Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

by Unknown

  At any rate, it was quickly discovered by the British that the Afrika Korps proposed to fight according to the rules. For this the whole credit was given to Rommel. Since the Afrika Korps looked up to him for an example in everything, he undoubtedly deserved a large share of it. However, he was lucky. “Thank God, we had no S.S. divisions in the desert,” said General Bayerlein, “or Heaven knows what would have happened: it would have been a very different sort of war.” He went on to tell me, what I for one had not realised, that, while a German general might have control of S.S. troops in the field during actual operations, he had no powers of discipline over them whatsoever. His only remedy, even against an “other rank,” was to report him, through the usual channels, to Himmler in person. The result was likely to be unsatisfactory. “Had the July 20th plot succeeded,” he added, “there would have been civil war between the S.S. divisions and the Army in Italy.”

  The Afrika Korps did not beat up prisoners. On the contrary, after the first rough pounce, it treated them with almost old-world courtesy. At Gambut, soon after the opening of the May, 1942 battle, I met an Army Film Unit photographer, a Scot, who had just managed to escape after an hour or two in enemy hands. He was newly arrived from England, this was his first experience of action and he was highly indignant. “What like of people are these bluidy Germans, sir?” he asked me. “I wad never ha' credited it. A German officer, an officer Ah'm tellin' ye, actually took ma camera off me an' wouldna give it back.... Never mind,” he added more cheerfully, “Ah hae his receipt for it.” So he had, on the back of an envelope, with name, rank and date. He proposed to look for the Oberleutnant after the war.

  This was my favourite story, until I had the misfortune to be captured myself. I could then cap it with the young German who, after searching me, politely handed back a gold cigarette-case which he found in the pocket of my bush-shirt. He apologised for taking my field-glasses but explained that these wereMilitargut whereas the cigarette-case wasprivat. Comparing notes with others in a prison-camp I found that no one had any serious cause for complaint until after being handed over to the Italians. Since I still have my cigarette-case, I must have been lucky in my Italians also. I tried, however, not to expose them to the same temptation.

  Misunderstandings there were from time to time between Rommel and ourselves and some of them had unpleasant repercussions upon prisoners. Such misunderstandings were quite genuine and the fault was not always on the German side. For example, we published an order to the effect that prisoners should not be given a meal before being interrogated. The intention was innocent enough. A prisoner is usually somewhat shaken when he is first captured and if he is interrogated immediately he may give away information of value. If, however, he has a meal and perhaps a cigarette, he has time to collect himself. The order meant no more than that the meal should be postponed until after the investigation. The assumption was, I presume, that this might involve a delay of an hour or two.

  It was nevertheless unwise to put such an order on paper and still more unwise to circulate it in forward areas where it might fall into German hands. I did not realise quite how unwise until I reached Tmimi aerodrome, having spent twelve hours standing up in a truck, under a hot sun, without food or water. Having been captured twenty-four hours earlier and having had nothing to eat or drink for six or seven hours before that I was looking forward to an evening meal and above all to water. We were paraded and addressed by a German officer in English.

  “I regret, gentlemen,” he said, “that we are unable to give you anything to eat or drink. As your orders are that German prisoners shall be starved and deprived of water until they reach Cairo for interrogation, I am obliged to treat you in the same way. You will get nothing until you reach Benghazi and have been interrogated, unless the British Government see fit to cancel the order. They have been asked to do so.” Presumably the British Government did, since we were given a meal and a drink at Derna next morning.

  More serious might have been the consequences of an order found on a British commando officer captured during an unsuccessful raid on Tobruk in August, 1942. Whatever its intention, as translated into Italian it gave the impression that, if prisoners could not conveniently be removed, they were to be killed. I have not seen the original text. I can only assume that it stressed that the infliction of casualties on the enemy was more important than the capture of prisoners. The distinction is a little subtle, even in English. Staff officers who draft such orders should remember that fine shades of meaning do not always survive translation. They should also remember that all orders are liable to fall into enemy hands and that those who suffer are their own countrymen in captivity. Many were manacled for months after the Dieppe raid, when our own orders for the handcuffing of German prisoners were captured. Hitler's famous or infamous order of October 18th, 1942, was at least unequivocal:

  From now on [said paragraph 3], all enemies on so-called Commando missions in Europe or Africa challenged by German troops, even if they are to all appearances soldiers in uniform or demolition troops, whether armed or unarmed, in battle or in flight, are to be slaughtered to the last man. It does not make any difference whether they are landed from ships and aeroplanes for their actions, or whether they are dropped by parachutes.

  Even if these individuals, when found, should apparently be prepared to give themselves up, no pardon is to be granted to them on principle....

  This order does not apply [said paragraph 5], to the treatment of any enemy soldiers who, in the course of normal hostilities (large-scale offensive actions, landing operations and airborne operations), are captured in open battle or give themselves up.

  I will hold responsible under Military Law [added the final paragraph], for failing to carry out this order, all commanders and officers who either have neglected their duty of instructing the troops about this order or acted against this order where it is to be executed.

  The order was signed “Adolf Hitler” and was, therefore, “top level.”

  On June 18th, 1946, General Siegfried Westphal was questioned about it at Nuremberg:

  Question:You were on the African front?

  Answer:More than a year and a half.

  Question:How was the war conducted there?

  Answer:I can answer in a sentence: it was conducted in a chivalrous and irreproachable manner.

  Question:Who was your chief?

  Answer:Marshal Rommel.

  Question:Did he ever order or sanction violation of the rules of war?

  Answer:Never.

  Question:What position did you hold with him?

  Answer:I was the head of the Operations Section and afterwards his Chief of Staff.

  Question:You were, then, always in contact with him?

  Answer:I was in contact with him always, both personally and on service matters.

  Question:Do you know the order issued by Hitler on October 18th, 1942?

  Answer:Yes.

  Question:Did you receive this order?

  Answer:Yes, we received it in the desert near Sidi Barrani, from a liaison officer.

  Question:How did Marshal Rommel behave on receipt of this order?

  Answer:Marshal Rommel and I read it standing beside our truck. I then immediately proposed that we should not publish it. We burnt it at once, where we stood. Our reasons were as follows: The motives of the order, which I think you will find in the introductory paragraph,*

  [* “I. Our enemies have for a long time been adopting methods, in carrying on the war, which are not in accordance with the International Conventions of Geneva. Particularly brutal and stealthy is the behavior of the members of the so-called Commandos which, as has been proved, are themselves in part recruited from circles of released criminals in the enemy countries. Captured orders prove that they are instructed not only to shackle prisoners, but even to simply kill defenceless prisoners the moment they think that, in the future pursuit of the mission, these prisoners constitute a burden, or otherwise an inconvenience. Finally
orders have been found in which the killing of prisoners has been ordered as a matter of principle.”]

  were clear in themselves. We knew the British orders for hand-to-hand combat. We knew the slogan of El Alamein: “Kill the Germans wherever you find them” and various other aggravations of the war. We had also captured an order, issued by a British armoured brigade, according to which prisoners must not be given anything to drink. Nevertheless, we did not wish this order to reach our troops, for that would have led to an aggravation of the war of which it would have been impossible to foresee the consequences. That was why the message was burnt ten minutes after it was received.... But it was only on another continent that one could have got away with so blatant an act of disobedience. I do not think that one could have done it in the east or the west.

  In fact, Rommel was very far from being the only German general who ignored this and similar orders. General Westphal was then questioned about the strange case of “the nephew of Field-Marshal Alexander”:

  Question:Could you briefly run through the case of the commando action in which the nephew of Field-Marshal Alexander took part?

  Answer:In the autumn of 1942, a close relation of Field-Marshal Alexander was taken prisoner behind the German lines. He was wearing an Afrika Korps cap and was armed with a German pistol. He had thus put himself outside the rules of war. Marshal Rommel gave the order that he should be treated like any other prisoner.

  The Marshal thought that he did not understand what might have been the consequences of his conduct. (What Rommel actually said when someone proposed that this officer should be shot, as he could legitimately have been, was:

  “What, shoot General Alexander's nephew? You damned fool, you might as well make a present of another couple of divisions to the British Army!” The officer in question, who was not a nephew but a cousin of General Alexander [now Field-Marshal Lord Alexander], and bears the same name, tells me that he relied on the Junker tradition of the solidarity of the military caste and took the view that a German general was unlikely to order the execution of a close relation of another general. Though Rommel was no Junker, the event proved him right.)

  There are endless anecdotes about Rommel's treatment of our prisoners, all, so far as I have heard, to his credit. For perhaps the best I am indebted to Brigadier G. H. Clifton, D.S.O., M.C., at the time of his encounters with Rommel a captured New Zealand brigade commander.

  Brigadier Clifton, christened “the flying kiwi,” was a born escaper. When he joined us in Campo PG 29 he at once evolved a very bold plan which came tragically near to success. He lowered himself at night out of a second-storey window into the smallest possible patch of shadow in the angle of a wall. The wall was actually on a sentry's beat. He stood face to the wall until the sentry moved away and then slid across the yard on his stomach and under a barbed wire fence.

  Travelling at high speed across country, he reached the nearest railway station, Ponte d'Olio, and took the first train in the morning to Milan. From the main station he crossed over by tram to the north station for the Como line and arrived in Como some time before he was missed at morning roll-call.

  At Como he made his fatal mistake. He proposed to follow the road past the Villa d'Este, as I did myself later on, and then cross over the mountains into Switzerland. To save time he hired a carriage at the station. When he was paying it off, there was a dispute about the fare. Two carabinieri, who had already been watching him with some suspicion, strolled over. That evening he was brought back to us.

  Removed to Campo PG 5, the “Straf” camp for inveterate escapers, we heard that he had been seen standing on the roof, fired at by sentries from all sides. On his way to Germany, seated between two guards in a railway carriage, he contrived to dive through a window while the train was running. He was shot at by the guards, severely wounded in the thigh and spent many months in a hospital, where he was well cared for by a German doctor who still writes to him.

  On March 22nd, 1945, he escaped again from a camp in Silesia and on April 15th, having been flown across the Pacific by the United States Air Force, he was back home in Auckland, New Zealand. When I met Rommel's widow, almost the first question she asked me was, “Did you know Brigadier Clifton? Where is he and did he manage to escape? My husband always hoped he would get out of Italy. He had a great opinion of him.”

  Here, then, is Brigadier Clifton's story:

  "In the early hours of September 4th, 1942, I drove out into 'No-man's-land' south of Alameyil Ridge, to tidy up someone else's night battle which had gone astray. It was before first light and a most confusing situation. As a result, we drove up to the wrong people, while looking for a forward company of my own brigade. The enemy concerned were Italian parachutists from the Folgere Division and, for a few minutes, it looked as though we might return with fifty Italians instead of staying as their prisoners. The argument was settled against us, however, by the intervention of a German artillery officer who was acting as F.O.O. about 100 yards away. He came down, told the Italians not to be so-and-so fools and we went 'into the bag.'

  "About two hours later I arrived back at my old headquarters in the Kaponga Box, now occupied by a swarm of Italians and a German paratroop battalion in reserve. It was only 7 o'clock in the morning but it seemed a lifetime since I left, expecting to return for breakfast.

  'Ten minutes later there was great excitement and an Intelligence Officer came across and told me that Rommel was arriving. Sure enough, three or four reconnaissance vehicles came round the corner, headed by an enormous staff car, with Rommel in person sitting up at the back. He stepped out to much saluting and clicking of heels. I noticed that he addressed himself first to the Italian colonel who was the senior officer in the area.

  "After a short discussion he then summoned the German major commanding the paratroops and a few minutes later I was called over and so met the famous Rommel for the first time. He was a short, stocky figure, running to waistline and obviously rather sensitive about it, but full of self-assurance and drive. Speaking in German, although he evidently understood English, he proceeded to harangue me about the 'gangster' methods of the New Zealanders. It appeared that we had bayoneted the German wounded at Minqarqaim in the night battle behind Matruh and he was very much annoyed about it. He said that if we wanted to fight rough, so could they, and that any further action of this sort on our part would be answered by immediate reprisals.

  "As the nearest New Zealander available for such reprisals, it became a rather personal matter to me. I was, however, able to explain our point of view over the occurrences of that famous night-attack. Our first wave, going through in the dark, caught the Germans by surprise. Some of them, lying on the ground, had fired or thrown bombs after the first company had passed. As a result, the supports following on simply stuck every man who failed to stand up and surrender. It is quite likely that some of the Germans were bayoneted several tines by people in passing.

  "I explained what had happened. Whether it was the way I I put it across I do not know but Rommel said, 'Well, that is i reasonable and could happen in a night battle but...' He then went on to describe an incident in which a German wounded officer had been thrown into a burning truck.

  "After some discussion on this alleged incident he asked, 'Why are you New Zealanders fighting? This is an European war, not yours. Are you here for the sport?' Realising that he really meant this, and never having previously faced up to putting into words the self-evident fact that if Britain fought we fought too, I held up my hands with the fingers closed and said, 'The British Commonwealth fights together. If you attack England you attack New Zealand and Australia too.' 'What about Ireland?' asked Rommel quickly. I had the answer to that one. A week or so earlier we had been given the figures of Southern Ireland volunteers in the fighting services. I believe their percentage to total population equalled any nation in the Commonwealth.

  "Rommel did not comment on this, wished me good luck and off he went to the battle, where his last off
ensive in Egypt was being very roughly handled. Six days later I escaped from Matruh but that is another story of a long walk and bad luck, which finished when I was recaptured on September 15th by three young panzer officers hunting gazelle ten miles west of the front at El Alamein. In due course, after being shot up by our own Hurri-bombers, a most embarrassing interlude, I was dumped at Rommel's headquarters for the second time.

  "The Marshal deigned to see me again, accompanied by the three lads who had picked me up and were expecting seven days special leave to Germany as a reward. (Incidentally, they were disappointed.) Rommel once more opened the conversation with strong comments on our 'gangster' methods, occasioned this time by a Flying Fortress high-level bombing at- tack on a hospital-ship leaving Tobruk. He then said, 'I do not blame you for attempting to escape, it is your duty and I would have done the same if I were in your position.'

  "Appreciating his increasing waistline and tight boots and breeches, I replied: 'I am quite sure you would try, sir, but I do not think you could have walked as far as I did.' (More than 100 miles in less than five days on one can of water.)

  Rommel came back very quickly with, 'No, I would have had more sense and borrowed a motor-car.' Trick to him. 'So would I, but with only twenty seconds start there was not much time, though we had a suitable vehicle marked down.'

  He then added that I was a nuisance and that any further attempt at a break would finish by my being shot while escaping. However, he decided to get rid of me quickly by plane from Daba early next morning direct to Rome.