War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  “General Auchinleck blames the Libyan reverses largely on the battalion commanders, their laxness in supervision of training, their lack of ability to handle armored units,” Fellers wrote afterward. One commander had led tanks into his own mine field, Auchinleck was complaining. General Ritchie blamed the tank crews, who carelessly drove straight toward the Germans’ brutal 88-mm antitank guns. Ritchie also thought the Free French had pictured the attack at Bir Hakeim as “much heavier than it actually developed,” while “the Free French claim the British let them down.”

  Fellers couldn’t understand how the commanders could shift responsibility to their subordinates. Writing, he was not friendly. The Eighth Army ignored “personal welfare of the private soldier and was lenient toward inefficient senior officers.” Commanders had responded slowly to swift changes in the battle. They had consistently underestimated the enemy, Fellers wrote. The Middle East was in greater danger than it had been at any time since the German invasion of the Soviet Union a year earlier, he said. British reinforcements—an armored division and an infantry division—were still on the long sea journey around Africa and would arrive only in late July.

  The Middle East was too important to rely solely on the British to defend it, he told the War Department. The only American help that could arrive in time would be heavy bombers. Send them, he urged the generals in Washington.1

  It was June 17. In Ritchie’s reports to Cairo, the word “withdrawing” repeated. The Eighth Army had just given up El Adem, south of Tobruk. It gave up Sidi Rezegh, further east. The RAF pulled out of a nearby airfield. The coastal road from Tobruk to Egypt was lost.2

  “Believe Tobruk can be captured in a very short time,” Fellers radioed the next day. “British morale is low; their losses heavy.”3

  “Tobruk is temporarily isolated” but more strongly held than during the previous siege, Auchinleck wrote in his weekly report to General Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff. He’d just visited the Eighth Army’s advanced headquarters at Sollum, on the Egyptian side of the border. “I… found morale high and an excellent spirit prevailing.”4

  GENERAL BROOKE READ Auchinleck’s cable in Washington. The chief of the Imperial General Staff was wearing the lightweight uniform his London tailor had sewn in a rush. Churchill had told Brooke that Roosevelt was “getting a bit off the rails,” and they must go speak to him. Wearing a London uniform in Washington in June would be hell. Brooke’s new uniform lacked the field of ribbons on his chest because the tailor hadn’t had enough time to sew them on. The tailor delivered the uniform at the railway station as Brooke was leaving. Churchill and Brooke took the prime minister’s special train to Loch Ryan in Scotland, then a motorboat to the Boeing flying boat, “beautifully fitted up with bunks to sleep in, dining saloon, lavatories, etc.,” Brooke noted.

  It took off, northwest toward the solstice sunrise, just before midnight. An hour later, there was light on the horizon. Twenty-six and a half hours later, the big plane put down on the Potomac.5

  Churchill had at least two reasons to worry. One was Midway: the victory might push American public opinion toward a Japan-first strategy. The other worry contradicted this one: Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had secretly visited the White House. The Soviet Union desperately needed America and Britain to invade France this year, to pull away German divisions before the Red Army collapsed, Molotov had told the president. Afterward, publicly, a joint US-Soviet statement announced agreement on the “urgent tasks of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942.”

  Churchill often disagreed with his generals. Brooke considered one of his essential tasks to be keeping Churchill from going off the rails. “Winston never had the slightest doubt that he had inherited all the military genius from his great ancestor Marlborough!” Brooke would write, referring to the legendary seventeenth-century English general. Churchill’s “military ideas varied from the most brilliant conceptions at one end to the wildest and most dangerous ideas at the other,” Brooke believed. But they agreed that a head-on cross-channel invasion this early would be suicidal. For Churchill the idea raised the very painful memory of his mistake at Gallipoli.6

  Churchill took another plane to Roosevelt’s estate at Hyde Park on the Hudson. Brooke stayed in Washington to meet with George Marshall and the other American generals. Brooke and the Americans agreed that the focus of joint strategy should be invading France, hopefully in 1943. They agreed that invading the Vichy-held French colonies of North Africa was a distraction. They shared great worry about what Churchill and Roosevelt were discussing, unsupervised.

  Roosevelt, like Churchill, had to think about leading a nation, not just an army. Japan, not Germany, had attacked America. Public ardor for fighting Germany could wear off if getting Americans into battle in or near Europe was delayed too long. Delay past election day in November could bring more isolationists and Republicans into Congress. Churchill had a solution: open the second front in French North Africa.7

  Brooke expected a quiet Sunday on June 21. Then Churchill phoned. He and Roosevelt were back in Washington. Brooke and Marshall went to the Oval Office to meet the two leaders. It was a very hot day. Roosevelt put Brooke at ease by inviting him to take his uniform coat off. They broke for lunch, then resumed discussing alternatives: France, North Africa, the Middle East.8

  Someone came in with a pink slip of paper, an incoming telegram. It was from Colonel Bonner Fellers in Cairo. Roosevelt read it and handed it to Churchill.

  “Night of June 20th June 21st Rommel took Tobruk Port,” it said.

  Besides the loss of the port and the thousands of men taken prisoner, two months’ supplies had been lost. The Eighth Army was now defending Sollum, on the Egyptian side of the border. “British troops very tired, dazed, morale low,” Fellers wrote. Their best hope was to fall back further, over 130 miles to Mersa Matruh, and there make their stand.9

  “What can we do to help?” Roosevelt said. Churchill and Brooke thought no words were ever better chosen.10

  “NEITHER WINSTON NOR I had contemplated such an eventuality and it was a staggering blow,” Brooke would recall. Tobruk had held out the year before.

  The year before, “there had been no doubt in the minds of the men defending Tobruk,” Moorehead wrote. They’d dug the trenches themselves. They were well organized and proud. This time around, they were men who’d just retreated in confusion into Tobruk, men who were exhausted, hungry, and defeated.

  The South African general in command had two fresh South African brigades that he had put on the southwest. The year before, that’s where Rommel had attacked. But the year before, Rommel had figured out too late that the weakest point was on the southeast. This time around, he attacked there instead. Tanks broke through the perimeter, infantry leapfrogged past, the tanks moved up. They reached the harbor. The fresh South African troops got orders to surrender before they started to fight. This time around, Rommel took Tobruk in twenty-five hours.11

  “A GOOD SOURCE reports on 20 June,” the deciphered message began. What followed were the estimates of “the British intelligence service” of the strength of the German and Italian forces, including captured British guns. Sent in the evening in the German army’s Chaffinch key of Enigma, it was deciphered and translated by the next morning.12

  It was just the kind of message that looked like a report from a very highly placed agent, one who knew British commanders’ assessments of the enemy. Now, though, Margaret Storey told her superiors that “Good Source” reports came from the Germans deciphering American messages. The information indeed came from someone highly placed, but who had no idea that he was a good source, or that the enemy was reading his mail.13

  For Menzies, the one thing that removed certainty from this conclusion was that the Americans had promised to change their code, and the Germans were still hearing from Cairo.

  AFTER HE SENT word of Tobruk, Fellers got back to the long radiogram he’d been writing. Captured Axis documents showed
that when Rommel started his offensive in late May, he “expected to take Tobruk in four days,” Fellers wrote. It had taken close to four weeks, and Rommel “has used more ammunition and fuel, has suffered greater losses than he calculated.”

  But the Eighth Army’s own losses were staggering. It was down to two South African brigades “of low combat efficiency,” an Indian division, a British division, some Free French, and a “fresh and complete New Zealand” division. An Australian division was still in Palestine and Syria. Fellers’s British sources wouldn’t tell him how many tanks they had left. A “most optimistic estimate” was one hundred, only a few American, the rest “mostly worthless” British tanks. Up to half the British artillery had been lost.

  His frustration rose as he wrote. “With numerically superior forces, tanks, aircraft, artillery… the British army has twice failed to defeat the Axis in Libya.” There had to be an explanation. His was failure at the top. “Under their present command, the British cannot be given enough lend-lease equipment to win a victory,” he said. “Eighth Army failed to maintain morale of its troops. Its tactical conceptions were consistently faulty… German Air Force has complete control of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Royal Navy is impotent.”

  “If Rommel intends to take the [Nile] Delta,” Fellers wrote, “now is an opportune time.”14

  “ACCORDING TO SOME intercepted cables from the American observer at Cairo, Fellers, we learn that the English have been beaten, and that if Rommel continues his action he has a good chance of reaching as far as the Canal Zone,” Galeazzo Ciano wrote in his diary.

  The one problem was that Hitler, ecstatic, had rewarded Rommel for taking Tobruk by promoting him to field marshal. The Italian generals who were theoretically Rommel’s commanders would have to get the same rank. “Bastico’s promotion will make people laugh; Cavallero’s will make them indignant,” Ciano told Mussolini.15

  KESSELRING ORDERED HIS planes back to Sicily to prepare for Operation Hercules, the invasion of Malta. Cavallero ordered a halt of the Axis ground forces at the Egyptian border. Bastico, the Italian commander in Libya, sent a liaison officer to tell Rommel to stop.

  Rommel told Bastico’s man that he would not follow this “advice.” He went over Bastico’s head, sent a message to Mussolini, and asked for approval to plunge “deep into Egypt.” Mussolini asked Hitler. Hitler answered that the Eighth Army was “as good as destroyed.” In southern Russia, advancing German armies would swing down through the Caucasus region into the Middle East. Rommel would provide the other side of a pincer movement that would bring “the collapse of the entire eastern part of the British Empire,” Hitler said. “The goddess of victory only approaches a leader once,” Hitler told Mussolini. “He who does not seize the opportunity will never have it again.”16

  Before dawn on June 24, Rommel received word from Rome: “Duce agrees to Panzer Army’s intention to pursue the enemy into Egypt.” Rommel had not waited. “We’re on the move and hope to land the next big punch very soon. Speed is the main thing now. The events of the past week lie before me like a dream,” he had written to his wife the day before, and had sent his forces to clear a gap in the minefield along the border. When approval came from Rome, they were already rushing into Egypt. Lack of fuel slowed down the advance. His armored force was down to forty-four tanks.17

  Rommel could have made this decision without a message from Cairo. He was euphoric. He had defied his commanders after the fall of Bir Hakeim, and his wager had paid off.

  But by June 23, and possibly by the day before, Rommel had what any general would value: detailed information, from a source that had proven accurate, a source on which he already depended, that his enemy was crumbling, that if he wanted to reach the Nile, this was the moment.18 He had what a compulsive gambler could only prize: an inside tip that the gamble that felt right in his bones, despite the odds, was a sure bet. If he waited, the Australian division might already be in Egypt. American reinforcements could arrive.

  Rommel wagered all he had gained, all that was left of his army, and plunged toward the Delta.

  AT THE WHITE House, on the afternoon of June 23, Roosevelt and Churchill and the generals met again. The agenda included possible answers to Roosevelt’s question: How could America help in the Middle East?

  Marshall’s first impulse when he heard about the fall of Tobruk was to send an American armored division to Egypt. The idea was out of character. It showed how deeply the news shocked him. Still gearing up for war, the US Army had only a couple of armored divisions ready. Marshall was entirely committed to building up forces in Britain to invade Europe. The Middle East, as he’d told Fellers, was Britain’s responsibility.

  Before the meeting, Roosevelt read Fellers’s long telegram. The day began earlier where Rommel was. It’s likely that Rommel read the telegram before Roosevelt.

  Along with Fellers’s criticism of the British, the attaché recommended sending “great quantities” of American bombers, tanks, and artillery to the British in Egypt. Even that wasn’t enough, he said. He urged creating an American armored corps in the Middle East, of much greater strength than Marshall had suggested. Send two armored divisions, an infantry division, and two antitank brigades, Fellers wrote. At the meeting, the president brought up Fellers’s ideas.

  Roosevelt did not know how much Fellers disliked him politically. It would not have mattered to him. He was intellectually omnivorous. The attaché’s ideas fit his appetite. They would quickly have Americans fighting Germans.

  “Fellers is a very valuable observer,” Marshall wrote to the president that evening, “but his responsibilities are not those of a strategist and his views are in opposition to mine and those of the entire Operations Division.”

  Brooke took a train with Marshall to watch army training exercises in South Carolina. He was underwhelmed; he did not think that his allies “have yet realized the standard of training required.” In Washington, the Operations Division wrote an analysis showing that shipping a US division to Egypt would cripple the buildup in Britain.

  Marshall could now retreat from the idea. He proposed an alternative: the United States would ship three hundred tanks and one hundred howitzers to the Eighth Army. The tanks would be the newest ones, which the British named Shermans, after the Civil War general. They were an improved version of the Grants, which British headquarters in Cairo said were the only Allied tanks “capable of meeting German tanks on anything approaching equal terms.” The Shermans, fresh from the factory, had been intended for an American division that was waiting for them in North Ireland.

  It was a compromise. On one side was Marshall’s own strategy, shared with all his military planners, which said that nothing should be diverted from preparations to invade France. On the other side was British desperation and Roosevelt’s desire to help, reinforced by the formerly isolationist military attaché in Cairo.

  Roosevelt and Churchill embraced the compromise. Churchill and Brooke took a train to Baltimore; in the harbor they boarded their flying boat for the trip home. The big question, of whether to invade France or French North Africa, was still open, subject to argument, intrigue, and confusion.19

  SECRET AGENTS JOHANN Eppler and Heinrich Sandstede liked to go to Hollywood Hairdressers on Emad el Dine Street for their morning shave. In the afternoon they often went to the cinema. Evenings they spent at Groppi’s, or the Continental rooftop garden, or Madame Bardia’s casino, or the Kit-Kat Club. Eventually, to make this all easier, they hired a driver. They hired two servants for their houseboat. Sandstede had a girlfriend named Sandra. Eppler’s constant companion was named Edith. She knew him only as Hussein Gaafar. The girls went home at night, not to Eppler and Sandstede’s houseboat, the driver would later testify. Nonetheless, Edith had the attraction of forbidden fruit for a German spy: she was Jewish.

  Regularly, Sandstede would try sending out his call letters from their wireless set. He got no response. This did not matter terribly, because with all the drinks th
ey’d bought, they’d yet to get any officers to reveal any information.

  Rommel’s sudden advance in late June worried them. In their diaries, they began recording imaginary espionage activities. Sandy wrote that Eppler had visited Suez and Port Said, at the south and north ends of the Canal, to recruit agents who would report on shipping and troop movements. On June 25, Sandy wrote that Hekmet, the belly dancer, had “rendered us valuable services. Today I received the plans of the dug-outs and fortifications of Tobruk.” Then he crossed out “Tobruk” and wrote “Mersa Matruh.” He later admitted that he had trouble remembering the difference between the two harbors, one in Libya, the other in Egypt. But the newspapers would have reminded him that Rommel had already taken Tobruk, and was now advancing toward Mersa Matruh. He wrote that after he studied the map, he destroyed it, because it would be too dangerous to keep it. Sandy, it appears, did not know that Hekmet’s British lover really had left an old map of Tobruk on her houseboat. His fiction happened to have a slight overlap with the truth.

  They figured that when Rommel got to Cairo, the diaries would be their evidence that they had accomplished something as spies.20

  THE ABWEHR WAS getting nothing from its Condor team. But Rommel had plenty of information from Cairo. Before he attacked Tobruk, he received reports that the British had lost most of their tanks to German 88-mm guns, that British commanders were blaming the officers under them and their tank crews for their defeats, that Eighth Army morale was shattered, that British troop movements to prevent collapse in Libya had left Syria and the Persian Gulf unprotected.

  After taking the town, he got updates. Only 30 percent of the British warplanes in the Middle East were in shape for combat, and the British had at most one hundred tanks. All of his judgments of how inferior British tactics were to his own, and British generals to himself, were confirmed by the source in Cairo. He knew that British soldiers were getting insufficient rations consisting mainly of canned meat. He did not know that in reporting what forces General Ritchie had left, the source had reduced a South African division to two brigades and that a mistranslation from English to Italian had cut it to one brigade. The Italians did not bother with the word “source.” They sent translated documents, including the name at the bottom, “Fellers.”