The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  Early on August 31, Rommel’s mobile headquarters had driven to the Jebel Kalakh, in the wake of his army. He believed that the enemy sector here was only weakly mined and defended. But his intelligence had served him badly. Almost at once his troops had run into minefields of great density (his sappers later found 181,000 mines in this sector). The minefields were defended by stubborn infantry equipped with heavy machine guns, artillery and mortars. Worse still, at 2:40 A.M. the whole area was illuminated by parachute flares and a nonstop air attack began. The lead elements of the Panzer Army became firmly wedged in the minefields, exposed to the planes, while sappers worked feverishly to clear lanes ahead of them. Trucks, personnel carriers and tanks were hit and began to blaze fiercely. The fires and parachute flares lit the battlefield as bright as day. There were explosions, screams and the rattle of heavy machine guns. Evidently, Montgomery had been expecting the attack—and right here. General von Bismarck was hit by a mortar bomb. Minutes later a British fighter-bomber attacked Nehring’s command truck: bomb fragments killed several of his staff, wrecked his radio and riddled Nehring himself. Bayerlein transferred to another vehicle and took temporary command of the Afrika Korps.

  Rommel learned of all this only hours later, at eight A.M., when he drove onto the battlefield. The first report was of the unexpected minefields, which had thrown his whole timetable out of joint. Then Corporal Böttcher registered in the diary: “8:05 A.M., second and third reports come in: Korps commander Nehring has been badly injured. General von Bismarck killed. C in C considers breaking off the battle.” Rommel was obviously deeply shocked at this unexpected reverse, but when he met Bayerlein ten minutes later, the colonel announced triumphantly that both panzer divisions had now broken through to the far edge of the minefields—ahead of them lay open desert. Rommel still hesitated. At 8:35 A.M. he radioed to the divisions, “Wait for new orders.” Bayerlein argued that to abandon the attack now would make a mockery of the sacrifices made by the men who had breached the enemy minefields. Rommel accepted this argument but introduced a fateful change of plan. Instead of advancing twenty miles due east, with the forbidding ridge of Alam el Halfa on his left, and then wheeling around it to take the enemy’s main positions in the rear, the whole force would now turn much sooner and attempt to cross the ridge itself. At 9:16 A.M. the panzer divisions recorded the new objective: “Alam el Halfa.”

  When Kesselring flew forward to Bayerlein’s command vehicle half an hour later, he was shocked at Rommel’s sudden mood of despair. Böttcher recorded, “C in C South [Kesselring] is all for a vigorous continuation of the offensive!!!” The change of axis that Rommel had introduced was precisely the move that Montgomery had expected. Unknown to Rommel, the ridge at Alam el Halfa had been turned into a deathtrap for the Panzer Army. On that ridge Montgomery intended to destroy the Desert Fox’s aura of invincibility once and for all.

  Between one and two P.M., Rommel’s tanks began rolling east again. A sandstorm had blown up, giving them a blessed protection from air attack. They made good progress until about four-thirty that afternoon, then wheeled to the north. This new axis took them into soft sand, and everything churned to a standstill at six P.M., as they faced Point 132—the most dominant feature on the ridge. Thus they had reached the killing ground.

  The weather cleared, and the British tanks and artillery massed on the ridge opened fire. After dusk, the bombers came. It was sheer slaughter, but with only thirty miles’ fuel supplies left—as the new Afrika Korps commander General von Vaerst bluntly told Rommel—they were stuck. They could not attempt to bypass the ridge to the east, where the going was far better, unless more fuel was brought up during the night.

  All night long the slaughter went on. Rommel drove out at dawn, September 1, to watch: the cramped terrain was littered with the wreckage of his tanks; many were still burning. “The idea of continuing with the main offensive has been abandoned because of the grave fuel shortage,” Böttcher entered in the diary. Two days before, the Italians had again promised 5,000 tons of gasoline. But now the tanker Sanandrea was sunk, with 2,411 tons, right outside Tobruk (and the next day the Picci Fascio would follow, with the loss of 1,100 tons). Small wonder that Rommel advised Berlin in a message to play down his new offensive, to avoid any later “setback” in public opinion.

  That morning Rommel suffered six bombing attacks. The air was unbreathable—hot, acrid with smoke and choked with fine sand. Lethal showers of shattered rock fragments added to the blast and shrapnel effects. “An eight-inch bomb fragment punched a hole clean through one of the shovels lying on the rim of his slit trench,” wrote Böttcher in the diary. “The red-hot metal fragment landed on the C in C in the trench.”

  During the night the enemy air attack intensified. Armbruster tells us, “We have never experienced bombing before that was anything like last night. Although we were well dispersed on Hill 92, the bombs came very close. . . . Our combat echelon has had many men killed; three flak eighty-eights were hit and several ammunition trucks.” Again bomb fragments fell right at Rommel’s feet. Thirty feet away a Volkswagen burst into flames. By 8:25 A.M. he had had enough. He ordered the Panzer Army to retreat to its jump-off positions of August 30, withdrawing stage by stage.

  Rommel’s troops were speechless and astonished. “This morning,” relates the history of the 104th Infantry Regiment, which was clinging to a shallow depression southwest of the ridge, “our drivers bring water forward to us. They tell us that Alam el Halfa has been taken, and that in two hours we’ll be marching on. Already we are thinking of the Nile, the Pyramids and the Sphinx, of belly dancers and cheering Egyptians. About one P.M. our trucks arrive, and we load up. Then we drive off—to the west. To the west? . . . That was an end to our dreams of Cairo, the Pyramids and the Suez Canal!” The battle of Alam el Halfa was over.

  At a dinner party in Alexandria, Montgomery announced to his distinguished foreign guests: “Egypt has been saved. It is now mathematically certain that I will eventually destroy Rommel.”

  When Kesselring arrived at Rommel’s command vehicle at 5:30 P.M. that day, September 2, he was grim-faced and left the army commander in no doubt of the damage this setback would do to the Führer’s grand strategy. Rommel heatedly explained why he had abandoned the attack, gave a vivid description of the enemy’s terrifying air onslaught and demanded a “fundamental improvement of the supply situation.”

  Kesselring privately believed that Rommel was just using the supply shortage as an excuse to cover his own demoralization.

  As the armored divisions fought their way back to their starting line over the next few days, he found it hard to understand why the same gasoline could not have been used to prolong their attack—particularly since they would almost certainly have captured some of the enemy fuel dumps in the process. “It was this cast-iron determination to follow through that was lacking,” Kesselring said after the war.

  For years afterward, postmortems were held into the reasons for Rommel’s failure. The main reason was Ultra—that is clear. But scarcely less important was Rommel’s illness: he was too weary to see the battle through, even though the cards were stacked against him. “I was convinced at the time,” wrote Kesselring, “that this battle would have been no problem for the ‘old’ Rommel—he would never have called it off when it had already succeeded in outflanking the enemy. Today I know that his troops never understood his order to retreat. Just think—he had already outflanked the British ‘last hope’ line of defense.” From Waldau he heard rumors that the enemy’s unexpected strength here actually caused Rommel to halt the attack at eight A.M., only to renew it again a few hours later, thus forfeiting the element of surprise. The Rommel diary confirms that this was largely true.

  In December of 1942 Hitler showed by his remarks that he was worried by Rommel’s change of heart.

  “There’s no doubt,” he told General Jodl, “no doubt at all that he was quite wrong to have called off that offensive, probably under the influence of the
sinking of the four-thousand-ton tanker. That’s Kesselring’s view too, and Ramcke shares it. He says, ‘It was a mystery to us why he didn’t go on with it. We had the British on the run again, we only had to pursue them and knock the daylights out of them.’ I really do feel,” continued Hitler, “that it’s folly to leave a man too long in a position of grave responsibility. It’s bound to get him down as time passes.”

  The victory that Montgomery had scored over Rommel was more psychological than material in nature. Rommel had marginally improved his own defensive line, by retaining the captured British minefields and commanding high ground at Qaret el Himeimat, which gave him a splendid view over Montgomery’s southern flank.

  His casualties were not excessive—536 men killed, of whom 369 were German, and thirty-eight tanks; while the enemy, although well dug in and on the defensive, had lost sixty-eight aircraft, sixty-seven tanks and many more casualties. But the British could afford the losses, while Rommel could not. In particular, the six-day battle cost him 400 trucks—transport that he would sorely miss in November, as events would show. And British morale was now high.

  On September 4 he arrived back at his old headquarters, peeled off his boots for the first time in a week and took a bath. He was weary—perhaps weary of war itself.

  He was impatient for his substitute to arrive, so he could get home and see his wife and son. He had not been with them for six months—young Manfred would soon be as tall as he. At his headquarters there were two letters waiting from Lucie, and a laboriously typed effort from thirteen-year-old Manfred. “Dear Daddy,” it read. “Today I learned to type a bit. It isn’t easy at all. Don’t get mad at me for not writing to you by hand, because it’s far harder with a typewriter. It’s wonderful that you’re coming home on leave. I’m looking forward to it immensely. I was looking at the Frankfurt Illustrated just recently and it stresses the way you set your men a good example. It says in the article that when the soldiers of your division in France were asked about the situation, they answered: ‘No neighbor division on the right, nobody covering our left flank, nobody behind us—and Rommel out in front!’ I sold off eight of my rabbits. I got eight Reichsmarks for them. I’m going to invest the money in fodder for more.”

  It was September 19 before Rommel’s stand-in arrived. General Georg Stumme was a large, good-humored panzer warfare expert who positively relished the new climate here—at first. Kesselring found him more even tempered than Rommel and watched approvingly as Stumme set about repairing the bruised relations between Germans and Italians and between commanders and troops. Rommel briefed him extensively, and showed him the letters he had written appealing for reinforcements and supplies before Montgomery launched his main offensive—probably with the full moon in October.

  Before he left for Germany at last on September 23, Rommel also handed to Stumme the most inflexible instructions for the work still to be done on the El Alamein defenses. Since the line could not be outflanked, Montgomery would have to penetrate it frontally. To minimize the effect of enemy artillery and air bombardment, Rommel designed a defensive system of great depth.

  The main obstacle to the British troops would be a continuous line of mined boxes, each unoccupied but sown with thousands of mines and booby traps. The front face of this line would be guarded by battle outposts—one company from each infantry battalion.

  About 2,000 yards behind the boxes were the main infantry defenses. The larger and antitank guns were held well back, and behind them came the armored and mechanized divisions as a mobile reserve.

  The mine belts became known as Rommel’s “Devil’s Garden.” Most of the mines were big enough to break a tank track or wreck a truck, but 3 percent of them were of the deadly antipersonnel variety—triggered by trip wires or by being stepped on. Then they sprang into the air like a jack-in-the-box and burst, scattering steel pellets in all directions. Before Montgomery attacked, the Panzer Army laid 249,849 antitank and 14,509 antipersonnel mines. Together with the captured British minefields in the south, there were over 445,000 mines in Rommel’s defense line.

  Rommel’s general tactical plan was to let the enemy attack bog down in his minefields, and then counterattack from the northern and southern ends of the line, trapping Montgomery’s elite troops. “If the battle begins,” he assured Stumme, “I shall abandon my cure and return to Africa.”

  Among Corporal Böttcher’s private papers I found a snapshot taken of Rommel leaving his tent on September 23, 1942, on his way back to Germany. He does not look ill—just very tired. That day, the British intercepted German signals revealing Rommel’s departure. He saw Mussolini the next day; the Fascist dictator confidentially decided that Rommel’s illness was psychological. An Ultra intercept of this estimate was eventually shown to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who commented: “Rommel must have taken quite a knock. Up to now he has been accustomed to a diet of victories based on intelligence from inside the British camp which, thank God, we have now terminated.” [Colonel Fellers had been repatriated from Cairo in July.]

  In Berlin, capital of Hitler’s expanding Reich, the marshal was guest of the Goebbels household for several days. There is a full description in the unpublished diary of the propaganda minister. With the beautiful Magda Goebbels bustling around him, Rommel worked up the maps and calculations he would need to sway the Führer. Far into every night the family listened to his spellbinding descriptions of the fighting in Egypt. Gradually they thawed Rommel out of his reserve, until he was telling scornful stories about the Italian nobility and officers—relating one appalling detail after another about their “cowardice,” about how they would desert to the first Australian or New Zealand troops they met. He told how he had so often escaped death or captivity himself, evoking squeals of admiring horror from Goebbels and his family. In return Goebbels showed him the newsreel films from North Africa. Before the family’s eyes, new life and vitality flowed into Rommel as he relived Tobruk and the pursuit of the Eighth Army to El Alamein.

  The Goebbels diary also reveals that he said a word to Hitler on September 29. He had known for some months that Hitler was considering making Rommel commander in chief of the entire German army after the war. Goebbels agreed: “A man like that certainly has what that job would take—laurels won on the field of battle, vitality, clarity of thought and the ability to seize the initiative.”

  In Munich, Frau Anneliese Schmundt telephoned my hotel. She is the widow of Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler’s chief adjutant, who was killed by the assassins of July 1944. It was ten years since I had first read her diaries and taken tea with her—a quiet, genteel East Prussian who has long put the bitterness of the past behind her. “You’re looking into the life of Rommel,” she said. “I met him only once—when he came to Berlin in the autumn of 1942. We had given a large dinner party, he phoned Rudolf, and of course Rudolf said he must come around. All the guests waited with excitement for the legendary Rommel to appear—and you know what? My son opened the door, Rommel asked what he had just been given for his birthday, my little boy said a train set, and they both went upstairs and played with it for the rest of the evening. He never came and met our guests at all.”

  And so on the last day of September 1942, during one of Berlin’s famous early autumn heat waves, Rommel marched smartly into Hitler’s study at the Reich Chancellery and was handed the black leather case containing the glittering and bejeweled marshal’s baton.

  Behind Hitler stood Keitel, his adjutant Schmundt and his assembled staff. Behind Rommel stood his own aide, Alfred Berndt, who, for the occasion, had exchanged his army uniform for that of the Nazi Party.

  At six P.M. Rommel was the guest of honor at a mass rally at the Berlin Sportpalast stadium. The newsreels showed him marching past the serried ranks of the Party and Wehrmacht to the tribune, being greeted by Hitler, wagging his baton and then raising his arm in something between a wave and the Nazi salute. Every radio station in the Reich carried Hitler’s speech of praise for Rommel. He was at the
very pinnacle of his achievements.

  Halfway along my research trail, I found the heavy metal baton unexpectedly in my hands, after I had expectantly opened the cardboard box lying at the bottom of the gray metal cupboard in the village in Swabia. It was from this same village that Rommel set out on his last motor journey, I reflected. Such power had once been symbolized by this rod!

  I remember being puzzled at the stiffly worded letters in army files from his last adjutant, Captain Hermann Aldinger, who was trying to establish what had happened to the cap and baton and demanding their immediate return to Lucie after that last journey. And I recalled the words used by the SS chauffeur that fateful day to describe how he found this very cap and baton lying on the floor of the car and tried to hand them over to his boss in Berlin, Hitler’s hunchbacked personal aide, Julius Schaub. “Schaub said, ‘I don’t know anything about this . . . I want nothing to do with them!’ ” Schaub had recoiled from the baton as though it were infected by some plague.

  But now, in my hands, it was lifeless and inert—like a stick of worn-out batteries—or obsolete, like a device designed to operate a machine that has long since gone out of manufacture. I wrapped the baton up again and returned it to its forgotten cupboard corner.

  Some days later Rommel wrote to Stumme about his meeting with Hitler. “Both the Führer and the Duce have agreed to my intention to hold on to the positions we have won in North Africa at present,” he said, “and not to resume the attack until our troops have been thoroughly provisioned and refreshed and more forces have been sent out to us.” Rommel added, “The Führer has promised me that he’s going to see that the Panzer Army gets every possible reinforcement, and above all the newest and biggest tanks, rocket projectors and antitank guns.” Rommel had also demanded huge numbers of rocket projectiles, the 260-millimeter mortar, the big new multiple-rocket projectors called the Nebelwerfer 42 and at least 500 smoke screen generators as well.