Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  And so on the flight from Rome back to North Africa, Rommel decided that, using whatever subterfuges were available, he would take the panzerarmee west, first to Sirte, next to Tripoli, then to Buerat, and finally all the way to the Mareth Line, regardless of what orders came from Rome or Berlin. The first Italian divisions began slipping off to the west on December 10, the mechanized units holding the Mersa el Brega line for the time being. Rommel was taking a huge gamble, for this movement would all but exhaust the on-hand stocks gasoline, leaving the remaining mechanized units with just enough fuel to reach Tripoli, but without adequate reserves to maneuver if the Eighth Army attacked. This was one of the reasons for Rommel’s fury at Kesselring’s high-handed appropriation of fuel specifically designated for the panzerarmee: Nehring’s 10th Panzer and the Fall schirm jäger regiments already had adequate supplies to accomplish their mission of blocking an Allied advance from the west.

  The next day aerial reconnaissance showed that Montgomery was moving his armor to the south, in preparation for precisely the sort of flanking maneuver Rommel had maintained made this position so vulnerable. The Eighth Army’s radio discipline continued to be sloppy, and while the near-arcane talents of Hauptmann Seebohm’s radio intercept company were still sorely missed, their replacements were gaining skill at divining British intentions from the snippets of signals they could catch. Thus on the evening of December 11, Rommel was informed that the British would be attacking at first light the next morning. When the inevitable artillery barrage began at midnight, the prearranged signal “222” was sent to all Axis units, initiating a well-planned evacuation of the Mersa el Brega line, so that when Montgomery’s attack went in, it was a mailed fist swinging futilely at empty space. Rommel noted wryly, “Evidently the enemy has not noted our nocturnal withdrawal.” In this he was incorrect, for on December 13 Montgomery, trying to put a brave face on the failure of his “attack” to actually attack anything, wrote to General Alan Brooke saying, “Rommel is very windy and starting to pull out.” Apparently Montgomery believed that Rommel was obliged to stay put until such time as Eighth Army and its commander were fully prepared, then dutifully remain in place when the attack finally began. To Rommel, Montgomery’s overly elaborate and time-consuming preparations before Mersa el Brega were simply further evidence of a lack of imagination, a shortcoming which Rommel found inexcusable in any general on either side.225

  In the north, November and December saw the Allies—mainly the Americans—stage a succession of local attacks that the Axis troops easily repulsed with relatively minor losses; by Christmas the Allies had made some gains, but in practical terms were no closer to taking Bizerte and Tunis than they had been in mid-November. The Americans were essentially feeling their way at this point, being utterly inexperienced in actual mechanized warfare and saddled with a cadre of peacetime officers, the majority of whom had been excellent administrators but were inept at leading men in combat. General Nehring, as long as he lasted, handled the American II Corps, as well as the equally green British First Army under General Kenneth Anderson, with aplomb, his earlier stint as commander the Afrika Korps under Rommel as well as his time spent on the Russian Front allowing him to deploy and maneuver his XC Panzerkorps with an easy assurance.

  Unfortunately he might have been too good, for even as he was handily keeping the Allies at arm’s length, he was strongly critical in his reports of what he regarded as the O.K.W.’s needlessly irresolute strategy for Tunisia. He averred that the Wehrmacht should either make a supreme effort to dispatch at once sufficient men and equipment to Tunisia to take the offensive against the Americans and British, or else should be systematically evacuating the units already there. Sending men and supplies to Tunisia in penny packets, he maintained, was a waste of both: doing so only assured that the Axis forces in Tunisia remained numerically and materially inferior to the Allies, whose logistical train was much better organized with a greater capacity than the Germans and Italians possessed. In retrospect his point was well made: from mid-November 1942 through the end of January 1943, 243,000 men and 856,000 tons of weapons, ammunition, supplies and equipment were sent to Tunisia—impressive numbers, save that the Allies committed nearly three times the men and materiel to North Africa in the same span of time. In the end, almost all of the Axis troops who had not been killed or wounded, and whatever materiel had not been expended, would be captured by the Allies.

  Kesselring, meanwhile, regarded Nehring as needlessly pessimistic, and made the argument to both Rome and Berlin that merely holding Tunisia was sufficient, so long as the Allies were kept away from Sicily and Italy proper. However, Kesselring was not above a bit of empire-building of his own in North Africa, which influenced the advice he gave to his superiors. Maintaining the status quo in Tunisia kept the XC Panzerkorps out of Rommel’s hands and under Kesselring’s command; if the Axis army was reinforced to a strength where it could begin an offensive against the Allies, an army officer would be given that command, with Kesselring at best relegated to that officer’s nominal superior; Kesselring’s worst nightmare was that such a command would be given to Rommel. On the other hand, a gradual withdrawal and eventual evacuation of Tunisia would mean a reduction in the size of the forces under Kesselring’s command, with a corresponding loss of personal prestige. In the end bureaucratic inertia took over and the final determination of Axis strategy in Tunisia was decided in Kesselring’s favor when no actual decision was made: no staged withdrawal and evacuation was begun, instead reinforcements would continue to be dispatched to Tunisia, but not in sufficient numbers to allow the Axis to take the offensive. As additional German and Italian units arrived in Tunis and Bizerte, the size of the Axis force in northern Tunisia grew well beyond that of a typical corps, and Kesselring advocated creating a second, separate panzer army, which would be subordinate to him. Berlin agreed and the Fifth Panzer Army was created on December 8, 1942, with command given to Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, a 53-year old veteran of the Russian Front: General Nehring lacked the required seniority for an army command, and so was superceded and placed in reserve.

  Although their effect on Panzerarmee Afrika was at the moment slight, Rommel followed the action in the north as best he could, even as Kesselring was being obstinate about keeping Rommel adequately informed: as the Axis perimeter in Tunisia contracted, which Rommel knew it must, the two panzer armies would, at some point, of necessity have to coordinate their operations in order to properly exploit successes and avoid working at cross-purposes; a unified command would have to be created sooner or later. For now, his attention was focused on getting Panzerarmee Afrika out of Tripolitania and into the Mareth Line. In accomplishing this he was receiving an unprecedented degree of cooperation from an unexpected quarter: Marshal Ettore Bastico. When the strutting, pompous little Italian arrived in Libya in July 1941, claiming command authority over the Afrika Korps, Rommel had christened him “Bombastico” and then promptly ignored him. For all of his ego, however, Bastico was not stupid: when he met with Rommel at Buerat on December 17, he listened carefully as the German field marshal recapitulated a screed of figures reckoning fuel consumption, ammunition expenditure, shipping tonnage, shipping losses, and port capacities—in the process giving the lie that Rommel was habitually ignorant of such details—to make his case for abandoning the whole of Tripolitania. Even knowing that it meant the end of Italy’s African empire, Bastico could not argue with Rommel’s assertion that Tripoli had lost its strategic value once the bombers of the Desert Air Force came within range of the port—it would be suicide for any ship to put in there now—and that without Tripoli, the whole of Libya was worthless. All that mattered now was saving as much of the army as possible.

  During the retreat to Tunisia, then, Bastico essentially acted as a buffer between Mussolini and Rommel, mitigating the most absurd of the Italian dictator’s demands to stand fast and hold at all costs, echoes of Hitler’s “victory or death” decrees, and acting as a brake on what seemed t
o Bastico, as well as Kesselring along with the O.K.W. and Comando Supremo, as Rommel’s near-obsession with rushing headlong to the Mareth Line. However much the Italian dictator might have admired the professional skill shown in Rommel’s retreat from El Alamein, he was loathe to give up the whole of Libya: despite his willingness to allow Rommel to fall back from Mersa el Brega, he insisted that the panzerarmee make its stand at Sirte, then at Buerat, and finally at Tripoli, each time demanding the position be held at all costs. Bastico, however, had learned the speed and scope of movement that was possible in desert warfare far better than did his superiors in Rome, who frequently gave the impression that they had learned nothing since November 1940. The sort of sweeping attack around an exposed southern flank that Rommel feared Eighth Army could execute, trapping the Axis army as it tried to hold one of those positions, was a very real threat and not, Bastico knew, an excuse for timidity or a lack of resolve on Rommel’s part.

  Somehow Bastico always found the proper mixture of rational argument and blandishments with which Mussolini could be mollified; Rommel, on the other hand, was not so easily diverted.

  The months of December 1942 and January 1943 were, without a doubt, the nadir of Rommel’s military career. It is no exaggeration to say that when he left Rome on December 3, he was a thoroughly demoralized man—and as a consequence, for a time his extraordinary capacity for leadership deserted him. He fully expected that, given its dire straits in manpower and equipment—in mid-December Rommel’s armored divisions could muster a total of 60 battle-worthy tanks, while Montgomery could field eight times that number—Panzerarmee Afrika would be forced to capitulate to Eighth Army in a matter of weeks. Nowhere else in his letters from North Africa does there appear anything near the despondency he showed in the letter he wrote to Manfred on December 8; three days later he would write to Lucie asking her “I wonder if you could have a German–English dictionary sent to me by courier post. It would come in very useful.” He was a man who at that moment regarded the best hope for his future to be a British prisoner-of-war compound. The cause of this sudden collapse of his previously indomitable spirit is not difficult to discern: Erwin Rommel was a sick man, sick at heart and sick in body.

  The feeling of betrayal by Hitler weighed very heavily on Rommel; he had imagined himself to be—and by all appearances was—the Führer’s fairhaired boy, his favorite general; to be so casually discarded was a sore blow to Rommel’s ego. An even greater burden was the realization that not only was he regarded by Hitler as being expendable, but so too was the entire army for which Rommel was responsible—and to no good purpose. He had not brought this army all the way across North Africa from El Alamein to Mersa el Brega only to allow it to be taken like an old badger in a trap. Having everything for which he and his men had striven and accomplished in the past 20 months so heedlessly dismissed would have been sufficient to dismay the stoutest spirit. At the same time that he was coming to grips with this new reality, Rommel was simultaneously suffering from low blood pressure, insomnia, migraine headaches, fainting spells, and the lingering effects of jaundice. The combination of 10 months of blistering heat every year, the other two months given over to near-torrential rain, the monotonous and unimaginative diet on which Rommel lived—as always he continued to be adamant about eating the same rations as his troops—and the stress and strain of leading an army that was in almost daily combat on some level, all combined to take a physical toll on Rommel, and eventually exacted also a mental toll. Rommel had once written to Lucie jocularly remarking that he was the only senior officer who had stayed in Africa, apart from leave, for the entire campaign; now his time in Africa was rapidly coming to an end.

  Given his mental and physical exhaustion, then, it hardly comes as a surprise that Rommel was for a time equally drained of imagination and daring. His determination to save what he could of Panzerarmee Afrika never flagged, however, so it naturally follows that the Mareth Line should become a lodestone for him. It held out the promise of a secure position where he was certain the army would be able to defend against the most determined British attacks while it recovered some measure of its former strength—as he would, he hoped, along with it. Given that there was no place between Mersa el Brega and Mareth where Rommel’s army could make a stand, he saw no compelling reason to waste the time or run the risk of being outflanked and trapped that making a protracted withdrawal would present. The critical factor here, as it had been for so much of the retreat from El Alamein, was the availability of gasoline—or, rather, the lack of it. By this time the run from the Italian ports to Tripoli had become so hazardous that Allies were sinking nine out of every 10 ships carrying supplies to Panzerarmee Afrika. Rommel literally did not know from one day to the next if there would be enough fuel available to keep the army moving; and if there was fuel to hand, moving the infantry westward was given first priority. Had Rommel enough gasoline to allow his relative handful of tanks to conduct a proper mobile defense, he might well have been willing to stand at each little settlement or village along the coastal road and make Eighth Army pay a bitter price for every advance; on the few occasions when the Afrika Korps had fuel and was able to maneuver, the British paid with eight or even 10 of their tanks for every German panzer they took out. As it was, however willing to fight the panzerarmee’s German and Italian soldiers may have been, the means to do so continued to be denied them.

  Given the operational difficulties and the instances where the Axis army was all but immobilized, that Eighth Army did not simply roll up its Axis opponent was due in no small part to the combination of the British force’s own supply problems—this time theirs was the army operating at the end of 1,000-mile long supply line—and the plodding, fussy nature of Montgomery’s command style, but also to the skill of one of the North African campaign’s unsung geniuses, Generalmajor Karl Bülowius. He was a Prussian by birth, with 35 years of service in the German Army, all of them in the engineers. He took command of the Afrika Korps’ engineer battalions in late October 1942; when Montgomery’s Operation Supercharge finally broke the Axis line at El Alamein, Rommel gave Bülowius the task of slowing down the British advance however possible. Bülowius proved to be fiendishly clever at creating dummy minefields, which, because there was always a scattering of real mines among the decoys, had to be cleared as methodically and carefully as a real minefield.

  Whenever the Afrika Korps halted, even if only for a day, Bülowius had his engineers busily setting up snares and booby traps to waylay the pursuing Tommies. A crooked picture, a door sitting half-ajar, a tin of peaches on a shelf, an inviting if dilapidated bench, a dropped pistol, a discarded uniform cap, an open book lying face-down, all could serve as triggers for small explosive devices that could kill or wound a soldier incautious enough to disturb them.226

  Contrary to their sinister reputation, the purpose of such booby traps was not to cause large numbers of fatalities or injuries: it was to delay the advance of an enemy by creating a sense of apprehension and excessive caution among the troops—which naturally translated into slow, even glacial movement on their part: booby traps were snares laid for soldiers who were foolishly unwary. The discovery of the first such trap, whether it was set off or simply found, would immediately introduce a level of apprehension and caution that all but paralyzed every soldier in the vicinity: not knowing where or even if there were other such devices to be found would compel an infantry unit to move with extraordinary care—and matching slowness—through the locale in which the trap or traps were found, as every step taken could be potentially lethal. In this way Bülowius often gained days for Panzerarmee Afrika; not all of the relative slowness of Eighth Army’s advance could be attributed to Montgomery’s lack of imagination: much of it came from the Tommies’ well-founded wariness.

  Bülowius’ gifts for mayhem allowed Rommel to fall back to Buerat in good order, and by December 18 the whole of the army was in place there, save for the 15th Panzer Division, which had remained at Sirte to act as
a blocking force. Rommel, though, had no desire to stay there a day longer than absolutely necessary: there was a broad antitank ditch and several mine fields to deter a frontal attack by the British, but as always, the army’s right flank was open, and Rommel’s panzers lacked the fuel to fight a mobile defense. “I was very much afraid,” he would later write of Buerat, “that the British commander might continue in his attempt to outflank us in the south.”227

  . . . the Buerat front was strong enough to resist a fair-scale British break-through attempt—that is, of course, assuming that they chose to attack it frontally. Like almost every other position in North Africa, the enemy could make a hook round the south to attack the Via Balbia, without even making contact with the fortified line. If he decided to throw several divisions into such a move the battle would be decided by the motorized forces alone. And in motorized forces we were hopelessly inferior quite apart from the fact that our gasoline would not possibly run to a mobile battle. . . . Because of their lack of speed the enemy can take them on one after the other, each time with locally superior forces, and destroy them piecemeal without suffering undue casualties himself.