by David Irving
There were new photos of Lucie and Manfred—the boy had been away from home for some weeks at a Hitler Youth camp. With fatherly anxiety Rommel read his son’s latest school report—a big improvement on the last one. Lucie wrote that Frau von Bismarck had telephoned from Pomerania, anxious for news of her husband. She had not heard from him for three weeks.
Rommel knew how long it took letters to go from Africa, but passed the word to General von Bismarck. (As events turned out, Bismarck had only three more weeks to live.) Lucie also told him of the latest newsreel: it showed Mussolini in Africa, and Kesselring, Cavallero and Bastico touring the El Alamein line with Rommel. Rommel looked far from pleased, in fact very grim-faced indeed.
Lucie, better informed of Rommel’s problems with supplies and the Italians than the other moviegoers, knew why. One letter from her told of Winston Churchill’s recent chastened visit to Stalin in Moscow: “How is the mighty England fallen!” She added, “Today the news said that your adversary Auchinleck has been sacked and replaced by a General Montgomery.” The name meant nothing yet to Rommel.
He guessed early in August of 1942 that he still had another four weeks before the British would attempt another move. Meanwhile, Hitler’s big push through Russia toward the Caucasus would be bound to affect British dispositions in the Middle East. He knew that the Panzer Army could withstand minor enemy attacks, but he had had to issue the sternest orders to prevent repetitions of the kind of panic that had gripped sections of the line in July. “I demand that every man, at staff level too, hold to his position and not fall back. Abandoning your position means annihilation. By holding our positions in the night battles, we won through with little casualties. Any enemy that breaks through must be mopped up by reserves standing by. . . . Anybody abandoning his position is to be charged with cowardice and stood before a court-martial.—Rommel.”
One thing was plain: victory or defeat at El Alamein would rest in the hands of the German troops here. Rommel never forgot that. To other generals, writing to congratulate him on his promotion, he replied: “The credit for this lofty recognition from the Führer is due solely to the courage of my trusty German soldiers.”
The gaps were being filled. During July he had received 5,400 replacement troops and the first two regiments of a new division, the 164th Light. That made 13,300 new troops airlifted to North Africa, and more were coming, at the rate of 1,000 every day. By early August one of the Luftwaffe’s elite units, the First Paratroop Brigade, was under Rommel’s command. Its commander, General Hermann Ramcke, was a lithe, pugnacious veteran of the fighting on Crete. He had a mouthful of metal teeth replacing those he had lost in a parachute accident. His paratroops were well armed and fit, but since they were a Luftwaffe unit and not army, Rommel had little time or sympathy for them. (Like the 164th Light, Ramcke’s troops had arrived with no transport of their own. The 164th Light had actually arrived with bicycles, which were soon discarded.)
However, they were German and disciplined, so they were all fed into Rommel’s thickening line of defense between the sea and the great depression. Artillery was arriving, ammunition dumps were building up, dense minefields and mine boxes were being laid out in carefully conceived patterns.
New Italian units were also arriving. Rommel omitted them from his calculations. “The stuff that’s coming over is virtually useless,” he said.
On July 29, when he met the new commander of the Bologna infantry division, General Alessandro Gloria, the Italian thumped his chest and proclaimed that Italian troops would never desert their posts. “At that the C in C dryly enlightened him as to the way things have been around here,” observes the Armbruster diary. (It was later that day that Rommel issued his warning about cowardice.)
The Italians had contributed one first-rate unit, the Folgore Paratroop Division. Their training (by Germans) showed when their commanding officer snapped to attention and swung to a gaping Rommel a salute that would have done a Prussian drill instructor proud. For the rest, Rommel scorned the Italian newcomers. “What I need here,” he explained to Alfred Gause in a letter, “are not still more Italian divisions—let alone the Pistoia, with no combat experience at all—but the German soldiers and the German equipment with which alone I am ultimately going to have to carry through my offensive.”
There were certain imperatives that cramped his freedom of decision now. Against the advice of his own staff—according to Mellenthin—he had firmly decided to stake his entire Panzer Army on one throw: he was going to break through the enemy line at its southern end, engage the Eighth Army there, and simultaneously mount a lightning attack on the vital bridges across the Nile at Cairo and Alexandria.
There is a map in Rommel’s papers on which he planned the advance of every corps, division and battalion—half of them surging on from Cairo to the Suez Canal, the other half turning south from Cairo along the Nile toward the heart of Africa. Mysterious visitors arrived at his trailer—Egyptian officers, who assured him that the moment that Rommel’s forces hit Cairo and Alexandria they would stage a military uprising against the British. But by September, he knew, the Eighth Army would be too strong for even Rommel to defeat. So it had to be August. And since his daring plan for a night attack would require a full moon, that meant the end of the month. “Then,” he wrote to his old adjutant, Ernst Streicher, “I hope we shall succeed in bursting open this last gateway barring our path to Egypt’s fertile fields.”
Throughout August, Rommel’s army dug in. The desert echoed to the staccato blast of pneumatic drills, of demolition charges, of pickaxe and shovel. Tens of thousands of mines were laid, in case the enemy attacked first.
On August 8, the Rommel diary hinted again at his imaginativeness: “Reconnaissance Battalion Thirty-three is given the job by C in C of finding out whether it is possible to descend to the Qattara Depression with an entire division or even larger formations.” Kesselring flew in the next day and approved Rommel’s general plans. Armbruster’s diary struggled to keep track of the tireless field marshal: “It’s stinking hot, but the C in C drives out every day.” On the tenth he recorded, “Three camels hit mines here, and we caught five Arabs. They had been trying to cross the minefield by night—you can be dead certain that they were in the pay of the British and trying to spy on us.”
Not only did the stupefying furnace temperatures and the unhealthy proximity to the Nile Delta take their toll of the Panzer Army’s troops; Rommel fell ill too—at this, of all times. On August 2 he began to feel a general malaise, and by mid-month he was really ill. He was in fact the only officer over forty to have lasted in Africa as long as he had.
On August 19 his staff noticed that the field marshal could not get rid of a head cold and was laboring from a sore throat too. They thought it was flu, and he took to his bed while his staff rushed his personal doctor, Professor Horster, to him.
Horster reported: “Field Marshal Rommel is suffering from low blood pressure and he has a tendency to dizzy spells. The condition can be attributed to his persistent stomach and enteric disorders, and it has been aggravated by excessive physical and mental efforts over the last weeks and particularly by the unfavorable climate. A complete recovery is by no means certain at present, particularly if the demands on him increase; recovery can only be expected from a long stay in Germany under proper medical supervision. Temporary treatment here on African soil would appear acceptable.”
Rommel radioed this diagnosis to Berlin on August 21 and recommended Heinz Guderian, a panzer general, as a substitute. He sent a telegram to Guderian too. He believed he would have ample time for this “sick leave.” Meanwhile Berndt procured a good cook for him and arranged for fresh vegetables and fruit to be flown to him daily—without his being told. “Otherwise, being the man he is, he would refuse to accept the extra rations,” Berndt explained in a private letter to Lucie. And he anxiously telegraphed to Goebbels in code, “I suggest sending Professor Brandt [Hitler’s personal doctor] out here at once to check field mar
shal’s condition.” On August 24, Rommel was well enough to drive briefly to Mersa Matruh for an electrocardiogram.
When he got back to his trailer, there was a radio signal from Keitel, chief of the High Command: Guderian had been turned down, as not healthy enough for the tropics. (The real reason was that Guderian was in disgrace, having disobeyed Hitler during the winter.)
So Rommel stayed at his post. He radioed in code to Keitel on the twenty-sixth that in his doctor’s opinion he could retain command of the Panzer Army during the coming offensive “while undergoing ambulatory medical treatment.” After that he would return to Germany for a cure, and a substitute would stand in for him.
Rommel conducted his last inspections of his entire battle line. As he now prepared his supreme offensive against the assembling forces of the British Empire, however, he was a sick man: sick, but sustained by the hope that with victory in his grasp he could return to Germany—perhaps in mid-September— and spend six weeks alone with Lucie and Manfred, somewhere in the mountains of Austria, where he could sleep in clean sheets, wash in running water and wake without the menacing rumble of the adversary’s guns.
The Ridge
THE BRITISH LIEUTENANT GENERAL who flies into Cairo on August 12, 1942, to replace Auchinleck has had no combat command since the debacle of Dunkirk, two years before. Small and wiry, Bernard Montgomery has birdlike features and a high, nasal voice that is grating and unfriendly. His knees are white, his face is pink. In many ways, however, he is like Rommel himself: both are lonely men, with more enemies than friends among their fellow generals; both are high-handed and arrogant, professional soldiers devoid of intellectual qualities; both are awkward and insubordinate officers in harness but become magnificent and original battle commanders in their own right; neither smokes or touches strong drink; both share a passion for winter sports and physical fitness.
Montgomery also has Rommel’s flair for public relations. He woos Churchill with a comfortable accommodation near Egypt’s bathing beaches, and plies him with brandy and good food—for just the same reasons that Rommel cultivates the admiration of Hitler and the friendship of Goebbels. Both have selected predominantly young and handsome officers for their “military households.” They are both publicity conscious. Rather as Rommel wears his famous cap and Perspex goggles, Montgomery flourishes an incongruous Australian bush hat covered with regimental badges. And where as a boy Rommel showed fleeting cruelty toward birds and animals, feeding peppered morsels to swans and guffawing at their agony, Montgomery’s career at Sandhurst military academy was marred by his reputation as a particularly nasty type of bully—he was the ringleader, of course.
But here the similarities end. Rommel is now a chivalrous soldier, and honors his enemy whatever the nationality. Montgomery’s order to his troops, “Kill the Germans wherever you find them,” gives a new accent to the desert war, a ferocity Rommel has scrupulously avoided. Montgomery is an eccentric, while his Nazi adversary is an orthodox military commander distinguished mainly by his flair for improvisation, his tactical insight. Rommel shows battlefield courage, but Montgomery will not be found leading supply trucks up to the front line, personally directing antitank guns onto targets when a breakthrough threatens or scrambling for cover with the leading riflemen during an infantry assault. Rommel relies on his own wits; Montgomery uses the brains of others, and relies on military might to compensate for any planning defects.
One thing must be emphasized: Montgomery’s intelligence sources are far superior in August 1942 to Rommel’s. It is Montgomery’s confident insight into Rommel’s mental processes that enables him to last out the main crises, where a less informed commander would have called off the operation. Many of Rommel’s top secret radio communications with his High Command are reaching Montgomery as Ultra intercepts only hours later. Thus Cairo learned on November 18, 1941, that Rommel had been so completely deceived about when Operation Crusader would begin that he was still in Rome with Frau Rommel. Thus when Rommel radios the High Command in August 1942 about his illness, Montgomery gets a copy of Professor Horster’s diagnosis too. Each time Rommel reports his plan of attack, the Ultra intercepts enable Montgomery to plan an appropriate defense. With great cunning, British intelligence also knows how to conceal its source: planted documents “reveal” to the Germans that Italian traitors have fed all this information to the enemy—a fabrication that Rommel and history ever after believe.
THE PANZER ARMY was unquestionably weaker than its adversary, but this was nothing new to Rommel. He was 16,000 men below strength, and sickness was reaching epidemic proportions (9,418 of his troops reported sick that month); his establishment was short 210 tanks, 175 troop carriers and armored cars and 1,500 other vehicles. On August 30, the day of his attack, Rommel would field 203 German battle tanks—including 100 of the long-barreled, deadly Specials—but Montgomery would have assembled 767 tanks and he now had hundreds of the new six-pounder antitank gun. Rommel’s plan differed only in minor details from all his previous attacks; it was to be the familiar “right hook,” outflanking the enemy’s defenses. Perhaps he was wearying or just exhausted by illness, but none of the diaries refers to any new ploys or devices designed to throw the British off balance or off the scent: no truck-mounted airplane engines or carefully planned feint operations.
Unquestionably, his main weakness was going to be his fuel supply. His two veteran panzer divisions had barely enough for 100 miles—provided the going was good. On August 18, Marshal Cavallero had assured him that the 6,000 tons of gasoline that Rommel was demanding would arrive in time for the thirtieth—X day for the attack. But on August 23 the logistics position was “taut,” as Rommel put it in a code message radioed to the German naval commander in Italy, Vice Admiral Weichold. Rommel had been promised six ships altogether, loaded with gasoline and ammunition.
He appealed to Weichold to see that they arrived by the end of the month, for “without them, execution of the planned operation is impossible.” Since all these signals were encoded by Enigma, it is no surprise that four of the six ships were sunk immediately (or that Montgomery was able to deduce the date of Rommel’s attack). By August 27, not one of the ships had reached Rommel. When Kesselring’s Storch landed at Panzer Army headquarters on the coast, Rommel impatiently told him: “X day depends on whether the gasoline ship scheduled for tomorrow gets in. My final deadline is the thirtieth—the moon’s already on the wane.” Kesselring slapped him on the back and confidently promised to airlift about 700 tons of gasoline to Rommel if all else failed.
By the next morning, Rommel had still not finally decided. He summoned all the generals commanding the armored divisions to his headquarters tent at 8:30 A.M., again went over his plan and warned them: “My deadline for X day is still the thirtieth, but everything still depends on the fuel situation. How far we go on after the end of the Battle of Alamein will depend on our logistic position—on our fuel and ammunition.”
On the day after that, Rommel decided he could wait no longer and would initiate the attack next day—the thirtieth, the last date possible—but it could only be of a limited nature now, given the fuel shortage: they could at best hope to disrupt the British forces in the El Alamein line. There would just not be enough fuel to go on to Cairo unless they managed to capture British dumps intact.
The panzer divisions had already begun moving inland down the desert tracks by night, heading for the southern end of the El Alamein line, where Rommel was going to break through. In two night marches this stealthy shift of balance from left to right was accomplished—and Rommel hoped his adversary had not detected it. As he left his sleeping truck early on August 30, he confided to his doctor with a worried frown, “This decision to attack today is the hardest I have ever had to take. Either we manage to reach the Suez Canal, and the army in the USSR succeeds in reaching Grozny [in the Caucasus], or —” and he made a gesture of defeat.
They drove about twenty miles into the desert, and set up advanced army headqu
arters. Rommel’s doctor, Horster, was with them. Waiting for the first news, Rommel began a long letter to Lucie: “Today has dawned at last. How long I’ve waited for it, worrying whether I was going to get together everything I needed to strike out again. Many things have still not been settled properly at all, and here and there we shall have big shortages. Despite that, I am risking this move because it will be a long time before we get the moonlight, balance of strength, etc., so favorable again. . . . If our blow succeeds, it may help win the war. If it does not, I still hope to have given the enemy a sound thrashing.”
It was of course a gamble—a desperate gamble. But the Italians had again assured him in a code message that a shipload of gasoline was arriving next day. In the Gazala fighting in May the odds against Rommel had been the same, but he had won through then; so why not now as well?
“Today,” he proclaimed to his troops, “our army sets out once more to attack and destroy the enemy, this time for keeps. I expect every soldier in my army to do his utmost in these decisive days! Long live Fascist Italy! Long live the Greater German Reich! Long live our great leaders!”
TEN P.M., AUGUST 30, 1942. A pale moon lights the undulating desert north of the Qattara Depression as Rommel’s armor begins moving eastward toward the enemy minefields. To the left of General Nehring’s Afrika Korps is the Italian armor—the Littorio and Ariete divisions—and to the left of them the Ninetieth Light. Soldiers waving pocket lamps and shouting instructions guide them toward the gaps in their own minefields, and then they are on their own.
Just before they pass through their own minefields, they hear a long-forgotten sound that brings a lump to the throats of many of the older men: General von Bismarck has sent the band of the Fifth Panzer Regiment to play Rommel’s army into battle with old Prussian marches, just as in bygone times. How often a band send-off has been the prelude to disaster—a naval band had played as Hitler’s proudest battleship, the ill-fated Bismarck, slipped secretly out of its harbor in 1941! It is an eerie sound, and the tank crews and infantry hear only blind snatches above the whine of engines in high gear and the crunch of tank tracks on gravel; but the sound is unforgettable.