by David Irving
The Afrika Korps had only thirty-seven tanks left and was still some distance away. The Italians had made no showing. As for the poor Ninetieth Light, it was less than one sixth of its proper strength. Nonetheless, Rommel ordered the division to resume its attack when the moon rose. He was encouraged by news from Luftwaffe headquarters: the British fleet had weighed anchor at Alexandria and was making for the safety of the Suez Canal. Evidently, Rommel felt, Axis morale was better than the enemy’s.
“The night was awful,” Armbruster wrote. “From midnight to four A.M. there were six or eight bombers constantly raiding us. I slept in my foxhole.” An hour before dawn, the fatigued riflemen of the Ninetieth Light dutifully began a new infantry attack, but without any artillery preparation. After only 2,000 yards their attack petered out in murderous artillery and machine gun fire. Rommel was told at ten in the morning. That afternoon, undeterred, he ordered the Afrika Korps to throw both its panzer divisions into one more attempt to break through to the coast. But at 4:30 P.M. the Ninetieth Light was again stalled, after advancing only 500 more yards. Afrika Korps’s two panzer divisions meanwhile clashed with British armored brigades until dark. By then, Nehring had lost eleven more tanks and was down to only twenty-six.
The next day, July 3, Rommel’s main thrusts everywhere were blocked. At about noon, his diary finds him under air attack, trying to harry his exhausted tank commanders to yet greater efforts. “C in C is convinced that both panzer divisions are loafing idly around and at 12:50 P.M. orders a forceful advance by the entire Afrika Korps.” But Rommel was now addressing only the deaf, or the demoralized, or the dead. Even Ariete, the pluckiest of the Italian divisions, had begun to disintegrate. Fierce New Zealanders had fixed bayonets and charged Ariete that morning, capturing nearly all of Ariete’s remaining guns and 380 prisoners; the rest of the Italians had thrown down their weapons and taken to their heels.
The death of one of his best officers—Captain von Hohmeyer, killed by shellfire that evening—seems to have at last brought it home to Rommel that he was fighting a losing battle. “Unfortunately, things aren’t going as well as I would have liked,” he admitted privately to Lucie. “Resistance is too great and our strength is exhausted . . . I’m rather tired and worn out.” Rommel passed his decision to his relieved corps commanders the next morning, July 4. He was going to pull the tattered panzer divisions out of the line and replace them with infantry divisions, primarily Italian. For a while the panzers would rest, replenish and reorganize. Then Rommel would resume the offensive, he assured them.
Mussolini and a collection of Fascist notables had already flown to Libya and were waiting impatiently to stage their grand entry into Cairo. The Duce’s white horse was waiting, too. Telegrams were flying back and forth between Rome and Berlin on the appointment of an Italian governor of Egypt and his relation to Rommel and the “Army of Occupation.” Meanwhile, enemy propagandists spread concocted rumors that the riches of a conquered Egypt would fall to the German troops alone.
The rumor was one of many that caused powerful unrest among Rommel’s Italian troops, and in mid-July he told Berlin that “entire battalions” were deserting in battle. Real cracks were now beginning to show in the Axis partnership. From Rommel’s headquarters, Alfred Berndt wrote privately to Goebbels that there was much bitterness among the Germans at the undue credit being given to Italian soldiers by the Nazi press. (Goebbels told his staff: “We are going to have to brief Rommel on the reasons why the Führer has deemed it necessary to magnify the Italian effort.”)
Rommel himself deplored all such politicking, but chose to disregard it until he had captured Cairo. He was well aware of his awkward situation. His ammunition and gasoline were low, his units under strength. In the month of June, 845 of his men had been killed and 3,318 wounded. His supply lines were long, while those of the enemy were short and well protected. Until now the Germans, although short of arms, had held their own because of the superiority of their weapons; but now the German qualitative superiority was being rapidly whittled away. Recent battles had shown, too, that enemy commanders were benefiting from contact with the Afrika Korps in combat, improving their tactics and procedures.
The line the Italian divisions held extended from the blue waters of the Mediterranean at El Alamein to the impenetrable, sunken, dried salt marshes of the Qattara Depression thirty-eight miles inland.
The wilderness of the depression was a spectacle that Rommel never tired of seeing. A dozen times in July 1942 we find him drawn to the high rim looking down on the vast cavity, with its dunes rolling like flat waves into the shimmering distance, out of which rose silent and forbidding flat-topped mountains on which perhaps no human foot had trod. Goebbels’s cameramen filmed him gazing down to the floor of the depression, 600 feet below. Was he planning some way of traversing this wilderness to reach the Nile?
Once that July he said to the lieutenant on his intelligence staff who had been an Egyptologist before the war, “Behrendt, I’ll be wanting you to seize a bridge intact across the Nile!”
The lieutenant laughed. “Herr Feldmarschall,” he said, “you ought to have given me that job in 1939!” Alfred Berndt chimed in: “If you go, I want to go too!” Behrendt shook his head—he knew who would get all the credit in that case.
Rommel planned to throw his panzer divisions through a gap at the southern end of the line on July 11. Two days earlier, he had captured an abandoned enemy strongpoint nearby, at Bab el Qattara.
Here in its complex warren of underground galleries, concrete bunkers and well-built slit trenches, Rommel conferred with the Twenty-first Panzer Division’s bullet-headed commander, Bismarck, and sketched with his familiar colored pencils the aspects of the coming panzer attack. He set up the Panzer Army’s advance headquarters right there in the bunker hospital. But the bunker, he discovered, housed a large flea colony. “The C in C elects to sleep in his car after all,” the Rommel diary for July 9 concludes. “The night passes peacefully.”
In his sleep he heard thunder. At four A.M. he heard it again—distant thunder. Not thunder, he realized as his brain cleared, but the mighty roar of field guns in a barrage louder than anything he had heard since World War I. Forty miles to the north of where he now was!
The enemy had begun a sudden and wholly unexpected attack on two ridges near the coast, Tell el Eisa and Tell el Makh Khad, defended by Italian infantry. Rommel’s main force could hardly have been farther away. “Did we fall into a trap?” asks Armbruster’s diary. Rommel saw the danger that the enemy would break right through and smash his army’s supply lines. “We at once drove north with our own combat squad and a battle group from Fifteenth Panzer,” said his diary. “C in C personally briefs the two battle groups on the battlefield.” In his absence Mellenthin, acting operations officer, had thrown in every German unit to plug the gap—staff personnel, flak, infantry, signalers, even cooks—because the Italian division Sabratha had just melted away to a depth of 6,000 yards. Waldau’s story puts it politely: “
There were regrettable symptoms of disintegration in the Italian units. The first real resistance was put up by Seebohm’s radio intercept company.” Armbruster’s diary reflects Rommel’s more forceful language: “The Tommies have netted two battalions of the Sabratha shits. Seebohm is missing. It makes you puke.”
The death of Captain Seebohm was a terrible blow for Rommel. Seebohm had commanded the brilliant radio intercept company that had so often given Rommel his tactical advantage over the British. Now Seebohm was dead, his irreplaceable trained personnel captured and their collection of code books and enemy orders of battle gone.
The loss was bound to hamper Rommel in the months to come, and the captured materials were certain to show the enemy how lax their radio security was. Now the Panzer Army would be fighting blind. To make things even worse—infinitely worse—there would be no more “little fellers” either, the enlightening intercepted messages from the American military attaché in Cairo. The enemy had realize
d that there was a leak and had recalled Colonel Fellers to Washington.
A memo dated June 29 in the files of “Foreign Armies West” in Berlin closes this chapter: “We will not be able to count on these intercepts for a long time to come, which is unfortunate as they told us all we needed to know, immediately, about virtually every enemy action.”
The next morning, July 10, the Australians attacked Tell el Eisa and by midday they had captured it. A small column of tanks and infantry scored a further resounding success over the Italians at Deir el Abyad, provoking this outburst from Armbruster at army headquarters: “The Italians ought to be whipped. Six British tanks have just rounded up an entire battalion of the Trento Division and sent them to captivity in their own trucks. This nation of shits deserves to be shot. And we still have to fight for them! Now of all times, just before the finish, these guys turn yellow. It’s a crying shame and we feel so sorry that the C in C has to make do with such troops.”
These limited enemy attacks had serious tactical consequences for Rommel. They had thrown the Panzer Army off balance and drained gasoline and ammunition reserves that Rommel had planned to use for his own offensive.
On July 13, he launched Bismarck’s Twenty-first Panzer Division once more against the enemy line. The plan was to cut off the fortified El Alamein “box,” then break in and finish it off. The attack would go in at high noon, when all desert contours shimmer in the heat and melt away—making good gun aiming impossible. Dead on time, Waldau’s dive bombers took out the enemy batteries southwest of the “box,” and the tanks began rolling until a useful sandstorm swallowed them from view. Rommel went forward to follow the course of the battle, but there was little he could see.
It was not until five P.M. that he learned that the panzer regiment had halted on a jebel south of Qasaba. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe waited in vain for further orders or requests. Finally, at six-thirty, Waldau sent in a second heavy dive bomber attack and the tanks began rolling again.
After that the battle just fell to pieces. At about eight P.M. Rommel telephoned Waldau. He was in high spirits and announced that the panzer division had exploited the magnificent dive bomber attack to penetrate right through the enemy line—“It’s going to try and reach the coast road east of El Alamein tonight.” The ugly reality, as described by the war diary of an infantry battalion attached to the Twenty-first Panzer, was different: “We are lying right in front of the enemy barbed wire, and hacking ineffectually away at it with quite useless tools. Only a few sappers have got this far with wire cutters to clear lanes for us. It is almost dusk. The battlefield is lit only by guttering spurts of flame and the wan moonlight. And then our tanks suddenly turn tail. Are they out of ammunition or gas? Captain von Rautenfeld leaps up onto the nearest tank to stop it going back. An antitank shell hits him in the neck and cuts him down. At midnight, Major Schutte leads our battalion back again.”
Rommel had returned meanwhile from the battlefield to Panzer Army headquarters. “Toward ten P.M.,” his diary reported, “Twenty-first Panzer radios that its attack has finally failed. C in C thereupon orders the division to withdraw to its original start line. Neither the sandstorm nor the well-aimed dive bomber attack nor the powerful support of our artillery was exploited by the division. A unique chance—and they blew it.” Just how high were the hopes Rommel had set by this operation is shown by his flustered letter home next morning: “My expectations of the attack were bitterly disappointed. It had no success whatever . . .”
Several of the next rounds in this increasingly confusing fight did go to Rommel. It is no coincidence that those were the days on which he elected to direct the battle from his army command post rather than to dash about the battlefield. Nevertheless, two Italian divisions, Pavia and Brescia, collapsed and the British tactics became only too clear. “The enemy,” he wrote to Lucie darkly on the seventeenth, “are rounding up one Italian formation after another. Our German units will be far too weak to stand by themselves. It makes me weep!” Early that day he heard that the Australians had broken through between two more Italian divisions, the Trento and Trieste. Trieste had suffered mass desertions. Rommel was forced to throw in every last reserve he had.
When the Italian High Command—Cavallero, Bastico and Air Force Commander General Rino Fougier—visited him that afternoon, Rommel bleakly told them: “Any more blows like today and I do not anticipate being able to hold the situation.” Armbruster, who interpreted their ninety-minute conference, afterward jotted in his own diary: “R. paints the situation pretty black.”
To Rommel’s relief, the next day, July 18, brought no surprises. The front was quiet. He spent the next two days touring the whole line, directing the laying of minefields and construction of strongpoints. He did not spare the Italians from private criticism. He told the Ninetieth Light’s commander, “Through the failure of four Italian divisions that have been virtually wiped out, a temporary crisis has emerged that will last until major German forces arrive here, in eight or ten days’ time.”
By July 21 he was a bit happier. He had about forty-two fit German tanks in the Afrika Korps, and about fifty Italian tanks. “The front has now calmed down, thank goodness, and I’ve had a chance to take stock,” he wrote privately. “But it’s going to be a long crisis yet, because the buildup on the other side is faster than here. Kesselring’s going to fly to the Führer’s headquarters—a pity I can’t do the same.” He had started wearing his short trousers again—the heat was too much for full uniform. The dust and flies were terrible, and it was humid, too.
Auchinleck’s new attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy Rommel’s panzer divisions. A captured enemy soldier confirmed this. It began late that evening with violent air attacks—more spectacular than effective—and an intense artillery bombardment. During the hours of darkness a New Zealand brigade penetrated from the south toward the shallow El Mreir depression—a saucerlike hollow in the middle of the desert. At dawn, tanks were to arrive. However, General Nehring had kept an unflustered watch on these developments and gave his panzer regiments instructions—three hours in advance—to counterattack at 4:15 A.M. Four A.M. found the Germans, including their scanty machine gun and rifle battalions, waiting around the lip of the depression, their watches ticking toward zero hour. The New Zealanders had made themselves comfortable, even setting up tents on the valley floor. At 4:15 A.M. exactly, signal flares arced into the air and tracer fire, high-explosive shells and mortar bombs rained down on the congested mass of invaders. Then the panzers rumbled over the rim and poured into the enemy positions. Of the enemy’s armor there was still no sign. This first phase of Auchinleck’s attack had cost him 1,000 men and much armament.
The second phase then began. The enemy threw about 100 tanks into the same sector from the east—two virgin tank regiments which had arrived from Britain only two weeks before. At 7:30 A.M. they broke through the minefields and the leading tanks surged far behind Rommel’s line. His thin infantry positions were overrun. To Rommel and Nehring it looked like the long-feared end of the army. Then a Colonel Bruer, who was commanding the Twenty-first Panzer in place of Bismarck (who was injured), came to the rescue. He halted the fleeing artillery battalions and turned them to face the enemy. Then his Fifth Panzer Regiment punched into the enemy flank, and the danger was past. In two hours Rommel’s commanders, by sheer professionalism and gallantry, had robbed the British of 200 men and eighty-seven tanks.
There was heroism on every level. Nineteen-year-old Günther Halm was a gunlayer manning one of two Russian-built 76.2-millimeter antitank guns that had been positioned so that they would be the last defense before the enemy armor could break through. The gun crew was unable to dig the gun into the rocky ground, so two gunners had to sit on the gun’s trails to absorb its recoil. Toward them roared a column of British tanks.
In two minutes Halm brewed up four Valentines. The others halted, searched for the barely concealed guns, and opened fire on them. A shell screamed between Halm’s legs.
A second shell tore off his loader’s legs; another gunner took that man’s place.
Five more British tanks were shot into flames before Halm’s gun was disabled by shellfire. By that time the Twenty-first Panzer had arrived and finished off the enemy tanks. One of the captured tank commanders angrily burst out: “Two years of training, a sea journey halfway round the world—and in just half an hour it’s all over for us!” One week later Rommel personally decorated Halm with the Knight’s Cross. He was the first enlisted man in the German army to win the award.
The next afternoon, July 23, Wilfried Armbruster penciled in his diary: “The tide has turned with a vengeance! The British Twenty-third Armored Brigade has been rubbed out. The Tommies lost 146 tanks and 1,200 men. What an excitement that was, but our C in C directed the whole show from ‘the rear’ this time, he had every commander on a string and everything just clicked into place. A fine mess he got the British into!”
Rommel toured the battlefield, thanked his troops and handed out medals. “Morale everywhere is sky-high,” his diary observed.
He had a look at the new British tanks. Some had got within 2,000 yards of the Twenty-first Panzer’s command post; they were still there now, their crews captured or buried beside them. “The difficulties we went through the last few days just beggar all description,” he confessed in a relieved letter to Lucie. “Of course, we are still nowhere near over the hump. The enemy is vastly superior in numbers. But the 146 tanks that we shot down in and behind our battle lines two days ago will take a lot of replacing: we have now blown them all up. The enemy won’t be able to afford many such extravagances.”
Now he had time to open his mail. Hitler’s chief adjutant, Rudolf Schmundt, had sent the cross-sword badges that Rommel would need as a field marshal. But he read the letters postmarked Wiener Neustadt first.