by Unknown
Rommel, for his part, had the poorest opinion of Keitel and Halder. In this he was not alone. Prince von Bismarck called Keitel an imbecile; von Hassell found him “stupid and narrow-minded, quite uninformed politically... downright ser- vile in his attitude towards the Party.” His grateful F�hrer described him as “a man with the mind of a movie doorman.” As for Halder, who appears to have been the sour and superior type of staff officer, he struck von Hassell as early as 1940 as “a weak man with shattered nerves... no more than a caddie to Hitler.” Beck, his brilliant predecessor as Chief of Staff, thought him merely a competent technician with no personality. His record in the conspiracy against Hitler shows him continually shivering on the brink but never willing to take the plunge. Jodl, who had such brains and character as there were in this Party, treated war as chess. His business was to produce plans, not to question orders. All three were identified with Hitler's ferocious policies in Russia and elsewhere. Keitel and Jodl were tried at Nuremberg and hanged. Halder, who is alleged by von Hassell to have signed the orders for the brutal treatment to be accorded to the Russians, was luckier, perhaps because he had already spent some years in a concentration camp, perhaps because he was so obviously a subordinate, perhaps because he was needed by the Allies as a prosecution witness against his former supe- riors and so used.
Rommel despised all three of them as “chairborne soldiers.” He despised them for then: subservience to the Party. When he came to know what had been done under their orders, he detested them for having dishonoured the German Wehrmacht. As will be seen, he was not afraid to protest against atrocities to Hitler himself. If, then, a man is to be judged by his enemies, these three were a good advertisement for Rommel. It was fortunate for the Allies that they were, at this time, so well entrenched at headquarters.
All these headaches and heartaches were, however, in the future when Rommel, in full favour with the F�hrer, a hero already to the German public and promotedGeneralleutnant the month before, was appointed to the command of the “German troops in Libya” on February 15th, 1941. The only hint of them was given by Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch at a farewell interview in Berlin (Rommel did not see Hitler). His mission, von Brauchitsch told him, was merely to assist the Italians, who would retain the supreme command of operations in North Africa, and prevent a British advance to Tripoli. The German troops were, in fact, a “blocking unit” and, when he had had a look round, he had better come back and report whether they were really needed. General Schmundt, Hitler's military A.D.C., was to go with him, doubtless to make an independent report to the F�hrer.
Schmundt proved a good friend to Rommel, though it was perhaps a pity that Rommel liked and trusted him as much as he did. Appointed at the suggestion of Keitel's brother to succeed Colonel Hossbach, an old Prussian officer, who resigned in disgust when Colonel-General von Fritsch was “framed” by Himmler on a false homosexuality charge, Schmundt was a youngish regular officer, very good-looking, very intelligent, very ambitious and very “smooth.” His friends had never known him to be a keen Nazi but, whether from conviction or from self-interest, he became one. That is to say, he became a devoted admirer of Hitler himself. To Rommel, of whom he seems to have been genuinely fond, he drew the distinction which Rommel had always instinctively drawn between the F�hrer and his followers. Of course Hitler was, unfortunately, surrounded by rascals, he would explain, most of them a legacy from the past. But what a great man! What an idealist! What a master to serve! Living in the closest personal contact with Hitler, and a witness, as he must have been, of many of his outbursts, can he have believed all this? It seems incredible. It was not incredible to Rommel, who was not in the innermost circle and was spared the worst of Hitler's displays of temper and hysteria until much later.
Thus, on their way to Africa and while Schmundt remained there, the two struck up a friendship and established a working partnership. Thereafter, when he wished to bring something to the personal notice of the F�hrer, Rommel wrote directly to Schmundt. Keitel and Halder suspected that they were being by-passed, though they could not prove it. The suspicion naturally did not make them any better disposed towards Rommel.
This relation with Schmundt explains why Rommel so long preserved his illusions about Hitler for, even from Rommel, Schmundt would never hear a word against the F�hrer. Whatever was wrong was the fault of the Goerings, the Himmlers, the Bormanns, the Keitels, the Jodls, the Halders. Yet only a few days before the attempt of July 20th, 1944, when Rommel was already in trouble with Hitler for his pessimism about the outcome of the war, Schmundt sent him a telegram saying, “Remember, you can always count on me.” Schmundt was in the room with Hitler when the bomb exploded and died about two months afterwards. Of his wounds? So it was said. Rommel was never quite sure.
Meanwhile Rommel, like many a junior officer and some senior officers who ought to know better, had defeated security, when he heard of his appointment, by writing to his wife to let her know where he was going. “Now I shall be able to do something for my rheumatism,” he wrote. Since Frau Rommel remembered that the doctor who had treated him for rheumatism during the campaign in France had said: “You need sunshine, General, you ought to be in Africa,” the inference was not difficult to draw. However, he was able come home for a few hours after his visit to Berlin. Then he and Schmundt set off for Rome, for Africa and the sunshine The faithful Aldinger followed with the kit.
Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox
CHAPTER 6
Desert Ups and Downs
I. ROMMEL V. WAVELL
Rommel was just over two years in North Africa. The graph of his fortunes (and of ours, in reverse) during that period is easy to follow. There is a sharp and spectacular rise for his first victory in April, 1941, followed by a small decline for his failure to capture Tobruk on May 1st. This is rather more than evened off by his defeat of General Wavell's minor offensives in mid-May and mid-June. Then comes a series of rapid ups-and-downs, like the recordings of a demented seismograph, at the end of November and beginning of December, ending in a long drop when he is squarely beaten by Generals Auchinleck and Ritchie and driven back to the borders of Cyrenaica. At the end of the year he is once again on the datum line. There follows another rapid rise when he counterattacks unexpectedly in January and February, 1942, and drives us in turn back to Gazala. On a graph and on the ground he is about two-thirds of the way to the high point he reached the previous April.
At the end of May, 1942, after an initial drop that lasted only a few days but might have been a headlong plunge to disaster, begins that most spectacular rise of all which, in a month, carries him over and past Tobruk, past the Egyptian frontier, past Mersa Matruh, Bagush and El Daba, to Alamein and the very gates of Alexandria. That is the peak. There General Auchinleck holds him and an almost imperceptible but ominous decline begins. General Montgomery's victories at Alam Halfa in August and El Alamein in early November turn it into a descent which proceeds unbroken until May 12th, 1943, when the survivors of the Afrika Korps lay down their arms in Tunisia. Rommel himself has flown off to Germany two months earlier, in a vain attempt to persuade Hitler to allow him at least to save the men.
The graph is easy to follow: the battles are not. Nor, I think, is there much point in attempting to describe them in detail again. Those who want to know where 4th Armoured Brigade was at first light on the morning of November 26th, 1942, can turn to the official historians or to the various divisional histories. Those who want to see the broad picture cannot do better than read or reread Alan Moorehead'sAfrican Trilogy , or the books of some of the other very able correspondents who accompanied the British forces. Writing under the stress of events, they caught the spirit of the desert war. Yet, since this is the story of Rommel of the Afrika Korps, I cannot altogether omit his battles in North Africa. The reader must be asked to travel what, for those who followed the campaign on the map at the time, will be familiar ground, the same old coast road, the same old desert tracks. It ma
y be a change to go part of the way in a German truck.
When I mentioned to Alan Moorehead that I thought of writing this book, he suggested that it might be useful to get into touch with a German war-artist named Wessels. Wessels was with Rommel in North Africa and Alan considered his water-colour drawings of the Western Desert the best he had ever seen. Unfortunately he had mislaid the address. Before he could find it, I had set off for Germany, to stay with the 10th Hussars at Iserlohn and look around from there. As soon as I arrived, the C.O. of the 10th, also an “old boy” of Campo P.G. 29, our prison-camp in Italy, said that I might, perhaps, like to meet a German war-artist named Wessels who was with Rommel in North Africa. If so, he lived in Iserlohn. I met Wessels the same afternoon and a very good artist he is, and a very agreeable one. When I told him what I had in mind, he asked if I knew that General von Esebeck, sometime commander of the 15th Panzer Division in the desert, and General von Ravenstein, commander of the 21st, both lived in Iserlohn, within five hundred yards of the house in which I was staying and within twenty yards of each other.
Apart from having served in two wars against them, I have never known many Germans. I had certainly never met a German general, except Rommel, and that professionally and for a few seconds. My prejudice against a class which is largely responsible for my having spent ten years of my life in a sterile and unremunerative occupation is at least as strong as most people's. Nevertheless, I must admit that I found both of them congenial.
General von Esebeck, a quiet, elderly man, living alone in a small bed-sitting-room on the top floor, with seventeenth and eighteenth century paintings of his ancestors round the walls, was a pathetic figure, I thought, a military Mr. Chips. Wounded in the face by a bomb splinter near Tobruk in 1941 and sent, on his recovery, to the Russian front, he was arrested on suspicion after July 2Oth, 1944, and thrown into a concentration camp. Lucky to be alive? Perhaps, if a general, frail and prematurely aged, with no pension and no possible career or interests outside the army, is lucky to be alive in Germany to-day.
General von Ravenstein, across the road, was a horse from the same sort of aristocratic stable but one of a very different colour and in very different condition. A lean, good-looking Guards officer, who seemed much younger than fifty-odd, if one had seen him, quietly dressed in his good blue suit and | well-polished shoes, a pearl pin in his tie, strolling into the Guards Club or the Cavalry Club in London, one would have placed him at once as a young and successful general. After two disastrous wars, he seemed physically and mentally quite fit enough to command in another. In both he did well. In June, 1918, eighteen months after Rommel, he was given the Pour le Merite for gallantry in action. Between the wars he retired and became, of all things, head of a news agency in Duisburg, until he was thrown out by the Nazis. Rejoining the army as a colonel in 1939, he commanded a panzer unit in Poland. Then, having fought in Bulgaria and Greece in March and April, 1941, he came out to the desert to command a panzer regiment of 21st Panzer Division. He took over the division before the Halfaya Pass-Sollum battle in June.
It was von Ravenstein who led Rommel's famous breakthrough on November 24th-25th, 1941. His career in the desert came to an abrupt end when, at first light on November 28th, he inadvertently drove into the middle of the New Zealand Division. “It was terrible,” he told me, “because I had on me the Chief of Staffs map with all our dispositions and had no time to destroy it. When I saw that there was no way out, I determined to call myself Colonel Schmidt and hoped that they would not notice my rank badges. But then I was taken up to General Freyberg. You know how we Germans mention our name when we are introduced? I clicked my heels and bowed and before I could stop myself I had blurted out, 'von Ravenstein, General'!”*
[* A liaison officer with 6th New Zealand Brigade who drove General von Ravenstein to Divisional H.Q., tells me that he had no doubt about his identity and realised they had caught a bigger fish than “Colonel Schmidt.”]
General von Ravenstein eventually reached Canada. On the way from Suez to Cape Town he organised an attempt, which might easily have been successful, to seize the ship. It was discovered at the last moment by the captain. As an ex-P.O.W., in charge for some time of escaping in a prison-camp, I gave him full marks for it. Though only repatriated in 1948, General von Ravenstein has no complaints. He could not have been better treated. After the war, he was allowed almost complete freedom. “No shortages there,” he said.
“I can still give you a good Havana cigar: I have a few boxes left.” Now, though he has to share it with two other families, he lives in comfort in his own house in Iserlohn. He has some good pieces of furniture and his ancestral portraits also hang on the walls. His wife, a charming Portuguese countess who speaks even better English and French than he does himself, is with him. He also has a job. He is once again head of his news agency in Duisburg. All things considered, General von Ravenstein has not fared too badly. Since he gave 4th Indian Division (and myself) a very uncomfortable time in Sidi Omar just before he was captured, I propose to send him a photograph we took, during his unsuccessful attack on us, of seven of his tanks in flames.
General Fritz Bayerlein, whom I met in more orthodox fashion through the good offices of the U.S. Historical Section at Frankfurt, is something else again. A stocky, tough little terrier of a man, full of energy and enthusiasm, he is still only fifty. In the first war he fought, from the age of sixteen, as a private soldier against the British. He took part in the German attacks round Kemmel in March, 1918, and in the decisive battles on the Somme and about Bapaume and Cambrai in the summer. After the war, he had at first no intention of soldiering. For lack of anything better to do, he rejoined the army in 1921. He was at the Staff College from 1932 to 1935, after which he was posted to panzer troops.
Probably no one on either side, except Rommel himself, saw more continuous active service in the Western Desert than Fritz Bayerlein. He came over to Africa from Guder- ian's Panzer Army in Russia in October, 1941, and left only in May, 1943, when he was wounded and flown out just before the end. Those nineteen months were months of almost incessant fighting. He was Chief Staff Officer to the Afrika Korps until May, 1942, when General Gausi was wounded and he became acting Chief of Staff to Rommel himself. (Rommel had come out as commander of the Afrika Korps only but was given command ofPanzer Gruppe Afrika , which included two Italian corps, in the summer of 1941.) This appointment he held until the end, except for five hectic weeks after the capture of General von Thoma at El Alamein, when he commanded the Afrika Korps during the retreat.
Obviously there could be no better authority on the North African campaigns. Yet, as he unfolded, in a hut in the U.S. Interrogation Centre at Ober-Ursel, the familiar map of the desert from Agedabia to Alamein, he told me that this was the first time that he had been asked about Africa and that I was the first British officer he had met who had served there. He was also an authority on Rommel. Not only had he lived with him all those months at close quarters; he had previously known him at the Infantry School at Dresden from 1930 to 1933- We spent a long day together, with a great many “Do you remember's?” I apologise for liking certain German generals. I certainly have no affection for them as a class. But at the end of it I liked General Bayerlein. From these three first and from others later I got a picture of the African campaigns as seen from the German side of the lines.
At the beginning of this book I mentioned that General Wavell or his staff made a miscalculation in a time and space problem when they assumed that Rommel would not be able to attack, in the spring of 1941, as early as he did. The error did not add to the popularity of G.H.Q. There is more excuse for our Intelligence Staff when we know that Rommel surprised not only them but also his superiors in Berlin. He attacked on March 31st. It was only on March 21st that he was told by the Army Command to prepare a plan for the reconquest of Cyrenaica and to submit it for consideration not later than April 20th. It was to be a prudent plan. In the face of substantial British forces, he was not t
o go beyond Agedabia until 15th Panzer Division arrived. Halder and his staff would doubtless have spent a week or two in examining it with critical and unfriendly eyes. They never had the chance.
Nine days before they were due to receive it, Rommel had already reconquered Cyrenaica, with the exception of Tobruk, and reached the Egyptian frontier. He had done much more than he would have been allowed to attempt had he waited for permission. Even his F�hrer was ignored. On April 3rd, Hitler telegraphed to him telling him to be careful and not to launch any large-scale attack without waiting for 15th Panzer Division. In particular he must not expose his flank by turning up to Benghazi. The last part of the order could safely be disregarded for Benghazi was evacuated the day the telegram was sent. As for 15th Panzer Division, it was already landing in Tripoli and could thus be said to have “arrived.”
“It is my belief,” writes a very capable officer who was serving with Intelligence in Cairo at the time, “that an ordinary military appreciation was made, taking into consideration the strength of both sides, time and space and all the usual factors. Academically speaking, it was a good appreciation as Rommel's attack should not have succeeded. Unfortunately for us, he gambled and won. By the book, he shouldn't have attacked so soon....” Colonel-General Halder would doubtless have agreed.
The same view is taken by Brigadier Williams, afterwards General Montgomery's chief Intelligence officer but then a troop leader in the King's Dragoon Guards, the “recce” (reconnaissance) regiment of and Armoured Division. “I think personally,” he says, “that Rommel began by edging up and found it easy to capture Agheila (that I remember well, because I was in the fort when it was captured and had to make a quick 'get-away'), and that, after that, a well-planned reconnaissance developed into a successful offensive.... Certainly Rommel should not have dared to attack us as soon as he did....”