Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  No small part of Rommel’s difficulties in taking Tobruk was the character of the Australians themselves: he would write in Krieg ohne Haase of an encounter with a group of about 60 Australians captured in the attack on Ras el Madauar, remarking that they were “immensely big and powerful men who, without question, represented an elite formation of the British Empire, a fact that was also evident in battle.” They were tenacious in defense, and would guarantee that Tobruk remained Rommel’s “Dorn im Fleisch” for the next seven months. At the same time, an equal degree of defensive determination, this one by Axis forces, was being displayed 100 miles east of Tobruk, on the Egyptian frontier, where a motley collection of German and Italian infantry, artillery, and antitank guns had been holding the Via Balbia at the narrow coastal defile of Sollum and the passage through Halfaya Pass.

  The geography of the North African coast shared by Libya and Egypt was peculiar: a narrow strip of relatively level ground of varying width rose gently from the waters of the Mediterranean, then sheered abruptly upward into the slopes of a 600-foot high escarpment so steep that neither wheeled nor tracked vehicles could drive over it. The escarpment itself ran from a point about 70 miles east of the border westward all the way to Tobruk. At the coastal town of Sollum, the slopes of the escarpment approached to within a half-mile of the sea. A few miles south of Sollum was the Halfaya Pass, the only break passable to vehicles in the ridgeline of the escarpment, and the only means of bypassing the escarpment that did not require a long, tortuous detour inland. West of Sollum, and running inland to the southwest for 160 miles, was The Wire, a thick, dense, 6-foot high barricade of barbwire and wooden posts, built by the Italians as a border defense in the early 1930s. Together, Sollum and the Halfaya Pass created a natural bottleneck for any army advancing westward out of Egypt into Libya. Each position was a defender’s dream: both offered numerous sites on the slopes of the escarpment for observation posts, along with positions for artillery and antitank guns with almost unlimited fields of fire. At Sollum, the coastal road, the Via Balbia, took a sharp 90-degree turn to the left, forced on the Italian engineers who built it by the terrain; at Halfaya, the road through the pass wound and twisted, again according to the dictates of the contours of the land. Any vehicle attempting to pass through either place was compelled to move at low speed, making itself a particularly vulnerable target. Sollum and Halfaya offered Erwin Rommel a golden opportunity to use the terrain against the British to make up for the Afrika Korps’ inferior numbers.

  In early April, as he was simultaneously bundling the motorized and mechanized units of the Western Desert Force across the Egyptian frontier and bottling up the Australian infantry in Tobruk, Rommel knew that if the garrison there were able to hold out even for a few weeks, a British attack, or even an out-and-out offensive, to relieve the beleaguered fortress would be inevitable. That knowledge had been no small part of the reason for the repeated attempts to take the town in mid- and late-April. With the O.K.W. having forbidden any further assaults, it was now the task of the Afrika Korps to contain the Tobruk garrison while at the same time blunting and ultimately defeating the inevitable British attack out of Egypt trying to break through to Tobruk and raise the siege. Rommel, anticipating that sooner or later the O.K.W. would give him permission to once more try to take Tobruk by storm, began redeploying his Italian infantry division to hold the perimeter around the fortress while his German units began training in the old-fashioned assault tactics that Rommel had employed so successfully in 1917 and 1918. In the reshuffling, he proposed to send two Italian divisions eastward to bolster the defenses at Sollum and the Halfaya Pass.

  In the mad dash eastward from Mechili at the beginning of April, the 3rd Reconaissance Battalion had actually raced past Tobruk, occupied Sollum on April 15, and immediately dug in. In a few days it was joined by the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Panzer Regiment, and a battalion of motorized Italian infantry from the Trento Division, all under the command of Oberst Maximilian von Herff. Halfaya Pass was covered by two companies of Bersaglieri — tough, well-trained motorised infantry, the elite of the Italian army and justifiably regarded as formidable fighters by the Germans and British alike — with a half-dozen medium artillery batteries in support. Both positions were given a liberal sprinkling of German 37mm and 50mm antitank guns, but the key to the defense of either would be the thirteen 88mm Flak guns—seven at Sollum, six at Halfaya—sited and dug in to serve as antitank weapons. Originally designed as an antiaircraft gun, the Flak (flugzeugabwehr kanone) Model 36 and 37 guns (they differed only in the way their barrels were constructed) had proven able to defeat the armor of any tank in the Allied order of battle, including the heavily armored Matilda tanks of the British Army, as Rommel had discovered first-hand at Arras a year earlier. Now, in the flat expanses of the North African desert, the Flak 88 came into its own, as it possessed the range and power to knock out any vehicle its crew could see.

  Colonel von Herff’s tank battalion had roughly 40 Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks available (the actual number fluctuated daily, depending on how many tanks were actually running at any given moment), along with the armored cars of the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, ready to react to any British incursion toward Sollum or Halfaya. The Panzer III was a 25-ton tank armed with either a 37mm or 50mm main gun, designed before the war to be the Wehrmacht’s main battle tank; its stablemate, the Panzer IV, was slightly heavier (27 tons), and armed with a short-barreled 75mm main gun, its original purpose being to support advancing infantry. Later the Panzer IV would be given successively longer 75mm guns as it took over the battle tank role from the Panzer III—in the spring of 1941, however, either vehicle was capable of taking on and defeating any tank currently put in the field by the British Army.

  In addition to covering Sollum and the Halfaya Pass, von Herff, at Rommel’s direction, also took his small armored force on frequent raids into British territory. The purpose of these raids was to simultaneously gather intelligence on British plans and intentions, destroy British supply dumps whenever possible, cause whatever casualties could be inflicted at minimal risk to his own units, take the odd prisoner or two, and generally inflict mischief and mayhem upon the British whenever and wherever possible, with an eye on keeping them off-balance. Wavell had ordered what remained of the Western Desert Froce’s mechanized units to do their best to constantly press the Germans and Italians holding Sollum and Halfaya, and von Herff was returning the British in kind.

  The intelligence-gathering aspect of von Herff’s adventures was crucial to Rommel. Rarely has a commanding general become as adroit as did Erwin Rommel during his years in North Africa in comprehending, interpreting—and when necessary, intuiting—enemy plans and intentions from the information provided by his intelligence sources. Reconnaissance, both on the ground and from the air, was essential, of course, although it had its limitations: the British were the past masters of deceiving aerial observation and photography, a tradition begun by General Edmund Allenby in the Gaza campaign in the autumn of 1917. Prisoners of war often let slip critical bits of information, seemingly insignificant in and of themselves, but invaluable when pieced together by intelligence officers with other sources of information, especially captured enemy documents. But in the Western Desert, it was signals intelligence—the interception and interpretation of wireless transmissions back and forth between headquarters and subordinate units, or between individual units themselves, which provided the richest source of intelligence about enemy capabilities and intentions, and which for Afrika Korps would become an essential element in the creation and continuation of the legend of the Desert Fox.

  Signals intelligence in 1941 was still something of a dark art, for the Second World War was the first major conflict where significant amounts of essential communications by combat units took place via wireless radio. In the First World War, nearly all communications on land were sent and received via telephone lines, or, when those failed, via runner or even carrier pigeon. Wireless equipme
nt was still far too bulky and balky to be anything like an apparatus transportable in a battlefield, thus its tactical and operational usefulness was essentially nil. It would not be until the 1920s that radio transceivers became sufficiently compact and reliable to be mounted in tanks, armored cars, and command vehicles. Benefitting from two decades of naval experience with wireless, armies immediately understood that, unlike telephone lines, where any would-be eavesdropper had to physically tap into a cable in order to hear what it was transmitting, it was impossible to secure a wireless signal from the prying ears of anyone with a tunable radio receiver. Codes and coding systems were quickly developed and adopted, but in practice, as most of the codes and code machines were time-consuming and clumsy to operate, many armies were lax, sometimes egregiously so, in employing them consistently. (One of the advantages of the German “Enigma” system, which turned out to be a vulnerability that the British were ultimately able to exploit in their development of “Ultra,” was the ease with which messages could be encoded or decoded. This led to the generation of a huge number of Enigma-encoded messages passing back and forth among and between units of the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Kriegsmarine, and as any cryptographer would readily acknowledge, the larger the volume of messages with which a code-breaker has to work, the more likely that code will, in fact, be broken. That is, in a greatly simplified form, exactly what happened with Ultra.)

  British units in Egypt, from corps headquarters down to battalion level, were frequently guilty of very poor radio discipline, often transmitting messages partially or even fully “in the clear,” that is, uncoded, or spending time in idle chit-chat among units. Even when coded, the volume of messages sent and received by a given unit, their length, and the identifiers used by the sender and receiver could offer priceless bits of information about those units, reveal their overall organization and chain of command, and offer significant clues as to strengths and supply situations. An astute intelligence officer—and there were several such in the Afrika Korps—eavesdropping on his enemy’s radio net could readily deduce patterns and habits in those communications, and so recognize that when those patterns changed, it almost invariably signified something important was about to happen.

  That was precisely what happened on the night of May 14, when Leutnant Alfred Seebohm, commanding officer of the 3rd Company, 56th Signals Battalion and the Afrika Korps’ best signals intelligence specialist, heard the word “Fritz” broadcast to all British units in Egypt, and listened as the Tommy radio net then went silent—something that had never before occurred. Seebohm, who had a small liaison detachment assigned to Rommel’s staff, immediately passed the word along about this unusual incident, and Rommel, sensitive to the vulnerability of the Sollum–Halfaya position, alerted Colonel von Herff, and reinforced the southeastern sector of the Tobruk perimeter as a precaution against a sortie by the Tobruk garrison. At 6:00 A.M. on May 15, the British attacked at Sollum and Halfaya in what was to be the aptly named Operation Brevity.

  Ultra intercepts had provided London and Cairo with at least part of the report that Paulus had made to Halder, including observations he made about the Afrika Korps’ shortages of fuel and ammunition. General Wavell immediately understood that the Axis forces around Tobruk and at the Egyptian frontier had for the time being shifted to the defensive and saw an opportunity to relieve Tobruk. In London, Churchill read the same intercepts, and from them somehow concluded that the Germans were on the verge of collapse; before long, he was pestering Wavell to launch a major attack to relieve Tobruk and rout the Afrika Korps.

  Wavell was already planning such an operation, to be called Battleaxe, but the forces needed for such an effort were far from ready: tanks, guns, and equipment lost or worn out in the retreat from Cyrenaica had to be repaired or replaced, while new brigades and regiments arriving from Britain had to be trained, and often their tanks and vehicles—fresh from the factory—had to be modified and adapted to the conditions of the Egyptian and Libyan desert. Wavell had no reasonable expectation of mounting the sort of offensive Churchill was demanding before mid-June, but he did believe that he had the means to lay the groundwork for it, by taking Sollum and the Halfaya Pass, capturing Fort Capuzzo if practicable, and, as far as possible, “writing down” Rommel’s strength. This would be Operation Brevity. Brigadier William Gott, who had been harrying the Germans and Italians at the Egyptian frontier for weeks, was given command of the operation, and on the morning of May 15, he attacked in three columns, with infantry and armor more-or-less working together. The battle was essentially over in two days.

  Gott’s southern column, composed of elements of the 7th Armoured Brigade, was to take the long way around behind the escarpment, moving up to Sidi Azeiz and cutting off the retreat of the Axis units at Sollum and Halfaya. The center column, made up of the 22nd Guards Brigade, was tasked with taking the southern (upper) half of Halfaya Pass along with Fort Capuzzo, a ramshackle fortification that dated back to Italy’s first occupation of Libya in 1911. The northern column, comprised entirely of infantry, was given the lower half of Halfaya Pass and the town of Sollum as its objectives.

  The breadth of the British advance at first created no small confusion for Rommel, who believed that the enemy had committed two full divisions to the attack. He reacted by dispatching a second kampfgruppe from Tobruk, this one formed around a tank battalion from the 8th Panzer Regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hans Kramer, with orders to link up with Kampfgruppe von Herff south of Fort Capuzzo that afternoon. Meanwhile, Gott’s center column ran into strong opposition from the Bersaglieri at the top of Halfaya Pass. Rather than fight it out with the Axis antitank guns, the Guards moved on to Fort Capuzzo. The fort’s defenders, however, put up a stout resistance, and it wasn’t until early afternoon that Capuzzo was taken—briefly. The northern column found itself held up by the understrength Bersaglieri company at the entrance to Halfaya Pass; it needed the entire day to force the stubborn Italians to abandon their positions. As a consequence, the planned British threat to Sollum never materialized.

  Von Herff pulled his kampfgruppe back behind Sollum, to where the coastal road runs along the top of the escarpment, and from there he launched a counterattack on Capuzzo, taking it back from the British just hours after they had captured the fort. Meanwhile, on the desert flank, German reconnaissance patrols shadowed the 7th Armoured Brigade, but mistook the thin-skinned British cruiser tanks for the heavily armored Matildas. Colonel von Herff at first considered swinging wide into the desert to strike the 7th Armoured in the flank but was understandably chary of taking them on without antitank guns in support. Instead he chose to remain near Capuzzo and link up with Kampfgruppe Kramer in the morning, where the combined strength of the two battle groups could deliver a knockout punch to the British armored columns.

  Gott, meanwhile, saw that his center column, the 22nd Guards Brigade and its accompanying infantry, was now left sitting in the open around the oases of Bir Wair and Mussaid, vulnerable to a German counterattack. In the early hours of May 16, he pulled the column back to the top of Halfaya Pass, possibly with the idea of trying to take the remainder of the pass later that day; at the same time, waiting for the Germans to make the next move, he ordered the 7th Armoured Brigade group to halt in place somewhere west of Fort Capuzzo.

  Kramer’s battle group reached Fort Capuzzo at 6:30 A.M., and at 8:00 A.M., he made contact with Kampfgruppe von Herff. At this point the British missed an opportunity to deal Rommel, the Afrika Korps, and the entire Axis adventure in North Africa a crippling blow: by mid-morning both kampfgruppen ran out of fuel and were immobilized. Had Gott known of this and immediately ordered an attack by the 7th Armoured Brigade and the 22nd Dragoons Guards, he could have destroyed almost half of the Afrika Korps’ tank strength. As it was, none of his reconnaissance units divined the reason for von Herff and Kramer’s immobility, and the opportunity passed. It would be almost 4:00 P.M. before both panzer battalions could move again, setting of
f to the west of Capuzzo in pursuit of the British armor seen there the previous day, von Herff now confident that he possessed sufficient strength to deal with whatever the British had there. Tanks from the 5th Panzer Battalion bickered briefly with a company of cruiser tanks from the 7th Armoured Brigade, then both sides withdrew, each convinced they had driven off a powerful enemy attack. During the night the Germans and British tankers repaired damaged vehicles, replenished ammunition stocks, and prepared to once more try conclusions in the morning, but at dawn General Gott, unwilling to leave the 7th Armoured sitting unsupported in the middle of the desert, ordered the brigade to pull back to its starting point at Bir el Khireigat. Operation Brevity was over.

  For the British, Brevity could only be regarded as a failure: only a single objective had been attained, and that only in part, the capture of the northern, lower end, of Halfaya Pass. The British operations never truly came close to accomplishing Wavell’s primary objective, acquiring positions from which to launch an offensive to relieve Tobruk. In terms of personnel and materiel lost, casualties for both the Germans and the British were remarkably low for all the fighting that had actually taken place. Each lost a handful of tanks and a few hundred men killed, wounded, or captured—there was no Italian armor involved in the entire battle, and Italian records of killed and wounded have been lost; the British later claimed to have taken almost 350 Italian prisoners, a not unrealistic figure given the determined Bersaglieri defense of Halfaya.