Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  At the same time, Brevity was unquestionably a victory for the Axis, although it would be an exaggeration to call it significant. It has sometimes been viewed as the first real battle Erwin Rommel fought as a commanding general—as opposed to what were little more than glorified pursuits of a disorganized enemy in France and across Cyrenaica—but to characterize it as such is misleading. Once he had sent Lieutenant Colonel Kramer’s battle group forward to join Colonel von Herff, Rommel had very little influence on the outcome of the fighting around Capuzzo, Halfaya and Sollum. The battle was fought and won by Kampfgruppen von Herff and Kramer, and the Bersaglieri companies at Halfaya. The significance of Brevity for Erwin Rommel lay in its aftermath, rather than what happened during the battle itself; his lack of exercising direct command during the battle did not prevent his learning from it.

  The first lesson Rommel immediately drew was tactical: he took note of how von Herff’s movements around the upper part of Halfaya Pass seemed to validate his own ideas about the coordination of tanks and antitank guns. At this point in the desert war, and well into the summer of 1942, the overall quality of the Panzer III and IV models in firepower, protection, and reliability was superior to anything the British could field. But that superiority was not absolute: most of Rommel’s tanks were still vulnerable at combat ranges to the ubiquitous 2-pounder gun that was the main armament for all British tanks at the time. Indeed, the 2-pounder was so effective that its presence on the battlefield had relegated the Panzer I and II to reconnaissance duties and actions against “soft” targets, such as infantry formations. The Matilda frankly frightened German panzer crews, because its heavy armor was completely impervious to the 37mm Pak 36 (panzerabwehrkanone—antitank gun) and could shrug off hits from the 50mm Pak 40 at medium and long ranges—its own 2-pounder could, in turn, put paid to any of the Afrika Korps’ tanks. The only German weapon that could defeat the Matilda at any range were, of course, the 88mm Flak guns.

  This reality spurred Rommel to develop more flexible tactics for his antitank guns, tactics which would allow him to employ them aggressively, by advancing a screen of armor and moving up a line of guns behind it. At the proper moment, having drawn their British counterparts into an engagement, the panzers would fall back, drawing the pursuing British tanks into the fire of the previously hidden 37mm and 50mm Paks. A handful of Flak 88s, with their long range, would be sufficient to take on and take out any Matildas that might be among the British attackers—the lighter guns would be able to finish off anything else. This ploy would become the standard Axis tactic for the remainder of the war in North Africa.

  The success of Kampfgruppen von Herff and Kramer spurred Rommel into thinking more deeply about the use of small, battalion-sized ad hoc units assembled for particular actions and operations. This offered a far greater degree of flexibility in reacting to or taking advantage of specific tactical and operational situations, which might be relatively fleeting, and to which larger formations would be too ponderous and unwieldy to swiftly respond. Rommel did not invent the Kampfgruppe, or battle group; elements of the concept date back to the Stosstruppen of 1918, and it would be the cornerstone of Wehrmacht operations on the Eastern Front throughout the war. He brought the idea to the Western Desert, however, and in employing it he gave the Afrika Korps, and, to a lesser extent, the Italians, an operational flexibility which the British were never able to equal, and which often made up for the Axis inferiority in numbers of men, vehicles, and equipment.

  The first opportunity for Rommel to put this developing concept into action came just 10 days after Brevity came to an end. Rommel knew that the British would soon return, and in greater numbers, and he was determined to take back the lower half of the Halfaya Pass before they did so. His solution was Fall Skorpion, an attack by three kampfgruppen made up of tanks, artillery—including antitank guns—and infantry from the 5th and 8th Panzer Battalions, the 104th Infantry Battalion, the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, and the 33rd Artillery Regiment, all under the command of Oberst von Herff. On the morning of May 27, they struck at Halfaya Pass, which was held by a single battalion of the Coldstream Guards, supported by a handful of Matildas and a single battery of 25-pounder guns. The Coldstreams were in an untenable position, as there were no other British units close enough to provide support or reinforcements, and they were overrun in less than two hours. As soon as news of the German attack reached him, General Gott ordered the Halfaya garrison to abandon the pass, which they did, leaving behind 173 soldiers killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, along with the wrecks of five Matildas, four field guns, and eight antitank guns. The last British gains from Brevity had been eliminated.

  Relieved now that the whole of Halfaya Pass was back in his possession, Rommel significantly reinforced its defenses, giving the responsibility for holding the pass against the inevitable British offensive to one of the most colorful—and beloved—characters in the whole of the Afrika Korps, Hauptmann Wilhelm Georg Bach. Just a year younger than Rommel, Bach was cheerful, outgoing, cigar-chomping, slightly myopic Bavarian who had been awarded the Iron Cross, First and Second Class, in the Great War, and who walked with the aid of a cane courtesy of a severe leg injury incurred in that conflict. He had joined the Imperial German Army in the first week of August 1914, was so highly regarded as an enlisted man that he was marked for officer training, being commissioned a lieutenant of Reserves in August 1915. He served at the front for just over a year before being wounded in combat at the Somme and taken prisoner by the British. When he was repatriated to Germany after the war, he enrolled in an Evangelische (Lutheran) seminary, became an ordained Christian minister, and took up a position as the pastor of a church in Mannheim.

  He never resigned his commission, however, and so found himself—clerical collar, cigars, cane and all—recalled to reserve duty in the summer of 1936, when Hitler began his vast expansion of the German Army. In September 1939, with Germany again at war, Bach was posted to a reserve regiment stationed along the Moselle River, where the German and French armies went through the motions of the Phoney War. February 1940 saw him assigned to command a company in the 104th Infantry Regiment, which went into action for the first time in May, when the Wehrmacht invaded France. Then when the 104th Regiment’s parent unit, the 33rd Infantry Division, was dissolved in November 1940, the regiment became part of the newly created 15th Panzer Division, which was promptly sent to North Africa. The 1st Battalion of the 104th was Kampfgruppe von Herff’s infantry component when Halfaya Pass was retaken; heavily reinforced, it was immediately assigned to defend the recaptured defile, with Bach temporarily in command. Under his direction, most of the battalion’s strength—including five batteries of antitank guns, one of them the deadly 88mm Flak guns—was placed on the heights at the top of the pass, while the entrance down by the coastal road was covered by a machine-gun company and heavily mined.

  At first, Rommel was unsure what to make of Hauptmann Bach; the clergyman-turned-infantry officer was habitually addressed by his soldiers as “Vater” (“Father”), and it was unclear whether it was a reference to his former profession or to his paternal nature, for Bach had a reputation for taking very good care of his men. While Rommel was also held in high regard by his soldiers, his invariably punctilious nature discouraged that sort of familiarity. Also, Rommel, though not given over to requiring his rankers to waste time and effort on needless “spit and polish,” expected his officers to look like officers; given his own streak of vanity, he was almost always immaculately turned out. (When Rommel finally conceded defeat to the desert heat and began wearing short trousers in early May, it was an occasion for much comment by his staff and subordinates—out of his hearing, of course.) Bach, however, looked like nothing so much as a walking bundle of military laundry, all rumples and wrinkles—a less “soldierly”-looking officer would have been hard to find. Consequently Rommel took an initial dislike to Bach, and presumed that the Hauptmann’s military talents were on a par with his appearance. It would be
only a matter of weeks, however, before Rommel would find himself numbered among Hauptmann Bach’s admirers, for, despite his unprepossessing countenance, Bach could fight like a lion.

  At the same time that the Halfaya garrison was strengthened, reinforcements were sent to Sollum and Fort Capuzzo, backed by a handful of strongpoints (stützpunkten) that were well armed with antitank guns, mortars, and machine guns. In constructing these positions, Rommel unashamedly drew on the hard-won experience his soldiers had earned in attacking the Tobruk defenses, and his engineers openly copied their best features. Rommel also seized whatever plums fortune chose to drop into his lap: while driving along the coast road on one of his inspections of these new defenses, Rommel happened across dozens of artillery pieces of varying caliber, along with piles of ammunition, sitting abandoned in the desert northwest of Bardia. These were the guns abandoned six months previously by Marshal Graziani’s army in its headlong flight westward during Operation Compass. As Rommel told the tale,

  This materiel was just waiting to be used, and I therefore gave immediate instructions for all unclaimed Italian guns to be collected up and used to strengthen the Sollum–Halfaya–Sidi Omar front. A substantial number of these guns was put in order by one or two of our German workshops and then installed in the strongpoints. But the Italian High Command did not agree at all, and General Gariboldi had me informed . . . that the guns were Italian property and were only to be used by Italians. They had been perfectly content up till then to stand by and watch this materiel go to wrack and ruin, but the moment the first guns had been made serviceable on our initiative, they began to take notice. However, I was not to be put off.122

  During his years in Africa, Rommel would more than once remark on what he called “Italian treachery,” usually in reference to some intelligence failure or imagined betrayal by unnamed Italian spies, but incidents like this gave an added fillip to his suspicions that, however loyal may be the Italian soldiers at the front, doing the actual fighting, their superiors in Rome and Tripoli were more interested in political infighting and machismo posturing than in actually winning the war; to Rommel that was the ultimate treachery.

  Though not completely satisfied—he was still chronically short of men, vehicles, and equipment, especially artillery, despite the unexpected and involuntary Italian largesse—Rommel could now feel a bit more confident in the security of the approaches to Tobruk. Rightly certain that Brevity had not been a serious effort at relieving the besieged fortress, he now turned his hand once again to training his infantry units, especially the Italians, in tactics he devised to defeat and capture the defenses of Tobruk. His hope was that he would have an opportunity to storm the town before the British began the offensive to relieve the Australian defenders.

  At the same time, he had to set his own military house in order, not the most pleasant of tasks. The first priority was to bring some sense of order to the supply situation. The Axis forces in Africa were experiencing their first significant supply crisis: superficially, this was the consequence of Rommel’s mad but inspired dash across Cyrenaica and his less-than-inspired attacks on Tobruk; more realistically, it was the combined fault of O.K.W. and Comando Supremo. The chronic supply difficulties that plagued the Afrika Korps and the Italian Army resulted from fundamentally flawed strategic thinking in both Berlin and Rome. Admittedly Rommel’s drive across Libya had placed a near-breaking strain on the already inefficient Italian supply system, yet the harsh reality was that Italy’s North African ports barely possessed the capacity to meet the peacetime requirements of the Italian army and the Italian civil population in Libya. Even had Rommel obeyed his original orders and remained on the defensive at El Agheila, the addition of the Afrika Korps’ two panzer divisions and their supporting units pushed the supply requirements far beyond the total capacity of Libya’s ports still in Axis hands. Now, with the addition of a handful of squadrons from Fliegerkorps X flying out of bases west of Tobruk, the situation only became worse: despite the best efforts of the Italian navy, the Italian merchant marine, and the Luftwaffe, the Axis armies in Africa were steadily being starved of fuel and supplies—and the war in North Africa would be first and foremost a war of supply.

  There is an old—and misleading—bit of conventional military wisdom which holds that “amateurs study tactics, while professionals study logistics.” The truth is that amateurs study only tactics or logistics, while professionals study both simultaneously. The most brilliant tactics ever devised are pointless when the supplies needed to execute them do not exist, while all the supplies in the world are useless when a commanding officer has no idea how to effectively employ them. Of course, in modern mechanized warfare, there is far more involved in the term “supplies” than the classic “Three Bs” of black-powder days—Bullets, Beans, and Boots. The problems are considerably more complex than simply securing sufficient gasoline to power the tanks and trucks, or shells for the artillery. To properly function a mechanized army is dependent on an astonishing range of articles and materiel, ranging from spark plugs, piston rings, gaskets and seals, bearings and bearing grease, engine oil, transmission fluid, special recouperator oil for recoil mechanisms, tires for trucks and armored cars, rubber road wheels for tanks, replacement links for tracks, tubes for radios, maps, compasses, lens cleaner, bore cleaner, medical supplies and equipment, to items as mundane but utterly essential as socks, uniforms, and boots. In all, just the two divisions of the Afrika Korps alone required over 700 tons of supplies per day in order to be able to conduct basic operations—when they were on the attack, that figure doubled.

  None of this should have come as a surprise to the O.K.W. or Comando Supremo: the supply requirements ought to have been calculated before the first German unit sailed for North Africa, and the constraints imposed by the limitations of the Libyan ports understood with perfect clarity by the General Staff officers whose professional responsibility it was to oversee and, if possible, overcome such difficulties. Rommel, for his part, blamed the Italians for deliberately misleading their German allies, and if his censure is taken as being limited to the upper echelons of the Italian command structure, he was exactly right. In Rome, Mussolini, along with General Ugo Cavallero, chief of Comando Supremo, Admiral Arturo Riccardi, undersecretary of the Regia Marina, Italy’s navy, and, to a lesser degree, General Graziani in Tripoli, all airily reassured Hitler, Halder, Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch (the commander-in-chief of the German Army), and General der Flieger Otto von Waldau, who commanded Fliegerkorps X, that the Italian navy and merchant marine would be able to transport more than enough tonnage to Libya to keep the Afrika Korps properly supplied. Hitler and his officers, in turn, simply took the Italians at their word, and planned accordingly.

  Consequently, in March 1941, when Franz Halder asked Rommel how he expected to solve the Afrika Korps’ looming supply problems, Rommel rightly shot back, “That’s your pigeon!” The implication was that had Halder and the General Staff properly done their jobs, they would have foreseen the near-insurmountable obstacles to adequately supplying a panzerkorps in North Africa, and advised Hitler, who at the time was still amenable to taking the advice of his senior officers, against committing any ground forces to shoring up the sagging Italian war effort in Libya. Halder never forgave him for the barb, and began circulating the rumor among his fellow senior officers that Rommel’s grasp of logistics was weak, if not positively feeble, the beginnings of a myth that continues to persist.

  Yet Rommel was correct: the German high command had blithely taken its Italian counterpart at its word without question, with the result being a logistical disaster waiting to happen in North Africa. Rommel, in the last days of May, found himself compelled to decide how often Paul was to be robbed to pay Peter, and of how much. The supply situation of the entire North African campaign—until only a matter of weeks before its conclusion—would be run as a makeshift, improvised proposition, the Afrika Korps at times as much dependent for its existence on captured enemy sup
plies and equipment as that provided by its own quartermaster branch. At the same time, lest the mendacity of the Comando Supremo be taken as representative of the whole of the Italian armed forces, it should be remembered that, despite the best efforts of the Allied naval and air forces in the Mediterranean to prevent it, 84 percent of all the fuel, food, and munitions shipped to the Afrika Korps reached North Africa, all of it carried in Italian ships. The fault was not with the men responsible for delivering the supplies, but rather with those who made impossible promises and those who acted on them.

  It has to be said that Rommel sometimes made the situation more difficult than it actually was with the risks he took, but in May 1941, at least, Rommel knew he had to fight with one eye figuratively on his divisions’ fuel gauges and ammunition stocks: he had no room for error, and any risks he might take in countering the coming British offensive would have to be very finely calculated indeed. He was also acutely aware that both O.K.W. and O.K.H. (Oberkommando des Heers—the General Headquarters of the Army) would be peering over his shoulder during any operation to come in Libya. General von Brauchitsch had already sent Rommel a rather tart signal (in a letter to Lucie dated May 26, Rommel called it “a considerable rocket”) about the messages from Rommel received in Berlin in regard to the situation around Tobruk and at the Egyptian frontier. From all appearances, the General Staff and the Army Command minimized the severity of the difficulties Rommel faced, while overestimating the degree of whatever advantages he held over his British opponents. It is not at all difficult here to detect the influence of General Paulus’ report to Halder, made earlier that month. Paulus had thus far spent his entire military career, save for a few months in France in the autumn of 1914, in various staff positions: he never truly experienced and so never understood (as he would demonstrate at the cost of his entire army at Stalingrad just 18 months later) the profound differences between theoretical staff work and the harsh practical realities of life at the front. Paulus had downplayed the severity of Rommel’s supply problems, citing prewar statistics and theoretical studies which demonstrated, to his satisfaction—and Halder’s—that Rommel’s concerns were exaggerated.