Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

by Unknown

  At the end of July, General Auchinleck had correctly judged that Rommel must attack before the end of August. He added, in his appreciation, that he would “hardly be strong enough to attempt the conquest of the Delta except as a gamble and under very strong air cover,” since only in armour was he likely to have any superiority. In fact Rommel fought the battle of Alam-el-Halfa, which began on August 31st, under many disadvantages, besides that of having to attack an enemy in prepared defensive positions. Though he was slightly superior in numbers, six of his divisions were Italian. These had to be stiffened with his only German reinforcements, 164th Infantry Division and the Ramcke Parachute Brigade of four battalions. In guns and armour he had no superiority at all. The R.A.F. held complete command of the air.

  The nature of the Alamein position was such that it was almost impossible to achieve surprise or to profit by skill in manoeuvre. Lastly, he was himself so ill with an infection of the nose and a swollen liver, probably the result of neglected jaundice, that he could not get out of his truck. For one who relied much more on his personal observation and judgment during the progress of a battle than on a preconceived plan, this was perhaps the greatest handicap of all.

  Rommel attempted to achieve a decision in the only way in which it could have been achieved, by feinting in the north, making a holding attack in the centre and staging his main effort in the south. His intention was to penetrate above the Qattara Depression and then strike north to the sea. By this means he hoped to turn the whole position, just as he had turned the Gazala Line three months before. Had he succeeded the Eighth Army would have been trapped and its communications cut.

  Unfortunately for Rommel, this was precisely what General Alexander and General Montgomery, and General Auchinleck and Major-General Dorman-Smith before them, had deduced that he would do. General Montgomery had also seen, immediately on his arrival in the desert, that the answer was to refuse his left flank, fortify the Alam-el-Halfa Ridge, which Rommel dare not by-pass, and lead his armour on to its defences. He had, therefore, called up the whole of 44th Division, entrenched it on the ridge and dug in artillery and tanks to support it. He had also cunningly allowed a “going” map to be captured which showed good going south of Alam-el-Halfa where in fact there was very soft sand.

  To do Rommel justice, hisFingerspitzengef�hl came into play at once, even when he was lying helpless in his truck. “He wanted to break off the battle the first morning,” said Bayerlein, “as soon as it was obvious that we had not achieved a surprise. It was I who persuaded him to let me continue.” (Bayerlein was then temporarily commanding the Afrika Korps, General Nehring having been wounded on the night of August 31st in an air attack.) “The strength of the defences of the Alam-el-Halfa Ridge came as a complete surprise to me,” added General Bayerlein. “I made sure I could take it and went on attacking it much too long.”

  When I showed him the passage in Alan Moorehead's biography in which he describes how General Montgomery put his finger on Alam-el-Halfa almost as soon as he looked at the map, Bayerlein shook his head ruefully. “Excellent, excellent,” he murmured, with the respect of one professional for another. “That was very good generalship indeed.” *

  [* The story seems to have been somewhat over-dramatised. The Alam-el-Halfa position had already been mined and prepared, to some extent, for defence before General Montgomery arrived. He developed an existing plan.]

  Bayerlein gave the rest of the credit to the R.A.F. “We were very heavily attacked every hour of the day and night,” he said, “and had very heavy losses, more than from any other cause. Your air superiority was most important, perhaps decisive.” He added a rude remark or two about Kesselring, whose promises had apparently included command of the air by the Luftwaffe.

  His gamble having failed, on September 3rd Rommel began to withdraw. Wisely, General Montgomery did not at- tempt to follow him up. He could afford to wait.

  Three weeks later, for the first time in his life except when he was wounded, Rommel was compelled to report sick and fly to Germany for treatment. Before going into hospital at Semmering, he had an interview with Hitler at his headquarters. He told the F�hrer that Panzer Group Afrika was standing in front of the door of Alexandria but that it was impossible to push it open unless they were reinforced and the supply position improved. Above all, they could do nothing without petrol. (Ciano notes in his diary on September 2nd that “three of our oil-tankers have been sunk in two days,” on September 3rd that “the sinking of our ships continues; tonight there have been two,” and on September 4th that “two more ships have been sunk to-night.”)

  Rommel received another assurance, this time from the highest authority. “Don't worry,” said Hitler, “I mean to give Africa all the support needed. Never fear, we are going to get Alexandria all right.” He then volunteered a story that very small shallow-draught vessels, like landing-craft, were already in mass production, especially for Africa, and that some two hundred of them would be available almost immediately.

  They were to be armed with two 88 mm. guns each and would be much more difficult targets than tankers. They would be able to slip over at night and by means of them the petrol problem would be solved. No reference to these craft is to be found in the minutes of the F�hrer Conferences on Naval Affairs for 1942, but Hitler may have referred to light craft called, after their inventor,Siebelfaehren. These were quite unsuited for work in a seaway, such of them as existed were mostly in dock for repairs and there was no question of their being in mass production. Hitler, as usual, was letting his imagination run away with him.

  This was not all. After the interview, he took Rommel out and showed him the prototype of the Tiger tank and of theNebel Werfer , the formidable multiple mortar which we encountered later in Italy. These were also in mass production and Africa was first priority for deliveries. In fact, said Hitler, quantities ofNebel Werfer would be sent over at once by air, all available air-transport being used for the purpose. Incidentally, there was a new secret weapon of such appalling power that the blast “would throw a man off his horse at a distance of over two miles.”

  Rommel laughed about this last embellishment. Yet Hitler may not have been talking so wildly. In the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico a building four miles from the blast centre was moved two feet off its concrete foundation. For the rest, Rommel, having seen the Tiger tank and theNebel Werfer , took his F�hrer's promises seriously. The fact that he did so no doubt explains an optimistic speech which he made to foreign journalists in Berlin on October 3rd. In it he predicted that the Germans would soon be in Alexandria. (General von Thoma, who saw him for a few days before he left North Africa, formed the impression that he was not really confident but spoke with confidence to impress the troops, particularly the Italians. That was, however, before his interview with Hitler.) It was not until about a fortnight later that Rommel began to have doubts. He confided them to his wife. “I wonder if he told me all that to keep me quiet,” he said reflectively. For the first time he was vaguely suspicious of the F�hrer.

  Meanwhile it had been decided at the same interview that Rommel should not go back to North Africa. When he came out of hospital, he was to be given an Army Group in the southern Ukraine. General Stumme would replace him in command of Panzer Group Afrika. Hitler was solicitous about his health; a change of climate would do him good, he said. It may well be that he did not want his own deceptions to be discovered.

  Then, when Rommel was still in hospital at Semmering, Hitler telephoned to him personally at noon on October 24th. “Rommel, there is bad news from Africa,” he said. “The situation looks very black. No one seems to know what has happened to Stumme. Do you feel well enough to go back and would you be willing to go?” Rommel had had only three weeks' treatment. He was still a very sick man and in no condition to return to the desert and fight a desperate battle. It never occurred to him to refuse: his heart was with the Afrika Korps. He left next morning at seven by air, stopped in Italy for a confere
nce with von Rintelen about petrol supplies, landed in Crete and was in his headquarters in North Africa by 8 P.M.

  When he arrived the battle was already lost. “Alamein was lost before it was fought,” said General Cramer. “We had not the petrol.” “Rommel could do nothing,” said General Bayerlein, who had been on leave and followed two days after- wards. “He took over a battle in which all his reserves were already committed. No major decisions which could alter the course of events were possible.”

  Incredible though it seems, the German Intelligence Service was firmly of the belief that the British could not possibly attack during October, An officer from Army Command headquarters was especially sent over at the beginning of the month to say so. No wonder the unfortunate General Stumme died of heart failure twenty-four hours after General Montgomery's bombardment opened. (It appears that he fell or jumped out of his car during a British air attack without the driver noticing. The car returned without him and he was later found dead.)

  In justice to Stumme it should be said that he had inherited the defence scheme from Rommel. Bayerlein assures me that the latter had arranged every detail of the dispositions before leaving Africa. That he took the very unusual course, for him, of splitting his armour, with 15th Panzer Division in the extreme north and 21st Panzer Division in the south, both too close behind the line and both sub-divided into battle groups, can only have been due to his distrust of the Italian divisions, which held the greater part of it.

  His distrust was justified. Cowed by the fire of more than a thousand guns, attacked incessantly from the air, the Italians had little fight left in them when the attack was launched. But for the German infantry and paratroops interspersed amongst them, they would have broken more quickly than they did.

  This time General Montgomery was greatly superior in numbers and immensely so in tanks, guns and ammunition. El Alamein was an old-fashioned battle of material. Yet it was far from mere “iron-mongering.” It was preceded by a most elaborate cover plan. To suggest an attack in the south, while concealing the preparations for the real attack in the north, and at the same time to make it appear that arrangements in the south were still incomplete, the most elaborate and ingenious measures were taken. Hundreds of dummy vehicles were placed over tanks in the assembly areas; dummy lorries were parked in gun-positions so that the guns could be moved in at night and hidden under them; dummy tanks and dummy guns replaced the real articles in the staging areas as they went forward; mock dumps were started in the southern area and built up so slowly that they could not be ready until November; a fake wireless network was operated there with fake messages; a dummy pipeline, with dummy petrol stations and reservoirs, was built in the wrong direction and deliberately not completed; the movement of every vehicle was controlled to guard against tell-tale tracks in the sand. Aided by the fact that the R.A.F. allowed the Luftwaffe little chance of air reconnaissance and by the entirely wrong information supplied by the German Intelligence, the deception was so successful that the date of the attack, the direction of the main thrust and the location of the armour were completely hidden from the Germans. This involved the physical concealment in 13th Corps area to the north of two extra divisions, 240 guns, 150 extra tanks, to say nothing of such items as 7,500 tons of petrol.

  “It was not until D plus 3 that the enemy finally concentrated all his resources against our real attack,” writes Field-Marshal Alexander. D plus 3 (October 26th) was the day that Rommel took over and it is interesting to speculate whether he would have been so thoroughly deceived had he been in North Africa all through October. That he would have placed any reliance on German Intelligence reports is unlikely, for he had the lowest opinion of them.

  To Bayerlein alone he admitted that the battle was lost. The admission did not deter him from making a desperate attempt to restore it. In the north, 15th Panzer Division had already been badly mauled by being thrown in piecemeal against the strong concentrations of 10th Armoured Corps. Gathering up the survivors, bringing up 21st Panzer Division by a forced march from the south, ordering forward 90th Light, Rommel was planning a counter-offensive within a few hours of his arrival-and against the right spot, the British salient in the north. Two days previously he had been in a hospital bed in Semmering; that afternoon, with the sun behind him, he was leading a mass tank attack of the two staunch divisions which had so often followed him. He knew the ground. He had had time for reflection in the aircraft flying south. Nevertheless it was a quick appreciation and a gallant effort.

  The attack was broken up by artillery fire and air bombardment before it could get to grips. It was renewed the next day and beaten off by the 2nd Rifle Brigade and the Australians. Rommel had suffered losses in tanks which he had no hope of replacing. Determined and savage fighting followed when the 9th Australian Division thrust northwards again and took on successfully the pick of the German troops.

  Then General Montgomery switched the direction of his attack. In the early hours of November 2nd he struck farther south, at the junction between the Germans and the Italians. The infantry broke through on a 4,ooo-yard front and opened the road for the armour. It was no easy passage. Ninth Armoured Brigade lost 87 tanks to Rommel's usual screen of anti-tank guns. First Armoured Division, coming through the gap, were set upon by 21st Panzer Division. “The enemy fought with the certain knowledge that all was at stake and with all the skill of his long experience in armoured fighting,” wrote General Alexander in his despatch. At one moment he almost broke through our salient. “Operation Supercharge” was, however, the beginning of the end. That night Rommel decided to withdraw. He might still have got out most of the Germans with the transport he had. The Italians would have had to walk, but most of them would have preferred to surrender rather than suffer the attentions of the R.A.F. on the long road home. On November 3rd, when the withdrawal had already started, came an order from O.K.H., the German Army Command. “The position requires,” it read, “that the El Alamein position be held to the last man. There is to be no retreat, not so much as one millimetre! Victory or death!” It was signed “Adolf Hitler.”

  For once Rommel was caught in two minds. He knew that the order was ridiculous and that to obey it must make greater disaster certain. Yet it was so explicit that he felt that it could not be disregarded. Against Bayerlein's advice he caused it to be circulated to the troops. General von Thoma, commanding the Afrika Korps, asked to be allowed to retire to Fuka and Daba. Rommel would not give him permission. Von Thoma nevertheless withdrew his troops during the night. “I cannot tolerate this order of Hitler,” he said. Rommel turned a blind eye.

  Next morning von Thoma went out to confirm a report, which Rommel refused to believe, that British columns had broken through in the south and were already west of the Germans. At noon, General Bayerlein, having had no word from von Thoma, drove out in his command car to look for him. As he approached the Tel-el-Mansr position, heavy fire forced him to leave his car and make for the ridge on foot.

  When he was within two hundred yards of it he saw the general standing beside his burning tank. British tanks (they were, in fact, the 10th Hussars) ringed him round. All the German tanks and anti-tank guns on the position had been destroyed. Bayerlein waited until he saw British carriers drive up to von Thoma and carry him off. Then he himself withdrew unobserved. When he arrived back at headquarters, south of Daba, he and Rommel heard the 10th Hussar troop leaders talking about having captured a German general. That night General von Thoma dined with General Montgomery in his headquarters mess and invited the Eighth Army Commander to stay with him in Germany after the war. These mutual courtesies were criticised in England. They were not regarded as out of place in Africa.

  Next morning Bayerlein attained his ambition of commanding the Afrika Korps, just when it had virtually ceased to exist. “What can I do in face of this order of Hitler's?” he asked Rommel. “I cannot authorise you to disobey it,” said Rommel with unusual diplomacy. But there could be no more question of obeying it
if any one was to be saved.

  For the moment, with the shock of defeat coming on top of his illness, Rommel was a broken man. Nevertheless, though his staff found him more than ordinarily difficult to deal with, he conducted the retreat with great skill. This time he had no hope of turning on his pursuers. His remaining force amounted to little more than a composite division: eighty German tanks were left against nearly six hundred British. He could only save what he might out of the wreck. He was lucky to save anything at all. Had not heavy rain come on the night of November 6th, turning the desert into a morass and preventing the movement of the troops sent to cut him off, he would have been encircled at Matruh. Had the R.A.F. had the technique of “ground strafing” which it later acquired, he would not have got that far. Had air transport been developed as General Slim developed it in the much more difficult conditions of Burma, completely-equipped forces would have been dropped well behind him and supplied by air. General Montgomery has also been criticised by both sides for being too cautious. “I do not think General Patton would have let us get away so easily,” said Bayerlein, who, having fought in France afterwards, compared Patton with Guderian and Montgomery with von Rundstedt. He added, however, that “the best thing Rommel ever did in North Africa was this retreat.” As the Eighth Army covered the seven hundred miles from El Alamein to Benghazi in fifteen days and as this time Rommel was not allowed to stand at El Agheila, there is perhaps, not much room for criticism of either commander.

  On November 8th came the Allied landings in North Africa. Tripoli at once became of minor importance. Rommel received no reinforcements but they were poured into Tunisia by sea and air. Six months later they were all prisoners. Of the many bitter pills which Rommel had to swallow, before the last, one of the bitterest must have been to see what the German High Command could do in a lost cause and to compare it with what they had failed to do in support of a winning one. In November two regiments of airborne troops and an engineer battalion were flown in. They were followed by odd infantry units, tanks and artillery and formed into a scratch division. By the middle of December, 10th Panzer Division had arrived. Another infantry division, 334th, was brought over in the latter half of the month. A Grenadier regiment came from Crete. There appeared also a heavy tank battalion, the 501st, armed with the new Tiger tanks which Rommel had been promised. The redoubtable Herman Goering Panzer Division was on its way. Other German units, apart from various Italian formations, were added before the end to swell the Allied game-bag. What could not Rommel have done with half of this force five or six months earlier?