has been won and the enemy are disintegrating.” The enemy still held Tobruk and there were garrisons at El Adem and Belhamed, but late on June 16 El Adem fell. By the following evening the much-ravaged Sidi Rezegh battleground was also once again in Rommel’s hands. But there had been a desperate fight; the panzers had come under intense shuttle bombing from the nearby Gambut airfield, and Mark IIID Hurricane fighters had appeared, armed with a new and deadly antitank cannon of forty-millimeter caliber. This fearsome weapon had cost General von Bismarck two tanks—four men were killed in one tank outright.
It was now June 17. Rommel’s net was tightening around Tobruk.
He knew that time was running out—Field Marshal Kesselring would shortly be withdrawing Luftwaffe squadrons for the assault on Malta. That morning Kesselring landed near his headquarters and brought Hitler’s congratulations on the big victory won so far. At three P.M. the tanks of the Afrika Korps and Ariete moved off east, to complete the encirclement. Ariete fell back, and Rommel impatiently radioed to the panzer divisions to press on. At 6:30 P.M., he himself swung the Twenty-first Panzer Division around to the north again. To set the tempo he took his own combat squad right out in front and drove at gathering speed, past bemused British gun tractors and armored cars, toward the coast. It was growing dark, and the Twenty-first Panzer ran into an uncharted minefield—a tank blew up in an ugly ball of flame, killing three men—so Rommel unwillingly called a halt until the first light. But a reconnaissance battalion did reach the Via Balbia at midnight. At 8:05 A.M., June 18, he proudly radioed to the General Staff and Kesselring: “Fortress [of Tobruk] encircled.”
Of the RAF there was no trace. It had now had to abandon its forward airfields at Gambut.
Rommel was driving back down the Axis bypass, to establish a new headquarters, when he sighted several empty German trucks. They had run into a belt of mines and their crews had evidently been taken prisoner. Rommel swung nonchalantly out of his car, knelt down and began carefully lifting the mines with his own bare hands. His personal staff followed his example, and within five minutes they had cleared the mine belt away.
Tobruk! At last he could launch his dramatic panzer and infantry attack on the stronghold that had claimed so many German and Italian lives. He had outlined his basic plan to his commanders weeks before—for instance, to his trusty friend General Navarrini on April 15: “The attack on Tobruk will be made from the southeast, probably with the Afrika Korps on the right and the Twentieth Corps on the left.” He had assured them then that the fortress was much weaker than in 1941. Gone were the tough Australian troops. Indeed, the minefields and entanglements had been robbed to strengthen the Gazala line. The tank ditch had silted up in desert sandstorms.
This time Rommel was not going to repeat the errors that had wasted so much Luftwaffe effort at Bir Hacheim. On June 18, he called General von Waldau to his new command post, the Hatian strongpoint, just captured from the British, and discussed Luftwaffe tactics for the opening assault.
He asked for a maximum dive bombing effort against certain of Tobruk’
s perimeter strongpoints, the ones designated R49 through R71, at 5:20 A.M. Waldau thought that was too early, but agreed to carry out a trial at that time the next day, the nineteenth.
The assault would begin on June 20. Liaison channels were arranged, army and Luftwaffe maps exchanged. Rommel’s artillery would fire smoke shells when the Luftwaffe squadrons arrived, to mark out the section of the perimeter defenses to be assaulted. At noon on the nineteenth, Field Marshal Kesselring came and approved all this.
The description of the operation fills twenty pages of the shorthand Rommel diary. It shows him craftily resuming operations toward the Egyptian frontier—even before the attack on Tobruk—that very afternoon. He promptly advanced on Bardia, well down the coast toward Egypt. “C in C accompanies the advance with his combat squad, raising the maximum possible dust in the desert to the left and right of the highway until eighteen miles before Bardia.” The two German panzer divisions followed.
At four-thirty, however, they were ordered to turn back, while only elements of the Ninetieth Light and other, lesser units continued.
Soon it was dusk. Berndt described the scene: “There was a moon, but it was one of those moonlit African nights on which all the silhouettes seemed to shimmer. It was hard to drive; you couldn’t tell where the surface ahead rose or dipped. In two columns our tanks and trucks rolled on. Soon our artillery commander reported something quite astounding: our entire heavy artillery sites from 1941, to the south and east of Tobruk, were still intact, and near them had been found thousands of rounds of heavy-caliber shells. We need only drive in and open fire. That would save us a lot of time and gasoline. All night long there were suppressed shouts and grunted commands, and a rumbling and shifting about and now and then a green or red signal from a pocket lamp.”
At two A.M. Rommel reached his own command post at Hatian again. He tried to sleep, but the familiar preattack excitement kept him awake. At about 3:30 A.M. he was told that the panzer divisions had reached their appointed starting lines. Then he slept for a while, shivering slightly, like his troops, because of the intense cold before dawn. At 4:30 A.M. he was already in his car.
“Today’s the big day,” he had just written to Lucie. “Let’s hope Lady Luck stays faithful to me. I’m dog-tired, otherwise okay.”
At 5:30 A.M., punctual to the minute, the massed German and Italian artillery opened fire. For nearly half an hour there was no sign of the Luftwaffe, but then General Nehring, the Afrika Korps commander, who was standing on the hill next to Rommel, got the news that the squadrons were just coming. The Stukas peeled off and screamed down on their targets. They were unopposed by flak or enemy fighter aircraft, and there were direct hits on all the bunkers.
Now it was the turn of Rommel’s infantry. Company and platoon leaders stood up and blew the whistle for the attack, and in a chaos of choking dust and smoke, fires and shell bursts, the engineers raced to build a steel bridge across the ditch. At five to eight a bridge was ready, and panzers began to roll into the fortress.
From the Rommel diary: “About eight A.M. C in C drives forward into Fifteenth Panzer’s sector, taking his combat squad. Then he drives in an armored troop carrier accompanied by a car (Lieutenant Berndt’s) to the mine gap and watches the tanks and a rifle company attacking through the minefields and the bunkers already captured in the rear defense line. The defenders are laying down considerable shellfire on the mine gaps. There are traffic jams in the gaps, and trucks that have run into mines or been shot up.”
Rommel could see six British Crusader tanks ablaze. By nine he was confident of victory. He drove to the tank ditch and inspected two captured bunkers. Then he performed an act of calculated bravado: he motioned to a war correspondent to come over, and into his microphone Rommel spoke an announcement for German radio. “Today,” he exclaimed, his voice rasping onto the recording disk as the battle still thundered around him, “my troops have crowned their efforts by the capture of Tobruk.” With his eyes turned, perhaps, to the sheeted corpses of the riflemen who had only made it this far, he added: “The individual soldier may die, but the victory of our nation is assured.” A dispatch rider took the disk to an airfield and it was flown straight to Berlin, for broadcasting that same evening.
His plan was going like clockwork. Everywhere were burning and abandoned trucks and guns, and the geysers of dust thrown up by bursting shells; the air was deadly with flying fragments of razor-sharp rock and shell. By 2:45 P.M. Bismarck’s tanks had advanced to an escarpment from which Rommel could see clear down the incline to the port. Columns of enemy prisoners marched past him, their faces sorrowful with defeat. At seven P.M. the German tanks rumbled into the port. An hour later the two big forts, Pilastrino and Solaro, surrendered. Nothing—not even a Rommel—could now save Tobruk.
For months his troops had crouched outside this malicious, hostile parcel of Libyan desert, tortured by flies and plagues, tormented by sub-zero temperatures and baking sun, unable to raise their heads or seek cover between dawn and dusk—and now here he was, standing in the midst of the fortress.
He thought of Lucie and Manfred: how proud they were going to be at the next day’s news! By candlelight that evening he ate a supper hastily concocted from captured British stores—his eyes betraying that his mind was far away. After the meal he turned to Colonel Bayerlein, his chief of staff, and blurted out: “You know, it’s not just leadership that produces a triumph like this. You’ve got to have troops who will accept every imposition you put upon them—deprivation, hardship, combat and even death. I owe everything to my soldiers.”
Again he was too excited to sleep, yet sleep he must—it was vital if he was to maintain this tempo over the next few days. Midnight saw him slumped in a corner of his car, his head leaning wearily against the window, while his staff lay on the hard ground wrapped in blankets, waiting for the dawn. Rumbling detonations shivered the air as the trapped enemy blew up their big fuel and ammunition dumps. A pall of smoke hung over the port, lit by the fires from below. Against the reflection of the fires in the bay Rommel could see the silhouettes of the funnels and masts of ships partially sunk in the harbor waters.
At sunrise he drove down into the town. Corporal Böttcher stenographed an account in the diary: “After looking around Tobruk, C in C drives west along Via Balbia and meets General von Bismarck. C in C draws particular attention to the coastal wadis where there are still countless prisoners at large. A British army tank brigade offers to surrender. C in C stipulates that its trucks and tanks must be turned over to us intact. The brigade hands over thirty tanks in running order. Left and right of the highway are blazing vehicles and tanks, some set on fire by shelling, others by the enemy themselves. Among the captured South Africans are numbers of drunken blacks. They all look cheerful, and wave and shout, ‘The war’s over.’ ”
The capitulation of the rest of the Tobruk garrison followed. “At 9:40 A.M. C in C meets General Klopper—CO of Second South African Division and commandant of Tobruk—on the Via Balbia four miles west of Tobruk. Klopper offers capitulation, says he has ordered all resistance to cease. C in C orders the general’s car to fall in behind his own. On the way he passes 8–10,000 prisoners, jamming the highway. At 9:40 A.M. C in C gives staff a signal for OKH [in Berlin]: ‘Entire fortress Tobruk surrendered, over 25,000 prisoners including several generals.’ ” Five minutes later Rommel repeated this to his Panzer Army—and ordered the army to get ready to press straight on toward Egypt.
He set up his headquarters in the Albergo Tobruk, a former hotel, and sent for the enemy generals. H. B. Klopper was a short, wiry South African—the typical staff officer rather than a combat general. Rommel instructed him to see to the repair of the water supply immediately. Again the Rommel diary records an edict that was typical of him: “While the overflowing POW cage on the airfield is being set up, South African officers demand to be segregated from the blacks. This request is turned down by the C in C. He points out that the blacks are South African soldiers to
o—they wear the same uniform and they have fought side by side with the whites. They are to be housed in the same POW cage.”
Back in Germany, the news still had to break. Lucie had heard nothing from Rommel since the tenth, and knew only that the Panzer Army had again formed up around Tobruk. She recalled with a shudder how many lives the fighting there had cost during the year before. “They say you’ve already taken Sidi Rezegh!” she wrote. “I wonder where you will be now, my darling, at this very moment?” At midday on June 21 she heard the radio announce that there was to be a special communiqué from Hitler’s headquarters. Her first thought was that Sevastopol, Stalin’s last fortress in the Crimea, had fallen to General von Manstein’s siege. But then trumpets sounded the “England Fanfare” (the music always played when there was news of victory over England)—perhaps German U-boats had sunk another 100,000 tons of British shipping? When the announcer proclaimed that Rommel had captured Tobruk, Lucie felt faint with shock. Her first instinct was to ask for congratulations to be radioed to him, but she did not—there must be far more urgent messages for the radio waves to carry.
In Germany the newsreels were already being printed and dubbed—Rommel on a small mound, silhouetted against the sky; Rommel in his command car, after the port’s capture; Rommel with Berndt and Bayerlein, driving down into the town in an armored car. “Rommel knows no rest, the battle must go on,” the sound track proclaimed. Lucie and Manfred went to a movie theater with continuous performances and watched enthralled.
Her next letter to Rommel read almost like an editorial from Das Reich: “Full of just pride and admiration, the entire people—and we two in particular—look up to you now that you have pulled off the incredible feat of capturing Tobruk in such a short time. I wonder what you felt like, entering Tobruk with your gallant men.”
In all the surviving 650 handwritten letters from Lucie to Erwin Rommel, there is never any hint of intimacy—nor in his replies. Whether warmer letters existed and were later destroyed by Manfred, or whether the couple hesitated to expose their inner emotions to the Nazi censors, the entire correspondence leaves a curiously cold, clinical impression on those few permitted to have read through it. At any rate, they are the typical letters of a government-issue field marshal’s wife.