by David Irving
“How many men do you have?” Hitler interrupted him.
Rommel answered, “Sixty or seventy thousand.”
“And how many did you have when the British offensive began?”
“Eighty-two thousand.”
“So,” Hitler pointed out, “you’ve hardly lost any.”
Rommel persisted, “But we have lost nearly all our weapons. Thousands of the troops do not even have rifles.”
Hitler raised his voice: “That is because they threw them away.”
Rommel’s voice was rising too. “Africa cannot be held,” he declared. “The only thing left for us is to try and transport as many Germans out of Africa as we can.”
This renewed plea for a Dunkirk put the spark in the powder keg. Hitler shouted: “You are suggesting precisely the same thing my generals did last winter. They wanted to fall back on the German frontier. I refused to allow it, and events proved me right. I am not going to allow it in Africa either. There are sound political reasons why we must retain a big bridgehead in North Africa. If we do not, there will be the gravest repercussions for Italy. So there is to be no talk whatsoever of abandoning Tripolitania. Your army will be given so many weapons that you can put every man possible into the front line. You must cut back your supply echelons to the absolute minimum. Kesselring must use the entire Luftwaffe strength down there to escort supply convoys. I will send an immediate telegram to the Duce—unfortunately he is ill at present—and ask him to receive Göring and yourself.”
At eight P.M., with Hitler’s earnest promises—of more arms, ammunition and troops, of twenty of the still-secret eighty-eight Flak 41s, and of Tiger tanks—Rommel was escorted out of the Führer’s headquarters. Shortly after that he found himself in Reich Marshal Göring’s opulent state train, Asia, rolling down to Rome. For the next forty-two hours he unwillingly witnessed the spectacle of Hermann Göring in the flesh, dismayed as this flabby six-star general in his pearl gray uniform, with bejeweled tie clip and matching rings, fastidiously varnished his fingernails and prattled on endlessly about his growing collection of “liberated” paintings and sculptures. By the time they passed through Munich—where Lucie joined him, her fine features lined with worry—Rommel realized one certainty: the war was lost.
In the shorthand Rommel diary is a tantalizing entry: “November 29, 1942. Journey continued. Frau Rommel came aboard the train in the evening at Munich. See separate transcript of conversation.” The document itself is missing, but Rommel evidently considered their confidences highly significant, for a few days later he wrote to her, “I’m glad I was able to talk things over with you, my darling, about how grave things look for the future.” In June 1944, facing defeat in Normandy, Rommel again reminded her, though writing in suitably veiled terms: “You can probably imagine what difficult decisions we shall soon be faced with, and you will remember our conversation in November 1942.” What can it have been about? Most probably, he was pondering on how to reconcile his honor and allegiance to Hitler with a formal surrender to the British.
Of that train ride, Lucie later recalled, “My husband was quite shattered. ‘They just can’t and won’t see the danger,’ he said. ‘But it is coming at us with giant strides. The danger is—defeat.’ And in the same breath he added, ‘Let’s keep our voices down. They may even be bugging our conversation.’ ” All Rommel’s intimates agree that his rowdy meeting with Hitler was a turning point in the development of his attitudes.
In Göring’s train, Rommel conceived a new ploy to make the inevitable loss of Libya seem palatable. Why not let the Panzer Army fall back right through Buerat and Tripoli to Tunisia? There it could combine with General Nehring’s new force and spring a surprise attack on the raw American invaders. He sent Berndt down the corridor to put the idea to Göring. The Reich Marshal liked it. Rommel amplified: he proposed to fall back on the Mareth line, built by the French on the frontier between Libya and Tunisia before the war. It was well screened to the south and west by salt marshes. And in Tunisia, he pointed out, the main ports—Tunis and Bizerta—were very much closer to Italy. Besides, the country was rich in foodstuffs. Rommel could launch a joint offensive to the west—into Algeria and Morocco!
“The retreat from El Alamein,” concluded Berndt’s memorandum on the idea, “would suddenly appear in a new light, as a cunning stroke designed to concentrate strength in Tunisia. There would be a world sensation when Rommel suddenly appeared on the offensive in Tunisia.”
When the train arrived in Rome, the idea was put to Kesselring, who ridiculed it. He regarded it as one more Rommel ruse to prolong the Panzer Army’s “excursion” since El Alamein. He had ceased to regard Rommel as a fitting commander for a Panzer Army. He now accused him of passive resistance, of arbitrary actions like his senseless flight to the Führer’s headquarters, of insubordination. Every fresh Rommel retreat, he protested, brought the enemy’s airfields closer to Kesselring’s bases. The argument raged back and forth at conferences that afternoon with Mussolini and with the assembled Italian generals the next day, December 1. The outcome was a compromise. The Duce ruled that Rommel would be permitted to withdraw yet again, but only to the Buerat line, 200 miles east of Tripoli, and only when he was certain that Montgomery was on the very point of attacking Mersa Brega.
There was a luncheon that day at Rome’s lavish Hotel Excelsior. Field Marshal Erhard Milch, whom Göring had summoned from Berlin that morning, wrote in his private papers: “During lunch Göring savagely insulted Rommel, which cut him to the quick. Rommel asked me up to his room afterward, and for several hours I tried to console him. But he was such a nervous wreck deep down inside, that he finally buried his head in my right shoulder and wept for some time. He just couldn’t get over Hitler’s lack of trust in his leadership.”
Göring sent a telegram to Hitler afterward. The Führer read it and turned to Alfred Jodl, chief of his operations staff. “He says Rommel’s lost his nerve,” Hitler told him.
Thus the curtain went up on the final act in Africa. At 6:30 A.M. on December 2, 1942, Rommel landed back in Libya. Colonel Westphal met the plane and found Rommel a broken soul. His interpreter quietly observed in his diary: “C in C seems to have been taken down a peg by Führer. We’ve got to stay where we are for the time being.” Rommel himself admitted in a brief letter to Lucie: I don’t feel at all well. My nerves are shot to pieces.”
He was weary and apathetic, but immediately began planning for the move across the desert to Buerat that would commence as soon as Bastico gave the word. The next day he got into his Storch and flew to Buerat to survey it from the air. But until more gasoline arrived the Panzer Army had no choice except to remain at its present position.
Somehow, he scraped together enough fuel, and the first of General Enea Navarrini’s Italian infantry began pulling out of the Mersa Brega line after dark on December 6. Rommel had ordered that one man must precede each truck on foot, guiding it through the darkness, and that any stray lights were to be extinguished by rifle shots if necessary. But soon Afrika Korps headquarters telephoned him that the first Italian division had driven out of the line with headlights blazing, motors roaring and horns honking. All night long the desert road to Buerat was busy with hundreds of army trucks laden with cheering Italians—yet the British noticed nothing. By daybreak the road was again deserted.
Rommel’s spirits rose. The rain had stopped and the weather was warmer. He moved into a new and more comfortable trailer built by his engineers. Air reconnaissance told him that 5,000 enemy trucks and tanks were massing to attack his line. But more gasoline arrived and that night—again with headlights lit—the Giovanni Fascisti Division scurried to Buerat. “Apparently the enemy still hasn’t realized that we’re pulling out,” the Rommel diary observed with grim satisfaction on the eighth. “There are now 7,000 vehicles confronting us. C in C is in much better spirits today.” Armbruster’s diary echoed this: “C in C was in magnificent form—though according to Berndt it’s just gallows humor.”
The next night the Pistoia, the last of the Italian infantry divisions, withdrew without incident as well.
At any moment now Rommel expected the truth to dawn on Montgomery and an enraged tank onslaught to begin. He spent all day at his headquarters, waiting for the telephone to ring. It was a question of split-second timing. He wanted to zip his remaining forces back just as Montgomery’s massed forces wound up for the last punch—there is nothing more satisfying than seeing a bully overreach himself and fall flat on his face. “The countryside is emptying fast,” said the Rommel diary. “Now our supply echelons are also pulling out.”
Rommel filled the hours of waiting by writing to his son. He made no secret that he might well never see him again, given the enemy’s superiority and the Panzer Army’s lack of supplies. He and his soldiers, he wrote, were bitter at such a finale to a heroic and often victorious fight. “And now to you, dear Manfred. You know how much I love you and how much your mother and you are in my thoughts. You will soon be fourteen. Soon you will have your school days behind you. Try and see how serious life is, and learn as much as you can at school. You are learning for your own good. You may well soon, dear Manfred, have to stand on your own two feet.” It was hard to write like this to a son he hardly knew.
On the morning of December 10, at Afrika Korps headquarters, General Fehn warned him that Montgomery’s attack seemed imminent. Enemy fighter-bomber and reconnaissance activity had increased—particularly along the vulnerable southern sector. The next day British forces were seen circling south for a classical outflanking move, just as Rommel had predicted. That evening Rommel watched an entertaining movie appropriately called Shall We Dance? Toward midnight the usual methodical artillery bombardment began, as always before a Montgomery attack. German radio intelligence confirmed the intention from intercepts. Rommel issued the code flash “222”—the prearranged signal for the remaining German and Italian armor to withdraw, at least as far as their gasoline would permit them—and then watched another aptly titled movie, What Happened That Night?
When daylight came the Mersa Brega line was empty. Montgomery’s artillery was still pounding away at it, but again the bird had flown. “Evidently,” observed the Rommel diary smugly, “the enemy has not remarked our nocturnal withdrawal.” Hundreds of elaborate minefields laid by Buelowius and his experts awaited the probing enemy.
Montgomery’s vaunted offensive thus ended in a fiasco.
Later that day, December 13, the Rommel diary said: “The British claim to have taken a hundred prisoners. An immediate investigation by us has established that the report’s untrue—we haven’t lost a man.”
The Art of Disobedience
FOR THE NEXT THREE days, from December 13 to 15, 1942, the crucial withdrawal of Rommel’s panzer divisions from the Mersa Brega line was beset by the fuel crisis. Montgomery must have been aware of it from the Ultra intercepts, but he signally failed to exploit it. Meanwhile relentless air attacks harried Rommel’s troops. The one and only highway was scarred and cratered by bombs, the shoulders on either side strewn with blazing hulks of transport. More than once Rommel ran into dive bomber attacks, and had to hit the ditch. The next three gasoline ships were all sunk. Fifteen hundred enemy vehicles were sighted circling warily around his army in the desert, but there was enough gasoline left for only thirty miles. Said the Rommel diary: “It means that the Afrika Korps has already been outflanked.” Was this the end at last?
The two German panzer divisions bringing up the rear of Rommel’s retreat, with their fifty-four remaining tanks, never came closer to annihilation than on the afternoon of December 15. But General Fehn, their commander, ordered the tanks of the Twenty-first Panzer Division to empty all their remaining gasoline into the tanks of the Fifteenth Panzer, so that at least one division’s tanks could fight on during the night and protect the other until more gasoline could be trucked forward. Thus the Germans managed once more to extricate themselves from the enemy’s jaws of encirclement before they fully closed; they scattered Shermans, armored cars and enemy troops in all directions as they burst through to the west again.
That evening the enemy’s Radio Cairo and the BBC were heard crowing that Rommel and his army had at last been “bottled up” at Nofilia—a town on the coastal highway that Rommel had in fact slipped through already—and that at that very moment Montgomery was “hammering home the cork.”
Rommel burst out laughing: “Provided we get some gasoline tonight, they’re going to find the bottle empty.”
Radio Cairo now announced that Nazi troops trapped at Nofilia were “fighting desperately” to break out. The Rommel diary noted with some glee: “In reality, just one platoon of the 115th Regiment got cut off. And they have managed to escape, too, leaving only their transport behind.”
German aircraft observed that even the road from Mersa Brega to Nofilia was deserted, so evidently Buelowius’s lethal handiwork and booby traps were forcing the enemy to make tortuous detours instead. And there was proof that Montgomery was also encountering logistical problems: eight American bombers landed in error at Tamet airfield—still in German hands—and were found to be airlifting gasoline from Tobruk to Montgomery’s leading units. The Germans did not let the gasoline go to waste.
Rommel had driven off along the desert road to Buerat early on December 17. The landscape here was very different. “It’s already spring where we are now,” he wrote home. “The air is spiced with the fragrance of a thousand flowers.” His staff were impressed by the Buerat defenses and the deep antitank ditch, but Rommel’s eyes were—inevitably—already cast much farther west: to the Mareth line, on Libya’s frontier with Tunisia.
He claimed that this Buerat line was, like all the others, vulnerable to outflanking in the south. Most of its gun sites were empty, since he had only 160 antitank guns left. He had virtually no mines, ammunition or supplies at Buerat. Most of his troops had only rifles or machine guns—better suited to the defense of a mountain position like Mareth.
The more he flew and drove up and down the Buerat line, the less he liked it. Nor did he see any tactical reason to defend Tripoli any longer. The big port was already under heavy air attack. And what good was it as a port if no ships could reach it? Of eight more big ships recently bound for Tripoli, all but one had been sunk. So the arguments began all over again.
He made his pessimistic views plain to Marshal Bastico on the first morning of his arrival at Buerat. It all hinged on the gasoline supply. “I have sixty tanks left, with twelve more at Buerat and ten stranded with no fuel at Tripoli,” said Rommel. “Many of them are the new long-gunned Panzer Specials. They can pack quite a punch, provided I get the gasoline.” Armbruster summarized: “Conference at Buerat with Bastico. He too holds the view that the Buerat line cannot be held, as no ammunition or gasoline has been arriving. We’ll need to fall back on the Homs-Garian line [just east of Tripoli]. He also is seemingly for a linkup between the two command theaters”—meaning Libya and Tunisia.
Bastico’s report on this to Rome brought an avalanche down upon Rommel. Mussolini himself signaled him: “Resistance to the utmost, I repeat, resistance to the utmost will be offered by all troops of the German-Italian Panzer Army in the Buerat line.” The Italian High Command followed this message with an even harsher directive: on no account were the 30,000 Italian infantrymen under Rommel’s command to be “sacrificed like the first bunch.”
The implied criticism of Rommel’s actions after El Alamein infuriated the field marshal. The Rommel diary laid bare his rage. “C in C is absolutely furious at this. He is being ordered to defend the Buerat line ‘to the utmost,’ though it’s by no means clear what the Italians understand by ‘utmost.’ If he is supposed to evacuate the Italian troops from the front line, then he won’t be defending it to the last man but to the last German. It will be all over for the Italian soldiers too, then. And what is he supposed to do if the enemy does not give him the chance to ‘defend the Buerat line’ but just marches around it, outflan
ks it?”
There is no doubt that all this pressure was eroding Rommel’s mental stability. He clearly considered defeat, and even capitulation to Montgomery, as likely and perhaps inevitable, because on December 21 he again urgently appealed in a secret letter to Lucie: “Haven’t you sent off that English dictionary to me yet?”
Not surprisingly, Rommel’s attitude aroused fresh distrust in Rome. “When Rommel wants to withdraw,” Marshal Cavallero wanly recorded in his private diary, “he just withdraws.”
Cavallero also detected in Rommel a distinct tendency to exaggerate his own difficulties: “Every day he has a ‘desperate battle,’ which just is not true.” He told Kesselring: “In my opinion, Rommel is just looking for an excuse to retreat. No matter where he was, ever since Sollum/Halfaya Rommel has talked nonstop about withdrawing.”
Kesselring had to agree: “Rommel doesn’t realize that he still has quite a good hand of cards, if only he would play them.”
Rommel refused to listen to Kesselring now. He blamed the Luftwaffe, equally with the Italians, for reducing him to this plight. “Relations with Kesselring are strained,” he admitted to Lucie. “He fails to appreciate just how grim our position is.” He accused Kesselring of “milking” the supply ships now beginning to dock at Tunis and of giving the new Fifth Panzer Army now being raised in Tunisia the tanks, ammunition and gasoline that rightly belonged to Rommel. There is some evidence that this was so; but it would be wrong to blame Kesselring alone for it. General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, commanding the new army, was aggressive and optimistic, as Rommel had himself been in February 1941. And what profit was there in trucking the Tiger tanks, high-velocity guns and other supplies all the way down the coast to Libya if Rommel was intent only on retreating?