Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  These were Rommel’s “little fellers,” and they provided not only tactical and operational information for the Afrika Korps, they also provided the German and Italian air forces and navies warning of when Allied convoys were scheduled to sail through the Mediterranean. The consequences were often devastating: in June 1942, for example, two convoys, Vigorous and Harpoon, one eastbound from Gibraltar, the other westbound out of Alexandria, were almost wiped out as Feller’s intercepted signals provided the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica with their precise sailing times and routes, which resulted in near-incessant air attacks on both.

  It would not be until evidence began accumulating in Ultra intercepts that there was a high-level leak in Cairo that the security of Fellers’ signals began to be questioned, and it was mid-June 1942 that the suspicions were confirmed. Fellers would promptly change his code and Rommel’s gutte Quelle would dry up. Until it did, however, it was priceless, as it gave Rommel, O.K.W., and Comando Supremo an astonishing level of insight into British capabilities and planning in North Africa. Standing in his new armored command vehicle, an Sdkfz. 250 half-track nicknamed Greif (“Griffin”) on January 21, 1941, Erwin Rommel had no idea how long der gutte Quelle would last, but while it did, he was determined to make the most of it. Finding only the thinnest of screens in front of him, he concluded that Panzerarmee Afrika possessed the strength to seize the opportunity—if just barely.151

  The first move of Rommel’s riposte against Eighth Army was made that day, when he sent two strong armored columns forward from El Agheila—the 90th Light Division and part of the 21st Panzer on the left, the 15th Panzer and the balance of the 21st Panzer on the right, headed in the direction of El Haseia, a desert crossroads southeast of Agedabia. Once again, the British were caught by surprise, and the Benghazi Handicaps were off and running again. The British had assumed that it would be months before Rommel would accrue the strength necessary to go back over to the offensive, by which time their own attack into Tripolitania would be well underway. A thoroughly green division, the newly formed 1st Armoured, had arrived in North Africa in November 1941, but had not been sufficiently worked up before the end of Crusader. Posted forward at Agedabia, where, it was hoped, it could gain a bit of seasoning and finish adapting to the conditions in Libya, the division was mauled by the Afrika Korps, losing 110 of its 150 tanks in a single day as the two wings of Rommel’s attack converged on Agedabia. Rommel quickly sensed the same disorder that had marked the Western Desert Force a year earlier, and the likelihood that he could once again tumble the British out of Libya, began to grow with each passing hour. As he had been forced to do the previous March, Rommel had to have a care to minimize his own losses, for while he had a definite local superiority in tanks and men, the full strength of Eighth Army would overwhelm him. Another restraint was at work this time, however, one that had not been as significant a consideration in his previous attack across Cyrenaica, that being his limited stocks of fuel. Every move he made had to be carried out with one eye on his vehicles’ fuel gauges; with that in mind, on January 25 he set out for Msus, hoping to bluff the enemy out of the Cyrenaica bulge.

  The British scattered like tenpins, Tommies grabbing onto the nearest transport and rushing off in any direction, as long as it was away from advancing panzers. It was not for want of courage: over the course of three years fighting in North Africa British soldiers would prove time and again that whatever else they might lack, it was not that quality. But the various units of Eighth Army were so dispersed and everything was happening so quickly that there was neither time nor opportunity for any level of higher command to impose order on the battlefield. For now, everything was going Rommel’s way once again, and the feeling was like a tonic to him. The renewed self-confidence positively oozes from the letter he wrote to Lucie that evening.

  25 January 1942

  Dearest Lu,

  Four days of complete success behind us. Our blows struck home. And there’s still one to come. Then we’ll go all modest again and lie in wait for a bit. The foreign press opinion about me is improving again. Cavallero arrived and wanted to whistle me straight back on orders from the Duce. But the Duce’s directive, which was given to me in writing, reads differently and, at least, left me greater freedom.152

  It’s difficult not to share Rommel’s exasperation with—and some of his contempt for—the Italian generals and high command. Once again, their current demands were in direct contradiction of what they had asked Rommel to do only months previously. When Rommel was abandoning Tobruk, they implored him to stand and fight as they had never done, in order to protect Italian citizens and property; then they forbade him to retreat to El Agheila, insisting that he remain at Benghazi. Now, when he was advancing and liberating those citizens and properties and retaking Benghazi, they were demanding that he return to El Agheila. There must have been moments when Rommel wondered just on whose side were the Italian generals.

  Their protests were, in truth, mostly bombast and bluster, for the fact of the matter was that Rommel was making them look inept at best, incompetent at worst. Cavallero, along with Bastico, both of whom were nominally Rommel’s superiors, were angered as much by the disdain for them Rommel displayed in his actions as they were with the actions themselves. The operational orders for the attack out of El Agheila, for example, had been posted the day of the attack at every German supply dump in Tripolitania: these postings would be the first notice either Bastico or Cavallero had of Rommel’s plans. When Cavallero caught up with Rommel in Msus on January 26 and tried to assert his command authority, Rommel cooly informed him that “nobody but the Führer could change my decision, as it would be mainly German troops who would be engaged.” That, of course, was nonsense, but Cavallero was hesitant to call his bluff, especially when Rommel received a personal telephone call from Il Duce that evening, during which Mussolini congratulated him on the success of his new attack. Cavallero also knew that Generalmajor Enno von Rintelen, the German military attaché to Rome, was visiting Rommel’s headquarters, where Rommel gave him “a glimpse of the battlefield next day. He had spent practically all his time sitting in Rome and I wanted to instill in him some understanding of the needs of this theater.” With such allies, Rommel’s moral ascendency over the Italian generals was now absolute—it would remain so as long as he continued to be right and they were wrong.153

  At the same time, along with Rommel’s evident dislike of Cavallero, Bastico, and the rest of the Italian high command, there was a strong element of distrust of them. As a rule, Rommel liked his Italian soldiers, who usually fought hard, often bravely, and sometimes ingeniously for him. Once, in an effort to disguise how few of the precious Flak 88s he had—fewer than a dozen at the time—he ordered some of his Italian troops to build dummies and emplace them. A few days later, he was furious to see these irreplaceable guns sitting in the open, being shelled by British artillery. The tables turned on him—they were the dummy guns his Italians had cobbled together, and so convincing were they that the British mistook them for real 88s. Delighted, Rommel told the Italians to make more, and to be sure to bring them along as they advanced—their decoy value was tremendous. But the senior Italian officers were, in Rommel’s eyes, a very different kettle of fish. He could understand, perhaps, their lack of enthusiasm for what was at heart Mussolini’s war, but he suspected something deeper was at work: treachery.

  Rommel’s suspicions sprang out of the uncanny success which the Allies experienced in intercepting and sinking the vital supply ships that sailed from Italian ports bound for Tripoli, the ones that carried tanks, ammunition, food, and above all, gasoline. Less than half, and sometimes as little as a third, of the minimum supply needed to sustain Panzergruppe Afrika—a total of 60,000 tons was required every month—was reaching North Africa, the rest lost to Allied aircraft and submarines. Privately Rommel wondered if the Italian generals were somehow transmitting information to the Allies about departure dates for the North Africa-bound convoys, who
would then prepare their ambushes. There was no doubt that the Italian navy and merchant marine were doing their best—there is no record of any Italian ship bound for North Africa ever turning back once it departed Italy. The Allies seemed to have inside information, and the only possible source of that information was the Italian high command itself.

  Rommel, of course, never knew about Ultra. That was the source of the Allies’ “inside information.” The best-kept secret of the war, so well kept that its existence remained unknown and largely unsuspected until it was revealed 30 years after the end of hostilities in Europe, Ultra allowed the British to read the operational orders sent to German and Italian air and naval units stationed around the Mediterranean, as well as Berlin’s communications with Rommel himself, which gave them a decided advantage in attacking Italian shipping between Italy and North Africa. Of course, it could sometimes be a two-edged sword when the Allies became too heavily dependent on it, especially when a general such as Erwin Rommel was involved. Relying on Rommel to do as he was told by O.K.W., the British had drawn down and dispersed their forces in North Africa, confident that they would have time to once more marshal their strength before Rommel’s next attack. That he would once again defy O.K.W. and strike out on his own never occurred to Auchinleck or Churchill. Now Rommel was once more reminding them of why he was becoming known around the world as “The Desert Fox.”

  27 January 1942

  Dearest Lu,

  Everything’s OK here. We’re cleaning up the battlefield, collecting up guns, armored cars, tanks, rations, and ammunition for our own needs. It will take some time. It’s chilly again and rainy, though the rain has its advantages, as it prevents the British getting their planes off the ground from their airfields in Cyrenaica.

  Gause will be back on February 1. But he’ll never be quite the same. It was all rather much at once. I’m more used to such things.

  We’re getting on with the Italian Corps now. They’re very unhappy that they couldn’t come along with us. But that’s their own fault.154

  Sometimes Rommel didn’t tell Lucie quite everything, for rather than taking “some time” to gather up the plunder around Msus, he was off the next day for Benghazi. He wanted to continue his advance to Mechili, much as he had done the year before, but Benghazi was still occupied by the British, and in too great a strength to simply be ignored. So in a swift two-day action Benghazi was surrounded and taken. Inside was a wealth of supplies: artillery, trucks, fuel, rations, uniforms, boots, all of which found new homes with the men of the Afrika Korps, as for the first three months of 1942, Rommel was forced to rely on plundered British supplies and equipment to keep this new offensive going. Tmimi was taken on February 3, and Eighth Army pulled back to the Gazala ridge west of Tobruk, where it began digging in and setting up defensive “boxes” between the Bir Hakim oasis in the south to the Mediterranean coast in the north. This rapidly became known as the “Gazala Line.”

  For the time being, a sort of equilibrium was reached in the Western Desert as neither side possessed sufficient strength to again go over to the attack. This situation could not and would not last forever. Who moved first would probably decide the war in North Africa, but for now, both Germans and British played a waiting game.

  7 February 1942

  Dearest Lu,

  It’s quiet again on our front, which now extends for 300 miles (from the left to the right wing). It’s particularly pleasing to have got Cyrenaica back again. I’m hoping the situation will stabilize sufficiently for me to get away for a while. I’ve been given a new order, by the way (a star on the chest to match the one I’ve already got round my neck). [This would be the Gold Military Medal of Valor—the other was Colonial Order of the Star of Italy.]155

  The Afrika Korps waited impatiently, for its morale was soaring. Victory is a powerful tonic for any army, and once again the panzers were on the advance. There was a very real sense among these men—Rommel would always fondly call them his “Africans”—that they were an elite, led by an elite general, and while they had suffered a setback in the Crusader battles, they believed themselves to be far from defeated. The power which the personality of a charismatic commander exerts on his army cannot and should not be ignored: Wellington, for example, once remarked that the presence of Bonaparte on the battlefield was worth a reinforcement of 40,000 men to the French. There was also something of an “us against the world” attitude shared by Rommel and his “Africans,” as every officer and man knew that Panzergruppe Afrika was the German Army’s “poor relation,” always far down the list of priorities for Wehrmacht planners and supply masters. The distinctive spirit with which Rommel imbued the Afrika Korps was best described by German journalist Hanns Gert von Esebeck in a postwar memoir he wrote recounting his years spent in North Africa as a war correspondent; it is memorable—and effective—for its down-to-earth tone, of which Rommel would have no doubt approved.

  . . . [A]lways there is this strange magic strength that this soldier [Rommel] radiates to his troops, right down to the last rifleman. The privates call him “Erwin”—just that: “Erwin,” short and to the point. Not that they intend any disrespect by using his Christian name—it is a mark of profound admiration. Because the men can understand their commander-in-chief: when he talks with them he calls a spade a spade; he doesn’t sentimentalize with them, but meets them man-to-man, often uses hard language with them, but also knows how to praise and encourage them and make suggestions, and make complicated subjects easily comprehensible to them. Of course, to start with there were only a few of us—everybody knew everybody else and there was a desert camaraderie: the rifleman saw his general, and for that matter the general his rifleman, eating the same classical Libyan diet of sardines.156

  Fritz Bayerlein, now a colonel and serving as Rommel’s Chief of Staff in Gause’s absence, wrote

  The merit and value of a desert soldier can be measured in his physical capacity, intelligence, mobility, nerve, pugnacity, daring and stoicism. A commander of men requires these qualities in even greater measure and in addition must be outstanding in his toughness, devotion to his men, instinctive judgment of terrain and enemy, speed of reaction, and spirit. In General Rommel these qualities were embodied in a rare degree and I have known no other officer in whom they were so combined.157

  If so much as a single facet of the persona Rommel presented to his men had shone false—and soldiers, no matter in which army they serve, have an unerring instinct for detecting poseurs—the entire edifice would have come crashing down. But none ever did, because none ever existed; Rommel never presented himself as a great warrior born, living successive lives of martial splendor, or as a protean, near-Olympian figure set apart from and above the mass of humanity, predestined to lead men to victory. Nor did he claim an artist’s temperament, relying on untrained and untutored intuition and inspiration to formulate his strategies and tactics. He was vain, as are most exceptional leaders in one fashion or another. He had a temper, and when provoked was prone to immediately give the provocateur the rough side of his tongue; but he also knew when to make amends and apologize. (Major Heidkamper, late of the 7th Panzer Division, was a case in point: in the closing days of the Battle of France Rommel wrote of him to Lucie, saying “I shall have to have him posted away as soon as I can. . . . I’ll have to make a thorough study of the documents so as to put the boy in his place.” Two days later, he was informing her that “The Heidkamper affair was cleared up yesterday and has now been finally shelved. I have the feeling that it’s going to be all right now.”) He had no airs and graces, but he did have his foibles, his quirks: he was always immaculately turned out, no matter what the conditions, and he made his high-peaked officer’s hat and a pair of British-issue perspex sand goggles his personal trademark. He was stubborn, arrogant, and undeniably courageous; he was the very embodiment of the “useful soldier” as he had been described 30 years earlier, the genuine article, which his men appreciated and for which they esteemed him.
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br />   He was also immensely popular in the Fatherland. When he left North Africa on February 15 for a month’s leave, he never expected to arrive in Germany to find his face on the cover of Illustrierter Beobachter (“Illustrated Observer”), Germany’s national news magazine. (He would appear on the cover of Time magazine in the United States on July 13.) He also never imagined he would find his desk littered with what in a future generation would be called “fan mail,” sometimes hundreds of letters a day, many of them from lovelorn females of all ages, but most especially young women in the throes of unrequited romance. “The newsreels,” he quipped to Lucie, “have brought the younger females particularly out of their composure.” Göbbels and his minions over at the Propaganda Ministry had turned the handsome, dashing generaloberst (Rommel had been promoted on January 24, the same day that Panzergruppe Afrika became Panzerarmee Afrika) into something of a matinee idol, ably assisted by Leutnant Berndt, the officer Göbbels’ ministry had foisted on the Afrika Korps. Outgoing, with a ready grin, Rommel was the antithesis of the coldly korrekt and aloof Prussian offizier of yore and lore which glared at German theater audiences during the newsreels which Göbbels propaganda flacks churned out to glorify the Wehrmacht’s feats of arms. That he sprang from stolid yeoman stock rather than being some sprig of a decadent aristocracy also allowed the Propaganda Minister to present Rommel as an ideal of the National Socialist Man, the product of the New Order. There was some measure of truth to this, for Rommel had risen far higher and much faster in the Nazi-spawned Wehrmacht that he could have ever hoped to do in the Reichswehr; at the same time most of that rise was attributable to Hitler’s patronage rather than any association with the National Socialist Party, which Rommel never joined and which he continued to scorn. The Nazis might try to take vicarious credit for Rommel’s successes, but they could never truly claim him as one of their own.