Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Bernard Law Montgomery was the fourth of nine children born to an Anglican minister of Ulster Scots descent. Four years older than Erwin Rommel, he spent the early part of his life in Tasmania before the family relocated to London. His was an unhappy, abused childhood in which he was given frequent (sometimes daily) beatings by his emotionally unstable mother, a sad fact which would account for his bitter, acerbic personality in his adult years and his need to dominate those around him. He was educated at St. Paul’s School before attending Sandhurst, the British military academy, graduating in 1908; service in India was followed by a stint as battalion adjutant in the Royal Warwickshires at Shorncliff. Like Rommel, Montgomery went to war in August 1914, and again like Rommel, was wounded for the first time in September. Montgomery’s injury was far graver, however, as he was shot through the chest by a sniper; a prolonged convalescence followed, after which he spent the remainder of the war as a staff officer, rising to the rank of temporary lieutenant colonel.

  The years between the two world wars saw Montgomery hold a battalion command in a handful of regiments before being appointed officer commanding the 9th Infantry Brigade and then General Officer Commanding 8th Infantry Division. In 1927 he married Elizabeth Carver, and their only child, a son named David, was born a year later. The marriage was, by all evidence, a happy one, but was short-lived: Elizabeth died in her husband’s arms in 1937, a victim of septicemia triggered by a botched surgical proceedure; from that point on Montgomery became wholly consumed by his career. In 1938 the 8th Division was posted to Palestine, where Montgomery led a nine-month campaign against Zionist insurgents; July 1939 he was recalled to Great Britain, where he was given command of the 3rd Infantry Division. When Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939 and sent the British Expeditionary Force to Belgium, the 3rd Division went with it as part of II Corps, which was under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Alan Brooke. During the retreat to Dunkirk he handled 3rd Division with considerable skill, and was able to see it evacuated to England with minimal casualties.

  Never having been a popular officer before the war began, Montgomery set about making a new set of enemies after Dunkirk, offering to anyone who would listen very detailed critiques of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lieutenant General Sir John Dill, and the commander of the B.E.F., Lord Gort. After being posted to command of V Corps in the south of England, Montgomery began a long-running feud with his immediate superior, Lieutenant General Claude Auchinleck; there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut reason for their dispute, apart from Montgomery’s perpetual need for someone with whom he could be at odds. While in command of V Corps, and later XII Corps and then Southeastern Command after Auchinleck’s posting to Egypt, Montgomery proved to be a demanding superior, training his men hard and working his officers harder. At the time, the likelihood of receiving a combat command was slim, as Auchinleck appeared to have things well in hand, with Rommel ejected from Tobruk and on the run back to El Agheila.

  Then fate took a hand, and Rommel trounced Auchinleck at Gazala then captured Tobruk. Despite having stopped Panzerarmee Afrika cold at El Alamein in the closing days of July and done yeoman work in reorganizing and resuscitating Eighth Army, Auchinleck had lost the confidence of both Churchill and Brooke, who by now was the CIGS. Auchinleck was eased out of command of Eighth Army, kicked upstairs and packed off to India, where he would eventually assume the duties of commander-in-chief of the Indian Army. His place was to be taken by Lieutenant General William Gott, who had performed adequately if not brilliantly at Gazala, but Gott was killed in early August when the transport plane in which he was a passenger was shot down by Luftwaffe fighters. Brooke then pressed Montgomery on Churchill as a substitute for Gott; the prime minister agreed to the appointment and Montgomery was given command of Eighth Army. Why Brooke had such confidence in Montgomery, whose only demonstrable achievement in combat so far was commanding a division in retreat, remains unclear. Perhaps they were simply kindred military spirits, products of the Western Front, methodical, unimaginative, more given to avoid losing battles than they were to attempting to win them; whatever the specifics, they were in almost every way the antithesis of the majority of their German opponents—or, later, many of their American allies.

  In any event, Montgomery formally assumed command on August 13, 1942, and as he would later tell the tale, Eighth Army’s morale soon soared and its fighting spirit returned. One story has it that he was overheard muttering, “After having an easy war, things have now got much more difficult,” and when told to cheer up by a fellow officer, blurted out “I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about Rommel!” Both during and after the war, Montgomery took pains to foster the impression within the British Army and without that he was the source of the dramatic about-face in the morale of Eighth Army in the weeks just prior to the second battle of El Alamein. And the truth of the matter was that in the aftermath of Gazala and the fall of Tobruk, Eighth Army did have a serious morale problem: Erwin Rommel.194

  It seemed inexplicable to the ordinary ranker, and most of his officers as well, that the Germans and Italians, having been so thoroughly walloped in Crusader, should in a matter of months, have turned right around and pushed the Eighth Army clean out of Libya and halfway across Egypt. The name “Rommel” was everywhere, on the lips of every prisoner taken, in seemingly every radio signal intercepted, written up in German magazines and newspapers that fell into British hands from time to time. He was “the Desert Fox,” who manufactured victories out of defeats and outfought, out-thought, or out-beguiled every British commander sent to face him. He seemed unstoppable! He had even entered the daily vernacular of the average Tommy: doing something especially clever or unexpected soon became known as “doing a Rommel.”

  It was a problem, and Auchinleck had known it to be so. He also knew that Rommel was in fact nothing more than a very good general who had the wit and skill to improvise as needed and take advantage of whatever luck he could find—and that Rommel had been lucky. Auchinleck also understood that for his other ranks, nothing would remove the self-inflicted stigma of defeat save for a victory. For his soldiers to believe that they could win against the Afrika Korps, though, their officers first had to believe it could be done. In early July, just as the First Alamein was heating up, he issued an unusual order to the whole of Eighth Army:

  There exists a real danger that our friend Rommel is becoming a kind of magical or bogey-man to our troops, who are talking far too much about him. He is by no means a superman, although he is undoubtedly very energetic and able. Even if he were a superman, it would still be highly undesirable that our men should credit him with supernatural powers.

  I wish you to dispel by all possible means the idea that Rommel represents something more than an ordinary German general. The important thing now is to see to it that we do not always talk of Rommel when we mean the enemy in Libya. We must refer to “the Germans” or “the Axis powers” or “the enemy” and not always keep harping on Rommel.

  Please ensure that this order is put into immediate effect, and impress upon all Commanders that, from a psychological point of view, it is a matter of the highest importance.195

  It is impossible to say at this remove what effect, if any, Auchinleck’s order may have had on the officers and men of Eighth Army, but what they accomplished in July 1942 made it irrelevant, as they fought Panzerarmee Afrika to a standstill. It was not a great victory, but the defeats had come to an end. The realization grew that Rommel had shot his last bolt, and that it had not been good enough, after all, to defeat Eighth Army. The action at Alam Halfa in the last two days of August, though by this time Auchinleck was gone, merely added the exclamation point to the statement made by the Tommies a month earlier. Montgomery would disingenuously tell Churchill that when he arrived in Egypt, he discovered that Auchinleck had no plans drawn up save for further retreats: in truth, Montgomery fought Alam Halfa using Auchinleck’s deployments, Auchinleck’s plans, and troops Auchinle
ck had trained. In fact, Montgomery’s sole contribution to the battle had been to arrange the mauling of two brigades of New Zealand infantry in an ill-advised counterattack on the Afrika Korps as the Germans began their withdrawal.

  Soldiers—especially combat soldiers—from the Egyptians Thutmose III led at Megiddo in the fifteenth century BC right up to the present day have always been, by nature, inclination, and experience, a skeptical lot. Brag, bluster, theatrics of any sort, by a commanding officer, particularly a new commanding officer, are greeted with a jaundiced eye at best, derision—sometimes open—at worst. The men of Eighth Army knew who had truly brought them to the point where they were about to turn the tables on the Germans and Italians. The Tommies, South Africans, New Zealanders and Indians would fight well in the months to come, but they would never fight for Montgomery the way that Rommel’s “Africans” fought for him. Understandably, the British people were hungry for victories and victors to celebrate, and Montgomery, hungry for an adulation that he had never been able to achieve on his own, along with a desire by men like Churchill and Brooke to burnish their reputations for prescience and wisdom in selecting Montgomery for command of Eighth Army, ensured that the seeds of Montgomery’s “legend” would fall on fertile ground.196 But the Tommies would always know better.197

  ROMMEL, SUFFERING FROM a liver infection, a duodenal ulcer, low blood pressure and desert sores, finally handed over command of Panzerarmee Afrika to General Stumme on the morning of July 23 and flew to Rome. There he had a tempestuous meeting with Mussolini and Cavallero, insisting that it was incompetence on the part of Comando Supremo and the Italian government that had left the Axis troops in North Africa near-starved for supplies. Mussolini did his best to placate the angry field marshal, who in turn stated in no uncertain terms that if the Italian navy and merchant marine could not properly supply Panzerarmee Afrika, then the time had come to abandon North Africa altogether. This was hardly what Il Duce wanted to hear, but he had come to learn that his bluster and bombast had little if any effect on Rommel, whom he then tried to fob off with assurances that Cavallero would do the very best he could to restore the Axis supply lines.

  Frustrated, feeling that he had accomplished nothing in Rome, Rommel departed for Berlin the next day, September 25, where he cooled his heels in Propaganda Minister Göbbels’ home until September 30, when he was the guest of honor at a formal reception at Berlin’s Sportspalast. It was there that Hitler formally presented Rommel with his feldmarschall’s baton, and assured him, far more convincingly than did Mussolini, that North Africa’s supply problems would be resolved once and for all. Publicly, Rommel said all of the right things, mouthing the platitudes about where the German soldier sets foot, there he stays, but later, privately, he was far more candid with Hitler, insisting that Panzerarmee Afrika had to have a minimum of 35,000 tons of supplies a month—anything less and it would be impossible, he declared, to stop the British offensive that he and Hitler both knew was coming.

  I quite realize that, with the present strategic sea and air situation in the Mediterranean, a very great effort will be required to ensure a safe and uninterrupted German supply to Africa. It will make the utmost demands of all German and Italian transport services and will require the reinforcement of the transport fleet. But it is only by the fulfilment of the conditions I have stated that the German troops, who are bearing the main brunt of the fighting in Africa, will be able to maintain their hold on this theater against the finest troops of the British Empire.198

  Not everyone at the conference shared Rommel’s sense of realism. Hitler, for one, was convinced that the attack on Alam Halfa had been called off prematurely, for which he chided Rommel. Hitler was also quite confident that when the Afrika Korps once again took the offensive—he had made lavish promises of new weapons, Tiger tanks, Nebelwerfer rocket artillery, tank destroyers, and the like—Rommel would sweep the British out of Egypt and deliver the Suez Canal into his hands. Rommel was suddenly aware of the fact that these men in Berlin, who were responsible for directing a war in which Germany was fighting for survival, were disturbingly out of touch with the truth about that war as it existed at the front in North Africa.

  During the conference I realised that the atmosphere in the Führer’s H.Q. was extremely optimistic. Göring in particular was inclined to minimise our difficulties. When I said that British fighter-bombers had shot up my tanks with 40mm shells, the Reichsmarschall, who felt himself touched by this, said: “That’s completely impossible. The Americans only know how to make razor blades” I replied: “We could do with some of those razor blades, Herr Reichsmarschall.”199

  When Göring continued to demur, Rommel produced one of the spent American-made 40mm shells and laid it in front of the Reichsmarschall, who promptly fell silent.

  Unsettled by the events in Berlin, Rommel hurried down to Vienna and from there to Wiener Neustadt to collect Lucie. The nearby mountain resort of Semmering awaited, where Rommel would take his cure under the watchful eye of Professor Horster. He would be a far from model patient, continually fretting about the situation in North Africa. He had assured Stumme that he would return if the British attacked while he was convalescing, a promise Stumme accepted with somewhat mixed feelings—it was at once a relief to know that he would not have to command such a critical battle himself, and yet it seemed as something less than a total vote of confidence in his ability to do so if need be. Stumme was, in fact, proving to be an able stand-in for Rommel: while he possessed none of the Desert Fox’s charisma, tactical cunning, or operational acumen, he was quite conscientious about completing Rommel’s defensive plans, from laying new minefields (between them the British and Axis forces would emplace nearly a half-million antipersonnel and antitank mines on the El Alamein battlefield, most of which remain there still), to stockpiling ammunition, to completing specific redeployments of armor and artillery units. Both Rommel and Stumme shared a sense that, given what they had to hand, they had done everything they could to prepare for Montgomery’s attack.

  There were even moments when Rommel wondered if Montgomery would attack at all, or simply go on building up men, equipment and supplies indefinitely. He had yet to develop the understanding that the British general would not make any offensive move until he had mustered overwhelming numerical superiority and was satisfied that his logistical base was properly organized—improvisation and exploiting unexpected opportunities were utterly unfamiliar concepts to the ever-methodical Montgomery. Even after Alam Halfa, when the Afrika Korps was at its nadir and the Italian infantry divisions were all but immobilized for lack of transport and fuel, he refused to move, declaring that he wished to conserve his forces, leaving Rommel to remark acerbically “If I were Montgomery, we wouldn’t still be here!”200

  AS BRITISH WARTIME slang would put it, the balloon went up at 9:40 P.M. on October 23, 1942. More than 900 British artillery pieces, ranging from 25-pounder guns to massive 5.5-inch howitzers opened fire in the single largest “stonk”—a “time-on-target” barrage—in history. A carefully calculated fire plan brought the rounds of all 900-plus guns onto the entire 40-mile front of the El Alamein at the same moment, and proceeded to methodically pound the the battlefield for 20 minutes before shifting to specific targets. As the barrage lifted in the northern half of the front, specially trained infantry units moved forward to clear paths through Axis minefields that had been nicknamed “the Devil’s Garden,” using man-portable mine-detectors in combat for the first time. Behind the minesweepers came four infantry divisions: their mission was to establish a bridgehead on the far side of the 5-mile deep minefields, through which more than 500 British tanks would rush in order to attack the Axis armored units from the rear.

  In the center the 4th Indian Division began advancing from the western end of Ruweisat Ridge, a diversionary attack that would, the British hoped, force the Afrika Korps to move the 15th Panzer and 90th Light Divisions southward rather than “at home,” as it were, in the north to meet the adva
ncing waves of Sherman and Grant tanks. A similar effort was underway at the southern end of the front: the 7th Armoured Division and the Free French Brigade were looking to tie up the 21st Panzer and the Ariete Divisions. Neither of these attacks made any significant progress, however, as the Axis minefields and antitank defenses proved far tougher than expected; for the moment, the German and Italian armor remained uncommitted.

  In the north, despite the best efforts of the British engineers, progress during the night of October 23 was slow as the mine-clearing proved to be more difficult that expected. By midday on October 24 no comprehensible picture of Eighth Army’s attack had yet emerged and Stumme refused to react prematurely. Taking a page from Rommel’s own book, he decided he needed to see for himself what was happening: together with his aide, Colonel Büchting, he set out for the headquarters of the 90th Light. He never made it—the next day, October 25, his car was found, Büchting shot through the head, Stumme lying beside it in the sand, dead of an apparent heart attack. Generalleutnant Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, who just three weeks earlier had taken the reins of the Afrika Korps from the wounded Walter Nehring, was now officer commanding of the whole of Panzerarmee Afrika. Von Thoma kept a cool head, and continued to hold back the panzers, but he did order the Axis artillery to begin lashing the enemy infantry in the north. By the end of its first day, the British attack seemed to have stalled, but von Thoma knew better: in raw numbers alone Eighth Army possessed a clear two-to-one superiority over Panzerarmee Afrika. When comparing British numbers to German, the situation was even worse: in manpower the British outnumbered the Germans six-to-one, in tanks by better than five-to-one. Montgomery literally had men and materiel to burn if necessary to achieve success. If the panzerarmee was to survive, it would need a miracle; in short, it needed Rommel.