by David Irving
AGAIN ROMMEL HAD not slept. Since 6:30 P.M. on November 2, his troops had been under a terrifying air attack—with over 1,000 bombs per square mile. He lay in his truck, hearing the ceaseless roar of vehicle engines as men and materiel began pulling out of the battle zone. Berndt dictated into the Rommel diary: “By evening countless trucks and tanks of the Littorio Armored Division, packed with troops, are visible on the road as they make their individual ways back. Afrika Korps reports that Littorio is no longer under officer control—it has just burst at the seams. Elements of it are in full flight. There are similar symptoms reported in the infantry of the Trieste Mechanized Division.”
“The battle is going heavily against us,” Rommel wrote to Lucie in the morning, November 3. “We’re just being crushed by the enemy’s weight. I’ve tried to salvage a part of my army—I wonder if I’ll succeed. . . . The dead are lucky—for them it’s all over. I think of you both constantly with heartfelt love and gratitude. Perhaps fate will be merciful and we can see each other again.”
He told his staff that until the new line at Fuka was ready to occupy, he proposed to fight a running battle. He had only just enough gasoline for that. Still more supply ships had been sunk. Then at nine A.M. he drove forward along the coast road to his command post, leaving Colonel Westphal to mind the shop at Panzer Army headquarters. Lieutenant Armbruster sat with Rommel: “Colossal westbound traffic on the road,” he penciled in his own diary. “But the battlefront has quieted down. By eleven A.M. the Tommies still haven’t noticed we’re moving out.” Indeed, Montgomery’s artillery was still pounding the Tenth Corps’s Himeimat ridge positions, which had been abandoned several hours before. But at eleven-thirty murderous air attacks began on the coast road—by this time jammed with bumper-to-bumper, hub-to-hub convoys of trucks.
He spent the morning at the artillery command post. The photos show him standing wearily in his open Volkswagen, his tunic creased and paunchy, his head sunk, his face morose. Colonel Bayerlein reported that the Afrika Korps had only thirty-two tanks left, confronting their tormentors in an open semicircle facing east near the Rahman Track.
General von Thoma told him by telephone that there were about one hundred enemy tanks—including the awesome Shermans—lying wrecked in front of his guns already, so the Afrika Korps was not going out without a struggle.
Rommel drove back to his headquarters bus. He lunched silently with Westphal, inside the bus. At 1:30 P.M. Major Elmar Warning, one of Westphal’s staff, climbed into the bus with a paper in his hand and gave it to Rommel. Hitler’s famous radio signal had arrived—the signal that ended: “To your troops therefore you can offer only one path—the path that leads to Victory or Death.”
As Rommel read this signal his mind fused. Something between rage and panic gripped him. Only ninety minutes earlier he had issued still more orders to his troops to retreat; he himself had seen the chaos on the roads, as Italians and Germans jostled to get away from the carnage of El Alamein. But now Hitler had specifically forbidden any withdrawal. What was he to do?
Over the next hour he drafted countless replies—Westphal recalls one as saying, for example, “Mein Führer, I will obey as always. But I cannot reconcile blind obedience with my own sense of responsibility . . .” But they were not transmitted. Rommel was trapped between his loyalty to the Führer and the realities of the crisis on the battlefield.
At 2:28 P.M. he telephoned General von Thoma, his Afrika Korps commander. Thoma reported, “I’ve just been around the battlefield. Fifteenth Panzer’s got ten tanks left, Twenty-first Panzer only fourteen and Littorio seventeen.”
Rommel tersely replied: “You are to fight on to the very utmost.”
He read out the Hitler signal, gave Thoma authority to issue direct orders to the tanks of Ariete too, and repeated: “You have got to instill this order into your troops—they are to fight to the very limit.”
Thoma saw this as a reliable recipe for complete disaster and suggested withdrawing the tanks to regroup, as he put it.
Rommel shouted into the telephone: “No—the Führer’s order is, we are to stand fast to the utmost. There’s to be no retreat.”
Thoma hesitated. “All right,” he agreed, “that is our broad policy. But we must make minor withdrawals.”
Rommel approved this formula. But the signals that he issued during the afternoon to the Panzer Army’s scattering units still ordered them to hold existing positions on “instructions from the highest level,” and that left them no room for maneuver at all.
Rommel’s staff, particularly Bayerlein, strongly deprecated this, but the field marshal had not yet learned to disobey a specific order from the Führer.
More precious hours were lost while he radioed Hitler a stark account of their plight. “Casualties to German troops in infantry, antitank and engineer units so far run to about 50 percent, and in artillery to about 40 percent. Afrika Korps now down to only twenty-four tanks. Littorio Armored and Trieste Mechanized divisions of Twentieth Corps have been virtually wiped out.” To add personal emphasis to this, at 4.30 P.M. he packed off Lieutenant Berndt on the long flight to East Prussia, to persuade Hitler to revoke the disastrous order. Berndt, as a Party official, would be more likely to get a hearing than an army staff officer. Rommel also gave him secret documents to carry to safety in Wiener Neustadt first—his plane would touch down there on its way to Hitler’s headquarters.
Apprehensive that his army’s inevitable retreat might be construed as open disobedience, at 6:40 P.M. Rommel meanwhile appealed to his commanders: “I demand that you do everything within human powers to bring the present battle to a victorious conclusion by remaining master of the battlefield.” When he telephoned Thoma’s chief of staff, he rubbed it in: “The Führer’s order rules out any kind of fluid defense.” He rejected the Korps’s proposed new line, and declaimed: “I insist that you hold on where you are—it’s vital.”
He regarded his army and himself as doomed, as is plain from what he had just written to Lucie.
“I can no longer, or scarcely any longer, believe in a successful outcome. What will become of us is in God’s hands. Farewell, you and the lad . . .” Into the envelope he tucked all the money he had saved—25,000 Italian lire, or about sixty dollars, and asked Berndt to make sure the letter reached her safely.
In Munich, I found Elmar Warning, the member of Westphal’s staff who handed Hitler’s Victory-or-Death message to Rommel. He is now sixty-nine, an international banker, a towering man, six and a half feet tall, with broad shoulders and well-groomed dark hair. In a sonorous voice that boomed around the oak panels of his study, he told me about the agony of decision confronting Rommel that night. “I could see him pacing up and down in the blackness of the desert near the bus,” said Warning. “Westphal called me over: ‘Go and keep the field marshal company. I’m too busy.’ So I joined him for two hours, and we just walked up and down while he battled with the decision whether or not to resume the retreat. ‘If we stay put here,’ Rommel said, ‘then the army won’t last three days’ And after a while: ‘But do I have the right as C in C, or even as a soldier, to disobey an order?’ And then after more brooding: ‘If I do obey the Führer’s order, then there’s the danger that my own troops won’t obey me.’ After that, he exclaimed, ‘My men’s lives come first!’
It was on this occasion that he first said: ‘The Führer is crazy.’ ”
Armbruster had at this point stepped into Berndt’s job and become the writer of the Rommel diary. When he reached the operations bus at 5:20 A.M., November 4, Rommel had just arrived too. The irony was that the battlefront had been quiet for several hours—so had Rommel ignored Hitler’s order, the mass of the Panzer Army would by now be safely ensconced in the new line at Fuka. But he had obeyed the order, and fate now took its course. At 7:25 A.M. Field Marshal Kesselring arrived—summoned by Rommel’s staff from Rome the afternoon before to give moral support. He had been delayed overnight by engine failure on Crete. (“What I achiev
ed on November 4 would have been of the greatest, perhaps even decisive, importance one day earlier,” Kesselring later said, reproaching himself.) Initially, as is clear from his remarks to Waldau at Crete, he had intended to insist on obedience to Hitler’s order. “The Führer’s thinking is naturally governed by the Russian campaign,” he explained to Rommel now, “and his experience in Russia has taught him that clinging obstinately to existing and well-built positions has always been the best thing to do.”
But when Kesselring learned that Rommel was now down to only twenty-two battle tanks, he revised his view at once. (There is a transcript of their discussion among Rommel’s papers.) I would be inclined to regard Hitler’s signal as an appeal, rather than a binding order.”
Rommel was horrified: “I regard the Führer’s directive as absolutely binding.”
“You must act as the situation demands,” Kesselring argued. “The Führer certainly cannot have intended your army to perish here.”
“It came just like a bolt out of the blue,” Rommel said bitterly. “And I always thought that the Führer trusted me.” He would like most now to stage a fighting withdrawal—“But only if the Führer expressly alters his order to me.”
Kesselring advised him to radio Hitler immediately: “Say that with your forces decimated and vastly outnumbered, the line cannot be held and the only chance of retaining at least a part of Africa lies in a fighting retreat.” Kesselring promised to send a message to Hitler himself.
Rommel did send such a telegram to Hitler. Meanwhile, for several hours he adhered to the stand-fast order. When he learned at eleven A.M. that Trento and Bologna were in full flight, he ordered the Italian officers to force their troops back into battle again. Air reconnaissance detected that the Italian Tenth Corps infantry was also falling back; he repeated the order. Not long after, he had to remind the Twentieth Corps, “Your positions are to be held to the utmost.” By this time he had driven forward to the Afrika Korps command post, in a dugout near the twelve-foot-high sand dune called Tell el Mamfsra. From it, he could see enormous dust clouds towering into the autumn sky to the south and southeast, where the tanks of the Ariete Division were in their death throes.
Colonel Bayerlein came to the dugout at 12:55 P.M. He told Rommel that General von Thoma had put on all his medals, denounced the orders to stand fast as “lunacy” and driven off in a tank to the focus of the battle. Bayerlein had driven after him an hour later and found a cemetery of blazing tanks, corpses and wrecked antitank guns. From 200 yards away he had seen the general’s tall, gaunt figure standing erect near a flaming tank, his little canvas satchel in his hand, as the British tanks converged on him. From Bayerlein’s description, Rommel and Westphal were in no doubt that Thoma had deliberately deserted to the British. Westphal exclaimed, “For God’s sake, Bayerlein, keep it to yourself—otherwise Thoma’s entire family will have to suffer for it.” Soon after, Rommel’s radio monitors heard a British unit reporting: “We’ve captured a German general. He says he is von Thoma.” That left no doubt as to the Afrika Korps commander’s fate.
I put all this episode to General Westphal. He revealed to me what the war diaries tactfully do not—that in a later operation Rommel’s troops captured British documents, among them an intelligence summary of the British Eighth Army which reported that Thoma had accepted Montgomery’s “chivalrous” invitation to dine with him that evening and had made no secret of Rommel’s further plans and dispositions in their subsequent conversation. “Rommel never did like that general,” reflected Westphal.
Still Rommel’s order to stand fast was obeyed. At three-thirty that afternoon Ariete’s last signals were picked up—the plucky Italian armored division had fought to the point of self-immolation. A breach twelve miles wide had now been ripped in the tottering Axis line. The entire Twentieth Corps had virtually ceased to exist. Without waiting for word from Hitler, Rommel now took his fate in both hands. He ordered the retreat.
At 8:50 P.M. Hitler approved it anyway. “In view of the way things have gone,” he sourly instructed the field marshal in a signal that reached him only the next day, “I approve your request.”
Thus began a harrowing retreat for Rommel’s 70,000 men—a 2,000-mile odyssey. How many men would complete it?
Humiliation
A WEEK PASSES BEFORE Germany officially learns that Rommel’s army is in retreat. A week passes before Rommel even writes home. On November 9, 1942, his secretary Corporal Böttcher types a four-word message (“I am all right”) for Lucie, and the field marshal scribbles his name beneath it. The next day, Rommel finally writes her a letter: “Since the enemy’s breakthrough at Alamein I didn’t get around to writing. . . . When an army gets broken through, it gets a raw deal. You’ve got to fight your way out, and you lose the rest of your fighting power in the process. Things can’t go on like this much longer, because we’re being pursued by a superior enemy.”
Few circumstances gnaw at the marrow of an army so insidiously as retreat. Yet Rommel will now show his great cunning in adversity. Reeling with sickness and bouts of fainting, he carries his 70,000 German and Italian troops across hundreds of miles of North Africa’s harsh desert coastline, through the blistering heat of tropical day and the rainstorms and freezing nights. His sixty-mile-long procession of tanks, guns, personnel carriers, trucks and cars is subjected to merciless air attack throughout. For days on end the entire movement is paralyzed by lack of fuel, while Rommel’s loyal veterans fight desperate rearguard actions though thirsting for water and starving for food. The weeks become months, but then the green hills and forests of Tunisia come into view, stabbing Rommel with pangs of nostalgia for his native Swabia. “Your retreat has been a masterpiece, Field Marshal!” Mussolini congratulates him.
The Rommel diary is complete for these dramatic months. He makes the same mistakes that he has always made. He overestimates the enemy’s strength. He transmits frantic inquiries about shipping movements—never realizing the direct causal link between his own Enigma-coded signals and the sinkings. He clashes violently with the Luftwaffe and the Italian High Command for failing to protect the supply ships. For their part, the Italians accuse him of deliberately abandoning their infantry divisions, and of purloining Italian trucks to rescue German troops from the wreckage of the El Alamein line. They suspect Rommel of plotting to pull out of Africa completely.
The German High Command also mistrusts Rommel. He is seen as disobedient, willful, deceptive and defeatist. He hotly denies these allegations, but his intimate letters and remarks vividly portray that his mind is in commotion. He writes on November 12, for instance, “All our work in this theater has been for nothing. I’ve made a superhuman effort, that’s true enough. But for it all to end like this is very bitter.” And on the fourteenth: “How far we’ll get, I just can’t say. . . . How will the war end? I only wish I could rid myself of these terrible thoughts.”
By mid-December, Erwin Rommel is writing secretly to Lucie to send him an English-German dictionary by courier. “I think it’s going to come in very handy.”
LIEUTENANT ALFRED BERNDT had reached Lucie’s house in Wiener Neustadt on the afternoon of the fourth of November. He handed over Rommel’s suitcase of secret papers and his letter. She was still in shock at eleven that evening, when she sat down to write to him. She could not believe what she had heard, it was all like some bad dream. “How can the Lord have deserted us in our hour of need?” she asked him. But she was glad that her husband had somebody solid like Berndt to lean on—loyal and upright, “every inch the kind of National Socialist the Führer wants us all to be.” When Berndt returned to her from seeing Hitler, he hinted that the Victory-or-Death signal had been some kind of misunderstanding. Lucie handed him a parcel of fresh-baked cakes to take to her husband, to remind him of his home and family during the coming weeks of travail.
In Germany, everybody waited with her for the news from Africa. Joseph Goebbels reassured his staff at a secret conference on the sixth, “We
just have to hope that Field Marshal Rommel will master this situation as he has so many others before.”
By that time the Desert Fox had already eluded the first traps set by the fumbling and over-apprehensive pursuing enemy. His own headquarters unit had moved off after dusk on November 4. The coastal highway to their right was ablaze with burning trucks and the glare of sky flares, but most of his troops were driving across open desert too. Montgomery tried to outflank him by short, tight turns, but each time the British reached the coastal road they found the bird had already flown and they had encircled nothing. By the early hours of the sixth, Rommel was driving through darkness toward Mersa Matruh, Arab villages looming up and dropping behind in the darkness. But in the morning, when Montgomery closed his main trap—his fourth attempt—just east of Matruh, Rommel had again escaped.
And now torrential rain began to fall, turning the desert into a quagmire stalling every enemy outflanking attempt. Here for two days Rommel took stock. The Panzer Army’s fighting strength was negligible. He had only a dozen tanks left. He had lost 1,100 German troops killed, 3,900 wounded and 7,900 missing. (Comparable figures for the Italians were 1,200 dead, 1,600 wounded and 20,000 missing.)
The Italian Tenth Corps had been left at the El Alamein line with no trucks, fuel or water; of the Twenty-first Corps, half the Trento Division had been overrun on October 24, the other half and Bologna had suffered the same fate as the Tenth Corps—abandoned to their fate; the Twentieth Corps had been virtually wiped out on November 4. The Afrika Korps was worth only one regiment. The Ninetieth Light Division was down to about one and a half battalions, and only a third of the 164th Light had survived the battle. The only cheering event was the unexpected reappearance of General Ramcke at Rommel’s bus on November 7. Ramcke swung him a snappy salute and tartly announced that he and 800 of his Luftwaffe paratroopers—written off by Rommel on the fourth—had ambushed a British truck convoy, stolen its trucks and driven through the enemy army to rejoin Rommel’s force. There was malicious delight in Ramcke’s metallic smile.