War of Shadows
Page 23
The commando raid was also a message to Rommel. The British considered him so valuable, so extraordinarily savvy, that they had targeted him personally. “Rommel” had become the name of the enemy. It was a commendation to add to his recent promotion to full general and the renaming of his command as the Panzergruppe Afrika, the Africa Armored Group.
While Rommel was possibly busy sparing the captives, he was unaware of the tanks of the British Eighth Army—the upgraded Western Desert Force—deep in the Libyan desert. Rare rainstorms had turned German runways into mud and grounded reconnaissance planes. Lieutenant Alfred Seebohm, commander of the Panzergruppe’s frontline listening company, reported on November 18, “Almost complete wireless silence of the English units.” Seebohm was a master of radio intelligence. Even when his company couldn’t decode British battlefield talk, it located units and figured out how armies were organized by tracking how many signals were coming from what direction.11
Rommel didn’t notice that wireless silence spoke much louder than chatter. He was preparing, despite low supplies, for another attempt to take Tobruk. It took till the second day of Operation Crusader, the offensive that Claude Auchinleck, the single-minded general in Cairo, had spent months preparing, for Rommel to understand that hundreds of tanks had crossed into Libya, south of his forward forces. Half the British tanks quickly turned toward the coast. Half followed a long arc in the desert. To the surprise of Auchinleck’s commander in the field, General Alan Cunningham, they did not find a waiting German and Italian line as they headed north toward Tobruk.
Late on the second afternoon, war correspondent Alan Moorehead drove into a British divisional headquarters in the desert and saw Bonner Fellers and his hearse.
“What’s happening?” Moorehead asked.
“Damned if I know,” Fellers replied. Just then the heavy gunfire began. The armies had begun to find each other.12
The Germans had an antiaircraft gun that fired 88-mm shells—three and a half inches in diameter—which they instead pointed at tanks, Fellers reported. Its range was much longer than that of the guns on the British- and American-built tanks; it destroyed them before they could get near. The RAF controlled the sky, Fellers would report, but couldn’t bomb German tanks because, from above, pilots could not tell them from British ones. No one had thought of marking them on top.13
There was no front line; there was chaos. “Field dressing stations and hospitals were taking in British and German and Italian wounded impartially and as the battle flowed back and forth the hospitals would sometimes be under British command, sometimes under German,” Moorehead wrote. He found places where the quickly dug graves of British and German tank crews were scattered among each other, next to tanks showing their insides “like the entrails of some wounded animal.”14
Rommel chose the tactic on which he had gambled in the past, all the way back when he’d been a young infantry officer: a dash forward. He took one of his tank divisions and charged through the British forces to reach his cut-off garrisons at the Egyptian border. He expected to cause panic.
He did. Cunningham radioed Auchinleck that “it would be necessary to withdraw the entire army into Egypt to replace losses”—so Fellers reported from a reliable source. This was “the immediate cause” for Auchinleck to fly to Libya, replace Cunningham with General Neil Ritchie, and give orders to move west, not east—to advance, not retreat.15 (The reliable, pained source was almost certainly Cunningham’s older brother Andrew, commander of the Mediterranean fleet.16)
Auchinleck had his own very reliable source. From Bletchley Park came a stream of deciphered messages that the Luftwaffe in Libya was desperately short of fuel. It was running out of tires for its fighters’ landing gear. “British air superiority is overwhelming,” said a German air force report. German truck convoys moved only at night because they were such easy targets for the RAF in daytime. They might cease altogether. “Germans thought shortage of fuel likely to immobilise their diesel-burning transport columns,” said a report from Hut 3. This may have come from an Italian navy message, as the Italians were responsible for shipping fuel across the Mediterranean. After the first days of the battle, Hut 6 was unable to break the army Enigma keys, so it could not decipher messages telling how many shells or tons of tank fuel the Panzergruppe Afrika had left. Auchinleck had only indirect clues, which fit his preconception that Rommel could not keep going. In this case, the intelligence bolstered a preconception that was right.17
“Dearest Lu,” Rommel wrote to his wife on their twenty-fifth anniversary, at the end of November, after his dash to the Egyptian border and his rapid return, “I’ve just spent four days in a desert counterattack with nothing to wash with. We had a splendid success.”18
This may have been faithful to his mood after his adventure, leading from the front, out of radio contact with the rest of his army. Yet he’d had to turn back without saving his isolated garrisons. He’d left the rest of his army in confusion. While the world heard the news from Pearl Harbor, Rommel ordered a retreat—first to a line west of Tobruk, ending the siege of the town, then all the way out of Cyrenaica, back to Agheila, where he’d started out the spring before. “Dearest Lu,” he wrote home on December 20, “We’re pulling out. There was simply nothing else for it… Christmas is going to be completely messed up.”19
Fellers drove back to Libya. Auchinleck’s success, the first British victory against a German army, underwhelmed him. The Eighth Army had thrown away the chance to finish off the Axis army, he reported. British field intelligence was intercepting Rommel’s battlefield messages in low-level codes and knew his “plans, intent, [and] disposition.” But “the miserable use which the British have made of this valuable information would eliminate German suspicion that their codes were compromised,” Fellers wrote. Although the British “would win in the end, they are paying dearly,” Fellers said.20
Moorehead and a fellow correspondent drove into Benghazi on Christmas 1941, arguing about where to stay, the Grand Hotel d’Italia or the Berenice, on the waterfront. “The Arabs were friendly” but the shops shuttered. Benghazi had changed hands three times that year. The RAF had bombed it night after night. The front of the Hotel d’Italia “bulged outward sickeningly,” apparently from a blast within. The Berenice was burned out. They found an abandoned flat where they could cook two turkeys, which they’d somehow procured in the previous town, and celebrate the holiday.21
“Maybe better times are coming,” Rommel wrote to his wife, mounting a defense against melancholy, “in spite of everything.”22
“AN EGYPTIAN, WHO is close to King Farouk” also liked to talk to Fellers. They met in Cairo when Fellers was between visits to the front. The Egyptian wanted to tell about his journey to Istanbul and his conversation with Franz von Papen, the German ambassador to Turkey. Papen assured him that Germany’s plan for the Middle East included “the independence of Egypt” as part of an Arab federation. The Palestine problem would be solved, Papen said, by letting the Jews become citizens of Arab states. “Italy’s demand for expansion would be ignored completely,” he’d told the Egyptian. The implication was that Farouk needn’t be bothered by Mussolini’s ranting about a new Roman Empire. Fellers did not say whether Farouk or his emissary believed Papen.
“My impression,” Fellers wrote to the Military Intelligence Division in Washington, “is that the British do not know of this meeting.”23
Fellers did not name the Egyptian. In all likelihood, it was Sami Zulficar, mentioned in one of Papen’s cables to Berlin as coming to him in the autumn of 1941 “by order of his king” and asking “what fate Germany envisaged for Egypt.” Zulficar’s brother Youssef was the king’s father-in-law, through whom Farouk had sent his warning the previous summer that Britain would occupy Iran.
Soon after, the Spanish chargé d’affaires from Cairo came to Papen, also bearing word from Farouk. “The king renewed his desire to bring about a complete understanding with the Axis,” Papen told Berlin. If Farouk
wasn’t showing this openly, it was because “his position was of utmost difficulty, he is under surveillance even in his own house. He asked that this might be taken into consideration.” It does not appear that the British ambassador to Egypt, Miles Lampson, knew about this meeting either.24
CHURCHILL SPENT CHRISTMAS in the White House. He arrived like a summer hurricane in midwinter, checked the beds in the guest rooms before choosing the one where he’d feel most comfortable working as well as taking his midday nap, and instructed Roosevelt’s butler on the sherry he required before breakfast, the scotch and soda before lunch, and the brandy at night.25
Churchill had invited himself and his top generals as soon as he heard about Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Malaya, even before Congress declared war on Japan. Roosevelt worried that he might face a lack of political support for declaring war on Germany and Italy as well, but he needn’t have. Hitler believed he’d acquired a navy by proxy, one that would defeat America at sea while Germany finished off the Soviet Union.
“Ribbentrop… is jumping with joy about the Japanese attack on the United States,” Galeazzo Ciano wrote, after a phone call from the German foreign minister. “One thing is now certain,” Ciano added. “America will now enter the conflict, and the conflict itself will last long enough to allow all her potential strength to come into play.” His doubts, if he expressed them to his father-in-law, had no effect. The Duce had returned to euphoria. On December 11 Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, which immediately reciprocated.26
Roosevelt governed with a web of friendships and intrigues and with meetings in which no notes were taken. Churchill ruled with roared arguments. The two men liked each other. For their generals, Pearl Harbor brought an arranged marriage, followed by a difficult courtship. The British military men thought the Americans had no idea how to run a government or a war because they did not do as done in London. “The president… has no proper private office, and no real private secretary… they have a hell of a lot to learn,” one of them wrote. At a meeting in the Oval Office, there was no conference table. Except for the president, behind the desk that hid his wheelchair, everyone sat in a semicircle, “perched on chairs and sofas.” Not only that, Roosevelt’s dog attended and started barking. It was a peculiar complaint: Churchill called generals to meet him in his bedroom, where they would find him in bed, wearing his red-and-gold dragon-festooned dressing gown, a cigar jutting sideways from his mouth, the bed covered in papers. His gray Persian cat, Smokey, sometimes sat beside him. One morning the prime minister’s toes wiggled under the blanket as he spoke on the phone with General Alan Brooke, now chief of the Imperial General Staff. Churchill’s secretary saw Smokey’s tail twitch. The cat leapt and sank his fangs into the toe. “Get off, you fool,” Churchill roared into the phone. The general, uncertain what he’d done to enrage the prime minister this time, hung up.27
Churchill and his entourage stayed in Washington for three weeks. Despite the culture clash, they and their American hosts came to agreements. They would create a joint command based in Washington. (Brooke, who’d stayed in London to mind the war, saw this as Britain having “sold the birthright for a plate of porridge.”) Their joint efforts would concentrate on defeating Germany first.
They did not agree about where to start. Churchill, like his generals, wanted to seize the Vichy colonies of Morocco and Algeria. From there and from Libya, American and British armies would close a vise on the Axis, drive it from Africa, and prepare the way to invade Italy or the Balkans. The Mediterranean would be safe, which would cut the time needed for ships to take troops, trucks, and arms to India and Egypt and to the Persian Gulf ports from which roads led to Russia. If each ship could make more trips, it would be like having many more ships.
The Americans did not like this idea. They wanted to take the most direct route into Germany, which meant landing divisions in France or Belgium as quickly as possible—by 1943, or even late in 1942. The way to defeat the enemy was to drive a stake into its heart. This was the “proper and orthodox” way to fight, as Secretary of War Henry Stimson would say. Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, the deputy chief of war planning, wrote a note for himself: “We’ve got to go to Europe and fight” and stop wasting time elsewhere. An adviser to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall said the British had “political [more] than strategic purposes” for invading the Vichy colonies. The Americans suspected the North Africa plan was designed to use US troops to save the British Empire.
The Americans’ “orthodox” insistence on striking directly at the enemy’s strongest forces has been attributed to the teachings of Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century master theoretician of war. The British strategy has been explained as resting on the teachings of the ancient Chinese theorist Sun Tzu: the way to weaken a powerful enemy begins with blows at the periphery of his forces.
Theory is not explanation enough. The British generals had read Clausewitz. But they had spent two brutal years fighting the Germans and losing, and they thought the supremely confident Yanks had no idea what they were facing. When Brooke eventually met Marshall, he described the American chief of staff as “a pleasant and easy man to get on with, rather over-filled with his own importance. But I should not put him down as a great man.” Just as the dog in the Oval Office stood for American amateurism, Marshall stood for the naiveté of the upstart nation. The strategic meetings in Washington, ironically named Arcadia, ended. The question of a target—Africa or France—waited for a decision.28
CHURCHILL CAME HOME knowing that he had something he still had to tell his friend. He asked Stewart Menzies to write the note, decided the tone was too formal, and wrote a more personal version.
“One night when we talked late, you spoke of the importance of our cipher people getting in close contact with yours,” he started. The two navies were already sharing ciphers, Churchill wrote. “But diplomatic and military ciphers are of equal importance and we appear to know nothing officially of your versions of these.”
Then came the admission, delicately, and the warning. “Some time ago, however, our experts claimed to have discovered the system and constructed some tables used by your diplomatic corps. From the moment we became allies, I gave instructions that this work should cease. However, danger of our enemies having achieved a measure of success cannot, I am advised, be dismissed.” That is: We’ve been reading your diplomatic mail, old boy. We’ve stopped. But change your codes.
“If possible, burn this letter when you have read it,” Churchill added. He sent the note by hand with the US ambassador, who was making a home visit. At the end, to soften the jolt, he added by hand,
With every good wish & my kindest regards.
Believe me,
Your sincere friend,
Winston Churchill.29
MILES LAMPSON MADE time for the correspondent from the Times of London, James Holburn. “A decent little fellow but not very impressive,” Lampson dictated to his diary typist. It was January 24, 1942. “I didn’t know until he told me this morning that he had been shot up last time he went up to the front. They were in a passenger plane somewhere near Sollum when they were attacked by three Messerschmidts. He got hit in the eye by splinters—but they made a crash landing.” It took more than this to impress the British ambassador, especially if you were not tall enough.30
After that, Lampson got to the news of the day: “Rommel is hitting back, apparently with unpleasant efficiency… It looks to me once more that we have made the mistake of underestimating German reinforcements in the West and being in a bit of a hurry in sending our stuff away to the East.” Just that week, in a meeting with Auchinleck, Admiral Cunningham, and Air Marshal Tedder, he’d warned about repeating “the painful experience of last summer, when we had almost lost Egypt in the abortive attempt to save Greece.”31
He had a point. Having rushed after Rommel’s retreating forces, the Eighth Army was spread thinly along the coastal rim of Libya. Auchinleck had just replaced a ba
ttered armored division with a fresh and inexperienced one. Another division, on its way to Egypt, had been diverted to Malaya to fight the Japanese, who were quickly advancing toward Singapore.
“The RAF is sending fighters to the Far East,” Fellers had reported on January 17. Unofficially, he’d said, the number was 250. He’d earlier written that the British had 450 fighters in operating shape in North Africa—and that the Germans had brought hundreds of warplanes to the Mediterranean from the Soviet front “on the assumption that the German army would be in Moscow by Christmas.” That assumption had proven wrong. But in a world war, the Germans’ need to get supplies to Libya helped the Red Army in the Russian winter, while the Japanese threat to Singapore robbed Air Marshal Tedder in Cairo of planes. “This reduction of fighter strength seriously jeopardizes British air position,” Fellers wrote, “at a time when only those guilty of wishful thinking can believe an Axis Mediterranean offensive is not probable.”32
Neither the German nor the Italian high command had considered an offensive probable or prudent. Rommel did not inform them of his intentions. The Italians, he believed, couldn’t keep a secret safe. The British intercepted and read everything that Italian headquarters in Libya radioed to Rome, he was certain. It was a good justification not to tell his nominal superior, the Italian commander in Libya, General Ettore Bastico, whom Rommel liked to call “Bombastico.” But he didn’t tell Berlin either. “I’m full of plans that I daren’t say anything about round here. They’d think me crazy. But I’m not; I simply see a bit farther than they do,” Rommel wrote to his wife.33
Whether because he did see farther, or because he calculated that the eighty or so tanks brought by recent convoys gave him a momentary advantage that would evaporate when the British got new shipments, or because his instinct was that war must be fought by hurtling forward, or because the rush of action cured despondency, he attacked. This time it worked. Even faster than the British units had advanced, they now crumbled and fell back.34