Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

by Unknown

  “Rommel may not havebeen a great strategist,” said General Bayerlein, “but there is no doubt that he was the best man in the whole of the German Army for desert war.”

  It was a young man's war. Rommel was no longer a young man. Thanks to years of skiing and mountaineering he was, however, physically in his prime. “He had the strength of a horse,” said a young German paratroop officer, himself a skiing champion. “I never saw another man like him. No need for food, no need for drink, no need for sleep. He could wear out men twenty and thirty years younger. If anything, he wastoo hard, on himself and everyone else.”

  There was, indeed, a Spartan strain in Rommel which made him take pride in being impervious to discomfort and fatigue. Neither heat nor cold nor hard lying affected him. Even theghibli , as the Germans called thekhamseen , the blinding sandstorm which reduced all in the desert, Arabs and camels included, to a common misery, he professed to regard as an exaggerated annoyance. Piloting his own Storch, he insisted on taking off in one during his first desert battle. When he had nearly killed himself, coming in to land with visibilitynil , he admitted that it had been “difficult to see what the British were up to.” No doubt they were merely up to their eyebrows in driving sand.

  Like Napoleon, Rommel could snatch a few minutes' sleep, sitting up in his truck or with his head on a table, and wake completely refreshed. I asked G�nther, his batman, now a pastry-cook in Garmisch, whether he minded being disturbed when he was having a night in. “Not at all,” said the stolid Giinther, who was with him for four years. “He always seemed quite pleased and was wide-awake in a second. He slept with one eye open: if a message came, he usually woke before I called him” G�nther added that he was a very even-tempered man who never took it out on his batman and was easy to satisfy. (His generals saw a different side of him.)

  Food, Rommel had never cared much about. He was quite content to set off for a day in the desert with a small packet of sandwiches or a tin of sardines and a piece of bread. Once he invited an Italian general to lunch with him in the open.

  “It was rather awkward,” he remarked afterwards: “I had only three slices of bread and they were all stale. Never mind, they eat too much.” Realising that the more one drinks in the desert the thirstier one becomes, he carried only a small flask of cold tea and lemon and often brought it back untouched. In the evening he would dine alone in his caravan with his old friend Aldinger. He insisted on being given the same rations as the troops.

  They were not very good. “One of the reasons we had so much sickness, especially jaundice,” said von Esebeck, the war correspondent, cousin of the general, “was that our rations were too heavy for the desert. Our black bread in a carton was handy but how we used to long to capture one of your field bakeries and eat fresh, white bread! And your jam! For the first four months we got no fresh fruit or vegetables at all. We lived all the time on Italian tinned meat. The tins had a big 'A.M.' on them: the troops used to call it 'asinus Mussolini.' ”

  To a young officer of the Afrika Korps who ventured to say that, while he had no complaints, the food was not too appetising, Rommel replied genially: “Do you imagine that it tastes any better to me?” In fact he never noticed how it tasted. His only recorded taste, a negative one, was that he disliked tea and coffee made with brackish water. (He cannot have enjoyed his visit to Girabub, where the water has the exact consistency of Epsom salts. Of Girabub, they used to say: “Here Mr. Eno would have starved to death and Mr. Bromo made a fortune.”)

  After the evening meal, which lasted twenty minutes at the most and at which he drank his one glass of wine, Rommel would turn on the wireless. He listened only to the news. Then he would write his daily letter to his wife. In action, when he had no time to write, it was G�nther's duty to write for him. He also carried on a continuous correspondence in his own hand with survivors of his first-war battalion. No letter from one of them ever went unanswered. Official papers took up the rest of the evening until bedtime. If he read at all, it was a newspaper or a book on a military subject. He had some interest in the history of North Africa and was mildly curious about the ruins of Cirene. But the story that he had kept up his classics and was a keen archaeologist who spent his scanty leisure in digging for Roman remains was a production of the propagandists. Von Esebeck was responsible for it. “Some of us had been scratching about and had turned up some bits of Roman pottery,” he told me. “We were looking at them when Rommel came along. What he actually said, when we showed them to him, was: 'What the hell do you want with all that junk?' But you can't tell that from the photograph!”

  In the morning, Rommel was up and about by six. A stickler for turn-out on a parade, he let the Afrika Korps dress as they pleased in the desert. Usually they followed the Australian fashion and wore shoes, shorts and their peaked caps. He himself was always shaved and in uniform. Sometimes he wore shorts but more often breeches and boots and invariably a jacket. His tropical helmet he threw away, like the rest of us, soon after his arrival: he never put on a tin hat. His only eccentricity, perhaps borrowed from the British, was a check scarf round his neck in winter. Under it, according to the German custom, he wore his Iron Cross. He was thus considerably more dressy than our own commanders who, in their short, zip-fastened, camel-hair coats and corduroy slacks, could only be distinguished by their red hats and rank badges -when they wore them. (General Messervy, temporarily captured when commanding 7th Armoured Division, succeeded in passing as a private soldier. “A bit old for this, aren't you?” asked a German officer. “Much too old,” agreed General Messervy: “Reservist: they had no right to call me up.”)

  By 6:30 A.M. Rommel had started on his daily round of his positions. Sometimes he went by air, flying the aircraft himself. Though he had no ticket, he was a confident pilot and an excellent navigator. In battle, he generally used “Mammut,” his British armoured command truck. Often he drove himself about in a Volkswagen, finding his way unerringly across the desert from the first. No post was too isolated for him to turn up at it. When he descended on the back areas, it was an unlucky senior officer whom he caught in bed after seven.

  “You damned lazy fox,” he said to one unfortunate colonel who came out to meet him in his pyjamas. “I suppose you were waiting for me to bring you your breakfast?” To Aldinger he remarked afterwards: “It's a great thing to be a Field-Marshal and still remember how to talk to them like a sergeant-major.”

  His visits to the forward area were no mere perfunctory inspections. With his keen eye for country and his great mastery of minor tactics, he missed nothing-a machine-gun badly sited, transport in the wrongwadi , mines too obviously laid, an uncamouflaged O.P. If he were not satisfied with a position, he would drive out alone a mile or so into the desert, to look at it with the enemy's eyes. Not infrequently he drew fire. Then he would return to a flank, so as not to give the position away. Crawling towards the fort at Acroma, he was fired on when he was half-way through the minefield. “That comes of being in a hurry,” he said. “I should have moved more slowly.” His attention to their own small problems, his fertility of tactical ideas, his skill in desert navigation, these impressed the young officer and the young soldier. He was one of themselves, a “front-line type.”

  Moreover, he could talk to them, for he had a great affection for youth. “He was always gay when he was speaking to young men,” said von Esebeck. “He had a smile and a joke for everyone who seemed to be doing his job. There was nothing he liked better than to talk with a man from his own part of the country in the Swabian dialect. He had a very warm heart,” added von Esebeck reflectively, “and more charm than any one I have ever known.” This last, from a well-read and sophisticated man, who had seen much more of the world and of “society” than Rommel, was a surprise. In battle, Rommel was at his best. He was a natural leader and he relied, both instinctively and deliberately, upon personal leadership. As was remarked at the time, he was the first to identify desert war with war at sea, the first to understand t
hat “no admiral ever won a naval battle from a shore base.”

  He had an exceptionally quick brain and an exceptionally quick eye for a military situation. But the reason that he was able to catch so many fleeting opportunities, the secret of his early successes, was that he did not have to wait for information to be filtered back to him through the usual channels of command. He was up to see for himself, in his aircraft, his tank, his armoured car, his Volkswagen or on foot. It was thus that he was able, without any appreciable interval for planning, to turn his reconnaissances in April, 1941, and January, 1942, into victorious offensives. It was thus that he was able to emerge from defeat and almost certain disaster at the end of May, 1942, and to swing the issue of the battle as soon as his supplies were assured. So far as one man can in modern war, he contrived to “ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.”

  He has been criticised, by Captain Liddell Hart amongst others, for “dashing about the battlefield” and being too often out of touch with his headquarters. There is some truth in that. Yet Captain Liddell Hart himself admits that he had “a wonderful knack of appearing at some vital spot and giving a decisive impetus to the action at a crucial moment.” Major-General Fuller has fewer doubts. “In rapidity of decision and velocity of movement,” he writes, “the Germans completely outclassed their enemy and mainly because Rommel, instead of delegating his command to his subordinates, normally took personal command of his armour... It was not that the British Generals were less able than the German. It was that their education was out of date. It was built on the trench warfare of 1914-1918 and not on the armoured warfare they were called upon to direct.” Rommel was twice defeated when General Auchinleck took over in the forward area and gave his orders on the spot. He escaped defeat in June, 1942, because decisions and communications on our side were too slow.

  No one in the desert doubted that personal command paid. But it would be a mistake to picture Rommel as a modern Prince Rupert, always waving his hat and leading his tanks in headlong charges against the enemy. On the contrary, he was a canny fighter who, more often than our own commanders, refused action except on his own terms. His main contribution to tank tactics was, indeed, his use of a screen of self-propelled anti-tank guns. Behind it, his panzers advanced; behind it, they would withdraw or refuel; through it, they would be launched to the attack, when his guns had taken toll of our armour. Repeatedly our tanks were entrapped and led on to the guns in their attempts to close. Repeatedly, with his own armour concentrated, he caught ours dispersed. He was artful in other ways. His first order on landing in Tripoli was for the construction of dummy tanks. He constantly used his transport to create dust and suggest the presence of his panzer divisions. He started by dragging tarpaulins behind trucks but soon got the idea of fitting propellers behind them. The streams of coloured flares which lit the desert at night were often for our benefit. Captured trucks and carriers were freely employed, not only because the Germans were short of transport but also to create confusion during an advance.

  Nor was his system of command so haphazard and slipshod as has been supposed. He did not merely rush about the battlefield giving impromptu orders to individuals or minor formations. Had he done so, he could never have controlled forces of 100,000 men with the success he did. His orders were often given verbally. In the heat of battle, when he thought that the enemy would not have time to profit if they picked them up, he sometimes gave them over the air in clear. But Aldinger assures me that a shorthand note was always taken and that they were confirmed in writing, whenever time allowed. In any case they were short and unequivocal. Rommel never had any doubt about what he wanted and left none in the minds of his subordinates.

  Inevitably, he took great personal risks in battle. Again and again he was close to death or capture. Once both his driver and his spare driver were killed alongside him and he had to drive the truck out himself. Rommel was an exceptionally brave man and completely imperturbable under fire but our senior commanders would have done the same had it been the custom. No one could have been braver, on a lower level, than Generals Freyberg, or “Jock” Campbell or “Strafer” Gott. Rommel, like Napoleon and Wellington, took risks because he had to, if he were to direct the battle in person. They were merely occupational hazards. He was the more easily able to accept them because he was comfortably convinced that it was impossible for him to be killed in action.

  So were his subordinates. They, however, attributed his immunity to his “Fingerspitzengef�hl,” that innate sense of what the enemy was about to do. “At noon on November 25th,” said General Bayerlein, “we were at the headquarters of the Afrika Korps at Gasr-el-Abid. Suddenly Rommel turned to me and said, 'Bayerlein, I would advise you to get out of this: I don't like it.' An hour later the headquarters were unexpectedly attacked and overrun. The same afternoon we were standing together when he said, 'Let's move a couple of hundred yards to a flank: I think we are going to get shelled here.' One bit of desert was just the same as another. But five minutes after we had moved the shells were falling exactly where we had been standing. Everyone you meet who fought with Rommel in either war will tell you similar stories.” Everyone did.

  It is easy, in considering, academically, Rommel's method of command, to forget its main purpose and its main effect-the encouragement in his troops of a will to win. On that hangs, in the last analysis, the issue of all battles. Battles may, indeed, be lost by bad generalship or bad staff-work. But no generalship, however good, and still less staff-work, can out-weigh lack of morale in the fighting man. “A la guerre les trois quarts sont des affaires morales,” said Napoleon, and oth- ers have put it higher. Rommel's continual prowling about their forward positions may have been an irritation to his subordinate commanders. It is possible that he could sometimes have been better employed in studying maps and messages at his headquarters than in dashing into the dust and confusion of a desert “dog-fight.” That it was his personal inspiration and the physical sight of that stocky, confident figure in action which made the Afrika Korps what it was is certain.

  At the time we believed that the Afrika Korps was acorps d'elite , hand-picked from volunteers and specially toughened and trained for desert warfare. It was not so. The men were not volunteers. “Otherwise the whole of the German Army would have volunteered,” said General von Ravenstein. Nor were they individually selected. They were recruited from depots and units in the usual way and it is not to be supposed that German commanding officers were always more scrupulous than our own in sending their best for extra-regimental duty. There was no special training, except that some of the officers were privileged to be attached to the Italians for instruction. Otherwise the Afrika Korps was just the run-of-the-mill of the Wehrmacht. The young German soldier was strong, willing and well-trained in the use of his weapons. He was disciplined, patriotic and brave. Physically he was not particularly well-suited to the desert. The very young and the very blond could not stand the heat; nor could the veterans of the first war. On the whole, the Germans did not adapt themselves to desert conditions as easily as did the Australians, the New Zealanders, the South Africans, the Indians or the British. Few of them, either officers or men, had ever been out of Europe. They did not understand Africa. For example, it was hard to make them realise that all water was not fit to drink. “There was no proper water purification system,” said von Esebeck, “and we suffered much from dysentery as well as from jaundice. Our doctors did not know nearly as much as yours about keeping troops fit in a tropical climate. German field hospitals were inferior to yours and there was, at first, no plasma for blood transfusions. It took us a long time to learn to look after ourselves in the desert.”

  On the credit side, the Afrika Korps had better weapons, though less transport, and knew better how to use them. It had better prospects of leave. It was better supplied with newspapers, such as its ownOase. It was homogeneous, whereas the Eighth Army was always a very mixed bag. It arrived in Africa in good heart. All this admitted, it was Rommel
who, almost at once, by personal influence and example, by force of character, by taking more risks than his troops, converted it into that tough, truculent, resilient fighting force we knew. Rommelwas the Afrika Korps, to his own men as well as to his enemy. It was he who made them bold, self-confident and even arrogant in battle. It was he who taught them to pull the last ounce out of themselves and never to admit that they were beaten. It was because they were the Afrika Korps that, even when they were taken prisoner, they marched down to the docks at Suez with their heads high, still whistling “We march against England to-day.” In Germany in 1949 they still carry their palm-tree brassard in their pocket-books. If you ask them whether they were in North Africa they take pride in answering: “Yes, I was in the Afrika Korps: I fought with Rommel.” Good-luck to them, for they fought well and, as the Germans say, the next best thing to a good friend is a good enemy. It is a pity they were not fighting in a better cause.

  Idolised by the Afrika Korps, Rommel was revered some way this side of idolatry by his generals. From all their accounts, he was a hard and difficult man to deal with. In battle he put out the most sensitive antennae to the reactions of the enemy: he was not so sensitive to the feelings of his senior officers. He had a rough tongue and could be brutal. He was impatient. He would not see what he did not want to see. He would not have his orders questioned. He could not bear to be told that anything was impossible. He had a bad habit of going over the heads of commanders and giving orders direct to subordinates. A still worse one was that of dragging his Chief of Staff with him wherever he went and leaving no one at headquarters with authority to make a decision. In action he was inclined to occupy himself with details, such as the capture of General Cunningham, which did not strictly concern a supreme commander. Out of the line he was unso- ciable. “Of course he had not had quite the same early advantages as most German Field-Marshals,” explained, deprecatingly, one of his generals, around whom one could still detect a lingering aura of cavalry messes and country estates, of full-dress uniforms and balls and the visits of minor royalty.