The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  By this time Rommel had the result of the morning reconnaissance too. It was as the Italians were saying: the British inland force had come to a standstill in the mountainous country. Without doubt, his order for the retreat had been “premature,” as Mussolini protested. Rommel evidently recognized the error, and it bothered him for weeks afterward. He appealed to his Italian corps commanders for moral support. Navarrini assured him: “I would have acted just the same.” But to have acted just like an Italian general should not have commended itself to Field Marshal Rommel.

  At five P.M. he drove to Bianchi—a charming Italian colonial village, typical of those that Mussolini’s countrymen had labored for twenty years to build here. Marshals Cavallero, Kesselring and Bastico awaited him, their faces black with thunder. Armbruster interpreted, and penciled later in his notebook: “Violent differences of opinion. The Duce is dissatisfied with C in C’s actions, believes we withdrew too soon. But so far our C in C has always had a pretty good nose about the position. The Italians ought not to make such a song and dance—up to now it’s always been we who carried the ball and sweated things out.” The Rommel diary also admitted that the language used was “forceful.” Rommel asked for a firm ruling on whether the Panzer Army was expected to fight to the death here or to arrive as a fighting force in the Mareth line in Tunisia. “You can’t have it both ways,” he icily told Cavallero. It all sounded very familiar to the Italians—they had been hearing this refrain ever since the collapse at El Alamein.

  The next day Marshal Cavallero had a more sober interview with Rommel and handed down another command of Delphic vagueness: “The Duce’s directives remain unaltered. The Panzer Army’s destruction is still to be prevented— but you are to gain as much time as possible.” On this same visit Cavallero confidentially canvassed the Italian corps commanders about a suitable Italian general to succeed Rommel, in view of the field marshal’s repeated disobedience of directives. The hounds were out, and they were baying for Rommel’s blood.

  Rommel interpreted Cavallero’s message his own way. He regrouped his entire army west of Tripoli during the night, and the next morning he ordered the city evacuated of all Axis troops as dusk fell. “He talks of the pain this will cause to the Italians,” the Rommel diary related. “But, as he puts it, the pain would be far greater if Tripoli fell into enemy hands on the twenty-fifth with the destruction of the army, than on the twenty-third without it.”

  As Tripoli, capital of Libya, transferred into Montgomery’s hands—and with it tens of thousands of tons of war materiel that could not be destroyed or moved out in time—Rommel and Bayerlein put the war behind them and drove to Sabratha, site of an ancient and more peaceful civilization that had died two centuries before Christ. The Italian curator showed him around the excavations, and they examined the mosaics in the local museum. Then he drove in silence back to his trailer. He was having unbearable headaches, and Professor Horster prescribed sedatives so that he could sleep.

  Were the illnesses that now plagued Rommel once again imaginary, a subconscious refuge from failure and defeat? At his staffs request, Horster had examined the field marshal but found little wrong clinically. But Rommel complained of violent headaches and “nervous exhaustion,” which he blamed on blood circulation disorders. On January 22, 1943, the High Command solicitously inquired by radio if his health would permit him to retain command of the Panzer Army once he had conveyed it up the coast to the safety of the Mareth line. Rommel privately wrote to his old friend Schmundt—by now Hitler’s chief of army personnel as well as chief adjutant—that in its present form his health would not be good enough.

  In a long doleful letter on January 22, Rommel prepared Lucie for his early return to Wiener Neustadt. “The way things turned out yesterday has completely vindicated my actions,” he claimed. “But, as you can imagine, our dear allies are giving me the sweetest problems. It was only too predictable that they would turn nasty in the end. I don’t think they’ll be our allies much longer. A country can’t change its spots. As for my health, I feel much of a muchness—la, la.”

  By January 25, the Panzer Army had begun to enter southern Tunisia. Rommel drove along the coast road. As he passed through the port of Zuara, there were ships blazing in the harbor; one blew up in a sheet of flame. He still felt unwell. “I’m so depressed that I can hardly work. Perhaps somebody else will see things in a more favorable light and can make something out of the mess. Take Kesselring, for example—he’s always bursting with optimism. He probably sees me as the reason why our army did not put up a longer stand.”

  Thus Rommel said farewell to Libya, the scene of all his African victories and of the graves of 10,000 German and Italian soldiers. In pouring rain his car crossed the frontier into Tunisia at 5:59 A.M. on January 26. Six hours later, at the new Panzer Army headquarters in Tunisia, Rommel received a signal from the Italian High Command relieving him of duty at such time as he should himself determine. It was the price of disobedience. Rommel petulantly commented, “The sooner the better.” But to be replaced by an Italian general deeply shocked him, and his heart bled for his poor “Africans.” To Lucie he exclaimed, “That really was uncalled for. . . . Surely they could have found a German general to succeed me.” All night he lay sleepless in his trailer, listening to the barking and baying of the wild dogs of Tunisia. He was at low ebb.

  IN THE ROMMEL papers one finds shorthand texts of letters written to Lucie by Alfred Berndt—now promoted on Berlin’s orders to full captain—that show how alarmed his staff was at the field marshal’s mental condition. Professor Horster, he said, had advised the High Command that a cure of at least eight weeks, starting on about February 20, was desirable. “The field marshal’s condition brings on fits of depression,” wrote Berndt, “in which nothing seems as it really is—everything looks blacker and less favorable. . . . He was supposed to take over the whole show here, but medical opinion was against it. The upshot is that he must finish off his cure first, try and forget, and concentrate on getting well again. . . . At present he imagines that everything has a different cause from the real one.” Professor Horster’s own advice to Lucie was: “Do everything you can to counter his fits of depression.”

  Then a miraculous transformation took place. In Tunisia’s green and fertile hills, a change came over Rommel. He even began planning a new offensive. “The successor they’re sending out from Rome is just going to have to wait before he can step into my shoes,” he defiantly announced in a letter on February 8. He had chosen a target: the Americans.

  Last Chance of Glory

  “THE LAND,” WRITES Rommel about Tunisia, “is beautiful and fertile, a country of rolling, flowering prairies and cornfields.” Here, as far as the eye can see, there are trees, shrubs, orchards, plantations. There are wells with fresh water, well-tended horses, even palm trees. Lieutenant Armbruster, his interpreter, who drives around the area with Rommel, marvels in his diary: “Most of the Arab women here go unveiled, and the people are much friendlier than over in Libya.” After they visit Toujane, an Arab settlement clinging high up a mountain face, he writes: “The whole region is magnificent and ruggedly romantic.”

  Down Tunisia’s spine run two mountain ranges. Between them lies a more barren country, and it is here that Rommel will find his main battlefield for February 1943. Half-starved Arabs ride hungry camels across an undulating desert. Here and there are piles of marble fragments, or a splendid arch, or an arrow-straight aqueduct or finely engineered road to mark where Roman civilization passed this way 2,000 years ago.

  Tides of different races have swept across the plains and swirled around the rocky hills, slaughtering, building, farming, procreating and being slaughtered in turn: Numidians, Berbers, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs and Turks. There are traces of all these bloods in the people who sidle out to meet Rommel, from the dusty Arab children to the sheikh and notables of Beni Zelten, Rommel’s new headquarters, who come and greet him bearing eggs and other gifts.<
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  ON FEBRUARY 2, 1943, the Italian general Giovanni Messe lunched with Rommel. Messe was heir presumptive to the Panzer Army command, but he said he was in no hurry to take over. Rommel gloomily briefed him. “In Africa,” he said, “there is no defense line that cannot be outflanked, and that goes for this line at Mareth too.”

  Messe, a realistic veteran from the Russian front, with a high Nazi medal at his throat, made a good impression on Rommel. He declared, “It is the greatest honor in my life to be the successor of Field Marshal Rommel!”

  Rommel had not begun to get his cold feet about the Mareth line until mid-January, when General Krause, his artillery commander, came and drew an unfavorable comparison between Mareth and the far better line possible at Wadi Akarit, farther up the coast. The Rommel diary thereafter contains much evidence of his growing disenchantment with Mareth. It had been built before the war by the French, and its bunkers and pillboxes had deteriorated over the years. Rommel lacked the seasoned combat troops, ammunition and artillery to defend it for very long.

  It was an open secret that Hitler and Mussolini were planning eventually to set up an army group headquarters to control all their troops in Tunisia, and that General von Arnim was earmarked for that job. Everyone was waiting impatiently for Rommel to vacate the theater as planned, to take his medical leave. But this he stubbornly refused to do; he was waiting to be ordered out by the German High Command, and they were perversely leaving the choice of a date to him. His continued presence blighted command relations in Tunisia throughout February. “I belong to my soldiers,” Rommel told Berndt. “If I myself fix the date for my departure and then something goes wrong a few days later, I’ll be accused of not having provided for it, and of having gotten out while the going was good.” So Rommel stayed. The whole affair was very awkward for both Arnim and Messe.

  Why did Rommel hang on? A clue lay in his intense dislike of General von Arnim. He was everything that Rommel was not—a Silesian aristocrat, son of a general, brush-moustached, respected and quiet-spoken. He was three years older than Rommel but ranked lower. Arnim had been in Africa since December, but there had been no contact whatever between their staffs until January 31, when Lieutenant General Heinz Ziegler, Arnim’s deputy, met Rommel to agree on a mutual boundary. Rommel glumly told Ziegler: “As far as our major strategic intentions are concerned, I’m no wiser than you. Given our lack of supplies and our meager forces, I personally consider that any major offensive westward is quite impossible. And in that case it is really rather pointless for us to hold on to the bridgehead in Tunisia in its present form.” The decision was left in the air.

  This stalemate began to disappear on February 3, though only slowly. That evening the Twenty-first Panzer Division—now under Arnim’s control—captured the vital Faid Pass from a small French garrison. This gave to the Germans the chance of striking through the pass at the Americans.

  On February 4, the Rommel diary shows him visiting the Italian armored division Centauro that already held the only other pass, at Maknassy, and mentioning “the possibility of an operation against Gafsa in the near future.” Gafsa was an oasis formerly of 10,000 inhabitants, who lived resplendently in pink buildings among tall palm trees. It was now the center of the powerful American force built up by General Eisenhower for the attack on Rommel’s lifeline at Sfax.

  The Americans had arrived in northwest Africa with all the swagger that went with parade-ground armies. Captured British and French officers referred to them as “our Italians.” By attacking them, Rommel wanted to inflict a stinging blow on American morale—he wanted to show the world that even after a 2,000-mile retreat Hitler’s soldiers could still defeat Eisenhower’s GIs, however superior their equipment. Right from the start, there was disagreement between Rommel and Arnim on the best way to hurt the Americans.

  Arnim was not eager to part with any forces for Rommel’s plan; while Rommel—still mesmerized by Montgomery’s remorseless approach to the Mareth line—refused to disengage his Fifteenth Panzer Division from its rearguard actions there. Arnim had devised a plan to push his Tenth Panzer Division through the recently captured Faid Pass to Sidi Bou Zid, thus consolidating his hold on the mountain range known as the Eastern Dorsale, the “spine” of Tunisia.

  It would not be possible to execute both plans simultaneously, so Kesselring ruled that Arnim’s must come first, followed by Rommel’s; Rommel would use both his own and Arnim’s panzer forces. Arnim was still reluctant, so Kesselring forced the two commanders to meet on neutral ground—the Luftwaffe command post at Rhennouch—on February 9.

  It was eighteen years since Rommel had last met Arnim. Both had been army captains. He had not liked him then, and he disliked him now. Kesselring dictated terms to them: “We are going to go all out for the total destruction of the Americans. They have pulled back most of their troops to Sbeitla and Kasserine. . . . We must exploit the situation, and strike fast.” Arnim proposed to launch his attack on Sidi Bou Zid early on the twelfth. Rommel replied: “I can then start my attack on Gafsa two days later, before the enemy can get away. What counts isn’t any ground we gain but the damage we inflict on the enemy.”

  Kesselring, as usual, was quite excited about their prospects: “I think that after Gafsa we should thrust into Algeria,” he said, “to destroy still more American forces.” Rommel was not so optimistic. Kesselring suggested that Rommel had only a small-scale attack in mind. He asked Rommel’s doctor how soon he ought to be sent on his cure, and Horster replied: “I suggest that he depart on about February twentieth.” Kesselring urged Arnim to be patient until then about taking over the promised Army Group command. Kesselring said with a chuckle, “Let’s give Rommel this one last chance of glory before he gets out of Africa.”

  At eight A.M. on February 12 the band of the Eighth Panzer Regiment struck up outside Rommel’s trailer. It was two years to the day since Rommel had set foot in Africa. Not many of his “Africans” had survived the two years. Of the 1,000 men who had arrived with the Eighth Machine Gun Battalion, for instance, only four had stayed the entire course. At midday all the officers who had come over with Rommel in February 1941 and were still fighting under his command—nineteen men in all—came for a little reunion.

  Rommel was lean and sun-tanned, but his face was furrowed with worry, and his eyes were moist as the old memories were refreshed and the band softly played the march that this epic two-year struggle had inspired, “We are the men of the Afrika Korps . . .”

  None of them would forget how the rain poured in Tunisia. The rains delayed Arnim’s move against Sidi Bou Zid for two days. Meanwhile, on February 13, Rommel drove up to attend a commanders’ conference called by General Ziegler on an airfield south of Sfax.

  Here he met Baron Fritz von Broich, the general commanding the Tenth Panzer Division, and Colonel Hans-Georg Hildebrandt, commander of the Twenty-first Panzer. (Hildebrandt had caustically dismissed Rommel to a Rommel aide with these words: “All he knows is just one word, and he bawls it all the time: A’greifen [attack]!”—and he mimicked Rommel’s Swabian accent.)

  Ziegler would be controlling 140 tanks in the attack. Rommel felt very much out of things.

  “We don’t have much to do with it,” he commented with noticeable bitterness to Lucie after Ziegler’s attack began.

  Ziegler’s attack on Sidi Bou Zid, code-named “Spring Breeze,” began at six A.M. on February 14, with powerful Luftwaffe support. By five P.M., the enemy’s Combat Command “A” was in rout. Eisenhower was taken completely by surprise by this German attack—in fact, he himself had been in this very village only a few hours before. From the Ultra intercepts of Rommel’s and Arnim’s code signals the enemy had somehow deduced that this attack was only a feint, to camouflage a much bigger offensive starting farther north. So the enemy were caught on the wrong foot, their reserves miles away and still not released. As the American troops fell back in disorder on Sbeitla, the next township, they left the battlefield strewn with wreckage—for
ty-four big tanks, fifty-nine half-tracks and twenty-six guns.

  Still unconvinced, the American Combat Command “C” counterattacked the next day with all the subtlety of a goaded bull. For thirteen miles, in a dead straight line across open country, they advanced on Sidi Bou Zid. In parade-ground formation, this mass of modern hardware rolled forward, making no attempt to push out forward reconnaissance. As they came within range of the German guns, a tornado of shells swept through them.

  A pincer attack by Ziegler’s Tenth and Twenty-first Panzer divisions completed the ambush. By dusk, the Americans were again in rout, having lost another fifty-four tanks, fifty-seven half-tracks and twenty-nine guns. Eisenhower was furious at the faulty intelligence that had led to this calamity, and demanded his intelligence officer’s recall. At a private dinner party in Algiers some days later, he explained to his Allied superiors that he had not sent down reserves because the Ultra intercepts had suggested that this was to be a purely diversionary attack, in advance of a real one elsewhere. “So the Ultra proved to be wrong,” noted his aide, Harry C. Butcher, in the diary he kept for Eisenhower. He went on to speculate (incorrectly): “That makes me wonder if we have been listening to something the Germans have purposely been using.”

  Where was Rommel on that historic day of battle? The diaries show that he was visiting the Mareth line in southern Tunisia. His preoccupation with this position had not receded. When the unexpected news came that afternoon that the panicking Americans had actually pulled out of Gafsa, Rommel’s first recorded reaction was open relief that his own scheduled attack on Gafsa was thereby made superfluous.