Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  When Wavell ordered the halt by the Western Desert Force outside of El Agheila in early February, his intent was that it would be as brief as possible, to give his troops some much-needed rest and allow them a chance to re-equip and refit their vehicles. He had the Italians on the run everywhere in northern and eastern Africa, and by now was supremely confident that he could drive them off the continent entirely, but on February 9, word came from London making the halt permanent and directing him to begin preparations for embarking at least one division for service elsewhere. The directive came straight from the prime minister, Winston Churchill, and though Wavell protested vigorously, he immediately set about to comply with his new orders.

  As it turned out, events had anticipated Wavell’s decision to halt before El Agheila: Mussolini had bungled yet another military adventure, this time in Greece. In April 1939, the Italians had invaded the tiny and essentially defenseless kingdom of Albania, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, forcibly incorporating it into the Kingdom of Italy; in late October 1940, Mussolini decided that Greece was a plum ripe for the picking. Jealous of the victories won by Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht in France and the Low Countries, which had commanded the attention of the world, he declared, “Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli. This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece.”92 The resultant military laurels would burnish the reputation of Italian arms as well as Il Duce’s stature as a would-be conqueror. The Greeks were of a different mind: when the Italian army attacked out of the Albanian hills, the Greeks fought back tenaciously and soon were counterattacking, driving the Italians pell-mell back across the Albanian border. By the end of January 1941, after having lost nearly a quarter of Albania, the Italians had finally stopped the Greeks, who were having severe supply problems in the rugged Albanian mountains.

  There the situation might have stayed, in indefinite stalemate, had Winston Churchill not chosen this moment to intervene. Pugnacious and aggressive, Churchill saw the Italian attack on Greece as an opening where the British Army could once again have a presence on the European continent, eventually, it was hoped, striking directly at the Germans. Greece had been neutral in the European war until attacked by Italy: had Mussolini “stayed home,” as it were, there would have been no opportunity for Britain to intervene. British intelligence was convinced—correctly—that the Germans were preparing to invade Greece, for reasons of political prestige as much as military necessity—an effort to help Mussolini “save face” and prevent repeated Italian embarrassments from splattering onto the Third Reich. Churchill saw a chance to steal a march on the Nazis by reinforcing the Greeks, and so directed Wavell to pull the Australian 6th Division out of the British position in front of El Agheila, and ready it to be transferred to Greece, the first of four British divisions to be sent there.

  Mussolini now had two debacles on his hands, North Africa and Greece, which together could lead to the collapse of the Italian war effort; instead of gaining fresh conquests for his revived Roman Empire, victories which would earn the awe if not the admiration of the world, he had blundered into widening the war, creating awkward strategic complications for his German allies at the very moment when the O.K.W. was preoccupied with planning the pending invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Hitler decided that enough was enough—Mussolini, left to his own devices, was a liability, not an asset, and if the Führer couldn’t abandon his fellow dictator, he could at least bring him to heel. In early October 1940 Hitler had met with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass and suggested sending a small contingent of German troops and tanks to North Africa to bolster the Italian effort against the British. The Italian dictator, in a fit of the same pique that drove him to invade Greece, had spurned the Führer’s assistance; now, Hitler was no longer offering, he was telling Mussolini that the Deutsches Afrika Korps (“German Africa Corps”), which on January 11, 1941 was activated on his personal order, was going to Tripolitania with the express purpose of stopping the Italian collapse there.

  It was this rather bizarre confluence of events and circumstances, then, that brought Erwin Rommel to North Africa. From the outset, Hitler had only meant for Afrika Korps to support the Italian defense of Libya; he neither imagined nor intended that North Africa would evolve into a major theater of the war. Meanwhile, senior officers of the ilk of Halder and von Brauchitsch considered it to be the perfect backwater in which to dispose of a rambunctious general who was insufficiently deferential to their caste. If they couldn’t rid themselves of this troublesome officer, they could at least marginalize him.

  Predictably, from the very beginning Erwin Rommel did not see it that way at all. Just as he had done in France, Rommel would write to Lucie daily while in North Africa, even if only a few lines, and the succession of letters she received in the weeks after Rommel’s arrival in Tripoli creates a powerful impression of the energy, drive, and ambition he brought to his new posting. While careful not to give away the show, it was clear that he wasn’t at all prepared to simply sit in place and wait for the British to do something.

  14 February 1941

  Dearest Lu,

  All is going as well as I could wish. I hope to be able to pull it off. I’m doing well. There’s nothing whatever for you to worry about. A lot to do. I’ve already had a thorough look around.

  17 February 1941

  Everything is splendid with me and mine in this glorious sunshine. I’m getting on very well with the Italian command and couldn’t wish for better cooperation. My lads are already at the front, which has been moved about 560 kilometers [350 miles] to the east. As far as I am concerned [the British] can come now.

  5 March 1941

  Just returned from a two-day journey—or rather, flight—to the front, which has now been moved about 450 miles to the east. Everything going fine. A lot to do. Can’t leave here for the moment as I couldn’t be answerable for my absence. Too much depends on my own person and my determination. I hope you’ve gotten some of the letters from me. My troops are on the way. Speed is the one thing that matters here.

  . . . Had a “gala” showing of Victory in the West here today. . . . I said [to the guests] that I hoped the day would come when we would be showing Victory in Africa.93

  By the time this last letter was written, the whole of the 5th Panzer Regiment, the armored contingent of the 5th Light Division, around which the Afrika Korps would be organized, had been shipped across the Mediterranean and landed at Tripoli. It mustered a total strength of only 150 tanks, half of which were Panzer Is and Panzer IIs, vehicles more suited to reconnaissance and screening than to actual combat. Rommel, hoping to create an illusion of having greater strength than he actually possessed, staged an elaborate parade for his panzer regiment in Tripoli, rolling his tanks down the central boulevard of the city. Once they had turned off the main street, they raced back to the parade’s starting point, and, like a stage army once again passed down the broad roadway, creating the illusion of a seemingly endless column of armor prepared to advance against the British. Rommel suspected, rightly, that Allied spies in Tripoli would take careful count of the numbers and types of vehicles in the procession, and pass their numbers on to the British intelligence services. After several such passes, the tanks, still painted in their dark panzergrau, roared off down the coastal highway toward El Agheila. At the moment, Rommel could have no idea just how effective had been his little ruse, or what unexpected dividends it would pay when he set into motion his own plans for the Afrika Korps. For what Erwin Rommel was about to undertake was nothing short of an act of audacious insubordination carried out on a truly massive scale.

  The German General Staff’s plan for the Afrika Korps, concocted under the name Sonnenblume (“Sunflowers”), was to do no more than hold the position at El Agheila, essentially accepting the status quo in North Africa. There were sound strategic reasons for adopting a more-or-less permanent defensive posture in Libya. Tunisia and Trip
olitania were secure: the Vichy French regime in Algeria could be counted on to remain docile and cooperative, which meant that there would be no attacks from the west; and by this time the Italians had pretty much had their fill of aggressive adventures. For their part, the upper echelons of the German high command were preoccupied with the planning for Fall Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union scheduled for the summer of 1941. Every aspect of Germany’s military capability was to be subordinated to this titanic undertaking, and the General Staff officers of the O.K.W. were unwilling to consider any diversion or dilution of the forces available to the Wehrmacht with which to attack the Russians. In their eyes, that one armored division, the 5th Light, had been diverted to North Africa, and an entire Luftwaffe air corps, Fliegerkorps X, complete with fighters, dive-bombers, and level bombers, had been transferred to airfields in Sicily, all in support of a faltering “ally,” was bad enough. Conventional strategic wisdom dictated that nothing more in the way of men or materiel be sent to Africa: Rommel’s task was to hold the line against the British where he stood, nothing more.

  Rommel took a very different view of the situation. In a memorandum analyzing the destruction of Graziani’s Tenth Army, he concluded that

  Graziani’s failure can be attributed mainly to the fact that the Italian army was delivered up helpless and un-motorized in the open desert to the weak but fully motorized British formations, while the Italian motorized forces, although too weak oppose the British successfully, were nevertheless compelled to accept battle and allow themselves to be destroyed in defense of the infantry. . . . Out of this purely motorized form of warfare which developed in Libya and Egypt there arose certain principles, fundamentally different from those applicable in other theaters.

  In other words, immobility in the desert, whether the consequence of a lack of equipment and faulty organization, or inflicted by foolish orders from on high, was a recipe for disaster. Sitting at El Agheila waiting for the British to attack made defeat inevitable. As Rommel saw the situation, “defending” Libya by giving up half the province was foolishness—the best defense was one staged as far forward as possible. But by the time the Afrika Korps arrived in Tripoli, the Italians had withdrawn yet again, this time to Sirte, 100 miles further west, abandoning El Agheila to the British, with only screens of light units covering the distance in between. Therefore, rather than waiting for the British to come to him, he, Rommel, would take the war back to the British, and if given the opportunity, defend Libya by driving the British out of the province entirely. To accomplish this, though, Rommel would have to resort to evasion, deception, prevarication and outright lying to both his own German superiors and the Italian Comando Supremo. That he had to do so was the consequence of the bewildering—and often bewildered—command structure in North Africa.94

  As the British—who have had more experience at it than any other nation on earth—could have told the Germans, coalition warfare is never easy. The peculiar, prickly, and paranoid personalities of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini made joint military efforts between Germany and Italy rather more difficult than were such undertakings typically. The core of the problem lay in the very nature of the “Berlin–Rome Axis” itself. Formed in 1936, at a moment in European history when both Germany and Italy were feeling diplomatically isolated, it was never a proper alliance in the true sense of the word, as the military and political objectives of the two nations—and the two dictators—were too divergent to allow their military arms to develop a coherent joint strategy and command structures.

  When Rommel arrived in North Africa, he was technically subordinate to the governor-general of Libya, which at the time was still Marshal Graziani, who would be replaced by Marshal Italo Gariboldi on March 25. The province was an Italian colony, the majority of the troops there were, and would remain throughout Rommel’s African sojourn, Italian, and all of the Afrika Korps’ supplies would be carried across the Mediterranean by Italian shipping. These three factors made the Germans de jure the junior partners in the North African venture. Rommel, from a combination of national pride and personal ego, was determined from the outset that he and his people would de facto take the lead in whatever campaigns lay ahead. To do so, he brazenly exploited the realities of the command structure for North Africa that had been cobbled together by Rome and Berlin.

  Rommel’s temper quickly chafed under Italian authority—his comment in his letter to Lucie that he was “getting on very well with the Italian command and couldn’t wish for better cooperation” was disingenuous at best. Key to Rommel’s frequent circumvention of Gariboldi and his successors—whom Rommel came to regard as a bunch of clucking old women—would be that as commanding officer of the German ground forces in North Africa, he possessed the right to appeal any decision made in Rome with which he disagreed to the O.K.H., the O.K.W., or even Adolf Hitler himself. At the same time, when he disagreed with senior German officers on operational and strategic decisions in the Mediterranean theater, the Luftwaffe’s General (later Field Marshal) Albert Kesselring, for example, he was not above playing a similar game with them. If Comando Supremo had issued a directive which Rommel could construe as being in support of his particular plans and objectives, he would simply point out that Rome had given him specific instructions and thus he had no choice but to obey orders.

  Still, Rommel’s attitude toward his Italian colleagues and superiors would remain one of mingled distrust and disgust. Understandably shaken by the rout of the Tenth Army by the Western Desert Force, the generals in Rome and Tripoli nonetheless seemed more intent on assigning—and avoiding—blame than on working to correct the defects in their army, and for this Rommel gave them little respect. During his time in North Africa, he would take an almost perverse pleasure, whenever asked by a senior Italian officer where he had won his Pour le Mérite, in blurting out “Longarone!”

  At the same time, though, Rommel would discover that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the typical Italian soldier—the problem was their officers: the higher the rank, the less competent they were. When under the leadership of German NCOs and junior officers, that is, men who knew what they were doing on a battlefield, Italian soldati could—and would—fight with tenacity and courage. Already the bravery of Italian artillerymen was legendary on both sides in North Africa: there would be more than one instance in the Libyan desert where British tanks had blood on their tracks after literally overrunning the positions of Italian gunners who stubbornly refused to give up their guns.

  But even at their best the Italians would remain something of a liability for Rommel in North Africa, far less by way of any deficiencies of the Italians as soldiers than of the circumstances and reasons by which they were compelled to fight. Badly equipped, poorly trained, treated with indifference at best and disdain at worst by his officers, the typical soldati was hardly motivated to wage wars of conquest which brought glory to Mussolini and his cronies but did little to improve the material lot of the Italian people, and so could hardly be faulted for lacking in martial ardor. Rommel would have to do the best he could with them.

  The stage was being set, the players were taking their places for Act I, Scene One of the great drama that would be the war in North Africa. After the grand production of its parade in Tripoli, the 5th Panzer Regiment was rushed forward, along with the 200th Rifle Regiment, an infantry unit, two reconnaissance battalions, an antitank battalion, a pair of machine-gun battalions and three batteries of artillery. Led by Generalmajor Johannes Streich, 5th Light Division’s officer commanding, they first went to Sirte, then onward to El Mugtaa, just west of El Agheila. A late arrival was a “flak”95—antiaircraft—battalion, which included a dozen 88mm antiaircraft guns that could do double duty in an antitank role. Along with 5th Light came the Italian Ariete Armored Division and the 102nd Motorized “Trento” Division, while four divisions of Italian infantry followed as best they could. Hoping to deceive British aerial reconnaissance as to both his numbers and intentions, he gave o
rders for scores of dummy tanks to be fabricated out of canvas and plywood, some immobile, others mounted on the ubiquitous kübelwagens (a type of German jeep) so that they could be moved at will, and deployed in the desert, while real vehicles created a confusion of tracks in the sand.

  Even as his preparations were still underway, Rommel began to consider the implications and potential of an offensive against the British in North Africa. In late February, when a young Italian officer reporting for duty on Rommel’s staff lamented that his division had just been driven out of Ethiopia, his new commanding officer told him not to worry about it. “We’re going to drive all the way to the Nile,” Rommel declared with a grin, “then make a right turn and take it all back!” That was simply a bit of classic Rommel cockiness, but privately, giving his imagination free rein and allowing for a scenario where the best of all possible outcomes took place, he allowed himself to foresee such a possibility: once his second panzer division arrived in May, a quick, hard strike along the length of the Via Balbia, the Italian-built coastal highway, might drive the British all the way back into Egypt and across the Suez Canal. Drafting a letter to Berlin on March 9, he outlined what he believed should be the course of operations in North Africa: “My first objective will be to retake Cyrenaica; my second, northern Egypt and the Suez Canal.” It is impossible to be certain whether Rommel regarded the concept as the basis for developing a detailed strategic plan for North Africa, or if this was simply a clever device he used in an effort to draw more of the O.K.W.’s—and Hitler’s—attention to the Mediterranean theater in the hope of securing a greater commitment of reinforcements in the months ahead. In any event, at a command conference held in Berlin 10 days after sending off his letter, nothing was said to him about this idea for a wider war in North Africa.