Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  For his part, Rommel was unimpressed by the O.K.H. missive. His reaction was exactly what would be expected from someone who scorned career staff officers like Paulus, Halder, and von Brauchitsch. As he wrote to Lucie, “the result will be that we’ll keep our mouths shut and only report in the briefest forms.” A few days later he was telling her that “Either they have confidence in me or they haven’t. If they haven’t then I’m asking them to draw their own conclusions”—a thinly veiled threat to resign his command. He then cut to the heart of the matter: “It’s easy enough to bellyache when you aren’t sweating it out here.” With that, as far as Rommel was concerned, the whole issue was closed.123

  A somewhat thornier problem was of more immediate concern to Rommel at that moment, as he was undertaking a very thorough reorganization of his own officer corps—it might almost be called a purge. He was determined to create a command structure staffed by officers who he knew would obey his orders rather than debate them. The first to go was, of course, Generalleutnant Streich, commander of the Afrika Korps, who had long known that he would be replaced. Neither Rommel nor Streich handled their final exchange with any particular grace: on May 16, Rommel telephoned Streich’s headquarters and announced, “Streich, I have asked for you to be replaced. You will continue in command, however, until your successor arrives!”

  “Does the General have any further orders?” Streich replied drily, then broke the connection before Rommel was able to reply. When his replacement arrived on the last day of May, Streich said goodbye to Rommel in a stiffly formal leave-taking. Rommel attempted to explain that he could no longer tolerate Streich’s habit of questioning orders, and that he believed the departing general’s performance of his duties had lapsed at times because he had been too interested in the welfare of his men. Streich simply retorted, “Herr General, I can imagine no greater words of praise for a division commander.” And with that, he was gone.124

  Streich’s words stung, for Rommel, as he had demonstrated in the First World War, and then in France in 1940, held the well-being of the soldiers under his command as one of his highest priorities. What Streich failed to grasp—and Rommel failed to make clear to Streich—was that now, as a corps commander and de facto commander of the Axis forces in Libya, Rommel’s priorities had shifted. He was compelled to take a broader, longer view of everything that was happening in North Africa, to better understand and plan the campaign for which he had been given the responsibility of fighting. He was being compelled, by his position, to think like a strategist, and strategy, however subtle, requires a willingness to be ruthless in its execution which is rarely demanded at the tactical or operational level; this was a burden Streich, as a division commander, never had to shoulder. The misfortune of the two men, who had begun their time in Africa by working so well together, was that both were right, according to the perspective given them by their levels of command, but the realities of war demanded that Rommel’s point of view prevail.

  The man who replaced Streich was Generalleutnant Johann von Ravenstein, the scion of a distinguished military family and, like Rommel, the recipient of the Pour le Mérite. In France, in May 1918, he had successfully led a few dozen soldiers into an attack that captured an important railway and took 1,500 prisoners. At the end of the Great War, von Ravenstein left the army and became an electrician, rejoining the army in 1934; he was promoted to colonel in October 1936. Von Ravenstein had spent almost all of his time in the First World War at the front, where he was wounded in action three times; like Rommel, and in spite of his aristocratic heritage, he was a fighting soldier with little time to waste on staff officers.

  Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Olbricht, commanding officer of the 5th Panzer Regiment, was the next to go. Like Streich, he too was prone to argue with Rommel rather than simply obey—unlike Streich, this seemed to be the result of clashing personalities, rather than differing command styles and priorities; his place was temporarily taken Major Ernst Bol-brinker. The commander of a panzer battalion, whose nerve broke during the April 30 attack on Tobruk, was given a court-martial and sent back to Germany in disgrace. Colonel von Herff, whose handling of his battle group during Brevity had impressed Rommel mightily, was given temporary command of the 15th Panzer Division, which was rapidly being brought up to full strength as all of its component units were finally arriving, a position he would hold while the division’s commander, Generalmajor Walter Neumann-Silkow, was becoming acclimated to the desert. There was an element of fear behind the speed with which the Afrika Korps’ command structure was ruthlessly rebuilt: intelligence briefings made Rommel uneasy about how the strategic situation in the Mediterranean was shifting, and could force General Wavell’s hand to begin his offensive to relieve Tobruk at the earliest possible moment.

  On the morning of May 20, 1941, three regiments of German fallschirmjäger (paratroopers) were dropped on the island of Crete in an airborne invasion under the code name Operation Merkur (Mercury). By the second day, miscommunication among a bumbling Allied command allowed a vital airfield to fall to the Germans, who then flooded the island with reinforcements. In 10 days the battle was over—the British and Greek defenders were evacuated by sea, with nine Royal Navy warships sunk, while another dozen were heavily damaged, among them an aircraft carrier and two battleships. Just as critical to Britain’s strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean, the Germans immediately deployed several of Fliegerkorps X’s bomber squadrons to Crete, dramatically increasing the Luftwaffe’s ability to provide close support for the Axis forces in Libya as well as interdict British troop movements.

  Rommel correctly suspected that, as a consequence of this latest Allied debacle, Wavell was under considerable pressure from London to produce a counterbalancing Allied success, specifically by striking at the Afrika Korps and relieving Tobruk. On May 12 a convoy arrived at Alexandria, having survived the gauntlet of passing the length of the Mediterranean, subjected almost the entire time to intense bombing attacks by the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica. Among masses of vital supplies for the Western Desert Force—now XIII Corps—it brought 238 new cruiser tanks for the 7th Armoured Division, which had worn out its vehicles in Operation Compass and thus been out of action since February. No sooner had the convoy, which had been code-named “Tiger,” arrived in Alexandria than Churchill began pestering Wavell as to when his “Tiger cubs” would go into action. For all of his admirable pugnacity Churchill knew next to nothing about desert warfare, while Wavell was a past master of the art; despite the prime minister’s unsubtle urgings, Wavell adamantly refused to simply throw tanks, guns, and their crews at the Germans and Italians, trusting to luck to acquire a victory. Everything had changed in North Africa since the heady days of November 1940, whether or not Churchill understood this to be so: this time around, Wavell could not count on being aided by the inferiority of his opponents’ equipment, the fragility of their morale, or the incompetence of their leaders. Indeed, while he had every confidence in the morale and leadership of his own troops, the question of technical inferiority gnawed at him. In a confidential report sent to London on May 28, he admitted that “Our infantry tanks are really too slow for a battle in the desert, and have been suffering considerable casualties from the fire of the enemy’s powerful antitank guns. Our cruisers have little advantage in power or speed over German medium tanks. Technical breakdowns are still too numerous.” His comments should not be construed as pessimism, however: Wavell was simply being realistic, a far more desirable characteristic in a commanding officer than that of “painting pictures” (in Bonaparte’s mot) or “taking counsel of his fears” (which General George S. Patton, Jr. regarded as a commander’s worst possible sin). Wavell had to hand the freshly re-equipped 7th Armoured Division, the 4th Indian (Motorized) Division, and the 22nd Guards Brigade; their 250 tanks should outnumber the armored strength of the Afrika Korps by at least two-to-one, and with them Wavell would, as he said in closing that report, “succeed in driving the enemy west of Torbruk
.”125

  The Tiger convoy was hardly a secret to either side, and so Rommel knew that when the British began their offensive, they would almost certainly have a large, even dangerous, numerical superiority over his two panzer divisions. He positioned the 15th Panzer’s tank regiment just west of Fort Capuzzo, where it would be able to readily respond to any British armored units that broke past the Halfaya or Sollum defenses, while the 5th Panzer Regiment was posted just east of Tobruk, where it could keep an eye on the garrison there and take action in the event that the Australians tried to break out to the east in order to link up with advancing British units. His signals intelligence section warned him on June 6 that British armor was moving into positions just east of Halfaya where they could scale the coastal escarpment. He wrote to Lucie that evening, saying “The British have moved forty miles into the desert. The problem is I don’t know if they’re falling back or preparing for a new attack.”

  His greatest worry was fuel: every move he made against the British would be influenced in some way by the Afrika Korps’ limited stocks of gasoline. Nevertheless, he assured Lucie, “We’re ready for them.”126

  British radio discipline had noticeably improved since Brevity, and the wizards of Leutnant Seebohm’s signals interception unit were nowhere near as certain of the details of the British order of battle, chain of command, and unit strengths as they had been before the first, abortive British attack. Still, they did their best, and even under such constraints their best was very, very good indeed. Perhaps their single most important contribution to the battle to come was made on the night of June 14, when the “Peter” was transmitted to all British units, after which the radio net went silent. Seebohm’s subordinates immediately recalled the identical use of the name “Fritz” immediately before Brevity, and Rommel was immediately informed. The alert went out to the German and Italian units at both the Egyptian frontier and the Tobruk perimeter, and a prearranged artillery barrage was fired to keep the Australians preoccupied. At 4:00 A.M. on June 15, the British attacked. Operation Battleaxe had begun.

  Wavell’s plan for Battleaxe broke the operation down into three stages. The first was to capture the German defensive positions at Halfaya, Sollum, and Fort Capuzzo, while engaging and defeating the Afrika Korps’ panzers in the area around Sidi Aziez. Once this was accomplished, XIII Corps would drive along the Via Balbia and link up with the Australians defending Tobruk; together the two forces would then push westward to retake Derna and Mechili. Wavell was confident that there he could establish a strong position to hold against any possible Axis riposte, and use Mechili as a staging area for any further advance into Cyrenaica. To accomplish the first part of the plan, XIII Corps was divided into the “Coast Force” and the “Escarpment Force.” The Coast Force would take Halfaya Pass, the Escarpment Force would cross the escarpment ridge while still behind British lines, at a point south of Buq Buq, then move westward around behind the German defenses, capturing Fort Capuzzo, Musaid and Sollum in the process. Meanwhile, the 7th Armoured Brigade Group was specifically tasked with engaging and destroying Rommel’s panzers. If this part of Wavell’s plan succeeded, the rest of Battleaxe would fall into place like clockwork. What Wavell was not to know was that his plan was based on intelligence (which was poor due to shortages of proper equipment and trained pilots needed for photographic reconnaissance) which incorrectly indicated that two-thirds of the Germans’ tank strength was situated around Tobruk; this would have placed him at a decisive material advantage on the frontier region.

  Overall command of the British ground forces was given to Lieutenant General Noel Beresford-Peirse; Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, in command of the Royal Air Force in the Middle East, the “Desert Air Force,” as it styled itself, was working hand-in-glove with Wavell and Beresford-Peirse in order to provide all possible air support for Battleaxe, even to the point of diverting squadrons of fighters and bombers from other part of the eastern Mediterranean to Egypt. Air operations actually began three days before Battleaxe commenced, as the Desert Air Force concentrated on destroying or at least disrupting any Axis traffic moving along the Via Balbia east of Benghazi. On the morning of June 15, fighter patrols hovered over the advancing columns of British armor, ready to drive off any attempts at interdiction by German fighters or dive-bombers; their efforts were so effective that only six sorties were completed by the Luftwaffe that day. Rommel had frequently complained to both Berlin and Rome about the poor, sometimes almost non-existent cooperation between the Axis air forces and ground forces. He particularly resented the fact that the Luftwaffe set its own mission and target priorities, with minimal reference to the needs of the ground forces, a very different situation than that which had obtained in France the previous year; the surprising degree of coordination achieved between Beresford-Peirse’s armor and Tedder’s air support only served to make more biting the validity of Rommel’s complaints.

  The first action between the British and Axis forces began at 6:00 A.M., June 15, when the Coast Force moved into Halfaya Pass; two battalions of Indian infantry, supported by a half-dozen Matilda tanks, attacked the lower half of the pass, while a company of a dozen Matildas and a battalion of Highland infantry tried to overrun the defenders at the top. By noon all but two of the tanks had been knocked out, while the Indian infantry were pinned down by heavy and accurate machine-gun fire from Vater Bach’s men and intermittent shelling by the Italian field guns covering the pass. Although the defenders at Halfaya were cut off and effectively bottled up by the British forces at each end of the pass, the battle for the pass itself progressed pretty much as Rommel expected it would; Bach and his men could clearly, for the time being, take care of themselves. The central thrust of the British armor, the 7th Royal Tank Regiment’s attack on Fort Capuzzo, was of more immediate concern to Rommel. After six hours of hard fighting around the fort, the German and Italian defenders were forced to fall back on the stützpunkt west of Bardia, where they joined up with the 15th Panzer Division.

  It was here for the first time that Rommel showed the deft touch that would characterize so many of his tank battles in North Africa. Using I Battalion of the 8th Panzer Regiment, he began a series of counterattacks against the 4th Armoured Brigade, which was soon joined by the 22nd Guards Brigade. None of these attacks were pressed very hard, instead they were something more akin to very aggressive feints, where the German tanks would briefly bicker with their British counterparts, then withdraw in apparent disorder in hope of luring pursuing British tanks into a concealed line of antitank guns. In this way, Rommel accomplished two goals: he was able to somewhat reduce the number of the Matildas, which despite their slow speed were still the bane of the German medium tanks, and he kept the British armor occupied while the 5th Light Division moved east from Tobruk to Sidi Azeiz, northwest of Capuzzo, where it could join the 15th Panzer in properly coordinated counterattacks. As night fell on June 15, three of the stützpunkten were taken by the British, along with almost 700 German and Italian soldiers captured and eight field guns taken out of action. This would be their last significant success during Battleaxe.

  To the west of Capuzzo was the Hafid Ridge, also called Bir Hafid, which was actually a series of wave-like ridges that dominated the local landscape and offered an excellent defensive position while also serving as a potential jumping-off point for any armored forces advancing toward Tobruk. The 7th Armoured Division was given the mission of taking and holding the ridge, which it approached at around 9:00 A.M. on June 15. As the tanks of the lead battalion crossed over the crest of the first ridgeline, carefully concealed German antitank guns opened fire at point-blank range. The two tank regiments had no supporting artillery with them, and the 2-pounder guns carried by the A-9 and A-10 Cruiser tanks, along with the new Crusader, which was supposed to be Wavell’s “secret weapon” in Battleaxe, lacked a high-explosive (HE) round: the British tanks had no way to effectively return fire, as the only way they could suppress the enemy guns was to destroy them with direct
hits. The supporting artillery, which could have driven the German gunners to ground in short order, had failed to keep pace with the tanks and so were still well out of range. The British armor pulled back over the ridge and moved to turn the flanks of the ridgeline. The Axis gun crews were caught looking the wrong way, and before they could get their antitank guns swung round, the British tanks were among them, chewing them up with machine guns the tanks had been unable to bring to bear earlier. Only when a pair of 88mm Flak guns began picking off the A-9s, A-10s and Crusaders at long range did the carnage among the gun crews come to a halt.

  A report from a Desert Air Force reconnaissance plane warned the 7th Armoured that enemy armor was approaching, so they pulled back across the ridge to await the panzers in favorable terrain. The expected attack never materialized, and instead the antitank guns on the reverse slopes of the ridge were seen limbering up and being towed away. The division went charging after them, only to be greeted as they broke the crest of the next ridge by yet another wrinkle in Rommel’s evolving bag of tricks. A second line of antitank guns was waiting—the withdrawal had been a ruse, and within minutes nearly a quarter of the 7th Armoured’s surviving tanks were either destroyed or heavily damaged. Another reconnaissance report, this time accurate, warned the British of the approach of a battalion of tanks from the 5th Panzer Regiment. The two armored forces engaged each other at long range as dusk approached and the 7th Armoured Division slowly withdrew from the Bir Hafid ridge.