Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  At 3:30 A.M. on April 14, Rommel was already awake and writing to Lucie, informing her that “today may well see the end of the Battle of Tobruk. The British were very stubborn”—he was still unaware that Tobruk’s defenders were primarily Australian—“and used a lot of artillery. However, we’ll bring it off. . . .” An hour later, just before first light, Olbricht’s tanks went roaring across the antitank ditch and into the gap created by Ponath’s infantrymen. A dozen batteries of Italian field guns, along with Major Hecht’s 88s, provided the fire support. Dawn was breaking as Rommel himself came forward to watch the attack progress, and for a brief while it seemed as if the string of luck created by Rommel’s audacity would continue unbroken. But something he saw at the front seemed to spook Rommel, and he went dashing off to find the Ariete Division, to bring it up to reinforce Olbricht’s 5th Panzer Regiment.111

  Just what he saw—or thought he saw—remains a mystery, but what happened next is not. The Italian armored division had arrived at Tobruk only that morning, its tanks low on fuel and badly in need of servicing; it was in no condition to go directly into action. Nonetheless, Rommel insisted that whatever tanks and vehicles were in running order advance on the 5th Panzer’s left flank, but as soon as the first British artillery shells began falling among them, the Italian troops broke ranks and fled. Disgusted, Rommel returned to El Adem and watched as the tanks of the 5th Panzer Regiment first came under fire from previously concealed Australian antitank guns, then were met by the garrison’s contingent of Matildas. The Matilda had been designed as an infantry support tank, intended to wade directly into enemy fire, and as such was essentially immune to the shot or shells fired by the 37mm guns of Afrika Korps’ panzers. The Matilda’s own 2-pounder gun was more than sufficient to put paid to any of its opponents, and so the defenders began methodically picking off the German tanks one by one.

  It was all over in less than three hours. While the British artillery worked over the 8th Battalion and the Matildas dealt with the panzers, the Australian infantry began pinching off the base of the German bridgehead, threatening to cut off the entire attacking force, armor and infantry alike. Major Hecht’s Flak battalion fought ferociously, but eventually most of its guns were knocked out by enemy artillery. Having lost almost half his tanks and facing annihilation, Olbricht ordered the panzers to pull back, covering the withdrawal of the machine gunners as best they could while doing so. Not that there was much left to cover: by 8:00 A.M. three-quarters of the 8th Machine-Gun Battalion were dead, dying, or had been taken prisoner—among the dead lay the body of Major Gustav Ponath.

  Furious at the failure of this last attack, Rommel demanded that Olbricht send forth his tanks yet again, this time at 4:00 P.M., and once more Streich demurred. He noted acidly to Major Karl-Otto Ehlers, Rommel’s operations officer, that “had the British been the least daring, they could have pushed out of [Tobruk] and not only overrun the rest of my division but also captured the Afrika Korps headquarters. . . . That would have been the end of the German presence in Libya and of the Herr General’s reputation as well.” Apparently Streich’s rebuke, while doing nothing to diminish Rommel’s dislike for his outspoken subordinate, had a salutary effect: upon being informed of Streich’s words, Rommel’s only reply was a terse cancellation of the proposed 4:00 P.M. attack, the Afrika Korps instead being instructed to assume an “aggressive defense.” Regrettably, Streich’s reaction, if any, has been lost.112

  The Australians had, for the time being, at least, beaten Rommel, and he gave up the idea that the El Adem position was a “weak” spot in Tobruk’s defenses. In truth, what would become known in the Australian official histories as the “the Easter attacks” had revealed Rommel at his worst. Short-tempered, impetuous, and imperious, he refused to listen to the advice or counsel of his subordinates, underestimated his opponent even as he overestimated his own skills, all the while committing the worse offense possible by any commanding officer: he demanded more of his soldiers than they were able to give him. Not that the men of the Afrika Korps were unwilling, but rather the tasks he laid before them were superhuman.

  Rommel’s hand had been evident in each of these attacks, with their over-reliance on the same sort of speed and audacity that had been so successful in France the previous spring and summer. Having watched as French defenders repeatedly abandoned strong positions at the first display of determined opposition, he failed to recognize that the morale and cohesion of British Army, let alone that of the Imperial Forces—the Australian, South African, and Indian divisions deployed in the Middle East—were nothing like the fragile spirit of their erstwhile French allies. British forces might retreat, and do so in great haste and no little degree of disorder, but they rarely panicked. Rommel had absorbed the lessons of Dinant, Phillipeville, Avesnes, and Landrecies, but not those of Arras. The British, meanwhile, were prepared to supply further tutelage.

  In the immediate aftermath of what can only be described as the fiasco at El Adem, something of a crisis in confidence occurred on the part of Rommel’s immediate subordinates, together with a lapse in self-confidence. Streich in particular was especially bitter, as he had been adamant ever since the failure of the attack on April 11 which had cost von Prittwitz his life that only a methodically planned, carefully prepared set-piece assault stood any reasonable chance of breaking through the defenses of Tobruk. Olbricht was fuming at what he considered to be the waste of valuable tanks and lives from his panzer regiment and the virtual destruction of the 8th Machine-Gun Battalion. Rommel himself couldn’t disagree: suffering unnecessary tank losses was bad enough—the Afrika Korps would always be chronically short of tanks, particularly the precious Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs—but enduring needless human casualties was worse. While he was not above spending his men’s lives to gain an objective, Rommel was loathe to throw them away in exchange for something as mundane as the details of an enemy’s defensive position. Nevertheless, through his own mistakes as well as circumstances beyond his control, he had been reduced to exactly that expedient.

  The time had come to change tactics: boldness and dash having failed, he would now have to rely on deliberation and method if he were to succeed in capturing the town and, especially, the port. Rommel, after studying what information the Italian headquarters in Tripoli could provide about the three defensive lines around Tobruk, decided to attack the western sector of the perimeter around Ras el Madauar, a dominating hill which provided a matchless observation for British artillery spotters, and this time it would be the Italians who were to try conclusions with the Australians.

  On April 15, an infantry battalion from the Brescia division, well supported by artillery fire, attacked the base of the hill and cracked the line of strongpoints. Again the Australians’ communications net came to their rescue, bringing a hail of intense and accurate 25-pounder shells down on top of the Italians, who were forced to pull back to their starting positions. The next day it was the turn of the 1st Battalion of the Trento Division, with tanks from the Ariete in support, and yet again the ubiquitous British artillery broke up the attack.

  Meanwhile, the Australians were being very aggressive in their own right; audacious Digger patrols were going out at night to infiltrate the enemy lines, bringing back whatever prisoners they could, and leaving dozens, sometimes hundreds, of dead German and Italian soldiers behind them. The fighting in the Libyan desert might have been remarkable for being less vicious than that of other fronts; that is not to say that it was any less lethal. These patrols served two purposes for General Morshead: it kept the Germans and Italians on edge, as they never knew where or when the next one of these nocturnal strikes would occur, and it prevented the men inside the Tobruk perimeter from developing the passive, purely defensive mentality that Morshead knew was usually fatal to a fortress garrison. They were the physical demonstration of what Morshead meant when he said, after seeing an article in a British newspaper headed “Tobruk can take it!”, that “We’re not here to take it, we’re
here to give it.”113

  Surprisingly, the setbacks experienced by the Italians did not raise a fraction of the ire or frustration in Rommel that he had expressed over the failure of the Afrika Korps to break through the Australian lines at El Adem. Nor did he place an inordinate amount of blame on the Italian troops for their lack of success, despite claims made by various critics at the time and later that the Italian army was Rommel’s preferred whipping-boy when things went badly for him. Not that he wasn’t above seeking out scapegoats: in a confidential report forwarded to the Kriegsministerium (War Ministry) in Berlin, he observed rather acidly that “During the offensive in Cyrenaica, and particularly during the early part of the siege of Tobruk, there were numerous instances where my clear and specific orders were not obeyed by my commanders,” that “there were instances bordering on disobedience,” and that “some commanders broke down in the face of the enemy.” These were, unmistakably, references to General Streich, Colonel Olbricht, Major Ehlers (whom Rommel had shipped back to Germany in something approaching disgrace), and—to Rommel’s shame—Major Ponath. He was more circumspect in giving voice to his anger and frustration in his letters to Lucie, telling her on April 16, for example, that “I don’t get the support I need from my commanders. . . . I’ve put in for some of them to be changed.”114

  He was also careful to present a more optimistic face to her, one more consistent with the version of events being offered up to the German public by Göbbels’ Ministry of Information. In that same letter he confided that “The battle for Tobruk has quietened down a bit. The enemy is embarking so we can expect the fortress to be ours very shortly.” How much of this Rommel actually believed is impossible to say, although there is the impression that he was aware of writing to a larger audience, should Lucie care to share some of the less personal passages of his letters with friends. What comes next is rather surprising, given the candor mixed in with Rommel’s obvious pride at his small army’s accomplishments. Once Tobruk was taken, he wrote, “. . . then we’ll probably come to a stop. Nevertheless our small force has achieved a tremendous amount, which has put a different picture on the whole campaign in the south.” Regardless of what he might say to encourage his troops or provide as grist for Göbbel’s propaganda mill, Rommel clearly understood that for the time being, the Afrika Korps and its Italian allies had reached the limits of their capabilities.115

  Intriguing is his comment, almost an aside, that the Afrika Korps’ advance to Tobruk “put a different picture on the whole campaign in the south,” evidence that Rommel, for probably the first time in his career, was now thinking in strategic terms, however imprecisely at that moment. It serves as a benchmark for the remarkably rapid maturing as a strategist that Rommel would experience over the next three years. He might regard General Staff-trained officers with disdain, holding up his own combat experience and rapid rise to corps command as proof that intellectual credentials were not essential to a successful officer, yet that did not mean there were no gaps in Rommel’s military education. The largest of such was his lack of strategic training: in Danzig, he was taught small-unit tactics and operations, along with the rudiments of logistics, the necessary tools for young junior officers. Strategy was not regarded as essential to their military education: it was assumed that, should they rise to higher command, they would at some point pass through the General Staff Kriegsakademie, where they would acquire a grounding in strategic theory. Rommel’s abrupt—and highly irregular—rise from oberst to generalleutnant in the span of just three years knocked that assumption, and all of its implications, into a cocked hat. In the spring of 1941, Erwin Rommel was most assuredly not a strategist—but he was rapidly becoming one.

  The need for him to do so would be ruthlessly driven home by the British in the months to come, as well as by events in Europe precipitated by the Wehrmacht. Rommel had not the slightest inkling when he ordered the Afrika Korps’ lunge out of El Agheila that in doing so he would bring about a fundamental change in the grand strategy of the British Empire. Indeed, it is highly doubtful, given his use of the word “campaign” in his letter to Lucie, that Rommel even imagined North Africa could become a fully developed theater of operations. His candid admission to Lucie that at Tobruk the Germans and Italians had, for the short term, at least, reached the limits of their capabilities was an unspoken acknowledgment that, for all of his earlier grandiose pronouncements about taking Alexandria and capturing the Suez Canal, he truly understood that, for whatever reasons, to Hitler and the O.K.W. North Africa was only a sideshow.

  Conversely, the Axis advance across Cyrenaica had been a godsend to Churchill, his War Cabinet, and his generals and admirals in their efforts to bring the war to the Germans. Forced to evacuate from France and Belgium in the first week of June 1940, followed by the withdrawal from Norway later that month, then run out of Greece even as the Afrika Korps was besieging Tobruk, nowhere in Europe itself or around the Mediterranean perimeter were British troops meeting German soldiers in combat. The Royal Air Force had won the Battle of Britain the previous autumn, but Britain’s cities were now reeling under the nighttime bombing raids of the Luftwaffe that would become known as “the Blitz,” while Britain’s own bomber offensive against Germany had yet to truly hit its stride. At sea, the news was almost always bad: the German U-boat fleet was in the midst of their “Happy Time,” sinking 282 Allied ships—1.5 million tons of shipping—in less than nine months, while losing fewer than a dozen submarines. And though commando raids on the coasts of occupied countries, along with the daring exploits of the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.)—a highly irregular command created by Churchill and specifically directed by him to “set Europe ablaze,”—might, when suitably publicized and burnished, serve to boost the morale of Britain’s civilian population, they were barely more than pin-pricks to the Germans.

  With Rommel’s headlong rush across Cyrenaica apparently stopped cold outside of Tobruk, Churchill and the War Cabinet were abruptly offered a place where the British Army could meet the Germans head-on with every reason to expect to a victory, and thus present the world, and in particular the United States, with the image of an empire still possessed of both the will and means to fight. Unwittingly aided by the Propagandaministerium’s depictions of the handsome, dashing Panzergeneral who was making himself the master of desert warfare, Great Britain’s own propaganda system began portraying Rommel as a noble nemesis, at once the moral antithesis of the stereotypical Nazi general and a commander of exceptional ability. Rommel would, in turn, and to the consternation of the British commanders in North Africa, repeatedly live up to that image. It would also come to have unexpected consequences for a surprising number of people on both sides.

  The first indication Rommel had that the British were not prepared to accept being summarily kicked out of Cyrenaica came on the night of April 19–20, when 500 British commandos were put ashore on the outskirts of the minor seaport of Bardia, 30 miles behind the Afrika Korps’ forward positions at Sollum and the Halfaya Pass. As darkness fell, a small task force—one submarine, three destroyers, and a light cruiser—brought the commandos to within a few hundred yards of the coast; from there men were brought ashore by landing craft—at least, that was the plan. The submarine failed to rendezvous with the other four ships, and so the Special Boat Section detachment it carried never arrived to join the rest of the commandos. Equipment problems set the operation behind schedule, and part of the raiding force landed in the wrong location; fortunately for them, there was no opposition at the beaches.

  Faulty intelligence was to blame when the commandos either found their supposed targets to be non-existent or located in the wrong places. Minor damage was done to the port and its defenses before the approaching dawn compelled the commandos to withdraw; a communications error caused one company of the raiding force to be left behind when its transports did not show up. Though the British publicly hailed the Bardia raid as a victory, in material terms the raid was a dismal failure, and
strategically it changed nothing in the disposition or balance of forces around Tobruk and at the Egyptian frontier. It was, however, a pointed message to Rommel that the British were rejecting any notion that they were resigned to doing nothing but standing on the defensive. Also, the raid caused Rommel some apprehension about the security of his lines of communication and supply to the German and Italian units holding Sollum and Halfaya, an anxiety that deepened significantly when, the day after the raid, April 21, his “Mammut” transport was strafed and damaged by a pair of RAF Hurricanes.

  While Rommel was no stranger to physical peril, this was Rommel’s first experience of being strafed, and it left him particularly unsettled. It was late in the day and he was returning from Bardia, where he had gone to examine the damage done by the British commando raid, to the German lines around Tobruk. The Mammut was hit 25 times as the Hurricanes made a pair of strafing runs. The vehicle’s driver was wounded by a bullet that came through the vision slit in the armored visor that protected the windshield, while the driver of Rommel’s armored half-track, Corporal Eggert, was killed, along with a dispatch rider, Private Kanthak. Rommel took over the wheel of the Mammut himself, intending to drive straight through to Tobruk, but he was unable to negotiate the unfamiliar route in the darkness, and was compelled to wait until sunrise before he could return to his command post.