Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox Read online

  Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

  Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword by Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck

  PRELUDE

  1. BENGHAZI (RETURN)

  2. “OUR FRIEND ROMMEL”

  3. BETWEEN TWO WARS

  4. GHOST DIVISION

  5. “NONE SO BLIND...”

  6. DESERT UPS AND DOWNS

  I. Rommel v. Wavell

  II. “Operation Crusader”

  7. TO THE GATES OF ALEXANDRIA

  8. THE ENEMY IN AFRICA

  I. “Desert-Worthy”

  II. Nostr'Alleati Italiani

  III. Civil War

  9. TO TUNIS AND SURRENDER

  10. THE ATLANTIC WALL

  11. “A PITILESS DESTINY”

  Appendix One: Rommel's Record of Service

  Appendix Two: The Rommel Papers

  Acknowledgments

  My grateful thanks are due to Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck for writing the foreword to the book and for his unvarying kindness to me during the years I was privileged to serve him; to Field-Marshal Earl Wavell, General Sir Richard O'Connor and Lt.-Gen. Sir Arthur Smith for giving me their appreciations of Rommel as a commander; to Brigadier E. J. Shearer, C.B., Brigadier E. T. Williams, C.B., D.S.O., Brigadier C. D. Quilliam, C.B.E. and Major Digby Raebum, D.S.O for information regarding Rommel's first appearance in the Western Desert; to Colonel G. H. Clifton, D.S.O., M.C. for the story of his interviews with Rommel as a prisoner-of-war, and to Lt.-Col. R. M. P. Carver, C.B., D.S.O., M.C. for allowing me to quote from his detailed account of the November-December 1941 battle (published in theRoyal Armoured Corps Journal ), and to use his maps.

  To Chester Wilmot I am deeply indebted for invaluable help about “sources,” to Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, Captain B. H. Liddell Hart and Alan Moorehead for advice and permission to quote from their writings, to Lt.-Col. P. Findlay for translatingInfanterie Greift An , to Dr. Paul Weber of Berne for procuring material in Switzerland, to my friends Mr. and Mrs. Gough of NeuchŸtel for driving me about Germany and to Lt.-Col. H. O. Larter of the U.S. Army Historical Section at Frankfurt for helping me when I was there. I am also grateful to Doubleday & Company for permission to quote from General Eisenhower'sCrusade in Europe , and to the Trustees of Count Ciano's Estate for quotations fromCiano's Diaries.

  On “the other side of the hill,” I received the greatest possible help from Frau Rommel and her son Manfred, from Vice-Admiral Ruge, from Generals Bayerlein, von Esbeck, von Ravenstein and Speidel, from Captains Aldinger and Hartmann, from Dr. Karl Str”lin of Stuttgart, who told me the story of Rommel's association with the plot against Hitler, from Baron von Esebeck, war correspondent, military historian and friend of Rommel, who served with him in North Africa and in Normandy, from Wilhelm Wessels, war artist with the Afrika Korps, and from Herbert G�nther, Rommel's batman for nearly four years.

  Lastly, I owe a great debt to my wife, who suggested the idea to me, kept me up to it and, in the intervals of marketing, cooking and dealing with a litter of puppies, contrived somehow to type what I wrote - and to improve it by criticism.

  Cottage du Grand Gondin Valescure. (Var.)

  D. Y.

  Foreword

  BY FIELD-MARSHAL SIR CLAUDE J. E. AUCHINLECK,

  G.C.B., G.C.I.E., C.S.I., D.S.O., O.B.E.

  In this book is reproduced a letter which I thought necessary to send to my commanders in the field when the name of Rommel was acquiring almost magical properties in the minds of our soldiers. An enemy commander does not gain a reputation of this sort unless be is out of the ordinary and Rommel was certainly exceptional. Germany produces many ruthlessly efficient generals: Rommel stood out amongst them because he had overcome the innate rigidity of the German military mind and was a master of improvisation.

  The German junior officers of the Afrika Korps, the platoon, company and battalion commanders, were, it always seemed to me, better grounded in tactics than our own. This was not the fault of our men but of the peculiar tasks laid on our Army in peace and of the lack of any really systematic training. As the war went on, our men found their feet and, more often than not, outmatched the Germans because their natural tactical instinct was developed and forced to display itself by stress of circumstance. But in the higher ranks Rommel remained pre-eminent as a leader on the battlefield. I can testify myself to his resilience, resourcefulness and mental agility and so long as we are still unhappily obliged to train our youth to arms and our officers to lead them into battle, there is much that we can learn from a study of him and his methods.

  My own contacts with Rommel were confined to encounters with him and the Afrika Korps in the campaigns of 1941-42 in the Western Desert, but after reading the story of his earlier and later years I find that my idea of him, formed in those strenuous days when the battle was swinging back and forth between Benghazi and Alexandria, does not differ much from the author's considered appreciation. In one respect, however, my conception was wrong. I was surprised to learn how simple and homely he seems to have been. I think that we who were fighting against him pictured him as a typical Junker officer, a product of the Prussian military machine.

  That he evidently was not and it may well be that this accounts for his amazing - and it was amazing - success as a leader of men in battle.

  Rommel gave me and those who served under my command in the Desert many anxious moments. There could never be any question of relaxing our efforts to destroy him, for if ever there was a general whose sole preoccupation was the destruction of the enemy, it was he. He showed no mercy and expected none. Yet I could never translate my deep detestation of the r‚gime for which he fought into personal hatred of him as an opponent. If I say, now that he is gone, that I salute him as a soldier and a man and deplore the shameful manner of his death, I may be accused of be- longing to what Mr. Bevin has called the “trade union of generals.”

  So far as I know, should such a fellowship exist, membership in it implies no more than recognition in an enemy of the qualities one would wish to possess oneself, respect for a brave, able and scrupulous opponent and a desire to see him treated, when beaten, in the way one would have wished to be treated had he been the winner and oneself the loser. This used to be called chivalry: many will now call it nonsense and say that the days when such sentiments could survive a war are past. If they are, then I, for one, am sorry.

  The author of this book, Brigadier Desmond Young, has spared no pains to learn the facts of Rommel's life and death from his family and others and I cannot think of any one better fitted to record them. A veteran of the first World War, he was in the thick of the fighting in the Desert until he had the bad luck to be taken at Gazala while the battle was still in the balance. He is an old friend of mine and, after his escape from enemy hands, became one of my staff officers. In Delhi and on long trips in aircraft about the world we have talked about most subjects under the sun. But, lest I be suspected of having inspired his views of military matters on which different opinions may well be held, I should perhaps say that I have never discussed with him the conduct of the war in North Africa. His conclusions about that, as about most other things, are his own, for he is a man of independent mind. As for his book, I read it only after it had already gone to the printers.

  I did so with the greatest interest and enjoyment, and I am sure that it will prove as fascinating to others as it was to me. That apart, I welcome it because it does justice to a stout-hearted adversary and may help to show to a new generation of Germans that it is not their soldierly qualities which we dislike but only the repeated
misuse of them by their rulers.

  Prelude

  Shambling along in the first, sharp sunshine of a June morning we had just cleared the minefield west of Bir Harmat. It was in and around the headquarters of 10th Indian Infantry Brigade at Bir Harmat that we had been overrun by German tanks the evening before. Like all prisoners who have spent a night in the open, we were a scruffy lot. British and Indian, some shivering in bush-shirts and shorts, some muffled to the eyes in greatcoats, blankets and Balaclava helmets, all unshaven, unwashed, tired, hungry and disarranged inside, we were beginning to realise that what was jocularly known in the Middle East as “going into the bag” was not much of a joke after all. Our guards glanced at us from time to time with the dispassionate contempt with which we ourselves had so often surveyed the endless columns of captive Italians. Terrified, normally, of mines, I trudged along through the fringe of the minefield for easier walking. It was only when a young German soldier called me sharply back to the column that I looked down to see where I was putting my feet - and then I did not very much care.

  On the other side of the minefield we passed in front of a German battery in action. Our guns and some tanks, hull-down, were evidently looking for it. Shell from a 25-pounder battery and tracer from the tanks began to fall round the column. A young officer near me had his foot blown off. There were shouts of alarm from up in front. By a common impulse, everyone broke into a shuffling double. I ran for a few yards with the rest and then, because it is just as easy to run into shell-bursts as out of them, dropped back into a walk. Soon I found myself alongside the blond young representative of the Afrika Korps who was bringing up the rear. He motioned to me to run. I took off my cap and showed him my grey hairs. Like a young sheepdog, doubtful whether to pick up a straggler or to keep the rest of the flock together, he hesitated. Then he doubled off in pursuit, beckoning to me to follow.

  Since the battery seemed occupied with its own affairs, I strolled off casually to the flank. Fifty yards or so away I found what I was looking for, a slit trench. I slid into it and pulled the spoil down on top of me. Capture in the desert was seldom final. With luck I might lie there until dark and then have a cut at getting through the minefield. Home, by now, might not be until El Adem, but plenty of people had walked much further than that.

  Twenty minutes later I was picked up. A German officer, standing up in his truck, spotted me as he passed and stopped. I was hauled out and driven, to the head of the column, still under sporadic sheilfire. Before I could mingle with the rest of the party a German captain shouted to me in English: “You are the senior officer here?” Perhaps I was. Certainly I was the oldest. “You will go in a staff-car with two German officers under a flag of truce and tell your battery over there to stop firing. They are only endangering your own men.” That was true enough. One's natural instinct as a prisoner-of-war is not, however, to do as one is told. I said that I did not think that I could do that. “Then you will detail another officer to do it.” I said that I did not think I could give such an order either. (I spent odd moments during the next sixteen months wondering how they would have got me back if I had reached the battery and whether I had not been a fool to refuse.)

  At this moment a Volkswagen drove up. Out of it jumped a short, stocky but wiry figure, correctly dressed, unlike the rest of us, in jacket and breeches. I noticed that he had a bright blue eye, a firm jaw and an air of command. One did not need to understand German to realise that he was asking “What goes on here?” They talked together for a few seconds. Then the officer who spoke English turned to me. “The General rules,” he said sourly, “that if you do not choose to obey the order I have just given you, you cannot be compelled to do so.” I looked at the general and saw, as I thought, the ghost of a smile. At any rate his intervention seemed to be worth a salute. I cut him one before I stepped back into the ranks to be driven off into captivity.

  I could hardly have failed to recognise Rommel. But I could hardly have supposed that, only a few years later, his widow would be showing me his death-mask and telling me the story of his murder.

  ROMMEL, THE DESERT FOX

  Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

  CHAPTER 1 Benghazi (Return)

  In the middle of February, 1941, British stock stood sky-high in Egypt. Those unfailing barometers of our fortunes, the barmen of Cairo and Alexandria, became so effusive that occasionally they could barely restrain themselves from setting up a round “on the house.”Suffragis* [* Egyptian hotel servants] lost something of their camel-like air of contempt; even Egyptian taxi-drivers grew approximately polite. In the higher reaches, fat pashas invited senior British officers to the Mahomed Ali Club. There were garden parties in the gardens of the rich around Gezireh. Cairo society ceased to practise its Italian. Relations between the Monarch and His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador were reputed to verge upon the cordial. In a word, the East (and in this there is no difference between Near and Middle and Far), was making its instinctive salaam to success. Only the shopkeepers of the Kasr-el-Nil, torn between a patriotic desire to see the last of us and a deeper-rooted reluctance to see the last of our money, reflected gloomily that the stream of piastres might soon be diverted to their opposite numbers in Tripoli.

  On our side, the personable young women working as telephonists in G.H.Q. or as probationers in the hospitals stared with open admiration as one, of the young lions of the 11th Hussars sauntered in his cherry-coloured slacks through the lounge of Shepheard's or the roof-garden of the Continental. For these were the most famous of the “desert rats” of the famous 7th Armoured Division. It was they who had struck the first blow, crossing the frontier wire the night after Italy entered the war and returning with a batch of Italian prisoners. Thereafter, for these past eight months, they had lived in the enemy's pockets, roaming behind his lines in their armoured cars, watching his every move, shooting him up along the coast road until he was afraid to stir after dark. Only the Long Range Desert Group was later to equal their reputation for daring. Even the escorts of the young women had to admit that, though the cavalry might be a trifle snob, a good British cavalry regiment “had something.”

  In the cloakrooms of the hotels the felt caps of the Rifle Brigade, with their silver Maltese crosses, hung beside those of the 60th with their red bosses and slung bugles. In the bar, the officers of these two almost equally famous battalions of the Support Group reluctantly conceded to each other a common humanity which they were unwilling to recognise in any one else, except, of course, the cavalry and the Royal Horse Artillery.

  As for the Australians, strolling through the streets, oblivious of senior officers, or driving, according to their custom, ten up in shabby victorias, they surveyed sardonically the town which their fathers had “taken apart” at the end of the first war. From time to time, they broke into “Waltzing Matilda” or “The Wizard of Oz.” The caf, proprietors, the dragomen, the vendors of fly-whisks and erotic postcards regarded them with a respect born of apprehension rather than affection.

  Setting an example to Cairo in turn-out and saluting, “details” left behind by 4th Indian Division, now departed to fresh victories in Eritrea and Abyssinia, moved inconspicuously among the crowds.

  If Egypt had a good opinion of the Army of the Nile, the Army of the Nile had a good conceit of itself - and with reason. In the last two months it had advanced 500 miles. It had beaten and destroyed an Italian army of four corps, comprising nine divisions and part of a tenth. It had captured 130,000 prisoners, 400 tanks and 1,290 guns, besides vast quanti- ties of other material. (Included in “other material” were clean sheets and comfortable beds, silk shirts, elaborate toilet-sets in Florentine leather, scent and scented “hair-muck,” be- coming blue cavalry-cloaks,vino andliquore of all varieties, Pellegrino water in profusion, to say nothing of a motor-caravan of young women, “officers for the use of...” The Italians went to war in comfort.) When General Berganzoli (“Electric Whiskers”) surrendered unconditionally on February 7th, he was jo
ined in captivity in India by more general officers than that country had seen together since the 1911 Durbar.

  The army of Graziani which, it had seemed the previous summer, had only to jump into its trucks and drive to Cairo, under cover of a superior air force, and which, indeed, might well have done so, had been swept from the map. Graziani himself, complaining that Mussolini had compelled him to wage war “as a flea against an elephant” (“a peculiar flea,” commented the Duce, “with more than a thousand guns”), had posted his will to his wife and retired, first to a Roman tomb, 70 feet deep, in Cirene and then to Italy.

  All this bad been achieved at a cost of 500 killed, 1,373 wounded and 55 missing, by a force only three divisions strong, of which only two divisions were employed at one time in the operations - 7th Armoured Division and 4th Indian Division, the latter relieved after the battle of Sidi Barrani by 6th Australian Division.

  The echoes of General Wavell's offensive were soon drowned in the thunder of greater battles on the Russian front. It became the fashion to decry victories won over the Italians. But in the very decision to attack an enemy so overwhelmingly superior in numbers, in the plan whereby our troops were to lie up for a whole day in the open desert within thirty miles of him, penetrate his line of forts by night unseen and then turn and attack them from the rear at dawn, was the first sign of military genius on our side.

  Badly officered and with little heart for the war, the Italians crumbled under the shock of surprise, of the discovery that their field-guns could not pierce the armour of our “I” tanks and of the assault of troops whose standard of training was as high as their spirit. Better divisions have done the same before and since. But it is wrong to suppose that these operations were just a glorified field-day. At Nibeiwa many of the Italian gunners served their pieces until the tanks ran over them. General Maletti, already wounded, was killed firing a machine-gun from his tent. At Beda Fomm the 2nd Rifle Brigade alone beat off nine tank attacks, pressed home with determination.