by David Irving
Eisenhower now had an Ultra intercept of a German radio report that the American troops had shown poor fighting quality. He wished he could show it to every one of his officers. “Some method of dissociating its source from the fact that it is a breakdown of the Axis cipher might be employed,” noted the aide. “The message chagrins any American . . .”
Rommel’s own career in Africa was almost over, however.
A week earlier the Italians had recommended that he leave Africa by February 22. On that date a new army group headquarters was due to be set up, to coordinate the fighting of the two panzer armies in Tunisia.
Arnim was supposed to become the headquarters’ first commander, as soon as Rommel left African soil. In Rudolf Schmundt’s war diary as chief of German army personnel there is this entry: “Despite all their own shortcomings, the Italians have remained overbearing and highly sensitive. For political reasons, the Führer has decided that their request [for Rommel’s departure] will have to be granted.”
However, Rommel still gave no sign of stepping down. During Kesselring’s visit he talked only of the counterattack on Montgomery that he proposed to mount at Mareth.
So Kesselring, somewhat daunted, resorted to a surprising solution. He confidentially asked Rommel if he would accept the army group command himself. Rommel feigned displeasure.
“Considering the attitude of the Italian High Command and the fact that Arnim has already been nominated for the job,” he said to Kesselring, “I have no real desire to be the army group commander.”
Afterward, his aide Alfred Berndt escorted Kesselring back to Kasserine village, and on the way, the Luftwaffe field marshal inquired about Rommel’s health. Berndt quoted Horster’s words: “There are no clinical objections to Rommel’s remaining in Tunisia for about another month, but then he must begin his cure without fail. It should take about eight weeks.”
Kesselring commented: “I think we shall be doing the field marshal a service if we give him the overall command. We can decide later whether he ought to return to Africa after his treatment is over.”
The next day Rommel again sat in his operations truck, mutely listening to the thunderous explosions echoing from the Kasserine Pass a mile away. Members of his staff were playing poker under a nearby railroad bridge. To a battle commander, the dull, deliberate thump of demolitions is a depressing sound, quite different from the exhilarating bark of artillery. Demolitions accompany retreats. At three P.M. the skies cleared, and the enemy’s strategic bombers arrived— over 100, escorted by fighters. When Rommel finally drove off to his new headquarters back at Sbeitla an hour later, a formation of eighteen bombers rolled out its “bomb carpet” only 100 yards ahead of his truck convoy, and he had to hit the dirt.
Awaiting him at Sbeitla was the formal signal from Rome appointing him commander of “Army Group Africa.” He viewed his new command with mixed feelings.
Farewell Africa
ROMMEL TOOK His new job as army group commander very seriously. He canceled the villa on Semmering mountain, and his staff resigned themselves to not seeing Germany for many more weeks. He alone failed to realize that the whole promotion was something of a charade. Without his knowledge, his aide Captain Berndt wrote to Lucie on February 26 to warn her of her husband’s complex psychological state. Berndt claimed much of the credit for engineering Rommel’s promotion, hoping it would serve as a kind of unorthodox medication. “It was important new proof that the Führer and Duce still trust him,” wrote Berndt. “I fixed it to strengthen his belief that—even after our long retreat—people still have absolute faith in him. He himself had begun to believe the opposite.”
To Rommel’s fury, Kesselring, Arnim and the Italian High Command at first ignored his new authority and dignities. Arnim did not discuss with him his own plan for an offensive toward Béja, code-named “Ochsenkopf” [Blockhead] . Rome dealt directly with Arnim and Messe. So did Kesselring. And when Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Hitler’s intelligence chief, flew down to Tunisia on the twenty-seventh, he made no attempt to visit Rommel. Canaris, of course, was leading a double life—he had been privately plotting Hitler’s downfall for several years—and to the anti-Hitler establishment Rommel still counted as a “Nazi,” as Hitler’s favorite field marshal.
In British government files are the pages of Canaris’s diary covering his visit. “Driving into downtown Tunis we pass long columns of American prisoners. They look exhausted and in low spirits, but otherwise well-fed football player types.” Arnim sketched a grave picture. “Our current run of local victories mustn’t be allowed to distract us,” he told Canaris, “from the huge difficulties caused by the supply problem. At present we’re getting only a fraction of the supplies we need—25,000 tons a month instead of 80,000. Gasoline can’t be brought over except by air and in jerrycans, as the risk to tankers is too great. With a supply situation like ours you can work out with pencil and paper just when the end will come.”
Arnim also said: “The command setup is completely obscure even now. Nobody knows who’s really in command here in Tunisia. Rommel, who’s on the point of going home but is arranging for an attack of his own with two divisions down south first? He’s now the army group commander, but he has no staff as such. Or Kesselring, who also interferes in decisions with his army operations officer, Colonel Westphal, from Frascati, outside Rome? Nobody knows!”
That same day Rommel had good cause to telephone Kesselring in a rage about the confused command structure. Westphal had arrived from Rome with an urgent request. Rommel, begged Westphal, should leave the Tenth and Twenty-first Panzer divisions holding the captured passes on the Eastern Dorsale for a few more days—until after Arnim’s new attack “toward Béja” had begun. This was the first Rommel had heard of such an attack—Arnim’s Operation Blockhead—and he rightly exclaimed: “If there was to be such an attack, it ought to have been sprung on the same day as we attacked toward Le Kef.” Furious, he sent for Arnim—now his subordinate. But he learned that Arnim had “been summoned” to Rome that morning. Rommel was speechless with annoyance that one of his generals should be summoned behind his back to Rome, and also that he should go. He decided to spike Arnim’s plan, just as Arnim had spiked his. He telephoned the Tenth Panzer Division, learned that it had already begun the withdrawal Arnim did not want to happen, and confirmed that the withdrawal should continue.
Rommel predicted that Arnim’s Blockhead assault was too weak to succeed, and by March 3 he smugly told his staff that he had been proved right. “They committed their tanks in a narrow, marshy valley in the north instead of the open terrain farther south,” he pointed out. “The second battalion of the Seventh Panzer Regiment has been wiped out, and the Heavy Tank Battalion 501 lost nine of its Tigers.” What was more serious for Rommel, however, was that Blockhead had involved a two-day delay to his own attack on Montgomery at Mareth.
Rommel’s heart, nerves and rheumatism were again giving him hell, but he was determined to square accounts with Montgomery before leaving Africa. Amid idyllic surroundings he pondered and planned, lay awake at night racking his brains, studied current charts and air photos, measured distances and scribbled calculations. All around the fields were rich with olive groves and corn. “What a colony this would make for us Germans!” he wrote. And a few days later: “The world could be so beautiful for all mankind. There is so much opportunity for contentment and happiness. There’s so much that is waiting to be done, especially here in Africa with its wide-open spaces.”
His plan had been to spring a savage attack on Montgomery on March 4, before the general himself was ready to attack. “We’ve got to strike fast,” he told his commanders. “We can’t limit ourselves to a straight defensive operation. We’ve got to destroy the enemy’s preparations for a general assault. . . . Our first objective will be Medenine.” He knew it would not be an easy battle. Montgomery’s troops, largely concentrating at Medenine—an important junction of roads and desert tracks—were seasoned desert warriors; and the
geography of Rommel’s own Mareth line left little scope for a surprise.
On February 28 all the German and Italian generals concerned were called to a battle-planning session at Wadi Akarit. The field marshal had for the first time decided against throwing a standard “right hook” around his own line and the enemy’s lines. What he was proposing was a pincer attack, with two divisions (the Tenth and Twenty-first Panzer) striking from the north, near the coast, and one and a half divisions (Fifteenth Panzer and part of the 164th Light) working through the mountains to attack Medenine from the south. An attack coming from the north was the last thing Montgomery would expect, argued Rommel.
His plan caused an outcry at the conference. Buelowius pointed out that they had laid thousands of mines in the north. “We’ve booby-trapped them to prevent their removal. If we blow them up, that will give the enemy advance warning that we’re coming.”
Messe’s counterproposal relied entirely on crossing the Matmata mountain ridge. Rommel disapproved of it, since enemy aircraft could easily block the narrow roads by setting gasoline and ammunition trucks on fire. “A pincer attack is more likely to succeed,” he sensibly recommended. “You must throw in all you’ve got—every tank, every truck, every gun.”
He asked Messe where Montgomery was siting his guns. The Italian general replied that air photos showed most of them between Medenine and the coast, which seemed another argument against adopting Rommel’s plan.
Still Rommel did not give up. He pointed out, “We had a bellyful of fighting the British tanks at long range at El Alamein. But experience here in Tunisia has shown that our tanks are far superior to both the British and the Americans at close range. So our tanks need difficult terrain for their advance.” The point was not taken. After five hours, no agreement was reached and Rommel left it to Messe to devise a battle plan himself. Messe adhered to the simple right-hook strategy. Rommel washed his hands of it.
By the time that Operation “Capri”—as it was called—belatedly began, there were disturbing signs that Montgomery had begun switching guns and men from the coast to the southern sector selected by Messe for the breakthrough. Rommel delivered a pep talk to the German commanders on March 5, the eve of Capri, then drove off at two P.M. along the spectacular and winding mountain roads to Hill 713, the vantage point from which he proposed to watch the battle at a range of fifteen or twenty miles.
Montgomery had in fact been given clear advance notice by the Ultra code breakers of both the direction and the precise timing of the attack. “I made up my mind,” he later airily claimed in his memoirs, “that Rommel’s attack would be made in a certain way and I planned to receive it on ground of my own choosing.” But it was not Rommel’s attack, and it failed just as he had anticipated.
For the first hours of Capri, the Battle of Medenine, Rommel saw little of the action from atop Hill 713, since the entire battlefield was blanketed by mist. “At six A.M. precisely,” his diary says, “our artillery bombardment begins. The Nebelwerfer rocket launchers open up from the Ninetieth Light’s sector. In that predawn twilight, the dazzling flashes of the artillery, seen through the thickening mist, present a battle picture the like of which one seldom sees. The Tenth Panzer Division has moved up through the Hallouf valley, but we cannot see its movements either from Hill 713. By eight A.M. it has cleared enough for us to see the Twenty-first Panzer’s movements clearly.”
Then the massacre began. Followed by infantry in trucks, the three panzer divisions advanced across the broad, flat plain until they reached a ridge about eight miles from Medenine. Here they ran into the murderous fire of Montgomery’s thoughtfully sited antitank gun screen. Montgomery wrote these words: “Rommel attacked me at dawn. It was very foolish of him. I have 500 six-pounder antitank guns dug in on the ground; I have 400 tanks and I have good infantry holding strong pivots, and a great weight of artillery. It is an absolute gift, and the man must be mad.” At noon, when Rommel saw General Hans Cramer—who had taken command of the Afrika Korps only the day before—Cramer had to report that his tanks were at a standstill. “The enemy was obviously expecting this attack,” Cramer announced. “The ground has been heavily mined, and a defensive gun screen set up facing southwest.”
Enemy prisoners and documents captured by a reconnaissance battalion confirmed that every last detail of Capri was known in advance to Montgomery. It seemed to Rommel that high Italian officers had betrayed the operation, but in truth it was the usual cunning British cover story for Ultra.
At five P.M. Rommel called off the attack. Altogether he had lost fifty of his 145 tanks, without having effectively delayed Montgomery’s own offensive planning by one day. “A pincer attack would have been much more successful,” he lamented. “This operation was pointless from the moment it turned out that we had not taken the enemy by surprise.”
That evening, it still seemed that General Arnim would have a long wait before he would step into Rommel’s shoes as army group commander. But late on March 6, a signal had come from Kesselring, and it was the last straw: “Chief of Wehrmacht operations staff [Alfred Jodl] states that Führer has disapproved your assessment of [Tunis] situation.”
The assessment was a graphic balance sheet he had sent up to Hitler after long talks with Arnim and his experts. Arnim had forecast to him: “If supplies don’t reach us, it will all be over here in Tunisia by July 1.” All told, Rommel’s army group now numbered 346,000 Germans and Italians, of whom only 120,000 were combat troops. To keep them fighting, an absolute minimum of 69,000 tons of supplies had to arrive each month; to allow stockpiling for future operations, Arnim thought twice that tonnage would be necessary. But in January, despite truly heroic efforts by the Italian merchant marine—who lost twenty-two out of fifty-one supply ships—only 46,000 tons had arrived, and in February about the same.
The meat of Rommel’s unashamed proposal to the High Command was this: he should be authorized to retreat yet again, abandoning the Mareth line before Montgomery could even begin his offensive, and withdraw Messe’s 200,000 men to the much more easily defended short line running inland from Enfidaville. The two armies—First Italian and Fifth Panzer—would then have to defend a total perimeter of only 100 miles. Rommel admitted that this would mean abandoning all but a small area around the city of Tunis itself, and losing valuable airfields too. (Kesselring angrily warned in an appendix to Rommel’s report that any such further retreat would give the enemy so many airfields that all supply operations into Tunis and Bizerta would become quite impossible. This was undoubtedly correct.) Rommel asked for a “swift decision,” since Montgomery would probably attack with the next full moon. Meanwhile he gave the go-ahead for construction work to begin on the new Enfidaville line.
Jodl, the Wehrmacht chief, read out Rommel’s letter to Hitler late on March 4. There is a shorthand record of their conversation. Hitler naturally recalled all the fine promises that Rommel had been uttering ever since November 1942, about the advantages of reaching Tunisia. “This is the complete opposite of everything he has been telling us earlier,” he raged. “It’s quite out of the question for him to retreat to there.”
“I’ll have a reply drafted at once,” said Jodl.
Rommel, still on Hill 713, read the reply early on March 7. He was stunned and dismayed by Hitler’s rejection. “Field Marshal Rommel’s assessment of the situation,” Hitler was quoted as having said, “differs fundamentally from his assessment at the time he was still east of Tripoli, when he regarded all possible crises as being totally abolished if only he could withdraw to the present Mareth line. To withdraw both armies into one cramped bridgehead around Tunis and Bizerta would spell the beginning of the end.” The solution that he offered—as stated by Jodl—was that the two panzer armies keep throwing short, sharp punches at the enemy, to keep them off balance. Supplies for Tunisia were going to be “doubled, and later tripled,” Hitler assured him. But he did not disclose how.
Suddenly—very suddenly—Rommel felt too sick to go on.
He evidently threw away Jodl’s reply, because—like many other documents that Rommel found distasteful—it is missing from his files. He abruptly climbed into his car and drove down Hill 713. “During the drive back to headquarters,” the Rommel diary relates in a significant passage, “C in C decides to begin his health cure right now—at once.” He took leave of his generals that afternoon: Arnim could not come immediately, as he was once again conferring with Kesselring (behind Rommel’s back) in Rome; he arrived at ten A.M. the next day. “C in C makes emotional farewell,” wrote Armbruster. “The whole thing stinks.”
Arnim begged Rommel to use his influence to save their two panzer armies. “We can’t afford a second Stalingrad. There’s still time for the Italian navy to get us out of here.” Rommel assured him, “I’ll try my hardest.” He raised his field marshal’s baton in salute, and promised, “If the worst comes to the worst, I shall return.” General Arnim believed him.
In fact, he was leaving forever. His personal staff, chauffeurs and cars were already on their way to Semmering mountain, with the typewriters and papers that he would need to write up his campaigns. Lucie would be joining him there. At 7:50 A.M. the next day, March 9,1943, Rommel climbed aboard a plane at Sfax, with Captain Berndt and Professor Horster, bound for Rome. He was never to set foot in Africa again.
AT FIVE PAST noon he was ushered in to see Benito Mussolini. He had always admired the Fascist dictator, while despising his cronies, whom he considered corrupt and inefficient. The Rommel diary shows that the meeting passed in harmony. In the papers of General Vittorio Ambrosio, new chief of the High Command, there is an Italian text of their twenty-five-minute audience. Mussolini asked in his clear, unhurried German about the failure of Operation Capri: