by David Irving
Rommel could not offer them much of a future. His supply position was desperate. Five thousand tons of gasoline had just reached Benghazi, but that was 600 miles ahead of him; there was no extra gasoline on Egyptian soil at all. There were 7,000 tons of ammunition piled up at Tobruk, 100 miles ahead—but between Rommel and Tobruk loomed the mountain passes of Sollum and Halfaya, on the Libyan-Egyptian frontier, and for fifty miles back from the hairpin bends there the only road was chocked solid with the traffic of the retreating army. Twenty-four new tanks were due to reach Benghazi on the eighth; but Rommel’s quartermaster warned that nothing could possibly get beyond that point, in order to reach him, for several days.
Every detail of Rommel’s plight was known, through the code breakers, to the enemy. On November 7 the official diary kept for General Dwight D. Eisenhower—commander of a new Allied invasion force at that very moment bearing down on the shores of Africa—recorded that Winston Churchill had just sent a very secret signal to him “that a message from Rommel to the German General Staff had been intercepted in which Rommel begged for aid immediately, or his force would be annihilated.”
On the eighth, the rains now over, Rommel decided he had to move again. He would have to abandon Mersa Matruh and resume the retreat. He met the panzer division commanders before they moved west again. Armbruster, keeping the Rommel diary in Berndt’s absence, noted Rommel’s instructions: “Keep the divisions rolling down the highway one behind the other—that way the enemy can’t outflank us.” Later Rommel told the Luftwaffe commander General Hans Seidemann: “The enemy will probably try to encircle us via Sidi Omar. We won’t be able to put up much of a resistance, because we’ve hardly got any weapons. We salvaged large numbers of men from the ‘shipwreck,’ but not many weapons.”
Early on November 8 Rommel himself headed off for the frontier. Cavallero and Mussolini were continuing to insist that he defend the frontier, and Hitler also expected this. But with his meager forces Rommel saw no prospect whatever of making a new stand there, and he told this to an emissary from Cavallero on the sixth.
At noon a car brought a small, bustling major general to him—Karl Buelowius, the Panzer Army’s new engineer officer. Rommel told him to stop at nothing to delay Montgomery’s pursuit. He assured him that Lieutenant General Count Theodor von Sponeck’s Ninetieth Light Division would fight continuous rearguard actions while the engineers laid mines and demolished roads.
Now the pursuit became a nightmare for the enemy—dummy “minefields” sown with scrap metal alternated with the real thing, arranged with fiendish ingenuity to lull and kill and destroy and maim. Abandoned buildings were booby-trapped with explosives that detonated when lavatory handles were flushed, or when crooked pictures were straightened.
Airfields were unusable for weeks after the Germans abandoned them. Buelowius used to deadly effect every day of respite that Montgomery’s fumbling gave the Panzer Army.
Buelowius’s name features so often in the Rommel diary that I made a strenuous effort to find him. Like Böttcher’s, the trail came to an abrupt end. Said one of his former officers in Düsseldorf West Germany: “He was always a bit of an eccentric—I got the impression that something had once happened to him, years before. He was interned by the Americans in Tennessee with Count von Sponeck and myself. One evening we were sitting with him and he began screaming: ‘They’re coming for me!’ We calmed him down and he seemed quite normal. The next day he went for a walk with Sponeck. Then that evening he hanged himself—with a luggage strap.”
On the road to the Libyan frontier, Rommel ran into Lieutenant Berndt, who had met Hitler late on the fourth. Berndt quoted Hitler’s key message: “The only thing that matters is to reestablish a new front somewhere in Africa. Precisely where is unimportant.” The Führer had promised to restore the Panzer Army to its old strength—Rommel would get the entire initial production of the brand new high-velocity version of the deadly eighty-eight gun, the Flak 41, and the first dozen of the mighty new Panzer VI, the Tiger tank, each weighing sixty tons.
Any encouragement that Rommel drew from Berndt’s report was short-lived. An hour later Rommel learned from his operations officer, Colonel Westphal, that a huge convoy had just landed over 100,000 American troops in Algeria and Morocco. Thus Rommel would always have this new enemy army advancing on him from the other direction, with virtually no other Axis forces to shield him. Now he felt that a stand was hopeless and it was time to get out of Africa while he could. He radioed urgently to Kesselring to come and see him with Cavallero, “as the position has continued to deteriorate.” Neither came. So Rommel decided to send Berndt over their heads—quite literally—by plane to Hitler again. Berndt would put to the Führer the field marshal’s startling plan for an immediate “Dunkirk”—not a stand but a holding operation on the coast, to permit the evacuation of the Panzer Army from Africa.
The young lieutenant saw Hitler in Munich on November 12. Rommel’s opinions were outlined in his diary of the tenth: “Evidently Rome still believes that Tobruk can be held. In the C in C’s view this will lead to our encirclement from the landward, and the annihilation of the army’s remnants within a few days. C in C is firmly convinced that with our remaining forces and weapons we cannot even hold Cyrenaica, and that we must prepare for an evacuation of Cyrenaica right now. The Gazala line affords us no support, because we have insufficient troops to man it and we would be quickly outflanked. We must resign ourselves from the start to a withdrawal clear back to the Mersa Brega line, behind which we may possibly find some respite. . . . If it proves impossible to rehabilitate the army on a large scale and to throw out a strong cordon against the enemy forces now advancing from the west as well, then the C in C considers it will be best to withdraw into a defensive position in the mountains of Cyrenaica and to evacuate as many trained soldiers as possible by U-boats, little ships and aircraft at night, and ferry them back to Europe for use elsewhere.”
Hitler, however, had a much larger political and strategic canvas to consider. To abandon Africa—as Rommel suggested—might result in the overthrow of Mussolini; and an anti-Fascist Italy would have grave consequences for the Reich. So he had no intention of allowing the American troops to exploit their invasion of northwest Africa. On November 10 he had already airlifted the first Axis troops to Tunisia to establish a new bridgehead there under General Walther Nehring, Rommel’s former subordinate.
Hitler accordingly gave Berndt this message for Rommel: “Just leave Tunisia out of your considerations. Act on the assumption that we are going to hold on to Tunisia. There is to be no question whatever of your barricading yourself into Cyrenaica and being evacuated from there (Britain’s command of the air and sea rules that out anyway). The Führer’s headquarters will do everything to rebuild your army via Tripoli with everything you need.”
Berndt repeated these words to Rommel. He tried to cheer the field marshal up, but in Hitler’s own words Rommel read a veiled rebuke. “I am absolutely convinced that your field marshal and his army did their utmost at Alamein,” Hitler had dictated to Berndt, “and that the command of operations there was beyond reproach. And I have persuaded myself that the Panzer Army’s withdrawal to the Fuka line was only planned after the entire northern sector of the Alamein line was already in enemy hands.” Rommel was depressed. On the thirteenth he burst out to Lieutenant Armbruster, “I wish I were just a newspaper vendor in Berlin—then I could sleep nights, without the responsibility I have now.”
Berndt resumed the diary, dictating to it on the fourteenth: “In consequence of the many upsets and his interrupted cure, the C in C’s health is very poor. Several bouts of fainting.” Rommel had abandoned the Halfaya Pass and even Tobruk without a fight: he had neither the troops to garrison nor the ships and aircraft to supply the Tobruk fortress as the enemy had done. He accepted its loss philosophically—after all, nobody could rob him of the fact of his victory there in June.
The Italians, however, feared that Rommel was not eve
n planning to halt at El Agheila, where the Mersa Brega line afforded one of the coastline’s best defensive positions.
Early on November 15, General Ritter von Pohl, Luftwaffe liaison officer in Rome, arrived in North Africa. It was Rommel’s fifty-first birthday. Pohl brought greetings and a big cake from Kesselring, and there was a loving letter from Lucie with a box of the chocolate and almond macaroons that were his favorite. But Pohl also brought a message from Cavallero: “Mussolini wants you to know that massive reinforcements are already flowing into Tunis and Tripoli, but they will take time to reach the front line. The fate of the Axis presence in Africa depends on your holding the new line at Agheila.”
Rommel told him the situation. The Panzer Army’s Afrika Korps (its panzer divisions) had no gasoline at all and hardly any tanks. Rommel told Pohl that he needed 400 tons of gasoline every day, but on some days he was getting none at all. Yesterday, he said disdainfully, barely forty tons had arrived. “Stop fobbing me off with phony figures,” he exclaimed to Pohl. “What I need is gasoline by the shipload. If your Luftwaffe offers to airlift certain quantities to me, then I must expect you to keep your word. I need 175 tons to enable my army to move at all. You can’t just bring me forty!”
Meanwhile the Italians in Benghazi were indulging in orgies of destruction. The port authorities had fled, and destroyers, submarines and tankers laden with Rommel’s gasoline were being diverted to other ports. For days his vehicles thirsted, and his army lay stranded between Benghazi and Agedabia. Waldau of the Luftwaffe, who had come with Pohl, took one look at the “huge convoys of trucks, jammed nose to tail along the highway”—as he scrawled in his diary—and fled back to Crete. Rommel confided to Lucie: “It’s enough to make you scream.”
The fate of the German merchant ship Hans Arp, with 500 tons of Rommel’s gasoline, was typical of the grim chaos. It sailed for Benghazi, was diverted to Ras el Ali by the Italians, and redirected by the Germans to Benghazi. From Rome Rintelen radioed Rommel—in the Enigma code—that the ship would arrive there at dawn on November 17, followed by two destroyers with more gasoline. He also reported that the ships Algerino, Maraudi, Salon and Genari were bringing fuel from Tripoli, and that the tankers Giordani and Sirio were each berthing at Tripoli with several thousand tons of gasoline on the seventeenth and eighteenth. With this target list thoughtfully provided to the enemy code breakers, the enemy submarines could hardly miss. The Hans Arp was torpedoed at dawn on the seventeenth. The next day Waldau wrote in his diary: “All the tankers have been sunk. How R. is going to keep moving now is a mystery.”
The Panzer Army was still 600 miles short of Tripoli. “It’s raining and blowing hard,” Rommel wrote on November 17. “Our position is all but hopeless because of our lack of supplies. But we must not give up; perhaps we will still manage to get through.” His air reconnaissance could see hundreds of enemy vehicles herding near Msus, halfway across the peninsula. But the rain had drenched the desert, and many of them had sunk deep in the soggy morass, while ahead of them the desert had turned into one vast watery lake.
Kesselring managed to airlift eighty tons of gasoline to Rommel, and in the two days’ respite granted by the rainstorms Rommel pulled out of Benghazi and escaped once more.
Down at Agedabia, the fuel crisis began all over again. Rommel ran out of fuel altogether, and Kesselring radioed him: “Gasoline airlift now impossible as you are out of range.” Rommel anxiously radioed to his High Command that in all Africa he had only ten tons of gasoline at Buerat, 250 miles farther along the coast, and 500 tons at Tripoli, even farther ahead. He demanded that Hitler be told.
Camping in his little Kübel automobile, with the rain drumming ceaselessly on the metal roof, Rommel brooded on the plight of his proud army. “I dare not hope for a favorable turn in our fortunes,” he wrote sorrowfully on the twenty-first. “But miracles do happen.” And they did. That morning General Seidemann landed nearby in his Storch, ran over to the field marshal’s car and shouted excitedly that from El Agheila to Mersa Brega the entire coastline was strewn with thousands of crates and oildrums! It was the cargo of the torpedoed Hans Arp, no less, which fate had now spread out at the feet of Rommel’s prostrate army. On these last drops of fuel the Desert Fox safely evacuated Agedabia on the twenty-third and carried his Panzer Army to the Mersa Brega line. He had retreated 800 miles from El Alamein—virtually without loss.
UPON REACHING the Mersa Brega line, Rommel surveyed it and decided it was a bad place to try and defend. He was anxious to start moving westward again. But Mussolini had ordered him to make his stand here, and Hitler had agreed with him. For the next ten days, Rommel bent all the rules of diplomacy and military usage to persuade them that they were wrong.
Tactically, he was right. The new line was 100 miles long—two and a half times as long as at El Alamein—and he had neither the gasoline nor the mobile forces to counter a determined enemy outflanking attempt. He had only 32,000 mines compared with the 500,000 he had had at El Alamein. His troops had lost most of their heavy weapons and antitank guns.
Behind them, as they faced Montgomery, lay a 250-mile desert highway to the port of Buerat; every drop of water and gasoline, every ton of food and ammunition would have to be carried forward across this vast barren tract.
Far better in Rommel’s view to inflict that 250-mile stretch on Montgomery instead—by retreating to Buerat, or even to Homs, almost on the doorstep of Tripoli, and making a stand there. Armed with these powerful arguments, General Giuseppe De Stefanis, of the Twentieth Corps, was sent by Rommel to Rome on November 20.
Cavallero asked the general where Rommel did intend to halt his retreat, and De Stefanis shrugged and replied, “Rommel’s going to keep withdrawing from one line to another—he even talks of surrendering!” Cavallero was shocked. “If Rommel keeps on like this,” he said “he’ll end up in Tunisia.”
Cavallero flatly refused to allow Rommel such freedom, and this was confirmed, on Hitler’s orders, by Keitel. The chief of the High Command promised Rommel reinforcements of tanks and guns, but he once more subordinated Rommel to the little Italian governor of Libya, Marshal Bastico.
Rommel repeated all his arguments to “Bombastico,” as he had contemptuously dubbed him, on November 22 and even warned him: “North Africa cannot be held.” Armbruster’s diary notes: “Bastico said he had no authority himself but would ask Cavallero to come over as soon as possible.”
A three-hour conference between four field marshals—Rommel, Kesselring, Cavallero and Bastico—took place on November 24. The venue was the Arco dei Fileini—the Marble Arch through which Mussolini’s colonial armies had marched into Cyrenaica in the 1930s. Rommel was in a truculent mood.
He did not want to hold this line at Mersa Brega, but kept repeating that since Mussolini and Hitler had both now ordered him to do so, it was pointless to debate other possibilities. He just wanted to place it on record that he had only thirty-five tanks and fifty-seven antitank guns, while Montgomery would have over 420 tanks and 300 armored cars.
“If this Mersa Brega line is lost,” he insisted, “it will not be possible to organize any other resistance before Tripoli.”
Kesselring tried flattery. “We’re all full of admiration for your retreat from El Alamein,” he cajoled Rommel. “To have brought back a major army over eight hundred miles along one highway, without the enemy being able to prevent you, is surely unique in the history of this war!”
Rommel impatiently interrupted. “What am I supposed to do,” he asked, “if the enemy ties into my army in the next day or two on this front and then outflanks me with strong forces?” He got no answer.
It was at this time that a poignant episode occurred that annoyed Rommel more than he cared to admit—as Manfred recalled. Armbruster’s diary recorded it on November 25: “In the evening there was a movie show at Panzer Army headquarters. We saw I Don’t Know You, but I’m in Love (old as the hills, but quite nice) and Roses in the Tyrol. But the newsreel was a calamity,
as it showed Rommel at the Berlin press reception.” As Rommel saw the scene with his hand on the doorknob (“. . . we have the door to all Egypt in our hands”), the blood rushed to his cheeks; and as hoots of laughter drowned the soundtrack, he realized that the same laughter must have sounded in thousands of cinemas throughout the Reich. Was his great name now an object of mockery?
MARSHAL BASTICO radioed to Rommel on November 26 that Mussolini now even expected the Panzer Army to launch limited counterattacks on the British advance guards. On no account, said Mussolini, was Rommel to withdraw any farther without his, Bastico’s, express permission. Despite this, Rommel briefed Navarrini and his own Colonel Müller to prepare the army’s further retreat to Buerat.
He put General Gustav Fehn in temporary charge of the Panzer Army—Fehn had arrived in Libya only three days before as Thoma’s successor—and then he did something dramatic that was a characteristic Rommel act. Without so much as informing Bastico, he climbed into his Heinkel airplane with Lieutenant Berndt, flew north to Wiener Neustadt—where he said hello to Lucie and put through a telephone call to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia—and then flew on to land at Hitler’s headquarters, 1,500 miles away from Libya, some time after three P.M. Keitel and Jodl awaited him in person at Rastenburg airfield and darkly asked him what business he had to transact with Hitler. At five he was shown into the conference room of the secret headquarters. The Führer was thunderstruck. His first words to Rommel were, “How dare you leave your theater of command without my permission!”
There was ice in the air for the next hour. (Hitler later ordered only one copy of the stenogram of this special conference S29/42 to be typed; it was eventually destroyed, but two long descriptions survive in Rommel’s diary and the Panzer Army papers.) Now Rommel learned that Hitler had far more on his plate than just Libya. On the Russian front, the Sixth Army had just been completely encircled at Stalingrad and there were signs of more trouble farther north at Velikiye Luki. Supplies were being airlifted to the Sixth Army, and Hitler was planning a counterattack under Erich von Manstein’s command. Rommel’s uninvited appearance from a relatively quiet theater did not please Hitler at all. He paid lip service to Rommel’s “exemplary and unique” retreat, but his temper snapped when Rommel began his carefully prepared speech about his army’s weakness, the inconveniences of the new line and the failings of the Italian supply organization.