The unit’s size testified to confidence that it would be able to recruit local collaborators in Egypt, Palestine, and the rest of the Middle East. That presumption rested in part on the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine, and in part on intelligence reports that glowingly described enthusiasm for Nazism, Hitler, and Rommel in Arab countries—reports reinforced by Husseini’s boasts.53 The German intelligence reports cannot be assumed to be more reliable in reading the public mood than British reports of that summer, which said that pro-Axis feeling in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine faded as the danger of living under actual German occupation grew. The reaction to Rommel’s approach, said one SIME analysis, had “discredited those alarmists who saw a ‘Fifth Columnist’ in every Muslim, every speaker of the Arabic language.”54
Most of all, though, the confidence of Rauff’s commanders rested on experience nearly everywhere in conquered lands. (The glaring exceptions were Denmark and the only Muslim country in Europe, Albania, but in both cases the resistance to the Nazi roundup of Jews became apparent later in the war.55) Universal support for the Nazi regime was unnecessary. Most of the population would be scared and passive. Some people would resist. Some would willingly join victorious Nazis in the murder of Jews.
On July 20, Rauff flew from Crete to Tobruk, then onward to Rommel’s battle headquarters to meet Rommel’s chief of staff. Lieutenant Colonel Siegfried Westphal told Rauff that the conquest of the Nile was being held up by logistics problems. Bringing the full Einsatzkommando to El Alamein immediately wasn’t practical. Instead, they agreed that the unit would move from Germany to Athens to wait for Rommel’s victory.56
Even that decision indicates that Westphal wasn’t feeling as bleak as Rommel had in a letter to his wife three days before. “Things are going downright badly for me at the moment,” he wrote. “The enemy is using his superiority, especially in infantry, to destroy the Italian formations one by one, and the German formations are much too weak to stand alone. It’s enough to make one weep.”57
The same day that Rauff came to El Alamein, Mussolini flew home from Derna. His pretense at optimism lasted for two days, Ciano wrote. Then he began raging at Cavallero, at his other generals, at the Germans.58
THE MEN OF the British Twenty-Third Armored Brigade and their tanks disembarked at Suez in early July. The men had trained in England, and had never been in the desert. The tanks, immobile and exposed to sea air for two months on the journey around Africa, were rushed in and out of workshops. Their wireless sets were not refitted with the batteries and tubes needed for the furious Egyptian heat.
At dawn on July 22, the Twenty-Third went into action—“these fresh-faced boys from England… full of confidence and courage for this, their first real action,” as Moorehead saw them. Operation Splendour, which according to battle orders would “destroy the enemy’s army,” had begun hours earlier. The infantry went first, in the darkness, when the German and Italian artillery and tank gunners were blind. That part of the operation succeeded, but with first light the infantrymen were exposed. Tanks were supposed to join and protect them.
Ten minutes before the tanks of the Twenty-Third Brigade moved forward, its divisional headquarters radioed word that a minefield hadn’t been cleared, and that the tanks should skirt it to the south. No one heard that order. In the middle of the minefield, the brigade came under antitank fire. Out of 106 tanks, 6 survived.59
Operation Splendour failed. So did Auchinleck’s next attempt at a counterattack.
After Tobruk, the British Ministry of Information had received an urgent cable from its man in Washington, asking how to explain the defeat. “We have had to build up these tank forces from scratch during the war years,” the first draft of an answer said, “and we are still to a considerable extent matching amateurs against professionals.”
The generals deleted the uncomfortable part about “amateurs.”60 But it fit what Moorehead reported from Egypt. German armored forces “had been trained to the nth degree,” so that dive-bombers, tanks, recovery crews, fuel trucks, and antitank gunners worked together like a machine. “We are simply not trained to it and they had years of practice,” Moorehead wrote.61 Those were the years in which Nazi Germany had prepared for war and Britain had ignored the threat.
FELLERS WAS ON his way to Washington, said the cable from Alexander Kirk in Cairo to the undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles. Fellers “knows more about military developments in this area than any of us” and should see the president, the ambassador wrote. Welles forwarded the cable. “I want to see Colonel Fellers,” Roosevelt wrote across the corner for the naval officer who managed his war room.62
Fellers, we can guess, had warring emotions when he came to the White House on July 30. He would personally brief the president of the United States—who was Franklin Roosevelt, of whom he was ever ready to believe the worst.
He came at a moment of decision.
All through July, the dispute had continued in Washington and London, and most of all between them, over where America and Britain should take the war. Marshall and other American military planners pressed for a plan code-named Sledgehammer: six divisions, or perhaps nine, would land that autumn in northwest France near Cherbourg to establish a beachhead and to force Germany to pull forces from the eastern front. General Brooke, Marshall’s British counterpart, believed that this would mean the useless sacrifice of six divisions, and that Marshall’s rigid strategy ignored the “different standard of training of German divisions as opposed to the raw American divisions and to most of our new divisions.” The British war cabinet rejected Sledgehammer.
Roosevelt sent his closest adviser, Henry Hopkins, to London with Marshall and navy commander in chief Admiral Ernest King to reach agreement on Sledgehammer—or an alternative plan for US ground troops to be fighting in Europe or Africa before the year’s end. Roosevelt’s instructions to them included a list of strategic reasons that the Middle East must “be held as strongly as possible.” It could have been cribbed from the cables that Fellers had sent in the spring and that Marshall had brushed aside.
Marshall, defeated, returned from London with a plan called Operation Torch: the United States and Britain would invade Morocco and Algeria “to drive in against the backdoor of Rommel’s armies.” When Fellers came to the White House, all that was still needed was an explicit, final order from the president.63 Fellers pressed the case for helping the British in the Middle East. He was “very pessimistic as to the ability of the British to hold the Nile Delta,” and “estimated that General Rommel would penetrate the British positions by the last of August,” according to Roosevelt’s brief notes.64
That evening Roosevelt called the military commanders to the White House and issued his order: Torch should “be undertaken at the earliest possible date.”65 Fellers’s final message from Egypt, delivered in person, may have only confirmed what Roosevelt had already resolved, or it may have been the conclusive, deciding factor. The man whom the British wanted out of Cairo had backed Churchill’s position against Marshall’s.
Fellers was right about the strategic value of the Middle East, just as Brooke was right about how unready American troops were. But by the time Fellers spoke to Roosevelt, his portrait of the war in Africa was a month old, and an eon out of date.
On July 27, quiet had come to the front. On the map, the Panzer Army had advanced nearly four hundred miles since the start of its offensive two months earlier. Yet Rommel had lost his gamble, and the battle. He had not reached the harbor at Alexandria. Rommel’s army was virtually marooned in the desert, in far greater danger than if he had stopped at the Egyptian border.
Tobruk’s small port, 340 miles away, could handle only one-fifth of the fuel, food, ammunition, and other supplies he needed. It was known as the “cemetery of the Italian navy” because of RAF bombing of the port and the convoys heading for it. Benghazi and Tripoli were safer—but were eight hundred and fourteen hundred miles from El Alamein. Trucks devoured the fuel that Rommel’s
hungry tanks needed—and the RAF bombed the truck convoys too.66 Rommel was in the position of a man who had climbed down an immense cliff, only to find that his rope ran out while he was dangling sixty feet in the air.
Militarily, the rational decision would have been for Rommel to retreat at least to the Libyan border to prepare for the inevitable British offensive. But he did not serve a rational master. Going to war had not been rational; invading the Soviet Union and pulling America into the war had not been rational. Hitler’s hubris did not make retreat a possibility.
It would take two more battles before Churchill would declare, “It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”67
Looking back, with greater calm than was possible that summer, July 1942 was really the end of the beginning of the war. On the western front in its widest sense, this was when the Axis armies could go no further, when the Nazi and Fascist empires had reached their outermost border. At El Alamein, the Eighth Army truly drew a line in the sand.
The battle between Rommel’s exhausted professionals and Auchinleck’s amateurs could have tipped either way. Each factor was insufficient in itself, and essential to the outcome—Auchinleck’s choice of El Alamein, the courage of his unready men, and the intelligence victory that preceded the battle.
Precise intelligence had not saved Crete, because General Freyberg’s forces had been too weak. Intelligence warnings did not prevent the surprise of Barbarossa, because Stalin would not listen to them.
The siren song of a seemingly perfect source drew Rommel to El Alamein and abandoned him. After that, Auchinleck acknowledged, the “most secret sources” overheard at Bletchley Park gave him the decisive advantage.68 Mussolini would not ride his white charger through Cairo; Rauff would not bring his gas vans to Jerusalem; Rommel would never fulfill his dream of meeting German forces from the Caucasus in Persia.
AN ITALIAN INTELLIGENCE official whispered it to a friend in the Vatican: the Axis had deciphered a message from “the American consul in Cairo” on the “weakness of British military equipment in Libya,” and this was “one of the factors” that had led Rommel “to make as far an advance as he did.”
The Vatican man passed the secret to another friend, the US chargé d’affaires at the Holy See, Harold Tittman, who sent the tip by diplomatic bag to the US ambassador in Switzerland, who cabled the State Department, which at the end of July radioed Ambassador Alexander Kirk in Cairo and asked if he could identify the message that the Axis had deciphered.
No one at the US legation in Egypt signed cables as “American consul,” Kirk stiffly answered. He raised the “possibility that spurious intercepts may be produced for the purpose of compromising certain officials.” And he pointed to the “probability that even the most confidential ciphers are being broken by both hostile and friendly governments.” In diplomatese, Kirk was suggesting that the tip from Rome was somehow tied to the British either breaking Fellers’s code—or entirely inventing the leak in order to rid themselves of the troublesome, brilliant colonel.69
The State Department also asked the Military Attaché Section at the War Department about the Vatican allegation. But the inquiry went no further. If anyone at the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service cabled Bletchley Park about it, the records are missing.70
Tittman’s information would not become a cryptic hint in Russell Dudley-Smith’s search for a solution to the Bluebird mystery. Some of the answers lay in as yet undeciphered Japanese messages. Some lay twelve hundred miles north and two years of hard fighting away from El Alamein. And some answers would be lost to the grave.
2
UNKNOWN SOLDIERS
August 1942–May 1945. El Alamein–Tunisia–Rome–Bletchley Park.
AT SUNRISE ON August 3, 1942, an American Liberator bomber descended into Cairo. Sitting in the copilot’s seat was a passenger, Winston Churchill. General Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, had landed earlier.
Churchill came to shake things up. Once in Egypt, he offered Brooke command of the Middle East in Auchinleck’s place. Brooke was tempted but refused. His duty, he believed, was to keep the prime minister under control. Churchill chose to bring General Harold Alexander from Britain instead. To head the Eighth Army, he picked General William Gott, one of Auchinleck’s field commanders. Gott boarded a plane to fly to Cairo for a brief leave—and was shot down and killed.
Churchill, stricken, accepted Brooke’s suggestion: General Bernard Montgomery, who had to fly immediately from England.
Montgomery was supposed to take over on August 15. He arrived at Eighth Army headquarters two days earlier and announced he was in command. He found contingency plans for retreat, prepared by Auchinleck’s hapless deputy in Cairo, General Tom Corbett. Montgomery treated them as if they reflected Auchinleck’s intentions and ordered them destroyed. He found Auchinleck’s plans for an offensive and presented them as his own. He gave orders that every soldier must know “the name Montgomery by tonight.” He went from unit to unit speaking to the troops. He courted press coverage. Instead of ordering his officers not to refer to the enemy as “Rommel,” he hung a captured copy of the Nazi propaganda portrait of Rommel in the trailer he used as his quarters. He let it be known that he studied it to understand his enemy’s mind.1
Churchill had still been looking for his own Rommel. Montgomery had never been in the desert or led armored forces. He was as cautious as Rommel was impetuous.
Montgomery shared this with Rommel, though: he understood that in a mass army, most soldiers knew a general at most as a name. He needed to be real to them, to be larger than real, to be the champion they would follow. A modern general needed to build an image, to manufacture a legend. Esprit de corps mattered more than historical truth or the reputation of his painfully self-effacing predecessor, Claude Auchinleck.2
Montgomery did know Rommel’s thoughts, and his fears, but not from communing with his portrait. In July, a team from Bletchley Park arrived in Heliopolis, outside Cairo, and began deciphering the Scorpion and Phoenix keys of Enigma. Putting the team in Egypt eliminated having to send locally intercepted messages to England and wait for decrypted texts. The intelligence reached Montgomery many valuable hours sooner. At the end of July, Hut 6 solved the key used for air transportation of troops and supplies from Crete to Africa. It completed a set: Gordon Welchman’s team was now cracking, at least on some days, every air force and army Enigma key that the Germans used in the battle for the Middle East.3
A British convoy finally reached Malta, so more planes from there could take off to target the tankers identified in deciphered Italian naval messages.4 Montgomery received a stream of German messages on plans—most of them impossible to carry out—to bring fuel to the Panzer Army by airplane, submarine, or motorboat. He learned that the poor rations of Luftwaffe pilots in Africa caused stomach trouble that kept them from flying at high altitude. (The pressure of excess gases inside the stomach and intestines became unbearably painful as air pressure outside the body dropped.) Montgomery read the radioed message to the German high command on August 26, in which Rommel said that his own failing health had improved just enough that he could postpone “fairly long treatment in Germany” until after the “coming operations.”5
Montgomery told his officers that the Axis attack would come in the south, when the moon was full at the end of August. The offensive in fact began on the last night of the full moon, just as officers began to doubt Montgomery’s intuition. Rommel counted on surprise and on the fuel carried by two Italian tankers still at sea, possibly his most desperate wager yet. A British brigade found the German armored forces at midnight. The battered German columns took too many hours to advance through gaps in a minefield. They turned toward Alam Halfa ridge, and met waiting British antitank guns. The RAF sank one of the Italian ships and damaged the other so badly it was beached.
Rommel’s bid to break the El Alamein line ran out of fuel.6 He blamed a lack of intelligence; he
blamed the Italian navy. It was always easiest to blame the Italians for his logistic crises. “With the failure of this offensive,” he wrote afterward, “our last chance of gaining the Suez Canal had gone.”7 For the moment, the desert was quiet.
CHURCHILL EXPECTED ALEXANDER and Montgomery to launch their own attack quickly. Even more stubbornly than Auchinleck had, the two generals rejected haste. They would wait for the new Sherman tanks to reach Suez, along with a hundred American artillery pieces mounted on tank chassis; for over forty thousand new troops to arrive and be trained; for every unit in the Eighth Army to be pulled off the line and rehearse its part in the offensive. They’d wait to have all the fuel and spare parts they needed, for British radio-intercept teams to learn all of Seebohm’s arts of battlefield intelligence. They waited for the full moon of October 23, which gave just enough light for the infantry to move up at night. At 9:40 p.m., nearly nine hundred guns of the British artillery opened fire. To the east, along the entire Axis front line, a curtain of flame rose.
Rommel was in Germany, being treated for his stomach troubles, low blood pressure, and fainting spells. Hitler ordered him back to Africa. On November 2, he sent a message to Hitler that after ten days of fighting, his army was on the verge of destruction and that he would have to retreat the next day. Hitler’s answer proclaimed that the “stronger will” would triumph and that Rommel had “no other road but that to victory or death.”
Rommel waited a day more. By then, the British had wiped out his Italian armored divisions. The Italian infantry was stranded without transport and surrendered. Rommel defied orders. With what was left of the German core of his army, he fled westward.8
Four days later, over one hundred thousand American and British troops invaded Algeria and Morocco. This time, secrets had been kept well. No deciphered message revealed Operation Torch. Even when German air reconnaissance discovered two Allied fleets steaming east of Gibraltar, Axis commanders had no idea where they were heading. The Allied commander was Dwight Eisenhower, who’d previously never led men in battle. The landings at Oran in Algeria were a “mix of anarchy and success,” the anarchy largely due to the American forces being as unready as Brooke had believed while watching them train in June, the success attributable to surprise and the poor condition of Vichy troops. But by November 12, Allied forces controlled Algeria and Morocco and were preparing to turn eastward.9
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