Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  But in that execution Rommel showed that he still had much to learn: for most of the problems encountered by the Afrika Korps in that first headlong rush into Cyrenaica, Rommel had no one to blame but himself. By his own admission, “Probably never before in modern warfare has such a completely unprepared offensive as this raid through Cyrenaica been attempted.”104 The word “unprepared” is key here, for though Rommel had the presence of mind and imagination to sense and seize the singular opportunity offered by the temporary vulnerability of the British forces opposite him, he reacted with much the same impulsiveness that he displayed as a young infantry oberleutnant leading a Jägerbataillon on the Isozo in 1918. His attack on Mersa el Brega was as much a surprise to his own staff officers as it was to the enemy, giving them no opportunity to calculate the supply requirements and create the detailed movement orders necessary to properly support the Afrika Korps’ advance. When a lack of fuel or ammunition or both threatened to slow his advancing tanks’ advance or even halt them in their tracks, Rommel expected his staff to immediately improvise solutions, or did so himself if necessary, and was frustrated by the delays created by such makeshift measures.

  It was not that Rommel was ignorant of or indifferent to how vital was proper logistical planning for successful operations, although this would be a charge repeatedly laid against him by critics during and after the war. Few officers were, in truth, ever as conscious of their logistics as was Rommel in North Africa: rarely was his supply situation more than merely adequate; most of the time it barely approached that level of sufficiency. Rommel would, in the months to come, demonstrate an ability to execute daring, sweeping maneuvers on the most marginal sufficiency of fuel, ammunition, food, and vehicles. He refused, however, to become preoccupied with supply calculations, save in broad terms of what was and was not possible under the circumstances which obtained at a specific moment, believing that they were rightly the balliwick of staff officers possessed of specialized training in service and supply. Still, in order to function properly, a general’s staff must know the mind of its commander and have a sense of his intentions and objectives, so that the commander’s designs can best be carried out given the resources at hand. By failing to keep his staff informed of his plans in March and April 1941, Rommel handicapped them and himself; had the British been less disorganized than they were, the Afrika Korps could have been handed a nasty setback in its first confrontation with them, and the course of the war in North Africa—and the Mediterranean theater—drastically altered as a result. Rommel owed his success in that first dash to the Egyptian frontier in no small part as much to his enemy’s disarray as to his own daring.

  At the same time, his displays of temper and petulance showed Rommel hadn’t fully exorcised the petty, bullying streak that had marred his character in the First World War. His working relationship with General Streich got off to a good start, by all appearances, but a frostiness set in between the two men when Streich made it clear outside Mechili that he would be neither intimidated nor marginalized when given what he regarded as pointless or foolish orders, invoking Rommel’s wrath and a round of verbal abuse. Von Schwerin proved to be cut from the same bolt of cloth, and Rommel privately decided that both men would be replaced at the earliest opportunity by officers with more pliable personalities. Streich would be relieved at the beginning of June, von Schwerin would not live long enough for that to happen.

  Overarching all of this is the question of whether or not Erwin Rommel should have obeyed his orders from the O.K.W. and General Gariboldi to remain on the defensive at El Agheila and not gone on the offensive at all against the Western Desert Force. In hindsight, the answer must be an unequivocal “Yes,” yet to be categorical about it is to merely be wise after the fact. The chain of consequences resulting from his decision to attack in March 1941 were his first lunging advance to the Egyptian frontier; the retreat before the British offensive of Operation Crusader; his own subsequent counterattack which led to the Afrika Korps’ triumph at Gazala—acknowledged to be Rommel’s masterpiece—and the capture of Tobruk; his defeat at El Alamein; the long retreat to Tunisia and the bitter rearguard action fought there; and finally the loss of the whole North African theater in May 1943. Given the scale of the defeat which the Axis would ultimately suffer there, it is difficult to not acknowledge that a less dynamic and aggressive commander might well have better served the requirements of German and Italian grand strategy.

  It was Rommel’s first offensive that provided Churchill the opportunity to turn to North Africa as the seat of Britain’s most important, indeed only, land campaign against the Germans and Italians for over two years. The need to restore British political and military prestige lost in the Grecian debacle compelled Churchill to turn a strategic backwater into a major theater of war, one where Britain must emerge triumphant, no matter what the cost: it was Rommel who provided the impetus for Churchill’s decision. And yet, Rommel being Rommel, he could have done no other: passive defense was not for him, having developed his skillset of command and concepts of warfare during the years from 1914 to 1918 in a succession of postings where movement and maneuver were still possible. He never acquired the sort of passive bunker mentality possessed by men like Alan Brooke or Bernard Montgomery: dull, plodding, obsessively methodical, relying solely on overwhelming material superiority as the means to victory. Instead, his dynamism, his belief in the decisiveness of movement, stamped itself indelibly on the minds of friend and foe alike. Indeed, so thoroughly would this solitary German general dominate North Africa, that a year after Rommel’s arrival, the prime minister of Great Britain would blurt out in a meeting of his War Cabinet, whilst attempting to direct global land, sea, and air campaigns, “Rommel! Rommel! Rommel! Rommel! What else matters but beating him?”105

  But to imply that Rommel should have somehow known all of this was going to happen, and thus restrained himself from attacking at Mersa el Brega, is absurd. Rommel was no more prescient than any other man. His duty was to help Germany win the war, and, as he saw it, the best way to do so was to take advantage of the enemy’s weakness and go on the offensive. What would prove to be near-astonishing was not that he was ultimately defeated in North Africa, but rather the scale of the effort the Allies had to mount in order to accomplish that defeat.

  But all of this was in the future when, on April 10, 1941, Erwin Rommel gathered the Afrika Korps and two motorized Italian divisions, the 17th Pavia and 27th Brescia, on the Via Balbia just east of Derna, preparing to fling them eastward, take Tobruk by coup de main and drive the British back across the Egyptian frontier. From there, at least according to the orders he issued that day, there would be no stopping before he and his men reached the ultimate prize: “The enemy is definitely retreating. We must pursue them with everything we have. Our objective is the Suez Canal, and every man is to be informed of this!”106

  Yet, even as he was issuing these orders, though he had no way of knowing, the same fortune whose fickleness seemed to tip every roll of the dice in Rommel’s favor during the first week of April was about to desert him. When news reached Cairo on April 8 that Generals Neame and O’Connor had been captured the previous day, Major General John Lavarack, the officer commanding of the 7th Australian Infantry Division in Tobruk, was placed in temporary command of all troops in Cyrenaica. His orders were simple: hold Tobruk at all costs in order to buy time for the organization of the defense of Egypt. To accomplish this, Lavarack had not only his own division, but also the 9th Australian Infantry Division. He was a stolid, unimaginative type, in the best sense of both words: he wasn’t prone to panic, nor was he given over to exaggerating his enemy’s strength or capability. He calmly deployed two of his four infantry brigades, the 20th and 26th, in blocking positions along the approaches to the fortress, while the other two, the 18th and the 24th, occupied the defensive perimeter. He then placed a fellow Australian, Major General Sir Leslie Morshead, in charge of the actual defensive operations. Over the course of the next sev
en months, Morshead’s tactics would become literally a textbook example of how a primarily infantry force can successfully hold a position against an enemy armored force of not only superior mobility but also superior numbers.

  Initially, Rommel had thought to drive directly past Tobruk, bringing his tanks around in a sweeping attack from the southeastern side of the perimeter, a move that would simultaneously cut off the port from Cairo and bring the panzers to bear on what was believed to be the weakest section of the defenses. As the Afrika Korps and the Pavia and Brescia Divisions approached Tobruk, he changed his mind, believing that surprise and momentum would allow him to take the town “on the bounce,” as it were. The first components of the 15th Panzer Division had just arrived in North Africa and made their way to Derna, a reconnaissance, a machine-gun and an antitank battalion, and Rommel ordered the 15th Panzer’s commander, Generalmajor Heinrich von Prittwitz und Gaffron, to take them, drive straight ahead along the Via Balbia to Tobruk, and hit the defenders as hard as he could. But when the screen of German armored cars approached the perimeter, the Australians, manning Italian artillery captured when Tobruk fell during Operation Compass, drove them off in confusion; next the defenders blew up a bridge across a wadi (a dry gulch or river bed) at the outer edge of the defenses as the light tanks of the reconnaissance battalion attempted to take it. Seeing this, von Prittwitz tried to cross the wadi itself: his staff car drove down into the gulch despite the warnings of his own men, but before it could reach the opposite embankment, a captured Italian 47mm antitank gun opened fire, destroying the car, killing von Prittwitz and his driver. The general had arrived in North Africa just two weeks earlier.

  The news that von Prittwitz had been killed very quickly reached the small white house in Derna where Rommel had set up the Afrika Korps’ headquarters. Streich was furious: to him, the new general’s death was the consequence of a foolish, wasteful decision by Rommel: only that morning, von Prittwitz had confided to von Schwerin, “Rommel has sent me to take command of the attack. But I’ve only just arrived in Africa, and I don’t know the troops or the terrain.” Still, like the dutiful Prussian officer he was, von Prittwitz had obeyed—and paid the price of obedience. Now, when Rommel returned to his headquarters, a furious Streich awaited him. “I informed [Rommel] that the general he had just sent up front was dead. That was the first time I saw him crack. He went pale, turned on his heel and drove off again without another word.”107

  Shaken by von Prittwitz’s death, Rommel immediately gave up any thought of taking Tobruk by coup de main and instead reverted to his original plan of mounting a set-piece attack from the southeast. By April 11, Tobruk was surrounded with the 5th Light Division in position to the southeast, the three battalions of the 15th Panzer and the Brescia Division to the south, and two Italian infantry divisions along with Ariete Armored Division to the west. Inside the defensive perimeter were the Australian 9th Division, the 18th Infantry Brigade of the Australian 7th Infantry Division, HQ 3rd Armoured Brigade with roughly 60 working tanks and armored cars, a motorized regiment of Indian infantry, and several thousand British soldiers of various units, most of them artillerymen. All in all, the garrison of Tobruk numbered some 24,000 Australian infantry, organized in four brigades, along with roughly 12,000 British soldiers, mainly artillery, signals, and support personnel, and a few score tanks, some British-made, some captured from the Italians. There were also a few thousand Italian prisoners of war who hadn’t yet been evacuated to Cairo, and the residents of the town. Rommel would spend the next seven months trying to take Tobruk in what is often styled a “siege,” but was in fact nothing of the sort. The British continued to hold the harbor, through which supplies and reinforcements were continually fed into the town, while wounded soldiers and non-essential personnel were withdrawn. It would always be a dicey proposition, as the forward airfields that the Italians had built around Tobruk reverted to their original owners, and the Regia Aeronautica, along with several squadrons of the Luftwaffe’s Fliegerkorps X, moved in and made life extremely uncomfortable for ships moving into or out of Tobruk’s harbor.

  Meanwhile, as his main units were taking up their positions around the town, Rommel threw together a kampfgruppe (“battle group”) heavy on infantry, artillery, and antitank guns but with no tanks assigned to it, and pushed it further eastward, past Tobruk. Command of the kampfgruppe was given to Oberst Maximilian von Herff, who moved swiftly to capture key positions along the Libyan-Egyptian frontier. Before the month was out, Fort Capuzzo, Bardia, Sollum and the vital Halfaya Pass were in his hands. For the time being, Rommel’s eastern flank was secure, and he could focus his attention on the capture of Tobruk. Against all conventional professional wisdom, he had pulled off one of the greatest bluffs in military history and through a combination of audacity, courage, guile, bluster, arrogance and insubordination recaptured almost the whole of Cyrenaica. What remained to be seen was how well he would respond when the British tried to take it all back.

  Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. An official portrait taken in 1943; note the Pour le Mérite worn alongside the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

  Officer cadet Erwin Rommel with his sister Helen and brothers Karl and Gerhard, in a photograph taken circa 1911.

  Leutnant Rommel with an unidentified comrade in France, 1915. In his buttonhole Rommel wears the ribbon of the Military Merit Order (Militärverdienstorden) of the Kingdom of Württemberg.

  Taken shortly after the end of the Great War, possibly 1920 or 1921, Erwin and Lucie pose for a formal portrait as husband and wife.

  Between the wars, a rare photo of Major Rommel, with his Pour le Mérite.

  Poland, the first week of September 1939; Rommel, commanding the Führer’s bodyguard, stands to Adolf Hitler’s immediate left.

  Generalmajor Rommel and the staff of 7th Panzer Division, near the River Seine, mid-June 1940.

  Rommel standing next to a Panzer IVD outside of Dieppe. The camera was a personal gift of Propaganda Minister Josef Göbbels, who greatly admired Rommel.

  Rommel at Saint-Valery-en-Caux on the Channel coast. The British officer on Rommel’s left is Major-General Victor Fortune, Officer Commanding, 51st Highland Division, who has just formally surrendered the town to Rommel.

  Erwin and Lucie Rommel in the summer of 1940. Rommel is wearing the Wehrmacht’s summer white uniform tunic, and the Knight’s Cross he was awarded during the Battle of France in June.

  Rommel shortly after his arrival in Tripoli, February 1941. He is standing with Generalmajor Stefan Frölich, who served as the Luftwaffe’s liason officer for the Afrika Korps.

  Rommel with Italian Marshal Ettore Bastico, in North Africa, spring 1941. Their professional relationship was tumultuous, though it eventually evolved into one of mutual respect.

  The Desert Fox. Rommel in North Africa sometime in 1941—the exact date is uncertain. Standing to Rommel’s left is Leutnant Alfred Berndt, originally of Göbbels’ Propaganda Ministry, who became an outstanding soldier, Rommel’s friend, sometime confidant, and frequent unofficial messenger to Hitler.

  The Afrika Korps on the move: 5th Light Division advancing toward Tobruk, April 1941.

  The primary workhorse of the Afrika Korps, the Pzkw. (Panzerkampfwagen) III. This is the J model, which mounted a long-barreled 50mm gun, capable of defeating any British tank save the heavily-armored Matilda. This particular panzer was abandoned for lack of fuel outside of Tobruk in November 1941.

  The Afrika Korps’ other workhorse, the Panzer IV. This is the E model, which mounted a short-barreled 75mm cannon. This one has spare track on the rear deck and an improvised jerrycan rack atop the turret for storing extra fuel.

  The much-feared 88mm Flak 36. Originally designed as an anti-aircraft gun, its extraordinarily long range (up to 8 miles) and remarkable hitting power made it the bane of Allied armor in North Africa.

  British tanks, a study in contrast: to the left, the A-13 Cruiser, fast, somewhat unreliable, and vulnerable to any anti-tan
k gun in the Afrika Korps’ arsenal; on the right the Matilda Mk. III, impervious to any German gun but the 88, thoroughly reliable, but slow, which was a handicap in the cut and thrust of desert warfare.

  Rommel in mid-May 1942, wearing an Afrika Korps sun helmet, having just been invested with Italy’s Grand Officer’s Cross of the Military Order of Savoy. He also wears Italy’s Silver Medal of Military Valor.

  Rommel’s Sdkfz. 250/3 command half-track, nicknamed “Greif” (“Strike”), somewhere in the Cauldron during the Battle of Gazala.

  Rommel, Oberstleutnant Fritz Bayerlein, and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring conferring during the Battle of Gazala, early June 1942.

  The “war without hate.” Rommel and Berndt visiting a graveyard in Libya, where German and British soldiers lie buried side-by-side, equally honored.

  The “Rommel touch.” Here Rommel awards the Iron Cross Second Class to one of his young tank crewmen. Whenever possible, Rommel preferred to make such awards in person. The young schutzen (private) and his commanding general both wear bandages over sores caused either by blisters or bites from sand flies.