CHAPTER NINE
ROMMEL
Of the greatest names in German military history Rommel stands out as a man apart. His exploits during his years of battle owed a breath-taking audacity and an imaginative approach to fighting consistent with the greatest commanders of all time.
Erwin Rommel came from a typical middle-class environment in provincial Germany.
He grew up in Bismarck's Second Reich, saw it collapse in 1918 and witnessed Germany struggle through the 1920's and emerge again under Hitler's regime before the final cataclysm of World War Two. Like many great commanders Rommel remains an enigma, for although his life spanned a period of his country's most turbulent politics he seemed only awakened by the demands of battle. His military achievements were so spectacular that they have ensured his reputation in the history of war. On the battlefield, Rommel was often a man of genius; off it, he was essentially a small-town German hardly compatible with the romanticised image his military exploits have earned for him.
Rommel’s military experience emerged from the field of battle, rather than through any administrative or policy-making process at the level of grand strategy or in the general staff. He was more at home in the execution of decisions than in the formulation of policy. He was an instinctive rather than an intellectual fighter. It took the smell of gunpowder, almost literally, to excite his senses.
Erwin Rommel was born on 15th November 1891, at Heidelheim, near Ulm. His father was a schoolteacher, as had his father before him. His mother was the daughter of a former president of the provincial government. Rommel joined the army in July 1910, having abandoned his first thought of becoming an engineer. He signed up with his local infantry regiment as an officer cadet, and went to the officer’s military school at Danzig. While he was in Danzig, Rommel met a young language student, Lucie Maria Mollin, the daughter of a Prussian landowner. They married in 1916, and their only child, Manfred, was born in 1928.
On 2nd August 1914, Rommel's regiment marched off to war, with bands playing, drums beating, and crowds cheering. A few days later, he was at the front savouring his first taste of a way of life which changed him from the shy, conscientious young man that he was, into what has been described as 'the perfect fighting animal'.
Rommel was posted to a mountain unit, in which his talents as an infantry subaltern with plenty of dash, initiative and energy could be put to better use than in the static trench warfare. On the Carpathian front, he saw action against the Rumanians in the assault on the heavily-fortified positions, then against the Italians at Caporetto. For his action at Caporetto, Rommel was awarded the 'Pour le Merite' which was normally won only by generals and had been awarded to only two junior officers before him. He was also promoted to Captain.
These brief but spectacular campaigns as a young man were all the fighting experience Rommel was to gain until he led a Panzer division across France in 1940. Yet these early experiences of war must also have left their mark on him, for he always seemed to think of battle as a kind of wild dance, an adventure, in which he had to pit his imagination, actually his genius, against improbable odds;
After the Armistice of November 1918, Captain Rommel was reposted to his old regiment, and prepared to settle down in the same barracks in which he had enlisted as a young officer cadet eight years previously. In October 1929, Rommel was posted as an instructor to the infantry school at Dresden. It was while lecturing there on his World War One experiences that he had the idea of publishing his lectures as the manual, Infantry Attacks. In October 1933, he was promoted to Major and in October 1935, he was sent as a lieutenant-colonel to teach at the war academy at Potsdam. In November 1938, he was appointed to command the war academy at Wiener Neustadt, leaving only shortly before the outbreak of war.
But, by then, the years of obscurity were almost over for him. When Hitler had marched into the Sudetenland, Rommel had been in attendance as the commander of his bodyguard. He had at last come to the Fűhrer’s attention. Six years from that first assignment for the dictator, Hitler was to give orders that Rommel was to die. But during those years Hitler was to catapult Rommel into high rank, give him an army, and finally promote him to the rank of Field Marshal.
When Germany invaded Poland on 1st September 1939, Rommel, recently promoted to Major-General, was once again at Hitler's side. Throughout the Polish campaign, he commanded the Fűhrer’s bodyguard and was obviously well placed at the centre to see the devastating effect achieved by the Panzer divisions applying all the tactical principles of the Blitzkrieg. When the campaign was finished, Hitler asked him what command he would like. In his own words, Rommel made the 'immoderate' request for a Panzer division. The request was granted. On 15th February 1940, Rommel assumed command of the 7th Panzer Division. Rommel, ‘the fighting animal’, was back in the fight.
On 10th May, 1940, Hitler struck west. In the space of a week, his Panzer divisions had burst through Holland, Belgium and France to reach the Channel coast. Within three weeks, the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force, a quarter of a million men, had been evacuated across the Channel in any vessel they could find. On 5th June, the Germans were on the Somme; on the 9th they crossed the Seine; on the 14th they entered Paris; they had reached the Rhone valley by the 16th. That same night, a new French Cabinet under Marshal Petain sent Hitler a request for an armistice. There was some token negotiation while the panzer divisions roared on. When France's surrender became effective on 25th June, it was a bare six weeks since the German tanks had first rolled forward into the hilly and wooded country of the Ardennes.
Like most of the other armoured divisions, Rommel's force made some quite spectacular advances during those summer days and nights. Perhaps its most decisive contribution to the overall campaign against France was in the crossing of the River Meuse, which took place after only two days of fighting. The glory and panache of that night-and-day runaway dash through a bewildered France was something common to most of the Panzers.
The pace and distance of the 7th Panzer Division's sweep from the German frontier to Cherbourg earned it the subsequent title of the 'Ghost Division'. In his very first action, on 10th May, Rommel's division brushed through some fairly light opposition from French forces. Rommel, in character, had trained his men to react instantly and aggressively to any encounter. His motor-cyclists were trained to drive on with machine-guns firing at anything which smacked of the enemy. The whole division thus displayed the behaviour of that aggressive young man who had won his spurs in the Argonne.
Rommel’s natural enthusiasm for the battle, and his profound belief that the commander must lead from the front, not only to infect his men with his confidence and enthusiasm but also to see for himself what was going on, naturally became more hazardous as the formations under his command became larger, and the area covered by the battle more extensive. At the head of a Panzer division in France, it was easier for him to command in this way. He was part of a much larger front which was advancing at speed, and the quality of the opposition was clearly not presenting much of a threat
At Arras, Rommel had, for a time, one of his most severe encounters in the French campaign. It was also the first time that he found himself fighting against British troops. His plans to by-pass Arras to the south, and swing round it, nearly foundered under the counter-attack by two British tank regiments. They represented the spearhead of two British divisions which had been ordered to counterattack against the Germans; to protect the right flank of the British Expeditionary Force as it withdrew from Belgium back towards the Channel.
Rommel's encounter at Arras, was in fact only a very minor engagement. On 10th June, Rommel's division reached the sea west of Dieppe, after a non-stop run of sixty miles in pursuit. The next day, he walked into St Valery beside the leading column of tanks to receive the British surrender. Rommel then raced across northern France to the Cherbourg peninsula
On 19th June, the garrison at Cherbourg surrendered. The division's casualties since 10th May were six hundred and eighty two killed, one thousand six hundred and forty six wounded and three hundred missing, with only 42 tanks lost. It captured ninety seven thousand prisoners, 458 tanks and armoured cars, 4 000 trucks, and several hundred guns.
After the fall of France, Rommel's division wintered in Bordeaux. Rommel spent most of the time working on his war diary of May and June 1940, and discussing it with his staff officers. He was promoted to Lieutenant-General in January 1941, and then in early February received a summons to Berlin. He had been posted to Africa. He went straight to Tripoli and was to stay in Africa for more than two years. During those years, he was twice to march1 500 miles eastward up the desert into Egypt, and twice to flee 1 500 miles westward down it, with the British army performing the same movements in reverse.
It is doubtful, however, whether any such dramatic and disastrous developments were anticipated by Hitler and the German general staff when they chose to send Rommel to Africa in early 1941. The desert war had started in September 1940, when Graziani, the Italian commander, pushed his divisions into Egypt against virtually non-existent British defences, and soon reached Sidi Barrani. There he started to consolidate his position. This gave the British time to prepare a counterattack which was duly launched in early December 1940. Thirty thousand British troops were sent in against the Italian army, which numbered, in the forward areas alone, nearly three times their strength. By 8th February 1941, when Rommel was in Berlin, the British army had taken Tobruk, forced the Italians out of Cyrenaica, captured nearly one hundred and thirty thousand prisoners and was in a position to threaten Tripolitania. Rommel later noted in his diary that if Wavell, the British Commander-in-Chief in Cairo, had continued his advance into Tripolitania, no resistance worthy of the name could have been put up against him. The Italian army in Africa had almost ceased to exist. In fact, Wavell was prevented from exploiting his victory by the decision of the British Cabinet to divert many of his troops from the North African theatre to the defence of Greece.
The British Cabinet after the Greek fiasco soon returned to the view that the Libyan campaign was, for Britain, the vital strategic engagement, worthy of all the time and military resources that could be applied to it. For the High Command in Berlin, however, the Africa campaign, certainly at its inception, and perhaps really for its duration, was a sideshow designed as a holding operation, originally conceived to prevent the Italians from being forced out of Africa.
When Rommel answered his summons to Berlin on 6th February 1941, he was told that on account of the Italians' critical situation in Africa, a German Afrika Korps was to be formed with two German divisions. One light and one Panzer, and was to be sent to Libya to help Graziani. Rommel was to be the corps commander and was to move off immediately. The first German troops would arrive by mid-February, the 5th Light Division by mid-April and the Panzer Division by the end of May. Ominously for Rommel, he was also told that, though he would be in command of the Italian motorised elements, he would be subordinate to the Italian Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Graziani. His command relationships with the Italians were destined to create endless trouble for Rommel in the two years in which he was in Africa.
As it turned out, Rommel's genius on the battlefield, and his distance from Berlin, enabled him to transform the situation he found in Africa, and to create there a whole new range of possibilities for German strategy. He assumed that his leaders in Berlin would also revise their original evaluation of the relative unimportance of his mission. In this he was mistaken. They never really did so. Throughout Rommel's time in Africa, and for months even before he went out there, the whole weight of German military preoccupation had been concentrated on the preparations for the gigantic attack on Russia, Operation Barbarossa, which was to be launched in June 1941.
On 10th March, Rommel was told by the OKH (the German supreme army command) not to advance too far until the 5th Division arrived. On 11th March, he flew home to report to Hitler and his generals. He told them that the British position in the bulge of Benghazi offered favourable conditions for him to carry out a successful attack. He would not be able to attack further eastwards, towards Tobruk, until he had dislodged the British forces from their positions. It was agreed between them, and von Brauchitsch repeated to Rommel, that they did not believe that the Afrika Korps was yet strong enough to undertake major operations, but should start, to prepare for a drive on Tobruk the following autumn. The OKH then turned its mind to the ever dominant planning for Barbarossa.
One can see what Rommel had to contend with in his superiors, but one can also see what Halder had to contend with in Rommel. Even allowing for the very different temperaments, they were clearly from the very first meeting talking two totally different languages born from almost diametrically opposite perspectives. Halder was to become obsessed with the Russian venture; yet Rommel could not appreciate that his own part in German grand strategy was, at that stage, only minor.
Rommel’s victories in the desert, however imaginative his plans for exploiting them, German strategy at the time was ineluctably caught up in the Russian operation; and that campaign had a momentum and a scale which would have required more than the victories of two enterprising German divisions in the North African sideshow to alter its course.
Because Rommel was still unaware of the recent British decision to divert resources to Greece, his first days were spent arranging measures to obscure what he thought was the basic weakness of his position and to bluff, what he imagined were the still overwhelming British forces into believing that a substantial Axis reinforcement was in progress. In those early days, Rommel literally commuted every morning from Tripoli to Sirte, flying back in the evening for a round trip of seven hundred miles. He started to plan a counter-offensive at the moment at which his early patrols told him that his fears of an imminent British attack were unfounded.
Rommel ordered an attack on 24th March, and this attack was duly, and successfully, accomplished. The assault was not intended to be the beginning of a major campaign, but once he had started, Rommel soon found that he could not stop. Warfare was to him something more like a continuous operation than a series of set piece attacks. It was a dynamic and unpredictable process in which the only hope of any kind of mastery was to keep moving. So, six days after the assault, he ordered another advance.
In his diaries, one senses the same atmosphere of dynamism and constant movement which characterised his narrative of the French invasion nearly a year before. Of course, there are differences; instead of the divisional commander carrying out his forward reconnaissance on foot, and travelling up and down his divisional area in an armoured car, we now see the corps commander flying everywhere in a little Storch spotter aircraft. Where, in France, fifty miles was an exceptional leap for his division, here the Africa Corps is already strung out over desert distances twice or three times as long. One thing about Rommel's campaign which never changed, however, was his capacity to become exposed to personal danger, and his equally good fortune in escaping from that danger. His plane was fired on, at a height of only 150 feet, by Italian troops who had never seen a Storch before. Another time, he was caught in a sandstorm, and only the refusal of the pilot to be bullied by Rommel into flying on saved them both from flying into death.
By 3rd April, ten days after the first move, Rommel's personal air reconnaissance had given him enough evidence to conclude that a major British retreat was in hand. He decided to recapture the whole of Cyrenaica. Indeed, his thoughts were already reaching much farther than that. One evening, in his tent, he laughed and told his staff officers: “We shall reach the Nile, make a right turn and win everything”.
As the speed of the advance started to quicken, two things happened to Rommel which typified the highly idiosyncratic and personal nature of his command of the Afrika Korps. His Storch landed in a sand hill and could not take off again. He narrowly escaped capture by an approaching British column by taking flight in a discarded German truck which he found in the vicinity. The other event, which was a direct consequence of the first, was that he was completely out of contact with his headquarters, indeed with his entire army. No one knew where he was or where to find him. There was thus a certain amount of confusion between Rommel's original orders for the newly-arrived 5th Light Division to advance, and new orders from his staff who felt that the situation had developed promisingly enough to justify bypassing the British in a leapfrog movement straight to Tobruk. When Rommel reappeared, he declared angrily that he had personally visited the 5th Light Division headquarters and confirmed his original order to attack. But his anger could not obscure the fact that the corps had been forced to operate for some time in a fast-moving mobile battle without its commander, who might easily have come to the same decision to go straight to Tobruk had he remained in a central position at which he could more competently assess the overall situation. Had he done so, he might well have reached Tobruk in time to prevent the British defences consolidating. As it was, the British had time to build up Tobruk, and Rommel's subsequent failure to capture it in 1941 prevented him from a much longer eastward advance.
In fairness to Rommel, he was not the only general in the desert hurrying about out of touch with troops and headquarters. The North African campaign was singular for the number of generals who were captured simply because sharp battle lines were so seldom drawn, and because each engagement resembled nothing so much as a general melee over a very large area. On the night of 6th April, Generals Neame and O'Connor got lost together in their staff car and were captured by a German recce group as they drove north, hoping to make contact with the British units. The next day, Rommel found O'Connor's armoured command vehicle, the Mammoth, lying abandoned but otherwise intact, even to the provision of a pair of sun and sand goggles. He climbed into the vehicle and put on the goggles saying: “Booty permissible, I take it, even for a general”. The goggles and the Mammoth were to become an inseparable part of Rommel's image during the next two years.
By 10th April, Rommel had reached the outer defences of Tobruk, and there he was brought to a halt for the first time. However, in the space of just over two weeks, he had driven the British out of western Cyrenaica and had reversed the strategic situation in North Africa from when he arrived. Naturally, it was not entirely his own doing, but Rommel's genius in the desert was his exploitation of every offensive opportunity that presented itself to him, however small, in the hope of acquiring such momentum that his innate confidence in victory would become, in a sense, self-fulfilling. Indeed, from his point of view, the victories in those two weeks had the desired effect on the British.
As Rommel approached Tobruk in early April, Wavell just had time to fly to Tobruk and pull the British forces together to stop the helter-skelter slide back into Egypt. He decided to make Tobruk into a fortress, with the main British defence line farther east at Sollum. Ironically, Rommel's victories proved upsetting in Berlin. The German general staff were clearly reluctant to make any further provision for the Afrika Korps, whatever its successes, if this would jeopardise the final preparations for Barbarossa. Rommel had hardly reached the outskirts of Tobruk before Halder was referring to his 'preposterous demands'. After Rommel's forces had again been repulsed from Tobruk, Halder drily notes: 'Rommel has at last admitted that his forces are not strong enough to take full advantage of the unique opportunities. It is the impression we have had for some time. Our air transport cannot meet his senseless demands. Aircraft landing there find no fuel for the return flight. He decided instead to send out General Paulus as perhaps the only man with enough personal influence to make Rommel see reason.
Two factors were really at work. One was the crescendo of preparation for Barbarossa, which was due to start in just under two months" time. The other was the fact that, basically, the German general staff did not want to be bothered by the Africa campaign. They had sent Rommel out there to get on with it with a certain number of troops. If he did anything which required more troops, they became rather irritated.
Wavell decided on a three pronged attack against Rommel's forces, ultimately to join up with the garrison at Tobruk, Rommel, for his part, intended to let any British offensive just wear itself out on the by now well-prepared anti-tank defensive positions. His two armoured formations were held in the rear for later committal as the battle developed. His army was poised rather like a dancer ready to sway or swivel in any direction. Perhaps this is how Rommel himself saw it, because he later described how “in a decisive moment it is often possible to decide the issue by making an unexpected shift of one's main weight”. On the third day of the battle, that is just what he did.
The first day of the British attack found Rommel well prepared. No great British headway was made, though the centre column succeeded during the first afternoon in taking Sollum. One of the most serious factors affecting early British tank losses was the devastating use made by the Germans of their 88mm anti-aircraft guns converted into an anti-tank role. Rommel meanwhile decided to commit his two armoured formations to the battle, having decided that the British armour had by then been satisfactorily worn down on his defences.
It was at this point, on the second night of the three-day battle that Rommel decided to shift his weight. In doing so, he achieved a decisive change in his fortunes. Until that moment, the battle of attrition of the first two days had, on balance, probably ended better for the British than for the Germans. Certainly, that was what the British felt on the second night, and Rommel too knew that the 15th Panzer Division's tank strength had dropped from eighty to thirty. But Rommel's subsequent manoeuvres managed to take the British by surprise, throw them off balance and cause a hasty withdrawal, leaving Rommel in sole possession of the battlefield.
Rommel and the Afrika Korps were exultant. In London, Churchill, if not inconsolable, nevertheless resolved to change his commanders. On 21st June, 1941, the day on which Hitler attacked Russia, Wavell was replaced by Auchinleck. With his victory Rommel's first phase in Africa was virtually over. It was to be some months before the new phase began. From June until November 1941, the desert war saw a period of consolidation and reorganisation on both sides. While the first weeks of the enormous German offensive against Russia were in progress, Rommel clearly had little chance of attracting much attention from anybody at supreme headquarters.
One of the main disputes during the summer concerned the command structure of the African forces, which were eventually reorganised from being merely the Afrika Korps to becoming the Panzer Group Afrika. Rommel, newly promoted to Panzer General, was put in command of the army group which consisted of both the Afrika Korps and five Italian divisions.
As the months went by, it became more and more obvious to Rommel that his position was basically untenable as long as the British held out in Tobruk behind his forward lines and threatening his lines of communication, which stretched back three hundred miles to Benghazi and nearly a thousand miles to Tripoli. He decided to time his attack for the second half of November. Berlin told him to postpone it, but Rommel ignored this advice and went ahead with his plans. It was to be a costly decision, for the British had not been idle either. Rommel refused to listen to the warnings that he received that the British were planning an offensive which might occur before his own plans came to fruition. When the British did start their offensive, Rommel was taken by surprise; although his tactical acrobatics saved him from disaster, the overall outcome was a six-week retreat across all those precious miles of desert he had won the previous spring, so that by the end of the year he was almost back where he had started from.
In these months he was to have his first experience of General Auchinleck's influence on the campaign. When Auchinleck had arrived in Cairo to succeed Wavell, he reached a fairly early conclusion that British forces could not return to the offensive in the western desert until the situations elsewhere in the theatre, were made secure. Churchill was badgering him as usual, and Auchinleck initially agreed that Tobruk might not be defensible after September, particularly if Rommel advanced far enough east to take the airfield at Sidi Barrani, thus putting Tobruk out of the range of British fighter cover.
The offensive that Auchinleck was planning, which came to be called "Crusader", was something he refused to be rushed into until the right preparations were made. So, in preparation for Crusader, Auchinleck organised the construction of large forward supply-dumps; the railway from Alexandria was extended farther westward; and a pipeline for fuel was laid along 150 miles. There is an inescapable contrast between these deliberate and methodical preparations for a British offensive and the impression which Rommel nearly always gives of an almost haphazard approach to the problem of supply. This may partly have been due to the fact that in the desert he was not in sole command of the supply organisation, and that there was constant feuding about it with the Italians, aggravated by the different equipment the two allies used. Nevertheless, one suspects of Rommel that he was always a little too ready to bewail the lack of supplies, and to imply that the supply organisation had let him down, without seeing that in desert war an acute awareness of supply was absolutely central to every tactical appreciation.
Meanwhile, Auchinleck and his new 8th Army commander, General Cunningham, were making their final dispositions. They agreed that the overall objective for General Cunningham should be the destruction of the enemy forces in the desert; this to be achieved by a feint towards Tobruk by a motorised infantry division in order to lure Rommel's two Panzer divisions out of the protected positions, so that the British armour could do battle with them in the open.
The torrential rain had put all airfields out of operation, so that there was no air reconnaissance, and the British forces therefore achieved almost total surprise when they advanced to the first attack. Rommel was reluctant to believe that it was anything more than another reconnaissance in force and, for the best part of the first day's fighting, he refused to abandon his cherished plan to attack Tobruk and instead concentrate on the British threat.
By 21st November, after three days of fighting, the British were still consolidating their position round Sidi Rezegh, and hoping to link up with the 70th Division, which had been given orders to break out of Tobruk. It was in the Sidi Rezegh area that the battle now became concentrated. Both German and Italian forces were deployed there to prevent the British link-up, and the clash of armour which ensued lasted three days. At the end of it, Rommel, had had the best of almost every engagement, had recaptured the airfield at Sidi Rezegh and had seen off the 7th Armoured Division. The British had withdrawn; but at least they were still in one piece, while the Germans suffered extensive losses which they could ill afford. The desert was littered with the charred hulks of literally hundreds of vehicles. The tank strength of both sides was now reduced to between seventy and eighty apiece.
On 23rd November, Rommel decided to gather up his armour, or what was left of it, and, to destroy the 7th Armoured Division. While Rommel was making this quite unexpected choice, a crisis of confidence was gripping the British leadership. General Cunningham had lost his nerve. Having lost so many tanks, he feared for the safety of his infantry divisions under the ravages of Rommel's Panzers. Should he continue the battle, at such risk possibly to the security of all Egypt? He decided that the magnitude of this decision was too much for him alone, and signalled for Auchinleck to come up from Cairo. After Cunningham had briefed him, Auchinleck replied that he had no doubt whatever that their only course was to continue the offensive with every means at their disposal. At last, Rommel was being opposed by an equal will.
Auchinleck, in his official despatch, later explained his reasons, and in the process gave a not inaccurate analysis of Rommel's real situation at this moment in the battle. But how nearly Rommel, in his next trick, created just that chaos and loss of balance which Auchinleck was at such pains to prevent. Rommel's plan was not quite as he had described it in his cable to Berlin. He was to put himself at the head of the Africa Corps and drive round behind the British, which was immediately between him and the frontier. He wanted then to force them back against the minefields The exhilaration of battle must by then have overcome him, affecting the coolness of his judgment, for the task he set himself involved an initial drive of at least sixty miles of desert even before he reached the frontier wire, and he would have to go well past the wire before he could swing up to the left. Yet Rommel told his subordinates that he intended to complete the whole operation that day and be back possibly by that night.
On the morning of the 24th, at 10 30 hours he set off at the head of just one Panzer regiment, with the rest of the corps following at noon. Rommel was destined to create almost as much chaos and confusion among his own staff, as he was on the enemy, in the what has come to be known as his 'dash to the wire'.
The immediate effect on the British, was to induce a state of near