Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  It was slow going for the infantry, and the southernmost division, Italy’s Folgore Parachute Division, was barely a quarter of the way to Fuka when the next storm broke: at midnight on November 2, 1942, another British barrage was underway, and this time Montgomery was determined to force the issue to a conclusion. “Operation Supercharge,” he called it, a battering-ram of two infantry and two armored divisions tasked with punching through what was left of the Axis defenses, destroying what was left of the Afrika Korps, and cutting off what remained of Rommel’s entire army. The Italians began to waver, not surprising as their antitank guns were practically useless against the Eighth Army’s Shermans, and the main guns on the Italian tanks were little better. Von Thoma, who still retained command of the Afrika Korps, did his best to stop the onslaught, but the British would not be denied this time. When von Thoma made his report to Rommel that evening, he was able to account for only 30 operable German tanks. For Rommel, that was enough: it was time to go. At 8:00 P.M. on November 2, the order went out to every unit of Panzerarmee Afrika: pull out, begin falling back to Fuka immediately.

  It would not be until midnight that Rommel got round to informing Berlin of his decision. When he did so, he sent a detailed signal to the O.K.W., enumerating the reasons for his decision to retreat: exhausted by 10 days of constant fighting, with inadequate supplies of food, fuel, and ammunition, and faced by overwheming enemy numbers on the ground and in the air, the El Alamein position was untenable. Rommel could retreat now and possibly save the Italian infantry, or stand, fight, and accept the destruction of Panzerarmee Afrika. This signal was little more than a formality, as the German military tradition had always been for higher command echelons, accepting that “the man on the spot” would have the best sense of the circumstances which actually obtained where he was, to endorse the tactical and operational decisions that man made.

  It was at 1:30 P.M. on November 3—more than 12 hours after Rommel’s signal to Berlin—that O.K.W. replied to Rommel, and when they did, it was with a personal message from the Führer himself. It was not at all what Rommel had expected.

  To FIELD MARSHAL ROMMEL

  It is with trusting confidence in your leadership and the courage of the German-Italian troops under your command that the German people and I are following the heroic struggle in Egypt. In the situation which you find yourself there can be no other thought but to stand fast, yield not a yard of ground and throw every gun and every man into the battle. Considerable air force reinforcements are being sent to Commander-in-Chief South. The Duce and the Comando Supremo are also making the utmost efforts to send you the means to continue the fight. Your enemy, despite his superiority, must also be at the end of his strength. It would not be the first time in history that a strong will has triumphed over the bigger battalions. As to your troops, you can show them no other road than that to victory or death.

  (Signed) ADOLF HITLER206

  This was a watershed moment for Erwin Rommel, for the magic that had thus far kept him spellbound by the Führer was suddenly and irreparably broken. The unspoken bond between a soldier and his commander is never that the commander will not ask the soldier to stand and die, but that he will never ask the soldier to do so needlessly; yet that was precisely what Hitler was expecting of Rommel and his men. The Führer was morally obliged to the officers and men of Panzerarmee Afrika to explain why he was demanding this, if only to encourage them to sell their lives more dearly, but as Rommel suddenly discovered, moral obligation ran in only one direction for Adolf Hitler.

  This order demanded the impossible. . . . We were completely stunned, and for the first time during the African campaign I did not know what to do. A kind of apathy took hold of us as we issued orders for all existing positions to be held on instructions from the highest authority. I forced myself to this action, as I had always demanded unconditional obedience from others and, consequently, wished to apply the same principle to myself. Had I known what was to come I should have acted differently, because from that time on, we had continually to circumvent orders from the Führer or Duce in order to save the army from destruction. But this first instance of interference by higher authority in the tactical conduct of the African war came as a considerable shock. . . . An overwhelming bitterness welled up in us when we saw the superlative spirit of the army, in which every man, from the highest to the lowest, knew that even the greatest effort could no longer change the course of the battle.207

  His letter to Lucie that night was short, fatalistic, and bitter.

  Dearest Lu,

  The battle still rages with unspent fury. I can no longer, or scarcely any longer, believe in its successful outcome. Berndt flies to the Führer to-day to report.

  Enclosed 25,000 lire that I’ve saved.

  What will become of us is in God’s hands. . . .

  (Even in such dire straits, ever the canny Swabian, Rommel included a quick postscript, reminding Lucie to “Have Appel exchange the lire. Currency regulations!”)208

  Despite that momentary assertion of his practical Swabian nature, Rommel was at once torn by his habitual instinct to obey the orders of a superior, and furious at the implications of Hitler’s directive. He had pledged absolute obedience to the Führer, and he often demanded the same from his own subordinates, so it seemed hypocritical to suddenly exempt himself from the same standard of conduct. And yet the order made absolutely no sense. Walking back and forth outside his command tent with Major Elmar Warning, an officer on Westphal’s staff, Rommel held forth on Hitler’s “victory or death” missive, saying, “If we stay put here, then the army won’t last three days. But do I have the right, as the commanding officer, or even as a soldier, to disobey an order? If I do obey the Führer’s order, then there’s the danger my own troops won’t obey me!” He paused then blurted out, “My men’s lives come first! The Führer is crazy!”

  Warming to his subject now, Rommel went on: “Warning, believe me, Hitler is the greatest criminal whom I know. He will fight not only to the last German soldier, but to the total destruction of Germany, in his own selfish interests!”209

  Giving evidence of his inner turmoil, Rommel’s new orders to his army uncharacteristically temporized: the 90th Light Division, along with the Pavia, Folgore, Trento, and Bologna Divisions, were ordered to stand fast, dig in, and hold off the advancing British for as long as possible, thus superficially satisfying Hitler’s demand to “yield not a yard of ground,” while at the same time the remaining German and Italian units continued to fall back. On the other side of the lines, Montgomery urged the 1st and 7th Armoured Divisions to press hard on the heels of the retreating Axis forces, only to have the 21st Panzer and Ariete give them bloody noses, though by the end of November 3 Ariete was all but spent as a fighting force. The Littorio and Trieste Division surrendered, but the Italian paratroopers of Folgore kept fighting until they literally exhausted their ammunition, putting one last redeeming exclamation point on the career of the Italian Army in North Africa.

  That same day, Leutnant Berndt, acting on Rommel’s direct orders, flew to Berlin, where he would make Rommel’s case directly to Hitler, bluntly explaining that if the no retreat order were obeyed, it would mean the pointless destruction of Panzerarmee Afrika in a matter of days. Berndt, because he was one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party and well as a close associate of Dr. Göbbels, was usually warmly welcomed in Hitler’s inner circle. This time, however, he was received with a cold courtesy and his arguments fell on deaf ears. The order would stand.

  The fourth day of November was the decisive day for Rommel. His rearguard was disintegrating and there was no point in pretending that he was making any real effort to comply with Hitler’s “victory or death” directive. Late that morning he sent one final pro forma request for permission to withdraw from El Alamein while at the same time doing his best to accelerate the westward movement of the army. Ritter von Thoma appeared at panzerarmee headquarters to report on the state of the Afrika Korps, pron
ounced Hitler’s orders “madness” then drove back to what was left of his panzer divisions. That afternoon he was captured by the British after his own command tank had been immobilized and set on fire. Not long after von Thoma left, Kesselring appeared; the meeting with Rommel was lively to say the least, for Rommel was convinced that overly optimistic reports by Luftwaffe officers—including Kesselring himself—had misled the Führer about the true situation at El Alamein. Kesselring insisted that this was not so, that Hitler was applying the tactical experience of the Russian Front to North Africa, never giving thought to how vastly different were the operational differences between the two. Rommel grudgingly agreed that this was probably the case, then blurted out “He should have left the decision to me!”210

  Then came the news that the 1st and 7th Armoured Divisions had finally broken through the crumbling Italian rearguard and were now sweeping wide to the west, clearly intent on turning north at some point to cut the coast road near Fuka and complete Montgomery’s long-awaited entrapment of Rommel and his army. By any realistic yardstick the decision was now out of Rommel’s hands.

  So now it had come, the thing we had done everything in our power to avoid: our front broken and the fully motorized enemy streaming into our rear. Superior orders could no longer count. We had to save what there was to be saved. . . . I issued orders for the retreat to be started immediately. This decision could at least be the means of saving the motorized part of the Panzer Army from destruction, although the army had already lost so much as a result of the 24-hour postponement of its retreat . . . that it was no longer in a position to offer effective opposition to the British advance at any point. . . . Anything that did not immediately reach the road and race off westwards was lost, for the enemy followed us up over a wide front and overran everything that came in his path.211

  The early winter rain began on November 5, just as Rommel and the remains of the Afrika Korps reached Fuka; there was a short, sharp engagement there between the Axis rearguard and the leading elements of Eighth Army, in which the British came out second best. On November 6 the rain turned into a near-deluge and the landscape became a quagmire, which slowed down the British pursuit and allowed Rommel time to sort out his units as best he could before moving further west to Mersa Matruh. The Eighth Army had for the moment reached the limits of the supplies allocated for Supercharge, and Montgomery, not wishing to upset his logistical arrangements, called a halt, save for light mobile units which continued to harass the Axis army. During the night Rommel pulled his forces out of Mersa Matruh and made for Sidi Barrani, where he stopped for two days to rest and reorder his columns; by this time the entire effective strength of Panzerarmee Afrika was barely more than 5,000 men, 20 tanks, and 50 guns.

  It was at Sidi Barrani where Rommel was informed that the United States Army had carried out amphibious landings on the North African coast, in French Morocco and Algeria—Operation Torch—on November 8. One of the American landings was at Algiers, which placed the US Army closer to Tripoli than was the panzerarmee at that moment. This news shifted the entire paradigm of the war in North Africa for Rommel, who saw immediately that this meant Panzerarmee Afrika’s days were numbered: his mission now was to get his command to a place where it could be evacuated before it was overwhelmed. Initially Rommel had planned to conduct a staged withdrawal along the Libyan coast, delaying Eighth Army’s advance as long as possible; with the news from Morocco and Algeria, that strategy evaporated: delaying the British advance from the east would do no good if the Americans were to take Tripolitania from the west. On the other hand, rushing headlong westward only to have to stop at some point and wait for the British to catch up in order to surrender to them was not a strategy either. Libya’s geography dictated that there were no truly defensible positions between Sollum and Mersa el Brega, back where Rommel had begun both of his offensives. Tobruk would have been a rat-trap—the panzerarmee would have been as easily bottled up there as had been South Africans in June, and the wherewithal to emulate the Australians from 1941 simply did not exist. Everywhere else in Libya, no matter where Rommel might choose to make his stand, his right flank would always be open, inviting the Eighth Army to swing around behind him in a mirror image of what he had done to them time and again. So what was Rommel to do? For that matter, with the threat it had once posed to Egypt a thing of the past, what strategic purpose did Panzerarmee Afrika now serve? On November 11, Rommel asked Kesselring and Cavallero to meet with him in the hope that between the three of them they could find an answer to the question, but both men declined the invitation, though neither chose to offer an explanation of why they did so. Rommel was vexed: once again, Hitler’s lack of a coherent grand strategy was actively hindering Germany’s war effort. What purpose was there in having an army in the field when no one could or would present clear instructions as to what was to be done with it?

  14 Nov. 1942

  Dearest Lu,

  Heading west again. I’m well in myself, but you won’t need to be told what’s going on in my mind. We have to be grateful for every day that the enemy does not close in on us. How far we shall get I cannot say. It all depends on the gasoline, which has yet to be flown across to us.

  How are you both? My thoughts even with so much on my mind are often with you. What will become of the war if we lose North Africa? How will it finish? I wish I could get free of these terrible thoughts.

  Rommel decided to go straight to the top to get answers, so once again Leutnant Berndt figuratively trudged off to Berlin at Rommel’s behest, seeking the counsel of the Führer himself. Hitler proved to be considerably less than helpful, however. It was clear to Berndt, who relayed his thoughts and conclusions to Rommel, that the Führer now regarded the officer commanding Panzerarmee Afrika as a hopeless pessimist who could not endure setbacks and needlessly retreated when he met with the slightest rebuff. However, if Rommel insisted on retreating all the way to Mersa el Brega, then he should, Hitler demanded, concentrate on using that position as the “springboard for a new offensive.” The vanguard of an Axis blocking force had been dispatched to Tunisia two days after the Allied landings in Morocco and Algiers; there, it was hoped, it would forestall any Allied advance into Tripolitania. When Berndt asked what advice the Führer had to aid Rommel in coordinating his strategy with the Tunisian force, Hitler snapped back, “Sagen, der Feldmarschall, sagte ich zu Tunis aus seinen Berechnungen lassen!”—“Tell the Field Marshal I said to leave Tunis out of his calculations!”

  Rommel was not idle while Berndt was in Berlin. Using the 90th Light Division as his rearguard, he deftly fell back across Cyrenaica, snapping at Eighth Army if it got too close or too inquisitive. Montgomery, despite having air superiority and overwhelming numbers of men and equipment, was never quite able to spring the trap on Rommel, who attributed the British general’s inability to “finish the job,” as it were, to a fundamental timidity. Focused on conserving his manpower and equipment, careful never to overreach his supplies, Montgomery was, in Rommel’s words, “overcautious.”

  He risked nothing in any way doubtful and bold solutions were completely foreign to him. So our motorised forces would have to keep up an appearance of constant activity, in order to induce ever greater caution in the British and make them even slower. I was quite satisfied that Montgomery would never take the risk of following up boldly and overrunning us, as he could have done without any danger to himself. Indeed, such a course would have cost him far fewer losses in the long run than his methodical insistence on overwhelming superiority in each tactical action, which he could only obtain at the cost of his speed.212

  Astonishingly, the panzerarmee’s morale remained rock solid—a circumstance due in no small part to the confidence possessed by its soldiers, German and Italian alike, in the man leading them. There was in Rommel none of the questionable bonhommie and avuncular posturing of Kesselring, nor any of the sense of intrinsic privilege which too many senior Italian officers considered to be inherent to their ran
k. He ate the same rations as his troops, spent just as much time sweating in the sun as did they, slept in his car when necessary, or else in his command vehicle or in a tent most of the rest of the time—the occasions when he had a roof over his head were so infrequent as to be worthy of comment in his correspondence with Lucie. He lived among his soldiers, so that they knew their man: they understood almost implicitly why they couldn’t stand and challenge the British to a fight to the finish. Retreating did not come naturally to the men of the Afrika Korps, nor, after being led by Rommel, as easily to the Italians as it once had done; still, they understood why they were falling back across Libya, and while they were unhappy at being compelled to do so, there was none of the sullenness that might have been expected. Instead, a perverse sense of pride manifested itself as they conducted their retreat as skillfully and stubbornly as possible.

  During the retreat to Mersa el Brega, Rommel turned contemplative: he had seen and heard a lot during his three weeks in Semmering, before he had to return to North Africa, and he had intuited much, much more. Now he began putting it all together. For the most part, he kept his thoughts to himself, not even confiding them in his letters to Lucie, until an encounter with Hans von Luck, the major commanding 21st Panzer’s reconnaissance battalion, turned him unexpectedly voluble. Von Luck was having an interesting war in North Africa: given command of a total of three recon battalions, he led the screening forces that covered the panzerarmee’s right flank during the retreat from El Alamein. He did so with skill, imagination, and not a little eccentricity: one British unit which von Luck’s battalions repeatedly encountered were the Royal Dragoons. So often did the two units cross paths that a certain degree of familiarity sprang up between them, to the point where they would routinely exchange messages about the wellbeing of recently captured personnel, and established a “gentlemen’s agreement” to cease fire at 5:00 P.M. every day for the duration of the retreat.