by David Irving
Rommel told Hitler of the crippling enemy air superiority, and he delivered a string of complaints about the Italians. Their officers and men were unready, he said, their tanks were too weak, their artillery unable to fire beyond five miles. Italian troops had no field kitchens and were frequently seen begging food and drink from their German comrades. “The Italians are a millstone around my neck,” he said. “They’re useless except for defense, and even then they’re useless if the British infantry attacks with fixed bayonets.”
No act of treachery was too mean for Rommel to blame on the Italians. Somehow the enemy had learned that he was ill—“no doubt through Rome.” Captured British officers, he said, had told of an Italian who had betrayed Rommel’s surprise attack at Alam el Halfa. He explained the sinking of all those ships bringing him gasoline by insisting that traitors in Italy must be signaling the shipping movements to the enemy. “The ordinary Italian soldiers are good,” he now told his old friend Kurt Hesse. “Their officers are worthless. Their High Command are traitors.” He made a gesture of frustration. “Give me three shiploads of gasoline for my tanks—and I’ll be in Cairo forty-eight hours later!”
The morning of October 3, at Goebbels’s request, he attended a press reception for international journalists at the propaganda ministry. As Rommel stepped into the auditorium, all eyes were on him. Deliberately he stopped with his hand on the doorknob. Movie cameras began softly whirring. “Today,” he calmly announced, “we stand just fifty miles from Alexandria and Cairo, and we have the door to all Egypt in our hands. And we mean to do something with it, too! We haven’t gone all that way just to get thrown back again. You can take that from me. What we have, we hang onto.”
At noon his plane left Berlin for Vienna and Semmering mountain, near Wiener Neustadt, where he was to begin his cure. A few hours later he was in the arms of Lucie at last.
If I Don’t Return
TWO-FORTY P.M., OCTOBER 25, 1942. Beneath the low-fying Heinkel 111 bomber, the blue waves of the Mediterranean skim past in an endless blur. This is DH-YA, the Heinkel especially converted for Rommel’s journeys. Lieutenant Hermann Giesen, the pilot, turns to his passenger and announces, “Landing in Crete in fve minutes.”
Rommel reflects on the extraordinary events of the last two days. Just twenty-four hours earlier he was convalescing at a mountain villa in Austria, with Lucie—far from the troops desperately fighting street by street for possession of Stalingrad, far from the bomb-torn cities of the Ruhr, far from Egypt. He was lazing, strolling and reflecting, studying only statistical reports—such as those on the U.S. war effort—and the letters that General Georg Stumme sent him from the El Alamein front. Only yesterday he sent his young aide, Lieutenant Berndt, with letters down to Rome. Berlin and the General Staff were predicting a period of tranquillity in Egypt. But at three P.M. the telephone suddenly rang in his villa. It was Berndt calling from Rome: “Montgomery’s offensive has begun—last night! And General Stumme has vanished without a trace!”
All Rommel’s lingering suspicions about his enemies in Rome were aroused. Why had they left him in the dark until now? He put through a telephone call to the Wehrmacht High Command. But almost at once they telephoned him instead, and he found Hitler on the line.
The Führer’s voice was gruff: “Bad news from Africa, Rommel. Nobody seems to know what’s happened to Stumme.” Rommel offered to fly out to El Alamein at once. “Are you sure you feel up to it?” asked Hitler.
Rommel said he did. “Then stand by at Wiener Neustadt airfield,” was Hitler’s reply. “I’ll find out how urgently they need you.” Rommel kissed Lucie good-bye and drove to the airfield at once.
After that, silence. He waited at the airfield into the evening for further orders, until it was too dark for his Heinkel to take off. At about 8:30 P.M. the Wehrmacht headquarters in Vienna supplied him with the Panzer Army’s latest situation report: Montgomery’s main offensive had opened in the north, and it was expected to spread along the entire El Alamein front the next day. “General Stumme drove up front this morning, October 24, and was ambushed. He has been missing since 9:30 A.M., despite an all-out search. He must be presumed wounded and captured. General von Thoma has assumed command of the Panzer Army.” Thoma was the new commander of the Afrika Korps—Rommel had yet to meet him.
In fact, Hitler was of two minds: Might it not be better for Germany to reserve Rommel for future employment on the Russian front, rather than rush him prematurely, still an invalid, back to Africa? At nine P.M. he directed General von Rintelen, the senior German general in Rome, to obtain a fresh situation analysis by three A.M. to help him decide.
Desperate with worry about his “Africans,” Rommel waited all night at the airfield for Hitler to telephone again. When he did, he said that the Panzer Army’s verdict was that Montgomery’s main offensive was about to begin, and that it would be a long, hard battle. Hereupon, according to the Rommel diary, “The Führer gave the C in C the specific order to return to his army immediately and resume command.” Rommel’s Heinkel took off at 7:50 A.M., and he flew into Rome at ten.
Rintelen was waiting on the airfield—Field Marshal Kesselring had already flown down to the battlefield. Rintelen stunned Rommel with the news that the Panzer Army only had enough gasoline left for three days’ battle.
Rommel shouted, “But when I left Africa, the army had eight days’ gasoline in hand. And it needed at least thirty!”
Rintelen coughed apologetically. “You see, I’ve been on leave until a few days ago. Insufficient attention was paid to the supply situation in my absence.”
Rommel raised his voice even more: “Then the Italians must use every possible means, including their submarines and navy, to rush supplies to the Panzer Army. They’ll have to start right now.” At 10:45 Α·Μ· he was airborne again.
That was this morning. Now the airfield at Herakleion, Crete, is coming into view through the basketlike window frames of Rommel’s Heinkel. It is 2:45 P.M. as he steps out, and the refueling tanker moves forward. General von Waldau— now commanding the Luftwaffe’s Tenth Air Corps from here—is waiting on the runway. His face is somber as he hands the field marshal the latest messages from El Alamein. There have been heavy tank attacks by the British in both the northern and southern sectors. “In a renewed search of the terrain, the body of General Stumme has been recovered. Cause of death, heart failure.”
As Rommel swings around to climb back aboard the Heinkel, Waldau checks him. “I cannot permit you to fly on a Heinkel in broad daylight—it’s asking for trouble.” Rommel borrows a sleek, modern Dornier 217 bomber instead of the slower plane and takes off for Egypt without further protest. The Dornier lands at the sand-swept airfield of Qasaba at five-thirty, where Rommel’s Storch is waiting. He flies on east until the darkness forces him to land, and then he continues along the coast road by car. The horizon ahead is ablaze with the flash of bombs and artillery. Again and again he asks himself: Has Stumme already lost the battle? Then he is back at Panzer Army headquarters—the familiar faces, the operations bus, the same barren desert strewn with stones, the same stifling heat, the same scorpions and flies, the same lean, brave troops that he left just thirty-two days before.
At 11:25 P.M. that evening, October 25, his signal goes out to all of them. “I have taken command of the army again.—Rommel.”
BY THE TIME Montgomery attacked it, Rommel’s army was unequal to his in every respect and the British commander knew it. He had told his officers of “Rommell’s” sickness, the depleted troop strengths and low food, gasoline and ammunition stocks. “You have all been trained to kill Germans,” Montgomery had jotted in his speech notes. “So shoot tanks—and shoot Germans.”
Each side had eight infantry divisions and four armored. But Rommel’s were far below strength. The Fifteenth Panzer Division had only 3,294 men instead of 9,178, for example. Sickness had disabled 10,000 of Rommel’s troops. For weeks his army had been on half rations because of the supply shortage; i
n the last week before Montgomery’s attack, they had had no fats or fresh vegetables. Instead of 46,000 German army troops, the Panzer Army had only just over 29,000 that were combat fit. Montgomery’s army numbered 195,000 men, and this crushing superiority was also displayed by his equipment. Rommel had only about 230 German tanks, as well as 320 Italian tanks not really worthy of inclusion in battle calculations. Facing him were Montgomery’s 1,029 tanks—including 500 American-built Sherman, superior in armor and gunpower to the Panzer IV.
The revival of Malta and consequent harassment of Rommel’s supply routes had devastated the Panzer Army’s logistics. In full battle, his Panzer Army needed about 600 tons of gasoline every day; even on quiet days it required 300 tons for routine supply movements to the front.
On October 13 Colonel Westphal—standing in as chief of staff for Bayerlein, who had also gone on leave—had written to Rommel that by the end of the month the stockpile would rise to ten “issues” of gasoline, each of them a day’s supply. He, Stumme and Kesselring were all sure Montgomery’s attack would fail. “While many things have not gone as we would have liked,” Westphal’s letter said, “you can be certain, Herr Feldmarschall, that if the British do attack in strength then we’ll be ready and waiting for them. We’re all itching to give the enemy a real thrashing. We only hope our supply lines don’t let us down.” And General Stumme had also written, in his spiky and cramped handwriting, “The Tommies are bound to attack—for political reasons they’ve got no choice. But they are none too happy about it. We’re going to wipe the floor with the British.”
This cockiness evaporated overnight on October 20. British aircraft and submarines, alerted by Ultra intercepts, had lain in wait for an Italian supply convoy and mauled it. The cruelest loss was the tanker Panuco with 1,650 tons of gasoline and cargo for Rommel—sunk by a Wellington bomber. A series of near hysterical radio signals to Rome had followed.
Westphal demanded another tanker immediately and insisted on being told when it could put into Tobruk. Back by radio came the obligingly detailed reply, encoded as always on the “leakproof” Enigma machine: “Tanker Proserpina sailing evening 21st with 2,500 tons army gasoline, arriving Tobruk early 26th. Tanker Luisiana ready to sail with 1,500 tons army gasoline on 25th; if tanker Proserpina arrives, tanker Luisiana will sail with tanker Portofino from Taranto evening of 27th, put into Tobruk approximately 31st. Portofino has 2,200 tons army gasoline.” When Rommel now arrived back, Westphal told him they were down to their last three issues of gasoline—and one of these was still 500 miles away at Benghazi.
In Berlin, the General Staff did not expect any major enemy attack at El Alamein in the immediate future—so Colonel Ulrich Liss, chief of Foreign Armies West, the intelligence branch concerned, personally assured General von Thoma as they toured the defense line early on October 23.
At nine-fifteen that evening, Montgomery’s thunderous artillery bombardment of Rommel’s Devil’s Garden began.
Corporal Albert Böttcher’s shorthand text for the Rommel diary had ended abruptly on September 7—or so it seemed, as I laid aside the black exercise book in the archives in West Germany. But then during my research I stumbled on an intriguing reference to more shorthand pads, captured by the U.S. Army: “These shorthand notes were, it seems, kept by the adjutant of the German headquarters in North Africa. . . . Writer frequently refers to the OB—Commander in Chief—who is never mentioned by name.” I flew to Washington, D.C., went to the Archives building, obtained the microfilm copy, and excitedly threaded it into a film reader. There was no doubt: this was also Böttcher’s shorthand! One pad was temptingly headed, “Daily Reports, Pad I”—the title that Rommel had also given his diaries of 1943 and 1944. Until late that night I cranked the photostatic printer, and when I returned to London I had the entire 458 pages in my luggage: three shorthand pads covering El Alamein and Rommel’s last months in Africa. The first pad began with October 23, 1942.
But what had become of Böttcher himself? His name is only a footnote in the works on Rommel. My search for him came literally to a dead end. A doctor in the little town where, I discovered, Böttcher had worked before the war in a small savings and loan bank, wrote: “A few years ago he committed suicide—he had a drinking problem.”
The Battle of El Alamein had been raging for exactly forty-eight hours when Field Marshal Rommel stepped back into his headquarters truck, late on October 25. The enemy artillery barrage was deafening. Rommel asked why their own guns had not shelled the British as they gathered for the offensive. Both General von Thoma—whom Rommel found to be gaunt, ascetic, pedantic and highly unlikeable—and Westphal explained that the late General Stumme had forbidden any such bombardment as an extravagance. This was a fateful error, in Rommel’s view. It had enabled the enemy to overwhelm the outposts and capture German minefields much too cheaply.
Thoma’s view was that the enemy were building up their main focus of attack in the north and that the heavy casualties the enemy had taken from the Panzer Army’s artillery were forcing them to go cautiously. The enemy’s intention was obviously to use infantry to prize open lanes through the minefields, under dense smoke screens, so that tanks could break through. Between the lanes lay an almost featureless patch of elevated ground, Hill 28, high enough to be of value as an artillery observation post. This hill fell to the British during the night.
“During the night there was again intense artillery fire,” began the Rommel diary the next morning, October 26. “It merged eventually in one incessant roar of thunder. C in C slept only a few hours, and was already back at his operations truck by five A.M.” He drove forward to watch the enemy’s moves through field glasses. He could clearly see the enemy digging in on Hill 28. Over the next days he launched desperate counterattacks on this hill. “Rivers of blood were spilled over miserable strips of land which in normal times even the poorest Arab would never have bothered his head about,” he later wrote.
He was convinced too that Montgomery’s main breakout attempt was coming here in the north, and his diary shows him during the afternoon of October 26 moving reserves, including the Twenty-first Panzer Division and most of his artillery, from the southern sector—a major gamble, because the Panzer Army’s gasoline was already so low that he could never move them back if his conviction should prove wrong. The consequence was that the next day, October 27, Rommel was able to thwart every attempt of the enemy to break through. The Rommel diary noted, “C in C once more ordered . . . the front line must be held.”
He launched his main panzer and infantry counterattack on Hill 28 at three P.M. It was unsuccessful, and left the assault troops in coverless terrain where they were subjected to merciless air attack. Rommel returned to his command truck, sick with disappointment. “Nobody can ever know the burden that lies on me,” he wrote dolefully to Lucie. “All the cards are stacked against us. Even so, I hope we can pull it off.”
One tactical solution would have been to pull back a few miles—out of range of the enemy artillery—and then lure the enemy tanks into a pitched battle, where air power could not intervene to help the enemy either. But Rommel just did not have enough gasoline for that. He had been handed the shocking news that the tanker Proserpina, with 2,500 tons of army gasoline, had also just been sunk, followed by the transport ship Tergestea with 1,000 tons each of gasoline and ammunition.
Small wonder that he could not sleep that night, but was beset by nightmare images of all that he had watched through his field glasses.
“Dearest Lu,” he wrote as soon as he got up the next morning, October 28. “Who knows whether I’ll ever manage to write in peace to you, my darling, again. Today there is still this chance. The battle is raging. . . . But the enemy’s superiority is crushing and our own resources are pitifully small. It lies in God’s hands whether I survive, if this battle ends in our defeat. The lot of the vanquished is difficult to bear. To the best of my belief I have done all I could for victory. Nor have I spared my own person. If I shou
ld not return, I want to thank you and our boy for all your love and our happiness, from the bottom of my heart. I came to realize in those few short weeks what you two both mean to me. My last thought will be of you. After I am gone, you must bear the mourning proudly. In a few years Manfred will be a man and I hope he will always be a credit to our family.”
After this, he issued a signal—timed 8:50 A.M.—to all his commanders in a scarcely more hopeful vein. He told them this was a battle of life and death, that orders were to be obeyed without question and that every one of them was to fight to the end. “Any soldier who fails or disobeys is to be court-martialed regardless of his rank.” The commanders were instructed to memorize the order, then destroy it.
He was certain that Montgomery was about to make his main breakthrough attempt. “C in C decides to transfer still more German units from the southern sector to the north,” recorded the Rommel diary, “leaving—apart from Italians— only weak German formations down there.” By afternoon, he had seen a captured British map which confirmed that Montgomery’s intention was to breach the main defense line near the northern end, then wheel northward to the coast at El Daba. When Rommel drove forward, he could see through his field glasses the enemy massing tightly in the wedge that had been hammered at such cost into the German minefields. At nine P.M. a thunderous artillery barrage began, and at ten the big offensive commenced.
These assault troops north of Hill 28 were General Leslie Morshead’s veteran Ninth Australian Division—the force that had cheated Rommel of Tobruk in April 1941. As Rommel had anticipated, this attack was driven farther into the minefields, northward toward the coast. Opposing it was the second battalion of the 125th Panzer-Grenadier Regiment, which fought with unparalleled heroism all night; moreover, here Rommel had installed a powerful screen of antitank guns. By dawn the Australian attack had been halted. Later that morning, October 29, Montgomery was having to rethink his strategy.