Killing Rommel

by Steven Pressfield

  The colonel gives instructions to the men surrounding us. He speaks so fast I can’t follow. The gist seems to be to detain but not to arrest or disarm us. The colonel’s glance finds me. “Deutsch sprechen?” Do I speak German?

  “Ein wenig,” I say. A little.

  He feels, I see, as awkward as I do.

  The colonel asks my name and what has happened. He does not ask our outfit. This is significant, for the Geneva Convention forbids such a query. Briefly I tell of the chase and the Teller mine. This makes a profound impression. I’m thinking, Am I mad to have brought these men in? Will my own army court-martial me? The transit from the hills has taken most of an hour; one of the soldiers has died, a second seems beyond help. Has the cost to our mission and to my own men been worth it?

  The last of the wounded Germans is being settled on to a stretcher on the bed of Collie’s truck. The medics set the litter down parallel to the boy’s prone form, then rock his body gently sideways until they can slide the stretcher underneath. His wounds have now been dressed. The mangled flesh where his right foot had been is now swathed in a ball of gauze, cotton and tape.

  An armoured car approaches. Round the site, hundreds of Afrika Korps troopers have now collected; they wear boots and jackets like ours, many with sand goggles and the same scarves round their necks to shield against sand and dust. Few are armed. They’re engineers and construction men.

  The armoured car comes up with both hatches open, driver and commander perched high in their stations. The vehicle stops. Behind it brakes an open-sided staff car. Our colonel turns and salutes. All round, troopers snap to attention.

  No one dismounts from the armoured car. From the staff car steps first a lieutenant in a dusty greatcoat, then a stocky officer of about fifty in jacket and breeches. The latter officer returns the colonel’s salute and comes forward. On his shoulders is the braid of a general. He wears a checked scarf, under which is pinned a Knight’s Cross, and an Afrika Korps cap with a pair of sand goggles pushed back over the brim. The officer’s throat is bandaged, as one sees so often in this theatre, indicating desert sores or some other campaign malady.

  37

  IT’S ROMMEL. He comes forward so matter-of-factly and with so little ceremony that he might be your uncle or a professor you admire and who knows you well. I salute. Collie and the others do the same. The lieutenant is apparently Rommel’s aide-de-camp. A third officer catching up from the staff car must be his interpreter.

  Rommel addresses me as Herr Leutnant and introduces himself, including his rank, as if he were just another officer in just another post. The whole thing has come about so suddenly that I don’t have time to be daunted. I identify myself. Rommel’s ADC indicates that all personnel—Afrika Korps troopers as well as ourselves—may stand at ease.

  For long moments the aide speaks privately to his commander. I can barely hear what he’s saying, but catch enough to know that Rommel is being told the circumstances under which these British and their vehicles have come to be in German custody.

  The Field Marshal absorbs this. Throughout, he studies me, my men and our vehicles. The aide finishes. Rommel steps past me towards Collie’s truck. His posture indicates that he wishes me to accompany him.

  I do.

  We cross to the truck.

  “Two-wheel drive or four?” Rommel asks in accented but clear English.

  “Two-wheel, sir.”

  “Indeed?” He confirms this with a peep at the front axle. “Petrol or diesel?”

  “Petrol, sir.”

  Rommel eyes the sun compass. He asks if it is the Bagnold version. I confirm this. The general’s glance moves to the overflow canister and the hose feeding into it from the radiator.

  “Condenser,” I say.

  Rommel nods. He steps round to the rear of the truck, taking in the guns and the sand-channels, the spare leaf springs and, under tarpaulins, the load of jerry cans.

  “Deutscher oder amerikanischer?”

  In just the past month, Eighth Army has started getting American copies of the excellent German petrol container. We prefer the original.

  “Deutscher, Herr General.”

  Rommel smiles. “A better pouring lip.”

  Our captor completes his circuit of the Chevrolet 30-hundred-weight. Collie, Punch and the others have formed up in line, standing correctly but at ease. Rommel stops before them, but addresses me. He speaks in German.

  “You are Long Range Desert Group. Reconnoitring a left hook round my position. Is that correct, Lieutenant?”

  I respond in German. “I may not answer that, sir.”

  Rommel doesn’t smile. But a look constituted of one part amusement and two parts approval softens his otherwise severe features. He takes one step back, then addresses, collectively and in English, me and my crew.

  “I shall never forget your kindness to my young men.”

  His voice cracks with emotion. There is a short pause; then, with a sharp command, the Desert Fox calls for fuel and water to be brought. Afrika Korps troopers respond with alacrity, bringing jerry cans which they load into the back of my jeep and into Collie’s and Punch’s trucks.

  Rommel shakes my hand and that of every man in T3 patrol.

  “I will give you an hour’s start,” he tells me in English. “After that, you understand, I must put my hounds on your trail.”

  I have no idea what protocol demands. Do I salute? Say thank you? I’m thinking, Get out of here now before anybody changes his mind. I’m about to speak in gratitude when I feel Punch, behind me and to the side, straighten and clear his throat.

  “With respect, sir,” Punch addresses Rommel. “An hour ain’t fair.”

  Our benefactor turns back.

  I shoot Punch a look: Shut up!

  Punch ignores me. He speaks directly to the German general.

  “It’ll take every bit of an hour, sir, just to get back to where we turned round from. By now your chaps’ll be all over the place, where they weren’t nowhere near before.” Punch stands taller and meets the Field Marshal’s eye. “We didn’t have to help your blokes, sir. We coulda shot ’em all and got a medal for it.”

  Rommel’s interpreter translates this in its entirety. I listen, making sure he gets it right. Collie and I are both coming out of our boots, expecting all hell to pay back Punch’s presumption.

  Rommel regards us all for a long moment.

  “Till dark, then. Will you call that fair?”

  “That’s square, sir,” says Punch.

  I speak before anyone else pipes up with another bright idea. “That will be most generous, sir.” I salute. Rommel responds and turns on his heel. I have one moment to meet Punch’s eye, threatening blue murder. Then we mount up and get out of there as fast as we can.

  38

  I DICTATED MY operation report on 6 February from the French hospital at Tébessa in Algeria, where dysentery, not jaundice or pneumonia, at last laid me low. Operation Torch, the Anglo-American landings at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, had in November put ashore 90,000 men and 450 tanks and this force had by the date of T3’s getaway pushed inland as far as the mountains of Tunisia’s Western Dorsale.

  The Yanks occupied the town of Tébessa, a sizeable and quite charming French colonial outpost, though they were about to get chased out by Rommel when he struck again with his customary audacity, driving the inexperienced American troops back over the Kasserine Pass and nearly out of Tunisia entirely. By then—mid-February 1943—I and all of T3 had been flown to HQ Eighth Army at Medenine and from there, individually and by various forms of transport, to Cairo and the end of our desert war.

  The act of chivalry that freed us from German custody was by no means without cost to Rommel. By letting us go, the Field Marshal made possible the signalling of our report on the topography of the Tebaga Gap and of his own dispositions within it. In the event, wireless failure prevented us from sending this signal—but Rommel had no way of knowing that when he released us. In addition,
our host sacrificed the chance of interrogating us as prisoners of war and perhaps gleaning vital intelligence.

  Why did he do it? I believe that, being the man he was, he had no choice. His enemy had performed an act of mercy towards men serving under his colours. By his own imperatives of honour, he could do no less than return the favour. I don’t believe he ever thought of doing anything else. Nor, I judge, did any of the onlooking soldiers. In Rommel’s boots, I believe, they would have done the same.

  Our escape proved anti-climactic. We retrieved our Guardsmen waiting with the signals truck, which had been attacked by Berbers in the interim and its radio put out of commission. Reckoning that our pursuers would track us south towards British lines, we turned west instead. Four days of struggling with mechanical failures and fending off sallies by armed natives got us round the western shoulder of the Chott Djerid, the great salt lake of southern Tunisia. Luck for once stayed with us. We reached the French post of Tozeur a day later and from there made our way to Gafsa, Feriana, and at last to the hospital at Tébessa.

  In Tozeur we learnt that Tinker and Popski were alive. They had been in this very town only a day earlier, with all their men, as well as a contingent of SAS and Fighting French, who had linked with them after their camp at Qaret Ali had been wiped out by German aircraft. Tinker and Popski had escaped this calamity by blind luck—being absent on reconnaissance at the time of the attack. Their group, now of over thirty men, had made its escape, as we had, via the Chott. After an ordeal on foot and in several overloaded jeeps, all had at last reached safety on the far side.

  The topographical intelligence that our patrol had acquired turned out to be of only corroborative importance. Both Tinker and Popski had reconnoitred the Tebaga Gap before us, as had, within days, the patrols of Lazarus, Spicer, Bruce and Henry. From Tozeur, Tinker had signalled his report to HQ Middle East. In fact he had cadged a flight to Monty’s headquarters and there completed delivery of his findings in person.

  The discovery of Wilder’s Gap, along with Tinker and Popski’s reconnaissance of the Tebaga Gap, proved to be decisive in the defeat of the Afrika Korps and the surrender of Axis forces in North Africa. When, on 12–19 March 1943, the 2nd New Zealand Division ran its left hook round the Mareth Line, it was Tinker himself with two NCOs from T2 patrol who guided the formation and its supporting arms.

  As for Rommel in that early February, he had by no means shot his final bolt. On the fourteenth, Operation Spring Wind overwhelmed the Americans at Sidi bou Zid. A day later, the Afrika Korps captured Gafsa, the town in which our patrol had been resting just a few days earlier, and pressed north to Kasserine. There on 20 February, Rommel’s Panzers fell again upon the untried Americans, capturing four thousand and inflicting a humiliating defeat upon Allied arms.

  By 9 March, however, the Desert Fox’s good fortune had run out. Racked by jaundice, thrown back by Monty at Medenine, with the Mareth Line days away from being turned, he voluntarily departed for Europe, alone except for his aides. His replacement in Tunisia, General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, fought on for another month and a half before finally capitulating at Tunis on 7 May. The despatch from General Alexander to the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, read as follows:

  Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over. All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.

  This was the end of the Axis armies in Africa, and the triumph for which Montgomery and Eighth Army had laboured for so long.

  I was returned to Cairo by hospital ship. When Rose reached me, in the 15th Scottish General Hospital, she held in her arms our infant daughter, whom she had named Alexandra, after the city in which the child was conceived.

  Both Punch and Collie survived the war, though I did not see either until a reunion at Wellington, New Zealand, in March 1963. Punch died on New Year’s Day, 1971, of heart failure at his home in Puhoi, north of Auckland. During the time of the patrol described in these pages, I lost four men—Trooper L. Z. Midge, Corporal R.A. Hornsby, Trooper L. R. Standage and Trooper J. M. Miller. To this day I see their faces. Collie and Punch were awarded the Military Medal; Grainger, Oliphant and Miller posthumously were mentioned in despatches. Marks survived his wounds at the flooded wadi. He died in 1986 in Durban, South Africa.

  Nick Wilder (DSO) and Ron Tinker (OBE, MC, MM) returned to New Zealand as heroes. I have cited their names over more dinners than I can count. Both have since passed on, Wilder at his sixteen-hundred-acre sheep farm near Waipukurau on 27 June 1970 at the age of fifty-six; Tinker in Christchurch on 16 February 1982, aged sixty-eight. Both retired with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

  Jake Easonsmith (DSO, MC) continued with the LRDG as its commanding officer and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel when the group was reconfigured for partisan operations in the Balkans and the Aegean islands. He was killed by a sniper on Leros on 16 November 1943.

  Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Vladimir Peniakoff (DSO, MC) authored the colourful and entertaining Popski’s Private Army, which was published to wide acclaim in 1950. He died just a year later of a brain tumor. He was fifty-four.

  Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Blair “Paddy” Mayne of the SAS (DSO with three bars, Légion d’Honneur, Croix de Guerre) was killed in a motor accident on 13 December 1955 near his home at Newtownards in Northern Ireland. He was the most decorated British soldier of the Second World War, as well as one of the founding pillars and a legend of the Special Air Service.

  Now: Rommel.

  The end of the Desert Fox’s life was attended by bitter irony and by, many believe, even greater honour than that which he had achieved by his feats of soldiering and generalship. Charged by Hitler’s henchmen with complicity in the July 1944 plot to assassinate the Führer, Rommel was offered the choice of taking his own life—by cyanide capsule provided by his accusers—or putting the nation through the ordeal of a trial before a Nazi court. More to the point, Rommel was certain that his persecutors would never let him survive to reach trial. He took the poison. He was buried with full military honours at Herrlingen on 18 October 1944.

  I was in hospital on Sardinia when I heard the report on the BBC, accompanied by the official German cover story of his death from wounds suffered in an American air attack. I believed it. It was not till the publication of Desmond Young’s Rommel the Desert Fox in 1950 that the truth became clear to all.

  Killing Rommel was an aim that we, his enemies, could never accomplish. It took Hitler and the worst of his own countrymen to still the heart of Germany’s greatest fighting general. In the end, we who strove against him came to respect Rommel as profoundly, perhaps, as did his own men, whom he led so brilliantly and to whom he was faithful to his final breath.

  Stein’s novel was published by Gattis & Thurlow in 1947. The book made my career. The Times called it “dazzling” and “intrepid” and ran a particularly dashing photo of Stein in his RHA uniform, which Rose had taken outside the Bodleian Library. A motion picture was produced based upon the book, with Jack Hawkins and a very young Laurence Harvey. There was even a bit of a Stein cult in Greenwich Village, New York, at the time of the beatniks.

  As for my combat career, it continued for eleven months after the German surrender in North Africa, through the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy. A fractured hip, acquired not under enemy action but in a traffic accident at home on leave, at last got me out of the line and into the kind of desk job that a part of me suspects I was more suited to from the start.

  Rose and I still have each other. I remain as deeply in love with her as I was as an undergraduate in 1938. Alexandra has been joined by Jessica, Thomas and Patrick and (so far) six grandchildren.

  As for the dream of my mother, I have had it all my life. If the imagery as Stein suggested is about reconciling oneself to death, I have not yet succeeded in doing so.

  Last, I must speak of the Italian soldiers we shot down that night at Benina. Over the centuries, countless warriors and thinkers, far wise
r than I, have addressed the issue of morality in war and the right and wrong of taking human life. I can speak only for myself. No martial credo, however lofty or noble-sounding, will ever convince me that those men were “enemy,” even though I know that they were and that, had they got the chance, they would have visited upon me and my comrades the same destruction which we loosed upon them. That changes nothing. We took their lives. By wilful violence ordered by me, our guns tore them from wives and children, fathers and mothers; from their country and from themselves. Rivers of tears cannot alter that fact. I have lived with it every day, every hour. Like many of my generation I did not go to war gravely and soberly, as Lao-tzu tells us a wise man ought. But I returned from it that way.

  • Epilogue •

  CHAP’S MEMOIR ENDS with that sentence. What he characteristically omitted to mention was the DSO he won for the operation described in these pages. Chap was awarded the Military Cross at Monte Cassino in Italy, May 1944; this honor joined his mention in dispatches from the Gazala campaign, so that the identification line in his obituary in The Times of London and the Guardian on December 27, 2004, read:

  Chapman, Maj. R. L., DSO, MC, m-i-d.

  This was the least likely encapsulation that Chap would have chosen for himself in summing up his life, yet I feel certain that his spirit, looking down from heaven, would be warmed to see that “attrib line,” as he would have called it as an editor.