Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  The 7th Panzer Division immediately went into reserve in the Somme valley, where it was brought back up to strength and its equipment repaired or replaced as needed. In July, the division was designated as one of the units that would lead the amphibious assault in Unternehmen Seelöwe (Operation Sea Lion), the invasion of Great Britain, but when the Luftwaffe failed to gain control of the skies over England that summer, the plans for the invasion were quietly scrapped and the division was sent to Bordeaux, where it continued to train and where it was poised, if need be, to move swiftly into unoccupied France—there were rumors floating about of an impending revolt against the highly unpopular Vichy government, which had replaced the French Republic after the armistice with Germany was signed. Rommel would remain the division’s commanding officer until early February 1941, and his officers and men would, by all accounts, well remember him and their service together in the Battle of France.

  At the Charleroi conference on June 2, Hitler had told Rommel that the German press had christened the 7th Panzer the “Gespensterdivision,” the Ghost Division, because it moved so fast that no one, friend or foe alike, knew where it was, or where it would next appear. While the words were spoken in jest, there was an element of chiding in them, as, despite his obvious successes, Rommel’s command style undeniably created problems for himself and his superiors. Effective command of a panzer division required that it be “led from the front,” however, Rommel took the concept too literally. There was no need, for example, for the division commander to be so far forward that he could nearly suffer the same fate as the unfortunate Major Erdmann and be killed by a “short” from one of his own artillery batteries. Rommel was also too prone to leave his staff and sometimes even his radio vehicle behind while personally directing the actions of a single company or battalion, making effective coordination of the division’s armor, infantry, and artillery problematic at best. General Heinz Guderian, when creating the panzer divisions, had developed a communication network that theoretically allowed command and control to be exercised from any unit in the division—Rommel never mastered the system during the 1940 campaign.

  His impulsiveness sometimes led him to ignore his own staff officers, thus dsepriving him of their intelligence and initiative. He frequently failed to inform his Chief of Staff, the longsuffering Major Heidkamper, of his intentions or whereabouts, which led to uncomfortable moments such as the incident near Le Cateau when Rommel’s tanks were running low on fuel and Heidkamper, having heard not a word from his commanding officer, assumed the worst had happened to him and held back the fuel bowsers. In short, Rommel was a combat commander par excellence, but temperamentally he was still very much the young oberleutnant leading a battalion of mountain troops up craggy slopes against Romanians or Italians; as a generalmajor and a divisional commander, he still had a lot to learn.

  Whether he would have to time to complete his education became questionable as 1940 came to a close. Rommel was able to spend Christmas with Lucie and Manfred in Wiener Neustadt, but was forced to cut short his leave when yet another alarum went up in France over yet another rumored revolt against Vichy. He planned to take a second leave in February 1941 to make up for the time he lost with his wife and son at Christmas, but those plans were scrapped as well when orders arrived in Bordeaux for him to report to Berlin on February 6. Rommel reported to Generalfeld-marschall Walter von Brauchitsch in the morning, and to Hitler personally in the afternoon. He was informed that he was relieved as officer commanding of the 7th Panzer Division, and that he would instead be given command of a small, two-division corps which was being sent to North Africa, where it would be employed to bolster Italy’s flagging fortunes in Libya. On February 9 he was promoted to Generalleutnant, on February 12 he flew to Tripoli to join his new command. The operation was code-named Sonnenblume—“Sunflowers”—his new command was called the Afrika Korps.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AFRIKA KORPS

  It was a sideshow—the greatest of sideshows. . . .

  —SIR CHARLES OMAN, on the Peninsular War

  Late in the morning of February 12, 1941, Generalmajor Erwin Rommel stepped off a Luftwaffe Junkers Ju-52 at the Castel Benito airfield outside Tripoli, Libya. That afternoon, he and Colonel Schmundt, who by now had proven himself invaluable as an aide and adjutant, were flying over the Libyan desert near El Agheila, giving Rommel the first look at the landscape where he would become a legend. Two days later, he stood on the quay as the troops and armored cars, motorcycles, trucks and artillery of the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion and 39th Antitank Battalion of the 5th Light Division, the first German units to arrive in North Africa, were unloaded at the docks of Tripoli harbor. The port facilities at Tripoli, while fairly modern, were not particularly extensive, their capacity limited, and Rommel, anxious to get his men and equipment ashore as quickly as possible, demanded that the work continue throughout the night, the docks bathed in the glare of floodlights, despite the very real possibility of an unfriendly visit from the bombers of the Royal Air Force.

  His urgency was driven by more than just his usual impatience: after having made several reconnaissance flights, followed by conferences with the senior Italian officers in Tripoli, Rommel had concluded that the only way he could possibly accomplish the mission in North Africa given to him by the Führer would be to pull off a bluff executed on a monumental scale. For Rommel had not been sent to Africa to expand the reach of Nazi conquest along the far shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Despite the brilliance of his unorthodox handling of the 7th Panzer Division in France—or arguably because of it—he had been tasked with containing the damage done to the Axis’ strategic position in the Mediterranean by Italian adventurism: in what would become something of a habit with him, Adolf Hitler, for reasons of political prestige, was trying to pull Benito Mussolini’s irons out of the fire.

  More than a handful of Roman emperors, various English and French kings, and even a few more recent heads of state—Idi Amin, Muamar Qadaffi, and the North Korean Kims, pere et fils, and the like—are remembered by history as little more than glorified buffoons. But rarely have any of them been in a position of sufficient power and influence to affect the course of world events, or alter the destinies of entire continents. And yet the one man of whom it could be said had a reasonable claim to being the greatest buffoon ever to become a head of state did exactly that: Benito Mussolini, Il Duce (“The Leader”), the dictator of Fascist Italy. Ignorant, arrogant, bombastic, and proud, his dreams of martial glory for Italy and fantasies of a revived Roman Empire would, by the time they had run their course, achieve nothing more than a few hundred thousand dead and wounded Italian soldiers, the complete loss of Italy’s overseas empire, and an Italian nation left battered and broken by a war that by its end would run the length of the Italian peninsula.

  Mussolini’s first excursion into African adventurism occurred in 1935, when the Italians invaded Ethiopia, a conquest they could only accomplish through the use of tanks, bombers, and poison gas. He was distracted shortly thereafter by the Spanish Civil War, when he sent over 60,000 troops, along with several squadrons of the Regia Aeronautica, Italy’s air force, to fight for General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists. Shortly after that he began to develop closer military and diplomatic ties with Adolf Hitler, whom he had originally regarded with a measure of disdain. By 1938 and the Munich Crisis, Mussolini—and Italy with him—had fallen thoroughly into Hitler’s orbit.

  It wasn’t until the summer of 1940 that Mussolini’s attention returned to Africa. Italy had wrested away the Ottoman province of Tripolitania from the Turks in 1911, restoring its ancient Roman name of “Libya,” and by dint of hard work and careful investment in the years that followed transformed what had been an Ottoman backwater into a fairly modern, reasonably prosperous Italian colony. Settlements and development were concentrated on the roadway that ran along the Mediterranean shoreline; when Italy became an active belligerent in June 1940, work was already well under way to turn th
e towns of Benghazi and Tobruk into significant seaports. Tobruk in particular was heavily fortified in the months following the Italian declaration of war on France and Great Britain.

  The Italian dictator soon saw that Libya’s provincial governor-general, Marshal Italo Balbo, had over 215,000 Italian soldiers in Libya, while the British89 forces right next door in Egypt numbered barely 35,000—an effective numerical superiority of better than six-to-one; likewise the disparity in strength between the Regia Aeronautica and the Royal Air Force units stationed in North Africa, while not as severe as that of the ground forces, also heavily favored the Italians. Mussolini, convinced that such apparently overwhelming superiority made an Italian victory inevitable, pressed Balbo to mount an offensive with the objective of simultaneously driving the British out of Egypt and seizing the Suez Canal.

  Marshal Balbo was not nearly as sanguine as Il Duce about the prospect of an assured victory, however. He knew that his army was thoroughly modern and well equipped—for 1935, when Italy had invaded Ethiopia. But this was 1940, and in those five years weapons and warfare had evolved drastically and dramatically. Save for some 70-odd light and medium tanks, which were already obsolescent, Balbo had no armor. Only a few thousand of his infantry were motorized, that is, possessed their own truck transportation: the rest arrived at the battlefield in just the same manner as did the Italian regiments that had filled out the ranks of Bonaparte’s Grande Armée—by marching to it. In the desert this translated into near-immobility, making the mass of Balbo’s infantry more of a liability than an asset. Equally critical, the army’s logistics were a shambles, in particular lacking the plans or means to guarantee an adequate supply of water for the troops as they advanced into Egypt. To have any chance of success, Balbo insisted, he needed at minimum one complete armored division, 100 water tankers, 1,000 trucks, and hundreds more antitank guns. Mussolini ignored Balbo’s material demands and dismissed his misgivings out of hand: under heavy pressure, Balbo agreed to begin planning for an invasion of Egypt to begin sometime in late July or early August.

  Those plans came to a temporary halt when Balbo was killed in a “friendly fire” incident where the Savoia-Marchetti bomber in which he was a passenger was mistakenly shot down by Italian antiaircraft gunners as it approached Tobruk on June 28, 1940. His successor, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, despite voicing the same reservations and doubts as his late predecessor, was told by Mussolini to press on with the preparations for the offensive into Egypt, which finally began on September 13, 1940. After advancing for three days, Graziani’s 150,000 troops, organized as the Tenth Army, stopped cold at the town of Maktila, 60 miles east of the Libyan–Egyptian frontier, and began to dig in, creating a line of fortified camps just east of the coastal town of Sidi Barrani which ran from the Mediterranean inland for roughly 40 miles, ending on the shoulder of a near-impassable escarpment to the south. From there Graziani refused to budge until he was reinforced and resupplied, although what little actual combat there had been with the British thus far had amounted to little more than skirmishes.

  In Cairo, the British Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, and the commander of the Western Desert Force, Major General Richard O’Connor, together concocted a plan, Operation Compass, to drive the Italians out of Egypt. Though badly outnumbered, the British forces were almost entirely mechanized, and thus highly mobile, while the British tanks were across the board superior to those deployed by the Italians, two crucial advantages the British commanders were determined to exploit to the fullest. Moving out on the night of December 7–8, having discovered a gap toward the southern end of the poorly sited Italian defensive positions, the British forces drove straight for Fort Capuzzo. Sixty miles behind the Italian lines, the fort dominated the coast road and was the key to the Italian defenses guarding the Libyan-Egyptian border. Capturing the fort would not only cut off the Italian army still clustered around Maktila from its supply base in Tobruk, it would block the Italians only route out of Egypt.

  Graziani’s army virtually disintegrated as every able-bodied officer and soldier fled westward in an effort to escape the British trap; a quarter of the Italian forces that had marched into Egypt were taken prisoner in the first five days of the British attack. Pressing forward with a speed and panache as impressive as any displayed earlier that summer by the Germans in France, the Western Desert Force, which deployed Australian and Indian divisions alongside British units, took Bardia on January 5, 1941, Tobruk on January 22, and Derna on February 3—some 400 miles from its starting line. Demoralized and off-balance, Graziani decided to abandon the whole of Cyrenaica, ordering his troops to fall back along the coast road to Beda Fomm, south of Benghazi.

  Poor Italian communications security gave the game away to O’Connor, who detached a brigade-size column to drive straight west-southwest across the “bulge” of Cyrenaica and take Beda Fomm before the Italians arrived. Composed of tanks and infantry from the 7th Armoured Division, the justly famous “Desert Rats,” this force, just over 2,000 strong, reached the Gulf of Sirte just north of Beda Fomm on February 4, took up strong defensive positions, and for three days fought off repeated attacks by the lead units of the retreating Italian army. With the British army to the front and rear, the Mediterranean Sea to the right and the empty waste of the Libyan desert to the left, the Italians simply gave up. Italian losses totaled around 3,000 killed, with 130,000 captured, out of the 150,000 men who had marched into Egypt. British, Australian, and Indian losses were 494 dead and 1,225 wounded, placing Compass among the most one-sided military campaigns in modern history.

  While the British weren’t able to drive the Italians out of North Africa entirely, they had, in a matter of weeks, upset the entire strategic situation in the Mediterranean. (They had no way of knowing that it would soon shift again, with equally dramatic consequences.) Only about 32,000 Italian troops, demoralized, lacking heavy weapons and all but the most basic kit, had escaped the disaster in Cyrenaica. There were still four Italian divisions in Tripolitania, the western half of Libya, which Graziani believed would be sufficient to stop any further British advance once they were positioned in the strong defenses prepared at El Agheila. Graziani himself had been among the first Italian officers to leave Tobruk when the British began sweeping westward along the Libyan coast, a situation which was not, despite appearances, an exercise in mere self-preservation. He was, after all, the governor-general of Libya, responsible for the entire province, not just the Tenth Army. He still had a job to do, namely preventing the rest of Libya from falling to the British.

  Meanwhile, in a state of near-panic, Comando Supremo, the Italian high command in Rome, hurriedly shipped three fresh divisions, one infantry, one motorized, and one armored, across the Mediterranean to Tripoli, to further stiffen the defenses at El Agheila. They needn’t have worried so much—O’Connor’s forces, men and machines alike, were tired and worn, much in need of rest and refitting. Realizing he and O’Connor had taken their offensive as far as it could go, Wavell was, for the moment, prepared to call a halt. After all, Compass had exceeded even the most wildly optimistic expectations of the men who planned the operation. Ever the pragmatist, Wavell had confided to one of his senior officers on the eve of the attack that, “I do not entertain extravagant hopes of this operation but I do wish to make certain that if a big opportunity occurs we are prepared morally, mentally and administratively to use it to the fullest. . . .”90

  This was Archibald Wavell at his finest: attuned to the possibilities of mechanized warfare; realistic, yet sufficiently flexible and imaginative to be prepared to seize and exploit unexpected opportunities. Born into a family of soldiers in 1883, Wavell was a man of formidable intellect, whom his headmaster at Summer Fields School said, in the classically understated English manner, had “sufficient ability to make his way in other walks of life”91 than the army. Nonetheless, he chose to follow in his father’s footsteps and was commissioned into the Black Watch when he graduated from Sandhurst
in 1901. His first combat experience came in India in 1908, graduated from the Staff College two years later, and then spent a year as a military observer in Russia, learning the Russian language in the process; various staff positions followed, along with another stint in Russia, at one point running afoul of the Ohkrana, the tsarist secret police, who suspected him of being a spy.

  When the Great War erupted, he went to France as a staff officer with the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force, but within a few months was serving in the trenches, losing his left eye during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. Once he was pronounced fit for duty, he saw service once again with the Russians and then in the Middle East, rising to the temporary rank of brigadier before the Armistice. His service between the world wars was typical of that of most military men in Europe during those years—a succession of staff and command postings interspersed with brief stints on half pay, as there was a surplus of officers in the British Army during those years. In July 1939, he was named as General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Middle East Command, with the local rank of full general; the title of his posting was changed to Commander-in-Chief Middle East in February 1940.

  Despite his rather rocky relationship with Prime Minister Churchill— Wavell was not given over to offering up pointless flattery to politicians—he was probably the ideal choice for the post. He had a firm grasp of the realities of desert warfare, especially the logistical challenges, as well as both the theory and practice of motorized and mechanized combined arms operations. He saw to it that the troops under his command were as well trained and thoroughly equipped for the desert as possible. And provided that he was allowed to exercise his command authority free from meddling by politicians, he had an excellent grasp of his strategic priorities: while overseeing Operation Compass, he was also directing a campaign in Ethiopia, where Major General William Platt was handily running the Italians out of the country.