The whole “Dash to The Wire” episode was marked by confusion and bits of surreality. At one point, on his way back to Sidi Omar, Rommel’s car broke down in the middle of nowhere as night was approaching. By pure chance, a few hours later, Crüwell, in a big Mammoth bus similar to Rommel’s, passed by and gave the errant general a lift. But Crüwell’s driver, trying to navigate in the darkness, drove into the Wire by mistake and became lost. Forced to wait until daybreak to get their bearings, the commanders of Panzergruppe Afrika and the Afrika Korps sat huddling in the cold, along with their staffs while columns of British infantry passed by only yards away; the Tommies, noting a British-made vehicle sitting motionless in the darkness, gave the big bus no mind. Later, after Rommel obtained another vehicle, he inadvertently drove into the heart of a New Zealander field hospital, believing it to be German. The informal protocols for such things had already been well established: medical facilities were by tacit agreement neutral ground. So Rommel—visored officer’s cap, medals and all—calmly asked the chief surgeon if there was anything he needed, promised to see that medical supplies got through to him, and then with the most perfect aplomb, drove away.
For eight days, from November 29 to December 6, the issue hung in the balance, as both sides licked their wounds, totaled their losses, and engaged in minor attacks in an effort to improve their tactical positions. By December 7, though, Rommel was forced to face the music: the Afrika Korps had fewer than 100 serviceable tanks, the Italians not many more, while the British were bringing forward almost three times that number out of their armor depots. The Axis supply situation could not longer sustain the level of operations required to hold the Tobruk perimeter and a renewed British offensive. The order went out, and the Germans and Italians began abandoning their positions around Tobruk, withdrawing toward Gazala.
9 December 1941
Dearest Lu,
You will have no doubt seen how we’re doing from the Wehrmacht communiqués. I had to break off the action outside Tobruk on acount of the Italian formations and also the badly exhausted German troops. I’m hoping we’ll succeed in escaping enemy encirclement and holding on to Cyrenaica. I’m keeping well. You can imagine what I’m going through and what anxieties I have. It doesn’t look as though we’ll get any Christmas this year. It’s only a fortnight away.
Auchinleck, meanwhile, officially declared the siege at Tobruk to be lifted on December 10.
Initially, Rommel hoped to be able to hold a position somewhere between Tobruk and Benghazi; the Gazala Line seemed to hold out the best prospect. It was far enough forward that in should the British take a misstep Tobruk would be vulnerable, but far enough west that the British would be unable to slip around behind him and cut him off from Tripoli. He was confident and reassuring when he wrote Lucie on December 12.
Dearest Lu,
Don’t worry about me. It will all come out all right. We’re still not through the crisis. It’ll probably go on for another couple of weeks yet. But I still have hopes of holding on here. I’m now living in a proper house, complete with “hero’s cellar” [a dugout]. I spend the days with the troops.
Happy Christmas to you and Manfred. I hope to be with you shortly afterward.146
But now Eighth Army set to with a will, although without the same tactical finesse displayed by the Afrika Korps when it was on the attack. The first attack on the Axis line at Gazala took place on December 13—for the next three days, German, Italian, British, Indian, and Polish troops would fight over a hill known as Point 204, the highest point in the whole Gazala Line and the key to the entire position. Casualties were heavy on both sides, but in the end Eighth Army was able to apply too much pressure and Rommel abandoned the Gazala position. Now he set his sights firmly on El Agheila—right back where he had begun his offensive in March. In his judgment, there were no other defensible positions available west of the Gazala ridge. In his letters to Lucie during the withdrawal the depth of his chagrin at being compelled to retreat after having come, as he believed, so close to success, is unmistakable.
20 December 1941
Dearest Lu,
We’re pulling out. There was simply nothing else for it. I hope we manage to get back to the line we’ve chosen. Christmas is going to be completely messed up. . . .
Some supplies have arrived—the first since October. My commanding officers are all ill—those who aren’t dead or wounded.
22 December 1941
Retreat to Agedabia!147 You can’t imagine what it’s like. Hoping to get the bulk of my force through and make a stand somewhere. Little ammunition and gasoline, no air support. Quite the reverse with the enemy. But enough of that. . . .
23 December 1941
Operations going satisfactorily today, so far as it’s possible to tell in the morning. It looks as though we’ll succeed in extricating ourselves from the envelopment and getting the main body back. It will be a great Christmas treat for me if it does come off. How modest one becomes! It’s no good turning to the Italian High Command of course. They would have been roped in long ago with all of their force.
25 December 1941
I opened my Christmas parcel in my caravan yesterday evening and was very pleased with the letters from you and Manfred and the presents. Some of it, like the bottle of champagne, I took straight across to the Intelligence truck where I sat over it with the Chief, the Ia and Ic [Gause, Lieutenant Colonel Siegfried Westphal, and von Mellenthin]. The night passed quietly. But the Italian divisions give us a lot of worry. There are shocking signs of disintegration and German troops are being forced to the rescue everywhere. The British were badly disappointed at Benghazi in neither cutting us off nor finding gasoline and rations. Crüwell has been made a full panzer general. He really deserves it.148
There would be nothing in this retreat of the Italian rout of January and February: Eighth Army was never able to outflank Panzergruppe Afrika, and Rommel always covered his movements with a rearguard powerful enough to hurt its pursuers. Despite their diminished numbers, the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions, along with the Ariete Division, were always handled with great skill, working closely with the inevitable screen of antitank guns which the British armor could not overcome.
The Italian senior officers, in Africa and Rome alike, protested bitterly when Rommel announced his plans to withdraw as far back as El Agheila, but he dismissed them with a figurative wave of his hand. At one point, in a personal meeting with Rommel, the chief of the Comando Supremo, General Ugo Cavallero, insisted that abandoning Cyrenaica would be a catastrophe for Italy; Rommel rounded on him by declaring that losing the whole of Tripolitania would be an even bigger one. All of the Italian generals’ combined mutterings, imprecations, pleas, and bluster left Rommel unmoved. He had come to regard his Italian soldiers with something like affection, but of Italian senior officers and government officials he was openly contemptuous. Libya was an Italian colony: many of these same men had been responsible for its loss to the British less than a year before; most of them had been openly obstructionist when he had been trying to retake Libya that spring and summer, and now they were demanding that the panzergruppe make a stand against Eighth Army in the same place that the Italian Army had stood the year before, where it could be destroyed in the same manner and for the same operational reasons the Italian Army had been destroyed 10 months earlier. Their protests fell on stone-deaf ears.
Rommel was determined not to let himself get trapped in the bulge of Cyrenaica, hence his decision to abandon Benghazi at the same time he withdrew from the Gazala ridge; for a few days at the end of December he made a stand at Agedabia. General Crüwell’s reconnaissance units noted an inviting gap opening up between two British armored brigades, and Rommel, who was at the moment personally commanding the Afrika Korps as Crüwell was bedridden with jaundice, saw an opportunity. On December 27 he turned on his British pursuers and savaged the long-suffering 22nd Armoured Brigade, destroying a third of its tanks in the process. Stunned, Eighth Army hal
ted temporarily, giving Rommel a breathing space to fall back in good order to El Algheila.
By January 10, 1942, the whole of Panzergruppe Afrika, such as it was and what there was of it, was once again on familiar ground. Meanwhile, 450 miles to the east, the last pages of the battle for Tobruk and the Egyptian frontier were being written. The last Axis garrison on the Egyptian–Libyan border, Bardia, had surrendered to the 2nd South African Division eight days earlier. Troops from the same division would take Sollum on January 12. Halfaya Pass, held by a mixed German and Italian force of just over 5,000 infantrymen and artillerymen, including the fighting pastor, Major Wilhelm Bach (he had been promoted while commanding the Halfaya defense) finally capitulated on January 17—but only after all the defenders’ supplies were exhausted. Rommel, when communicating the news to Berlin and Rome, made a point of commending the “superb leadership” of the Italian general who had held overall command of the Sollum–Halfaya defenses, Fedele De Giorgis.149
That same day, Rommel wrote a particularly cryptic letter to Lucie. Even while still retreating toward El Agheila, Rommel began to spot straws in the wind, telling Lucie on January 17. . . .
The situation here is developing to our advantage and I’m full of plans that I daren’t say anything about round here. They’d think me crazy. But I’m not; I simply see a bit farther than they do. But you know me. I work out my plans early each morning, and now often, during the past year and in France, have they been put into effect within a matter of hours. That’s how it should be and is going to be in the future.150
CHAPTER NINE
DER HEXENKESSEL
It has been a damned nice thing—the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. . . . By God! I don’t think it would have been done if I had not been there.
—ARTHUR WELLESLEY, 1st Duke of Wellington, after the Battle of Waterloo
Nineteen forty-one passed into 1942, and Erwin Rommel found himself, along with his army, standing back on the same ground from which he had begun his North African adventure nine months earlier. A general officer imbued with a more conventional, less imaginative concept of operations and strategy almost certainly would have regarded such a circumstance as a defeat; Rommel most certainly did not. He understood almost from the moment he came ashore in Tripoli that the key to success in desert warfare was not the mere gaining of empty ground. In desert warfare, the primary objective is, with very few exceptions, always the opposing army—the enemy’s tanks, troops, communications and supply lines. Those few exceptions involve the holding or seizing of specific, vital geographic locations. These points, whether coastal towns and cities, or dominating geographic features, compel either attack or defense, acting as lodestones to the enemy’s forces, and so facilitate, one way or another, the enemy’s destruction. There were few such places in Libya and Egypt—the narrow neck between the Mediterranean and the Quatarra Depression at El Alamein, Sollum and the Halfaya Pass, Tobruk, the Gazala Escarpment, and the dunes and ridges around Agedabia.
Rommel had first demonstrated in France, with his free-wheeling, opportunistic handling of the 7th Panzer Division, a clear grasp of how wide-ranging armored columns could severely disrupt a foe’s logistics and communications, in the process undermining the enemy soldiers’ morale and will to fight, creating confusion and disruption that was utterly out of proportion to the material damage done or the losses suffered on either side. Now, in North Africa, whether on the attack or in retreat, he was thoroughly in his element. Here in the Western Desert, he had schooled the British in the same lesson which they had first taught the Italians in 1940: in the emptiness of Cyrenaica, sheer numbers of tanks, troops, and guns are essentially meaningless—as is merely holding useless ground. It is how those tanks, troops, and guns are employed, and where, that makes them decisive. Having already played the headmaster in the spring of 1941, the question tantalizing Erwin Rommel in January 1942 was whether or not he could do it again.
There were straws in the wind which were giving Rommel increased confidence that he would be able to do exactly that. First and foremost was the Allies’ supply situation, which now mirrored that of the Afrika Korps just two months earlier. It was the British who were now operating at the end of a 500-mile-long supply line, maintained for almost its entire length on a single roadway. Leutnant Seebohm’s wireless intercept wizards were able to tease enough information out of Eighth Army’s radio traffic to confirm that the British were diverting ever-increasing numbers of combat units to roadwork and establishing the supply dumps that would be required if Eighth Army were to advance beyond El Agheila. Rommel saw replacements for men and armor begin to trickle in as well: on January 5, 1942, 55 new tanks, all of them the newest Panzer III and IV models, with heavier armor and more powerful main guns than anything the Afrika Korps currently had on strength, arrived at Tripoli.
There had also been a seismic shift in the world’s political and military landscape during Rommel’s retreat from Tobruk which would directly affect both the Afrika Korps and Eighth Army. On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a crippling air attack on the United States Navy’s main Pacific Fleet base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The upshot of the attack was America’s declaration of war on Japan; had the situation developed no further, only Eighth Army would have felt the consequences, as within days, sometimes hours, of striking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched other attacks, land and naval, on British, French, and Dutch colonial possessions in the Pacific and in Southeast Asia. The British, in an attempt to shore up weak defenses in places like Burma, Singapore, and Hong Kong, began withdrawing troops from North Africa; at the same time, the Australian government, fearing a Japanese attack on Australia’s northern coast, demanded the immediate return of Eighth Army’s Australian divisions. To Rommel, it appeared that the situation which had obtained in February 1941 might be repeating itself less than a year later.
But America’s entry into the war would have repercussions for Rommel and the Afrika Korps, although they would take longer to manifest. On December 8, America went to war with Japan—there was no corresponding declaration on Germany, however much President Franklin Roosevelt might desire one, given his certitude that the Third Reich posed the greater and more immediate danger for the West than did Japan. Hitler solved the problem for him, however, declaring war on the United States on December 10, the single greatest strategic blunder he would ever commit, doing so, he asserted, out of political necessity, as Germany had to stand by her Axis partner, Japan. What had been a stream of American-supplied tanks, guns, and aircraft supplying Eighth Army would soon become a flood, and by the year’s end, American ground and air forces would be fighting in North Africa, adding to the Allies’ preponderance of men and materiel. But for now, Rommel was contemplating his next move against Eighth Army, as the straws he was seeing convinced him that Eighth Army might be ripe for a riposte.
AMONG THOSE STRAWS was an intelligence windfall that qualified as an entire bale of hay in its own right, a gold mine which the Germans named der gutte Quelle (“the good source”) and which Rommel, with sly humor, cryptically christened his “little fellers.” It was an operational intelligence coup which has had few parallels in history, for, incredible as it may sound, Rommel’s “good source” was a series of official reports about Eighth Army plans and intentions written by the senior United States Army officer in Egypt.
Colonel Bonner Fellers was posted to the American embassy in Cairo as a military attaché in October 1941; his duties required that he make regular reports to Washington DC on Great Britain’s military operations in the Middle East. The British gave him carte blanche to roam and observe where he chose, after which he would write concise, detailed dispatches about unit strengths and positions, troop movements, convoys, newly arrived reinforcements, Eighth Army’s supply situation, and its morale, as well as summaries of plans and pending operations. These reports went directly to the President and the chiefs of staff; they were also being read by Adolf Hitler, Benito Muss
olini, and General der Panzertruppe Erwin Rommel.
Colonel Fellers sent his reports by radio, using the U.S. State Department’s “Black Code,” which had earlier been compromised by Italian spies working at the American embassy in Rome, and then independently broken by the German Beobachtungsdienst, or B-dienst. For six months, from December 1941 through June 1942, Fellers’ reports were being decoded and read in Berlin and Rome almost before they were read in Washington. From time to time Fellers would express concern that the Black Code might be compromised, and wanted to replace it with a military ciphering system, but he was always assured that the Black Code was secure, so the regular flow of reports continued uninterrupted.
Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel Page 38