FIELD MARSHAL WILHELM Keitel, chief of the O.K.W., put in a telephone call to Semmering late in the afternoon of October 24, informing Rommel that the British offensive at El Alamein had begun earlier that day. The situation, Keitel said, was uncertain, but General Stumme was missing. Was Rommel prepared to return to North Africa if needed? Rommel assured Keitel that he was, then waited until midnight before taking a personal call from Hitler, who asked him to fly back to Egypt as soon as possible. Rommel said goodbye to Lucie and Manfred, then flew to Rome, where he discovered that, as he had feared, Comando Supremo had made good on none of Mussolini’s promises of adequate supply for the Axis troops in North Africa. This was the final straw: he departed Rome for Benghazi, “[f]eeling that we would fight this battle with little hope of success” and certain that “. . . there were no more laurels to be won in North Africa.”201
It was late in the day when Rommel arrived back at the front on October 25, but immediately upon arriving he had a signal sent out to every unit, hoping to shore up morale: “I have taken command of the army again—Rommel.” It was then that he learned how truly disastrous the situation had become: there was less than three days’ supply for the entire panzerarmee in the whole of North Africa. The infantry units were beginning to take significant casualties as the British attacks continued, and while the panzers had begun local counterattacks the previous day, the fuel crisis prevented any large-scale riposte against Montgomery’s tanks. Frustration set in as Rommel saw a remarkable tactical opportunity had presented itself, one that might well have turned the entire battle in his favor regardless of Eighth Army’s numerical superiority: there simply wasn’t sufficient fuel to make it a reality.
Since the enemy was operating with astonishing hesitancy and caution, a concentrated attack by the whole of our armor could have been successful, although such an assembly of armor would of course have been met by the heaviest possible British artillery fire and air bombardment. However, we could have made the action more fluid by withdrawing a few miles to the west and could then have attacked the British in an all-out charge and defeated them in open country. The British artillery and air force could not easily have intervened with their usual weight in a tank battle of this kind, for their own forces would have been endangered.
But a decision to take forces from the southern front was unthinkable with the gasoline situation so bad. Not only could we not have kept a mobile battle going for more than a day or two, but our armor could never have returned to the south if the British had attacked there. I did, however, decide to bring the whole of the 21st Panzer Division up north, although I fully realized that the gasoline shortage would not allow it to return. In addition, since it was now obvious that the enemy would make his main effort in the north during the next few days and try for a decision there, half the Army artillery was drawn off from the southern front. At the same time I reported to the Führer’s H.Q. that we would lose the battle unless there was an immediate improvement in the supply situation. Judging by previous experience, there was very little hope of this happening.202
Making the situation worse, the Desert Air Force was operating with near-impunity over the rear areas of the Axis army, specifically targeting German and Italian airfields, often dropping more than 100 tons of bombs in a single raid. That may have been an unimpressive weight of explosives compared to the Royal Air Force raids being carried out against German cities, where thousands of tons of bombs were dropped nightly, but its impact on the already-thin Axis resources belied the numbers. The Luftwaffe, despite the best efforts of Field Marshal Kesselring, was essentially impotent at this point; the Regia Aeronautica was faring no better. Rommel by temperament was not someone who fell prey to despair, but he began to feel something akin to it, as he was confronted every commanding general’s worst nightmare: an operational and strategic situation so perilous that admitted of no good solutions, but only allowed the commander to choose what would be, he hoped, the least bad solution.
Initially he tried to put a brave face on the situation for Lucie, writing her on October 26 to tell her that he
Arrived 6:30 P.M. yesterday. Situation critical. A lot of work! After my wonderful weeks at home it’s not easy to acclimatize myself to the new surroundings and the job in hand. There’s too big a difference.203
That morning Rommel ordered a counterattack in the center by the 15th Panzer Division, the 164th Light Division, and units from the Italian XX Corps; British artillery and fighter-bombers effectively broke up the attack before it was properly underway. This was when he decided that it was time to bring the 21st Panzer and Ariete Divisions to the north: his tactical sense was telling him that was where the entire battle would be decided; if they remained in the south, these two divisions would be useless, and in danger of being cut off from the rest of the army.
27 Oct. 1942
Dearest Lu,
A very hard struggle. No one can conceive the burden that lies on me. Everything is at stake again and we’re fighting under the greatest possible handicaps. However, I hope we’ll pull through. You know I’ll put all I’ve got into it.
Of course, Rommel was not to know that fatigue was hard at work among the infantry and tank crews of Eighth Army as well. The Axis troops were fighting harder and inflicting more serious casualties than Montgomery and his staff had presumed would be the case. The Allied infantry had driven a deep wedge into the Axis defenses in the north, and the British armor was beginning to move through the enemy minefields, but this had been costly, especially among the engineers. There were murmurs at the divisional level that it might be best if the offensive were broken off: some commanders were openly dismayed by Montgomery’s seemingly clumsy handling of armored units, using them like bludgeons as opposed to Rommel’s rapier-like tactics.
It was not yet a crisis, but the situation was serious, as Montgomery, who had never expected the Axis troops, especially the Italians, to stand firm, had so far been unable to make his preponderance in strength a decisive factor. Recognizing that the attack was losing what little momentum it had, Montgomery changed its direction on October 28, turned the 1st and 10th Armoured Divisions to the north, and gave them new orders: make directly for the coast, cut off the 7th Bersaglieri Division, and open a gap in the Axis lines. The 7th Armoured Division would follow behind them; once the gap was created, it would move up the coast road to take El Daba and Fuka, cutting off Panzerarmee Afrika’s line of retreat as it did so.
While Montgomery was preparing this new stroke, Rommel struck at the British armor and infantry massing in the salient carved out of the Axis minefields. First 15th Panzer and the 90th Light, then 21st Panzer, then Littorio and Trieste, all waded into the fight. This was not the calculated riposte which had so tantalized him three days earlier, the counterstroke that could have cut off Montgomery’s offensive at the knees, denied Rommel by a lack of fuel. This was a slugfest, more brawl than battle, its sole purpose being to stop the enemy attack in its tracks. The time for finesse had long past.
28 October 1942
Dearest Lu,
Who knows whether I’ll have a chance to sit down and write in peace in the next few days or ever again. Today there’s still a chance. The battle is raging. Perhaps we will still manage to be able to stick it out, in spite of all that’s against us but it may go wrong, and that would have very grave consequences for the whole course of the war. For North Africa would then fall to the British in a few days, almost without a fight. We will do all we can to pull it off. But the enemy’s superiority is terrific and our resources very small. Whether I would survive a defeat lies in God’s hands. The lot of the vanquished is heavy. I’m happy in my own conscience that I’ve done all I can for victory and have not spared myself. I realized so well in the few short weeks I was at home what you two mean to me. My last thought is of you.204
The Germans and Italians gave better than they got, knocking out two enemy tanks for every one of theirs put out of action, but those were losses Montgomer
y could afford and Rommel could not. By day’s end, the Germans had fewer than 150 tanks still running, the Italians not many more, while Eighth Army’s tank strength stood at just over 800, many of them the new American-built Shermans. This was the battle which Rommel had sought to avoid since he first set foot in North Africa, the battle he knew could only have one outcome: the materialschlact, the battle of attrition. For 20 months he had used ruse, wile, and guile to avoid being caught in precisely the tactical situation in which he now found himself: fighting a battle without the wherewithal to retreat if necessary. If the Eighth Army broke through up along the coast, the whole of Panzerarmee Afrika would be trapped.
On October 29, having fought each other to a standstill, both sides paused to catch their breath. For the next three days the two armies would bicker back and forth over minor terrain features, but no major actions would be fought. Rommel briefly reflected on what might have been, then turned his mind to the hard choices he now had to make. As he saw it, yet another strategic opportunity was being squandered here: Stumme had done a remarkable job in finalizing Rommel’s defensive plans, as evidenced by Eighth Army’s inability to punch through the Axis lines despite its numerical and material superiority. It was a pity that Rommel would never be able to thank him for that. Had some of the heroic measures now being put in hand—the Luftwaffe, for example, was daily flying 250 tons of gasoline into Tobruk, a trickle admittedly, but it was better than nothing—begun weeks or even months earlier, Rommel might well have been able to hold the El Alamein line, not indefinitely, but certainly long enough to wake up the incompetents in Rome and Berlin who, Rommel was still certain, lied to the Führer about what could and could not be done for North Africa. Perhaps he might have held the line long enough for some of the manpower and equipment that even now was being squandered, or so he thought, on the Russian Front to be diverted to North Africa, where Rommel could accomplish something useful with them!
What Rommel was not to know of were two factors which rendered any such musings mere daydreams rather than strategic options. He was unaware of Ultra, had no way of knowing how it allowed British submarines to make almost-to-the-minute interceptions of the vital tankers that sailed from Naples or Salerno for Tripoli and send them to the bottom. He was still certain that Italian treachery was to blame—or if not treachery, corruption. (At one point he openly asserted that “It never proved possible to get major Italian naval units used for the protection of convoys or the transport of urgent supplies. Of course, the fuel could not then have been used for the Rome taxis.”) It was Ultra that at the end of October enabled the Royal Navy to destroy three tankers, the Luisiana, Prosperina, and Portofino, carrying between them over 5,000 tons of gasoline for the panzerarmee, which denied Rommel the ability to conduct a truly effective defense at El Alamein. It is impossible, then, to overstate the value of Ultra to the British in North Africa: when what Rommel accomplished with an under-supplied, under-equipped army is considered, what the Afrika Korps might have done if properly supported can scarce be imagined.205
But even had the Allies not possessed Ultra and used it to bring about Panzerarmee Afrika’s undoing, a far more powerful force, at once irresistible and inevitable, would have put paid to any remaining hopes and dreams Rommel might have retained once he had been stopped at El Alamein. What Rommel did not know, indeed what only a handful of Germans at the highest levels of the Nazi regime knew at that moment, was that by the autumn of 1942 Germany had reached the limits of her manpower and her economy. The O.K.W.’s niggardly response to Rommel’s pleas for more men and equipment was not due to the senior officers’ hostility toward this upstart outsider—at least, not entirely—but rather because there was nothing left to give him: the cupboard was, in fact, quite bare.
The single most enduring myth of the Second World War is that of the awesome German war machine, of matchless technical abilities paired with unparalleled organizational skills. The mighty German industrial juggernaut was actually a canard bruited about by the Allies to exhort their own workers to greater feats of productivity. Germany’s economy was never optimized for wartime production, unlike Great Britain and the United States, where vast swathes of the national economies and infrastructure were converted to wartime production, and research, development, and manufacturing were streamlined and rationalized, while the production of consumer goods became secondary. The Soviet Union’s reorganization was even more draconian, as the entire national economy was subordinated to the military’s requirements. In 1936, Herman Göring famously asked the German people “Which would you rather have, butter or guns?” implying that Germany’s economy could provide one or the other, but not both. The problem was that the Nazis tried to produce guns and butter even after the war began, with the result that the whole of Germany’s manufacturing capacity was never devoted to military production. It would not be until 1944, after two years of work by Albert Speer, the minister of Armaments and War Production, that Germany’s economy was fully mobilized for war, with production peaking in August of that year, long after Germany’s strategic position had become hopeless. Yet even then there were curious anomalies in German production priorities—the Steinbach piano company, for example, was still manufacturing its instruments in April 1945!
Perhaps no single example better illustrates the inherent inefficiency of the German economy, and hence a squandered potential for military might, than a straightforward comparison of the production figures for the mainstay battle tanks of the Wehrmacht, the Allies, and the Soviet Union. The German workhorse of the panzerkorps was the Panzerkampfwagen IV, or Panzer IV, of which a total of 8,569 examples of all models were produced from 1936, the year it was introduced, to the end of the war. By comparison, the total production of United States Army’s M4 Sherman, in all variants, was 49,234—produced in just five years; the numbers for the Red Army’s T-34 reached 84,070 in the same time span. Clearly, there is some merit to the argument of German apologists who assert that the Wehrmacht was never truly outfought, it was simply outproduced.
But on the most basic level, Germany’s inability to mobilize her economy as efficiently as did the Allies was due to a fundamental flaw in Adolf Hitler’s overall strategy, that flaw being, quite simply, that Adolf Hitler never possessed an overall strategy. He merely lurched from one campaign to another, with no conscious, deliberate connection between them: Hitler had no master plan, no “grand strategy,” for going about whatever it was he hoped to achieve, and only vague ideas of what were those goals. Such disjointed strategic “thinking” resulted in operations or even entire campaigns, such as “Sonnenblum,” Rommel’s original mission to North Africa, which had no clearly defined strategic objectives. The consequences could be—and were—disastrous for Germany; in the case of North Africa, what should have been nothing more elaborate than a minor holding action in Libya evolved into an entire new theater of war for the Axis, where they would be catastrophically defeated.
This lack of a grand strategy also meant that Germany’s weapon design, development and production was never given a coherent focus or direction until the war was already lost. German technology and engineering could and did produce some remarkably effective, even visionary weapons, but far too many of Germany’s research and design programs were given over to producing weapons that, while they were interesting or possessed intriguing capabilities, were not weapons that Germany truly needed. By way of contrast, from the outset the Allies formulated a grand strategy for the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan: the tanks, aircraft, artillery, ships, and small arms they produced were all designed and built to expedite the accomplishment of that mission.
As disorganized as was Germany’s weapons procurement programs, her allocation of manpower was even more absurd. Hitler’s eighteenth-century attitudes toward sex and gender prevented German women from ever becoming a significant proportion of the Fatherland’s labor pool, which meant that as late as the fall of 1944 there would be several million German men still working at u
nskilled or semi-skilled jobs that in Allied countries were being more than adequately filled by women. This put a near-crippling strain on the German Army’s replacement process, leading the O.K.W. into introducing ever-increasing numbers of foreign-born troops into Wehrmacht units, some of them serving as volunteers, most of them fighting under compulsion. The O.K.W. had to judiciously allocate what manpower it had, carefully prioritizing, and its parsimonious attitude toward North Africa simply indicated that the campaign in the Western Desert was never sufficiently perceived as being vital to the defense of the Reich.
All of this meant that, in the end, even had Rommel been able to hold on at El Alamein in the autumn of 1942, he would have ultimately been driven out under the sheer weight of numbers which the Allies would have brought to bear. In total manpower and industrial capacity, of course, Germany could have never hoped for anything remotely approaching parity with Britain, America, and the Soviet Union combined, even in the most ideal circumstances, but economic decisions made by Hitler and his henchmen at the beginning of the war guaranteed that if Germany could not achieve a swift victory, she would never be able to muster the strength to hold back the Allies long enough to compel any settlement of the war short of an unconditional German surrender.
All of this would only become clear to Rommel in the months ahead, however: on the morning of October 29, 1942, he was focused on extracting as many of the Italian infantry divisions that were manning the El Alamein line as he possibly could; they would fall back to a new line to be established at Fuka, 50 miles to the west along the coast road. By mid-afternoon the order went out for all non-combat troops to begin evacuating to Mersa Matruh, which was even farther west than Fuka. The Afrika Korps and the Italian motorized divisions would do their best to hold back the coming British attack in the north to give the infantry as much time as possible to make good their escape. Not a word of these withdrawal plans were mentioned to either Rome or Berlin.
Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel Page 47
