by David Irving
But then the next day, February 16, a sensational change came over Rommel. He had set out at 7:30 A.M. to see Gafsa himself, and the evocative sight of roads choked with his own advancing tanks, trucks, captured jeeps and wrecked American equipment stirred feelings in him that he had not felt for many months. As his car forced a way through the mobs of grinning Arabs openly hauling away their loot plundered from Gafsa’s abandoned villas, Rommel began intently studying his battle maps. Suppose he and Ziegler could keep the Americans on the run, and capture the passes through the western chain of mountains too? Then they could threaten the entire Anglo-American position in Tunisia from the rear! It was a chance of glory indeed.
Arnim had none of Rommel’s verve or temperament. He had no intention of promoting a big operation. Rommel proposed to Arnim that Ziegler’s two panzer divisions start marching at dusk and capture Sbeitla that same night, but he got no satisfactory reply from Arnim.
Meanwhile he drove on into Gafsa itself. Once more he was in the limelight, and he relished it. The Rommel diary relates, “The Americans have blown up their big ammunition dump without prior warning to the townspeople. Over thirty houses have collapsed; so far the corpses of thirty-four Arab men, women and children have been recovered, eighty more are missing. The Arabs crowd around the C in C’s car and celebrate their liberation by the Germans with wild whoops of delight. They shout two names, over and over again: Hitler and Rommel.”
Ideas were taking shape in his mind. In a violent hailstorm he drove back, and put through an urgent telephone call to Arnim’s headquarters. Arnim’s staff assured him they had now decided to start an attack on Sbeitla, which was an ancient Roman settlement at a crossroads on a remote and arid plain. Rommel announced that he had decided to reinforce the Afrika Korps assault group and advance from Gafsa to the next village, Feriana. After that he would have two alternatives, because the road forked: he could strike northwest toward Tebessa, in Algeria; or northeast through Thelepte to Kasserine, where he could join up with Ziegler’s panzer divisions arriving from Sbeitla.
The Americans seemed to be in full retreat. Rommel’s forces marched through Feriana the afternoon of February 17. Thelepte—the enemy’s main air base in the southern sector—fell soon after, with gasoline dumps ablaze and thirty aircraft abandoned on the two airfields. Arab travelers reported that the Americans were blowing up fuel and ammunition dumps as far away as Tebessa. The old Rommel blood was pulsing through his veins again. By four P.M. he had captured all his objectives on the road to Kasserine, where he hoped to find Ziegler’s panzer divisions. But Arnim was moving these panzer divisions—away from Rommel.
Rommel was furious. If only he had all three panzer divisions under his command, he would be able to give Eisenhower a real fright. This maddening certainty nagged at him all the next morning. Suddenly his patience snapped. Alfred Berndt, writing to brief Lucie a week later, recalled: “He could see that the successes we had obtained just weren’t being exploited fast enough and in the right way. So without standing on ceremony he made a very daring proposal.” From the Rommel diary we can pinpoint the precise timing of his decision to inflict a humiliating defeat on Eisenhower. He had lunched, according to Armbruster’s notes, with a local sheikh, on mutton and couscous . Then, sitting in the operations truck, he decided at 12:30 P.M. “to stake everything on one big gamble by throwing all we’ve got at Tebessa.”
“He comments,” continued the Rommel diary, “that the situation in this theater of war has always involved some element of risk for him, and he has never before staked the works on one throw of the dice. Even in the most audacious operations hitherto he has always kept enough in reserve to master any sudden twist of fortune, so he has never yet had to fear losing the whole kit and kaboodle. But, he says, the way things now stand we must risk more than we ever would have in the past so as to turn the tables decisively in our favor. If he now pushes through to Tebessa and sends reconnaissance forces north from there, the entire enemy front in Tunisia may well collapse.” Rommel radioed this proposal to Rome. “If you agree, I request that the Tenth and Twenty-first Panzer divisions be placed under my command and moved rapidly to assembly area Thelepte/Feriana.—Rommel.” Two hours later, Kesselring replied from Rome with a provisional go-ahead. The same ruling went to Arnim. Now there was no holding Rommel back. He was jubilant.
“That evening,” wrote Berndt to Lucie a few days later, “he ordered a bottle of champagne and declared, ‘I feel like an old cavalry horse that has suddenly heard the sound of the bugle again.’ ”
In his elation Rommel failed to realize just how obstinate Arnim could be. When he personally telephoned Arnim, from one end of Tunisia to the other, late that evening, the Fifth Panzer Army commander was still hostile. “I am planning my own attack west of Tunis in the next few days and I am going to need my Tenth Panzer Division for that,” he informed Rommel. As for Rommel’s plan, he maintained that the axis of attack should be farther east, for instance toward Le Kef. Rommel pointed out that that would take the attacking force straight into the enemy reserves, while an attack through Tebessa would put Rommel’s axis so far in the enemy’s rear that reserves could not possibly intervene in time. Arnim secretly submitted detailed objections to Rome.
Suffice it to say that when the Italian directive arrived from Rome late on the eighteenth it was an irritating compromise. Rommel was assigned control over the Tenth and Twenty-first Panzer divisions as well as his own Afrika Korps assault group, but Le Kef was to be his first objective.
SEVEN-THIRTY A.M., February 19, 1943. The day dawning under gray and sodden skies was one of the most crucial in Rommel’s career. He had barely slept since issuing his final orders three hours before. He was keeping his options open. At Feriana, an Italian armored battle group was standing by to probe northwestward along the main road that led to Tebessa, Algeria. Another group under Buelowius was to force the Kasserine Pass, and the Twenty-first Panzer was going to push northward from Sbeitla to Le Kef. When Rommel saw which force was making most progress, he would take over direct command, and give it the Tenth Panzer Division too. But too much time had been lost through the command conflict with Arnim. At the Kasserine Pass, the Americans had had time to occupy the high ground, and when Buelowius attacked during the morning his infantry, were slowed down by heavy and accurate shelling. Rommel drove up to the scrawny little village of Kasserine at one P.M. to see what was happening. There is an entry in the diary: “Along the road are American trucks with dead men sitting at the wheels, evidently shot up by low-level air strikes.” He continued his drive along the road to Sbeitla to check how the Twenty-first Panzer Division’s parallel thrust had gone.
He had ordered it to advance north on Ksour, an important crossroads fifty miles farther on. But it had taken Hildebrandt the last four hours to advance only fifteen miles. “The road is deep with slime after days of rain,” the Rommel diary continued. “Five miles this side of Sbiba, C in C finds Colonel Hildebrandt and is given a briefing on the progress so far.” Hildebrandt’s attack had been stalled since noon by mines, and there were excellent British defense forces arriving to stand against him, too. In pouring rain his tanks started rolling again at four P.M.; they ran into more mines, and Rommel decided to abandon any further thrust along this route. He would resume the offensive the next day elsewhere, through the Kasserine Pass, and he would send the Tenth Panzer Division—when it arrived—to help Buelowius and not the “dawdling” and “inefficient” Hildebrandt.
As dusk fell, he went off to find the Tenth Panzer Division, which had spent the whole afternoon approaching across the darkening prairie from the eastern mountain chain. (“Those fellows are all far too slow,” Rommel snapped at Armbruster.) He found the division resting near Sbeitla, the ruins of an ancient Roman settlement. It was only now that Rommel learned that Arnim had interpreted Kesselring’s orders very casually: two of the Tenth Panzer Division’s battalions were missing; so were the two dozen Tiger tanks. To Rommel, this was
a particularly dirty trick. He correctly suspected that Arnim was holding the best units back for a rival show of his own.
We have little evidence of Rommel’s private feelings during this battle. He stops writing to Lucie for several days, but in Böttcher’s shorthand pads one finds letters dictated by Alfred Berndt to friends in Germany, and these indicate that at this same time the field marshal is firmly planning to leave Africa forever. Hitler has mentioned either to him or to Berndt that Rommel is to get an army group in Russia after his cure, which is expected to last three months. A villa has already been rented on Semmering mountain in Austria.
“Our time is up,” says Berndt in one such letter—to the garrison commander at Wiener Neustadt, evidently on February 19. “In a few days’ time the field marshal will be free to start his long-needed leave. We’re hoping that after two years in Africa he’ll get a new command, probably one on the eastern front. . . . He said only yesterday that he feels like an old cavalry horse that has heard the bugle’s call again.”
At seven A.M. the next day, February 20, Rommel drove back to Kasserine. He had instructed Buelowius to break through the pass during the night, and then to fork left along a dirt track that led eventually to Tebessa. But none of these objectives had been attained.
The enemy were bringing up reinforcements. Rommel felt the initiative slipping out of his grasp. He ordered his driver to take him into the pass’s entrance. As he bumped along the asphalt road out of Kasserine village, his eyes focused on the mountain barrier looming ahead—the blue-gray range, rising above the rain-soaked, grassy prairie. Directly ahead the road vanished between two hill masses: the Kasserine Pass, for which a panzer-grenadier regiment had been battling unsuccessfully for over twenty-four hours.
Two miles before the entrance, Rommel found Colonel Menton. The colonel reported that the Americans still commanded the high ground, and thus the road through on the valley floor as well. Rommel was annoyed to find an assault commander directing the battle from the rear, and told Menton to climb into the car with him. He drove forward right to the pass, and set up his mobile headquarters there.
A thin rain—half drizzle, half mist—was hanging in the air.
General Fritz von Broich arrived at about ten A.M. Rommel curtly asked him where his Tenth Panzer Division’s troops were—he wanted a battalion of motorcycle troops sent along the hill route taken by Menton’s panzer-grenadiers over the Djebel Semmama, the hill on the right side of the pass. Broich awkwardly explained that he was waiting for an infantry battalion to arrive first. This earned him a savage rebuke from Rommel for disobeying orders. “Now go and fetch the motorcycle battalion yourself, and you are to lead it into action too.” He gave Buelowius permission to begin using the new Nebelwerfer rocket launchers. Each six-barreled launcher could lob eighty-pound rocket bombs at targets four miles away. These fragmentation bombs caused sheer panic among the Americans defending the hill positions. The troops on the Djebel Chambi, left of the pass, began to run.
But on the other side of the pass, Menton’s panzer-grenadiers reported at two P.M., there were fifty American half-tracks unloading hundreds of troops, and about thirty big tanks too. Rommel “decided,” in the words of his diary, “to force a breakthrough.”
“C in C then watches,” continued the diary, “as the panzer battalion rolls up through the pass, and he watched the exciting spectacle of the tank battle north of the pass as dusk fell that evening. The enemy is evidently badly shaken by our Nebelwerfer bombardment.” The panzer battalion destroyed twenty-two tanks and captured thirty half-track armored troop carriers.
Early on Sunday, February 21, Rommel drove into the jaws of the Kasserine Pass and inspected the carnage of the battlefield. Graves were being dug for the dead. Arabs were wandering around, looking for booty. Captured halftracks clanked past, laden with American prisoners starting their long journey to camps in Germany and Poland. Rommel looked over the knocked-out American tanks and commented on the quality and standardization of the equipment. As for himself, a certain aimlessness—almost apathy, perhaps an “end of term” feeling—seemed to have come upon him. Only yesterday he had bawled out Broich and Buelowius for wasting time; yet not until two P.M. that day would he resume the offensive from the pass, and the lost hours were used to powerful effect by the enemy.
The wrecks of six enemy tanks littered the hill and road. After a while he drove to the foremost infantry platoons, advancing through a cactus patch east of the road, and watched the progress of the assault. Here the corpses of British soldiers lying by their antitank guns had already been stripped naked by the Arabs.
This was a second “real Rommel day.” Armbruster described in his diary the look of adoration on the soldiers’ faces as they found Rommel once more among them. And Berndt wrote to Lucie, “You should have seen their eyes light up as he suddenly appeared, just like the old days, among the very foremost infantry and tanks, in the midst of their attack, and had to hit the dirt just like the riflemen when the enemy’s artillery opened up! What other commander is there who can call on such respect?” Rommel’s leather coat was covered with mud, he was wet and weary, but he was happier than at any time since Longarone: it was like being a platoon leader all over again.
Inexplicably, he now turned and drove back to the Kasserine Pass. Without Rommel on the scene, all the fire and impetus went out of the Tenth Panzer Division’s advance. It was not until the next morning that Rommel again concerned himself with Broich. He drove back up the long asphalt road and found that the Tenth Panzer Division, after a confusing battle the night before, had still not captured Thala, the next town to the north.
Had General von Broich pressed on in that direction, he would have found only a weak French detachment in Thala—and beyond that the open road to Le Kef. The Americans were already jittery, evacuating important airfields and destroying stores. The British army commander had also given preliminary authorization for Thala to be abandoned if necessary. The enemy had pulled out of Sbiba during the night—fearing a cross-penetration from Thala—not that the feckless commander of the Twenty-first Panzer Division even noticed that the enemy facing him had gone.
But then, when the Germans failed to press, enemy reinforcements began to trickle forward into Thala again, and the British commander radioed an order to all units: “There is to be no further withdrawal under any excuse.” Thus the vital moment had passed.
By the time Rommel’s intelligence officers brought him that “no withdrawal” intercept, his desire for victory had already expired and he had all but decided to cancel the offensive. Like the marathon runner who collapses just before the final tape, he was too weary to go on. A real triumph had been in his grasp that morning, February 22, but he let it slip away. Field Marshal Kesselring and Colonel Westphal—Kesselring’s new chief of staff—drove up and found the dejected Rommel sitting listening to the rain pounding on the roof of his operations truck. Nothing they could say would change his mind.
They praised hi; they cajoled him; they reminded him of the glories of the past; they promised that he had put the Americans in a far tougher jam than he was in. Rommel just sat there, ignoring the ringing of the telephone at his side and shaking his head.
Finally he began to try to rationalize his odd decision to call off the offensive. He referred to Arnim’s disobedience in denying him the Tiger tanks and the infantry battalions.
“That may be true,” Kesselring retorted, “but you had the authority to overrule Arnim. Why didn’t you!”
Rommel gave him a sulky reply. “The offensive toward Tebessa I proposed,” he said, “would really have taken the enemy by surprise and been a much bigger success than the one against Le Kef. They just don’t understand how to take calculated risks.”
Implicitly he also blamed the Italian High Command, suggesting that they had watered down his grand plan. He blamed the conduct of the Twenty-first Panzer Division too, and Kesselring admitted that Hildebrandt’s leadership had left a lot to be des
ired. Rommel also blamed the weather, the mud, the slime, the bad tank terrain and his low combat strengths. But to Kesselring, it was still a mystery. Only last evening Rommel had radioed him the most jubilant report on the battle.
The real truth was most probably that Rommel wanted to get back to the Mareth line as fast as possible. He had no grudge against the Americans, but he had a personal score to settle with Montgomery, the only enemy general to have gotten the better of him.
In his discussion with Kesselring, he made no secret of his anxiety to return to the southern sector. He claimed that Montgomery was about to launch a massive attack there (although his army’s files show that General Messe—who had been put in command of the “First Italian Army” there when Rommel left for Kasserine—had told him quite the opposite that very morning).
Kesselring hotly argued: “We have the initiative now. I strongly dispute your view that the Mareth line is in danger. The Mareth line is a formidable proposition for any attacker, and no commander is going to tackle it without the most thorough preparation.” Rommel again shook his head. His mind was made up. That afternoon he called off the whole attack at Kasserine, and prepared to return to Mareth. He had inflicted heavy losses on the Americans, of course. Of the 30,000 troops fighting under the U.S. Second Corps, 300 had been killed and over 4,000 taken prisoner.
Rommel had also destroyed over 200 enemy tanks, captured sixty and given the Americans a traumatic blow that they would not soon forget. General Eisenhower changed and even sent home top American commanders after Rommel’s foray. A new commander came to the U.S. Second Corps, a man closer to Rommel’s own stamp, General George S. Patton, Jr.
Eisenhower’s naval aide wrote in his official diary this candid admission on February 23: “The outstanding fact to me is that the proud and cocky Americans today stand humiliated by one of the greatest defeats in our history. This is particularly embarrassing to us with the British, who are courteous and understanding, but there is a definite ‘hang-headedness.’ ”