Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  The previous night, before they ate, slept, or attended to any personal business, all five crewman would have cleaned their tank’s guns—the main gun, the machine gun mounted alongside it on a coaxial mounting, and the bow gun—topping off the fuel tanks, radiator, and engine oil, adjusting the tension on the tracks, and attended to whatever minor mechanical problems might have been produced by the day’s action. Now, with the first faint light of dawn just beginning to touch the eastern sky, the driver started the engine (hoping that the batteries hadn’t lost their charge overnight, always a possibility that would necessitate hand-cranking the engine), while the radioman warmed up his equipment and performed a quick signals check, after which he loaded his machine gun. In the turret, the loader did a quick visual inventory of the rounds available for the main gun—a 37-or 50mm weapon in the Panzer III, a short-barreled 75mm gun in the Panzer IV. Hopefully during the night the ammunition trucks had been able to fully replenish whatever ammunition had been expended the previous day, but if not, it was the loader’s job to make the commander aware of how many rounds—antitank and high explosive—were available.

  The gunner cleared the main gun for action, checking that there were no obstructions in the bore, and if necessary recalibrating the sights if the tank had seen hard use the previous day that might have skewed them. The commander tied his vehicle into the platoon and company radio nets and made sure that his maps were properly updated, then while the rest of the crew finished their work, he and the other tank commanders would hold a quick conference with their company commander to learn of any last-minute changes in plan. Once this was done, he would return to his vehicle, don his headphones, and wait for the crackle of static that would precede a slightly metallic-sounding voice giving the order to “Weitergehen!”—“Move out!”

  Under way a tank is an impressive sight, if only because of its stark, uncompromising purposefulness. Its appearance is purely functional: there is no place for aesthetics on or in a vehicle designed expressly to destroy others of its kind, kill soft-skinned vehicles, and bring death to enemy infantry. How a tank is perceived on a battlefield is entirely subjective: an infantryman sees an armored behemoth, its armor seemingly invulnerable, possessing firepower that a mere footsoldier can never hope to wield. A tank is a mobile object offering friendly infantrymen cover and protection from enemy fire while it destroys enemy strongpoints and guns. Antitank gunners and artillerymen see enemy tanks as targets, one half of a kill-or-be killed duel, as rarely will gun or tank survive a direct hit from its opponent. Enemy tankers see their opponents in much the same way—a tank-versus-tank engagement has a more than passing similarity to an Old West gunfight: being quick on the draw isn’t enough, to survive a tank crew has to be both fast and accurate.

  It is the penalty for failure that is a tank crewman’s worst nightmare. While the front armor of his vehicle may be as much as two inches thick, the sides are usually only half that, and the top and bottom armor only half that again. Inside that armor were fuel tanks which, in a Panzer III for example, could hold as much as 84 gallons of gasoline; up to 100 rounds of ammunition for the main gun would be stored in ready-use lockers on either side of the hull, adjacent to the turret. The result was that while a tank could hit hard and sometime be hit, to its crew it was always a rolling explosion waiting to happen if it took a hit in the wrong place.

  If the crew of a tank struck by enemy fire were lucky, the incoming round might hit the transmission, blow off a part of the suspension, or knock out the engine, sufficient of course to immobilize the tank, but something the crew could readily survive. Worse were antitank projectiles that penetrated the armor and entered the crew compartment—fragments of red-hot steel would go whizzing about inside the tank at supersonic speeds with enough force to tear apart men and equipment with equal ease. The worst case was a hit in the fuel tanks or the ammunition storage: the result was what the men of the British 7th Armored Division, the legendary Desert Rats, called “brewing up”—either a searing flash as the ammunition exploded, or a swiftly spreading fireball that expanded out of every aperture in the stricken tank’s hull as the fuel ignited. Either way, the fate of crewmen in such vehicles was grisly.

  Even when there was no one shooting at them, there was more than sufficient discomfort and danger for the crew. Daytime temperatures in the North African desert often peaked close to 130° F in the summer months. Tanks would travel with every hatch and shutter open, in an effort to introduce even the smallest measure of a cooling breeze inside the vehicle. Once enemy action was in the offing, the hatches would be closed and the crew had to endure rising temperatures and limited ventilation. The stink of mingled sweat, gasoline fumes, hot motor oil, and the ammonia vapors from the burned propellant in spent shell casings made the air inside nigh unbreathable. Vision for all but the commander was limited to the narrow arcs offered by the vision blocks and ports of a crewman’s position, while illumination came from one small light bulb in the turret and one in the hull for the driver and radio operator. Tank engagements usually were relatively brief, so that at the first opportunity a tank’s crew would open the hatches to gulp down the fresh air, and even 120° F could seem blessedly cool after being shut up inside a sweltering steel box for as much as an hour at a time, fighting against an enemy just as determined to survive the encounter. Such was the life of a tank crew in the Afrika Korps.

  This was the life that awaited the Afrika Korps’ panzer crews when Rommel started his tanks rolling northward out of Agedabia. It was also at this moment that his signals intelligence section began to come into its own. Straining to capture every possible wireless message sent by the British, the Afrika Korps’ radio intercept company, commanded by Lieutenant (later Captain) Alfred Seebohm, would sift through the signals to learn as much as possible about what enemy units were where, along with their strength, their orders, and their command structure. Ironically, the British themselves proved incredibly helpful in this, as the radio discipline of British and Commonwealth units alike was simply appalling. British radio operators chattered away like gossiping old women, and they were too prone to passing along messages, sometimes “in the clear”—that is, uncoded—up and down the chain of command that included the identity of every unit through which the message was sent, rather than specifying only the next to which a message was to be passed. From a single such message, Seebohm and his men could learn the identity of every unit in the chain of command through which that message had passed. Combined with captured British codes and painstaking traffic analysis, a picture of the entire British order of battle could be created.

  So, on April 3, 1941, with his intuition that the British were ready to be tumbled out of Cyrenaica buttressed by the gleanings of his signals intelligence section, Rommel ordered his troops forward once again, dividing his forces into three columns. On the right, part of the 5th Light and a battalion of the Italian Ariete Division struck out across the chord of the Cyrenaican bulge, with the town of Derna as its objective: there it could block any British retreat along the Via Balbia. Command was given to Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard von Schwerin, a Prussian count whose family had been producing cavalry officers for three hundred years: Rommel could be confident that pursuit was in the Oberstleutnant’s blood. In the center, the bulk of the Afrika Korps’ armor, the 5th Panzer Regiment, in company with the balance of the Ariete Division, set out for Msus, then Mechili, the site of an old Italian fort, to cut off any British forces that might make their own attempt at crossing Cyrenaica’s bulge. On the left, the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion and the Brescia Division drove up the coast road to Benghazi; just as this column set out, an Italian priest was brought to Afrika Korps’ headquarters bearing the news that the British were already abandoning the town. With that, there was no holding back Rommel or his men: Benghazi fell that night, the British departure hasty and unorganized. (A few days later, when inspecting the port facilities, Rommel came across a blackboard where a cheeky Tommy had chalked an admonishment fo
r the new owners: “Please keep tidy! Back soon!” Rommel grinned and then growled, “We’ll see about that!”)

  That same night, his daily letters to Lucie still going out like clockwork, he wrote:

  Dearest Lu,

  We’ve been attacking since the 31st with dazzling success. There will be consternation among our masters in Tripoli and Rome, perhaps in Berlin, too. I took the risk against all orders and instructions because the opportunity seemed favorable. No doubt it will all be pronounced good later and they will all say they would have done exactly the same in my place. We’ve already reached our first objective, which we were not supposed to take until the end of May. The British are falling all over each other to get away. Our casualties are small. Booty cannot be estimated yet. You can understand why I can’t sleep for happiness.97

  Doubtless one of the sources of Rommel’s mirth was an encounter late on the night of April 3 with General Gariboldi, Rommel’s nominal commanding officer. Prickly and egotistical, furious that his orders to remain at Mersa el Brega had been ignored, Gariboldi stormed into the Afrika Korps’ command post and confronted Rommel about this act of insubordination. Rommel dismissed his nominal superior’s attempt to assert his authority, declaring that “One cannot permit unique opportunities to slip by for the sake of trifles.” Voices were raised, angry words exchanged, and Gariboldi was well into mid-tirade when a signal from Berlin was handed to Rommel, who silently read it and then announced that Hitler and the O.K.W. had just given him complete authority to act as he saw fit.98

  In fact, the signal handed to Rommel said exactly the opposite: it was a pointed reminder from Halder to advance no further than Mersa el Brega. Gariboldi, however, spoke and read little German, and couldn’t challenge Rommel’s version of the communiqué; even so, the Italian was not prepared to yield without a fight, and tried to resort to bluster. A second signal arrived, bearing the news (and Rommel, again being Rommel, wouldn’t have been above stage-managing this) that Benghazi had fallen. Fuming, knowing his indignation had been trumped by events, Gariboldi turned and departed without a further word. Little more than two months later, he would be replaced, the primary reason cited for his relief being his inability to cooperate with Rommel.

  A far more serious incident—and one very revealing of Erwin Rommel as commanding general—occurred on April 4, when he was told that problems with deliveries of fuel immobilized the 5th Panzer Regiment, a halt that would probably last four days. The problem began in the very abruptness with which Rommel had moved against Mersa el Brega, then on to Agedabia, and now out into the wilderness of Cyrenaica. Axis supply officers—German and Italian alike were caught flatfooted: with no forewarning of Rommel’s intentions, there had been no opportunity to set up the fuel dumps, create the movement plans, and arrange the convoys required to carry fuel to the advancing armored columns. This was not France in May and June 1940—there were no local gasoline stations from which fuel could be commandeered for Rommel’s thirsty panzers. Every drop of gasoline used by the Afrika Korps as well as the Italian armored and motorized divisions had to come from Europe, brought across the Mediterranean by tanker to Tripoli, and from there hauled by truck to the front. Further complicating the problem was a shortage of gasoline bowsers, tanker trucks with specially designed equipment that allowed them to refuel as many as a dozen tanks, trucks or armored cars simultaneously.

  The blame for this supply fiasco fell squarely on the shoulders of Erwin Rommel: by failing to inform his quartiermeister (corps supply officer) that he was considering attacking the British ahead of the schedule laid down by the orders from O.K.W., Rommel gave his staff no reason to create contingency supply plans for such an operation—his staff naturally assumed that he would obey the orders from his superiors in Berlin and Rome. But while Rommel’s impulsiveness was responsible for this blunder, it was his talent for improvisation which produced a solution: he ordered every truck in the 5th Light Division to halt in place, unload, and collect spare drivers from the tank crews. They were then sent back to El Agheila to collect gasoline and ammunition, driving non-stop, to replenish the fuel tanks and ammunition lockers of the Afrika Korps’ panzers. Rather than a four-day delay, 5th Light had to halt in place for only one.

  Such an experience was, naturally, part of the learning process through which any newly promoted corps commander had to go. Usually the corps staff were able to draw on their own experience to correct such oversights by their commanding general until he had a chance to settle into his new role, but in this instance, Rommel’s staff was as inexperienced as he at this level of operations. Clearly, commander and staff both had a lot to learn; fortunately they were very quick learners. Nonetheless, while never being as ignorant of logistics as his critics both during and after the war would maintain, the limitations imposed by his supply situation would remain something of a blind spot for Erwin Rommel.

  Nevertheless, the old cliché that “nothing succeeds like success” holds more truly in warfare than in perhaps any other form of human endeavor. Rommel presented Hitler, the O.K.W., and Comando Supremo with a fait accompli and defied any of them to call him out for his blatant insubordination. Gariboldi fumed, Cavallero (the Italian Chief of Staff) fulminated, and Halder and von Brauchitsch privately raged about insubordinate upstarts, but individually and collectively they did nothing. Hitler, normally never pleased by being gainsaid in any manner, was quietly delighted—because both men represented to him everything he detested about the German officer corps, he despised Franz Halder and held Walter von Brauchitsch in something close to contempt, so the spectacle of this stubborn young general who was one of his personal favorites showing up two of the General Staff’s most senior officers was one to warm his lance-corporal’s heart. Rommel made no effort to disguise his satisfaction when he wrote to Lucie that evening, saying, “Congratulations have come from the Führer for the unexpected success, plus a directive for further operations which is in full accord with my own ideas.”99

  The situation could well have turned badly on Rommel, nevertheless. The lack of an adequate fuel supply for the 5th Panzer Regiment was just one of a string of incidents in those first days of April which highlighted the confusion created within the Axis forces by the relative inexperience of both Rommel and his staff at this level of operations. When Streich’s tanks set out eastward from Benghazi bound, hopefully, for Derna, they began bogging down in the soft mix of sand and rock once they left the Via Balbia, leaving the 5th Panzer Regiment strewn across the highlands behind the Jebel Akhdar when it ran out of fuel.

  On April 5, worried that the delay would allow the retreating British time to escape and set up defensive positions along the coast road and at the old Turkish fort of Mechili, south of the Jebel Akhdar (which, in fact, was exactly what the new commander of the Western Desert Force, Lieutenant General Philip Neame, hoped to do), Rommel took the controls of a Fiesler Storch (“Stork”) light observation plane, and flew back and forth between his widely separated units, issuing orders to resume the advance. He personally instructed Colonel Olbricht’s machine-gun battalion to attack Mechili, then a few hours later countermanded that order, telling Olbricht to advance toward Derna, on the coast road, instead. Later that morning, meeting Streich and von Schwerin in the middle of the desert, he ordered an attack on Mechili to begin at 3:00 that afternoon. Von Schwerin said nothing, but Streich flatly refused the order, stating that with most of his tanks and armored cars still scattered across the desert as a result of the fuel fiasco, there was no hope of assembling a sufficiently strong force in time. Rommel, smarting at the implied rebuke over the fuel situation, shouted that Streich was a coward. The 5th Light’s commander took his Ritterskreuz from his neck, held it out, and icily informed Rommel, “No one has dared to call me that before. Withdraw it or I’ll throw this at your feet!” The Afrika Korps’ commander muttered a half-hearted apology, but from that moment until Streich’s relief two months later, there would be a distinct coolness between the proud Streich
and the prickly Rommel.100

  Late in the afternoon, Rommel returned, announcing imperiously that Streich and von Schwerin would together assault Mechili at 6:00 P.M., less than two hours hence; artillery support, he said, would be provided by the Italians. The Italians, however, were nowhere in sight, and aside from a handful of tanks and a few reconnaissance vehicles, the Germans had nothing with which to mount such an attack. The division and regimental commanders simply looked at each other and very pointedly said nothing; Rommel drove off, ostensibly to find the Italian artillery, which he never did. That night, he personally led a handful of infantry platoons in an attempt to take the fort: the British and Indian defenders in Mechili drove it off easily.

  Rommel had his own personal share of near misadventures as well, flitting about the desert in his command car, or flying above it in his Fiesler. Having been mercilessly harried by the Royal Air Force before and during Compass, the Italians were prone to fire first on any aircraft they didn’t immediately recognize, and ask questions later. So it was hardly surprising that Rommel should twice have come under fire from slightly trigger-happy Italian antiaircraft gunners who had never seen a Storch before. (They had shot down and killed their own Marshal Bagdolio the previous June because they misidentified his Savoia-Marchetti bomber as a British Blenheim.) On April 7, while trying to locate the German and Italian forces he believed should be converging on Mechili, Rommel almost landed beside a column of British trucks, noting his error only at the last minute and zooming away as fast as the little airplane could fly. Not long after, he spotted a lone 88mm gun in the desert and dropped in to land close by. As the Storch was taxiing over to the solitary gun, it hit a patch of soft sand and ground-looped, tearing away half its landing gear in the process. Jumping out, Rommel asked the gun crew if they had any transport handy. Assured that a truck was available, Rommel, recalling that the column of British vehicles was not far off, blurted out, “Then let’s get the hell out of here—the British will be here in five minutes!”