Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  For all of his quirks, however, von Luck was a soldier’s soldier, and together he and Rommel had a long history: he had been one of Rommel’s students at the Dresden infantry school in 1931, and when the two men next encountered each other, von Luck was commanding the reconnaissance battalion of the 7th Panzer Division in France in 1940. For most of the campaign, von Luck’s unit was leading the division; he impressed Rommel as being brave, intelligent, and very cool under fire. After spending 18 months on the Russian Front, von Luck was transferred to the 21st Panzer Division at Rommel’s request; he arrived in North Africa in April 1942. Although von Luck was a Prussian aristocrat with a 700 year-long family military tradition (the full family name was von Luck und Witten), Rommel genuinely liked him, for the young major never affected any of the airs, graces, and pretenses common to the aristocratic officers Rommel found so annoying. It was hardly surprising then, in a way, that it would be to von Luck to whom Rommel would finally open up.

  The war was lost, he said. That had become obvious at El Alamein, where Rommel got his first glimpse of the material advantages America would supply to the Allies. Germany must seek an armistice immediately, and force Hitler to abdicate if that was what was required to bring about the ceasefire. Prolonging the war would only assure Germany’s destruction: the Wehrmacht was fighting today hundreds of miles distant from the Fatherland, but it would only be a matter of time before the Allies—and the Russians!—were standing on German soil. And if Germany’s enemies did not destroy her from without, the Nazis would do so from within; they, too, would have to go. This was a side of Rommel which von Luck had never seen before, and the memory of Rommel’s candor and prescience stayed with him for the rest of his life.213

  On November 24, the same day that Panzerarmee Afrika reached Mersa el Brega, Rommel finally had his conference with Kesselring and Cavallero at the Arco di Fileni, the triumphal marble arch Mussolini had constructed astride the coastal road to mark the border between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Neither of them, in his opinion, could truly grasp the reason why the army could not stand at Mersa el Brega: Kesselring, he said, “looked at everything from the standpoint of the Luftwaffe, and thought principally of the consequences which the move would have on the strategic air situation in Tunisia,” while Cavallero “lived in a world of make-believe.” Rommel opened the meeting by declaring that he thought the Mersa el Brega position was untenable in the long run, because just as with every other position in Libya west of Sollum, the southern flank lay open to the desert, a standing invitation for Eighth Army to swing round it and roll it up. He wanted to continue moving west until he reached Gabes on the frontier between Tripolitania and Tunisia, where the army would have mountains on the right and the sea on the left. There Rommel would be able to make a stand against Montgomery. But both the Führer and the Duce wanted Panzerarmee Afrika to hold the line at Mersa el Brega, and so Rommel would at least make a show of doing so. The question was what would Kesselring and Cavallero do. Kesselring bluntly told Rommel that he would prefer the panzerarmee to stand at Mersa el Brega for as long as possible: the defenses in Tunisia were far from ready, and Rommel’s army could buy the time needed to complete them. In reply Rommel caustically asked what good would those defenses do if his army, outflanked and overrun, was unavailable to man them. The Afrika Korps had a total of 35 tanks—Montgomery’s Eighth Army had over 400. “We either lose the position four days earlier and save the army, or lose both position and army four days later.” All of Rommel’s subordinates, German and Italian alike, agreed that the panzerarmee could not hold back a determined British attack.214

  Surprisingly, Cavallero agreed with Rommel, at least in his strategic assessment: it was Tunisia which was now the critical Axis real estate in North Africa; Tripolitania was as good as lost, but as long as the Germans and Italians had an army in Tunisia, they could hold the Allies at arm’s length from the European continent and even, should circumstances change, go over to the offensive once again at some future date and take back everything that was lost. But, Cavallero insisted, it was imperative that Rommel hold at Mersa el Brega as long as possible in order to finish the defenses of which Kesselring had spoken. When a message from Mussolini arrived on November 26 essentially parroting Hitler’s order of November 20 to stand fast at Mersa el Brega and take every opportunity which presented itself to launch local counterattacks against Eighth Army, Rommel realized that drastic measures were needed if the people in Berlin and Rome were to see the realities of the war in North Africa as it now stood.

  On November 28 Rommel climbed in his Heinkel 111 transport at Tripoli, and flew to Berlin. The following day he would be in Rastenburg, Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, where he would fight an entirely different sort of battle than he had ever before fought.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AFRICAN PERIGEE

  Theirs not to reason why,

  Theirs but to do and die

  —ALFRED TENNYSON

  In retrospect, Rommel’s last four months in North Africa appear to be an anticlimax, a case of “too little, too late,” an inevitable end to a oncegrand adventure. Yet at the time neither Rommel nor his staff nor his subordinates saw the situation as a forlorn hope. If the Afrika Korps was no longer a threat to the British in Egypt and the Suez Canal, it could still stand as a force to be reckoned with in the counsel of Allied strategy, and Rommel was on his way to Berlin to make certain that it did so in Axis counsel as well.

  As a strategist Rommel had grown during his time in North Africa, in both the breadth and depth of his understanding of the widening war and his role—and place—in it as the commander of, successively, the Afrika Korps, Panzergruppe Afrika, and Panzerarmee Afrika. Libya was, of course, about to be written off, as it must be and as it should be, for its strategic value was now nil: the five successive offensives back and forth across Cyrenaica in the previous two years was proof that there was no way to hold Libya—nor in truth was there anything in it worth holding were it possible. Tunisia, however, was another story, as it had the potential to be, for a while at least, an Axis bastion: the terrain was far more rugged, offering far better opportunities for establishing strong defensive positions, the sea route between Italy’s southern ports and the city of Tunis was significantly shorter and better protected.

  Rommel did not imagine that Tunisia could hold out indefinitely against the Allies: the overwhelming industrial capacity of the United States would, in his considered opinion, assure an eventual Allied victory in any theater where its output could be properly brought to bear. What he was already intuiting—and would see evidence of before his run in Africa was over—was that between them the Americans and the British were bringing not just superior numbers to war, but a more intelligent, sophisticated, and realistic application of their resources than were the Soviets—or the Germans, for that matter. Whereas the Soviets were content with the simplicity of sheer brute force strategy and tactics, and the Germans were depending on their technological superiority to make up for their deficiencies in production capacity, the Allies were building a systematic way of waging war, akin to a machine, one that would, if given sufficient time, integrate formations, units, and weapons types, land, air, and sea into an irresistible force. One that would still be subject to the mental and physical limitations of the flesh-and-blood creatures who had to operate and guide it, but that had been fundamentally designed from the beginning to fight battles in the way the Allies intended to fight them. As Rommel saw it, the Wehrmacht could not defeat that machine, therefore the Gemans must find a way to make it too expensive for the Allies to continue to operate it. That process, he believed, could begin in Tunisia.215

  The first part of this strategy would be economy of force: throwing more men and materiel into Tunisia was not the solution; doing so would, in fact, only make the situation there worse. Rommel’s dash across Libya and into Egypt in the spring and summer of 1942, then the retreat from El Alamein had shown that, however good might be the int
entions in Berlin and Rome, sustaining an actual army along the length of the North African coast was beyond the ability of the Axis. In Tunisia, however, a few well-trained, well-equipped mechanized divisions would be able to hold a perimeter near the borders, where mountains, passes, and defiles limited the practical routes along which the Allies could attack; all nonessential personnel ought to be evacuated immediately. As Allied pressure inevitably increased, the remaining units would gradually withdraw, reducing the length of their front, methodically evacuating troops and, when possible, equipment as the perimeter shrank. This process would continue until the Allies finally overran the whole of Tunisia, with nothing to show for their efforts but a handful of prisoners—“and thus be robbed of the fruits of their victory, just as we had been at Dunkirk,” as Rommel put it.

  The troops successfully withdrawn from Tunisia would be a solid core of seasoned veterans, wily to the ways of the British and the Americans, around which would be built the army that would defend Sicily and Italy from the invasions that everyone knew would follow the loss of North Africa.216

  And so the purpose of his unscheduled flight to Berlin and his sudden appearance at the Führerhauptquartier in East Prussia was to persuade Hitler that there was a viable strategy for Tunisia, one that went beyond merely holding “to the last man and the last round.” He was confident, having always been welcomed in the past by the Führer, that this time he would be received at least cordially. He was shocked, then, when brought into the conference room where Hitler was holding court, the first words to issue forth from the dictator’s mouth were a shout of, “How dare you leave the theater of your command without my permission!”217

  It’s impossible to tell how much of Hitler’s outburst was the product of genuine anger, how much was theatrics, and how much was induced by frustration as he confronted an escalating emergency on the Eastern Front. Just six days earlier the Red Army had encircled and isolated the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad: a quarter-million Axis soldiers were trapped behind Soviet lines, and the situation was still deteriorating. War with the Soviet Union—the National Socialist crusade to rid the world of Bolshevism—had always been one-half of Hitler’s overriding compulsion (the other half being the eradication of the Jewish people), and suddenly the spearhead of the crusade, Sixth Army, was facing a military disaster. To Hitler the worth of the campaign in North Africa had always been exceedingly minor, even when Rommel was winning his most smashing victories; Rommel himself was always more useful to Hitler for his propaganda value than for strategic accomplishments. Now, when Rommel came to all but beg for the means to restore Panzerarmee Afrika to a fighting force, all Hitler had to offer was insult and abuse, accusing the men of the Afrika Korps of cowardice, denigrating them for having thrown their weapons away. If Rommel had followed the orders he, Hitler, had issued, the line at El Alamein would have held and there would have been no need for Rommel to come to Rastenburg, to Wolfsschanze to beg for new tanks, guns, and equipment for his men. Rommel, coldly and stiffly correct—no small feat for someone with his temper—told the Führer that the British bombers, tanks and artillery had simply blown the German soldiers’ weapons to pieces; it was, he asserted, nothing short of a miracle that anyone had escaped capture. Hitler could not be bothered to listen to the truth.

  . . . there was no attempt at discussion. The Führer said that his decision to hold the eastern front in the winter of 1941–42 had saved Russia and that there, too, he had upheld his orders ruthlessly. I began to realise that Adolf Hitler simply did not want to see the situation as it was, and that he reacted emotionally against what his intelligence must have told him was right. He said that it was a political necessity to continue to hold a major bridgehead in Africa and there would, therefore, be no withdrawal from the Mersa el Brega line.218

  With that, Hitler made a few vague promises about more supplies and new equipment, then coldly dismissed Rommel; he should have been paying closer attention to what the field marshal was saying, as Rommel had been doing his best to explain how to avert an even greater catastrophe than the one that was unfolding between the Volga and the Don.

  Rommel’s (wisely well-concealed) anger and resentment at Hitler’s refusal to talk constructively about the situation in North Africa was compounded when he learned that he would be traveling to Rome with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. The Luftwaffe commander-in-chief had never been one of Rommel’s favorites—Rommel very early on detected the underlying malignity of Göring’s character—and the feeling was compounded by the memory of Kesselring’s condescension and obstructionism—for that is what Rommel saw it to be—for the last six months in North Africa. Rommel found the journey to Rome aboard Göring’s specially appointed train uniformly unpleasant, as he was compelled was to

  . . . witness the antics of the Reichsmarschall in his special train. The situation did not seem to trouble him in the slightest. He plumed himself, beaming broadly at the primitive flattery heaped on him by imbeciles from his own court, and talked of nothing but jewelry and pictures. At other times his behavior could perhaps be amusing; now, it was infuriating.219

  Rommel suspected that Göring, who was ostensibly going to Rome as Hitler’s plenipotentiary to negotiate new arrangements for supplying Panzerarmee Afrika, had ulterior motives for this excursion. Göring was by nature amibtious—not, as Rommel would have been the first to agree, a bad trait in a man; but he was also ruthless, petty, jealous, and above all amoral. He coveted the influence in the Third Reich which the Waffen-SS gave Heinrich Himmler, its nominal commander-in-chief. He was in the process of creating what was in Rommel’s eyes his own Praetorian Guard by organizing Luftwaffe field divisions—mostly infantry units—formed out of surplus Luftwaffe ground personnel. There would ultimately be 20 such divisions—plus the “Hermann Göring Panzer Division”—most of which saw some combat on the Russian Front, where they performed adequately at best; if Göring had hoped they would be the equal of the Waffen-SS he was sadly disappointed. However, he saw an opportunity in North Africa for the Luftwaffe’s ground force to make a name for itself, as he regarded the British and Americans as weak and ineffective. Rommel suspected that Göring coveted the post of commander-in-chief in North Africa and was working to bring about Rommel’s dismissal. Göring was unquestionably the source of the rumors that Rommel was a sick man whose illness had fostered a pessimism which colored all of his reports to the O.K.W. and the Führer.

  He gave birth to the absurd idea that I was governed by moods and could only command when things went well; if they went badly I became depressed and caught the “African sickness.” From this it was argued that since, to win battles, it needed a general who believed in victory and since I was a sick man anyway, it was necessary to consider whether to relieve me of my command. On the subject of the “moods,” I should perhaps say that we at the front were naturally not particularly pleased when the situation approached disaster. The Reichsmarschall, on the other hand, sat through it all in his railway carriage. Thus the angle of approach was a little different.220

  Even as Rommel and Göring rolled toward Rome, the combat elements of the Hermann Göring Division were on their way to Tunisia. Rommel, of course, deplored the entire idea of “private armies,” whether they belonged to Heinrich Himmler or Hermann Göring. They created too much competition for limited resources of manpower and equipment, and there was too much duplication of effort in maintaining three separate logisitic organizations. But the Nazi tradition of empire-building, which went all the way back to the days of Ernst Röhm and the SA, was too deeply entrenched, so there was little Rommel could do to stem the rising tide of inefficiency and ineptitude.221

  On the other hand, Rommel was not entirely ignorant in the ways of using empires other men had built within the Third Reich. If there was any chance for him to remain in command of Panzerarmee Afrika, he could not propose any further withdrawals: Hitler was now enthralled by his own “no retreat” dogma, and Mussolini, if only for political purposes, w
as echoing the Führer. Defying the two dictators, regardless of how sound the military reasons for such defiance, would all but assure Rommel’s dismissal. And yet, for him, it was imperative that he secure permission to begin moving the army all the way back to Gabes, 80 miles inside Tunisia, where the French had built the Mareth Line, a wide, deep belt of prewar fortifications built to hold off any Italian attack out of Tripolitania, before Montgomery began his attack on Mersa el Brega. It would mean the difference between an orderly withdrawal which would save all the men as well as the carefully hoarded vehicles and equipment the army had been able to save from the wreck of Libya, and a hasty, disorganized retreat where some men and materiel would have to be sacrificed to save the lion’s share of the army. Rommel knew that whatever plan of operations he put forward in the upcoming conference with Mussolini would automatically incur Göring’s opposition. Leutnant Berndt, on the other hand, whose high standing within the Nazi Party and at the Propaganda Ministry gave him a certain cachet with the Reichsmarschall, was the perfect emissary for presenting Rommel’s proposal for a retreat into Tunisia.

  This Berndt did—but not before Rommel added a twist to it that he was certain would play on not only Göring’s vanity but on his ambition, as well. This was to disguise the withdrawal to Gabes as a maneuver which would be the prelude to opening an attack to the west, out of Tunisia, against the Americans in Algiers. The panzerarmee would fall back past the Mareth Line, head northwest and combine with the fresh German units in Tunisia, including the 10th Panzer Division, which had just been dispatched to Tunis. A lightning-quick blow against the Americans to knock them back on their heels, perhaps even push them farther westward, and then the panzerarmee could be back on the Mareth Line to meet any counterstroke by the Eighth Army before Montgomery could finish amassing his troops and supplies.