Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox Read online

  Whether, had he been allowed to try, General Wavell could have gone on to Tripoli, thus turning what had been planned as a five-day raid into a major offensive, is another matter. Would our worn-out tanks and over-taxed transport have been equal to another five hundred miles? Would not the still intact Italian divisions in Tripoli, secure from surprise, have fortified the line Homs-Tirhuana, as General Montgomery expected the Germans to do nearly two years later? Could Benghazi have been used as a supply port under intensive bombing? Above all, would not the Germans have reacted - and flown over their reserve airborne divisions from southern Italy? On the whole, it seems that General O'Connor, comanding Western Desert Force, would have found himself “out on a limb,” even if he had reached Tripoli. At that time we had not the means to exploit an operation which had already succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.*

  [* it is fair to say that General O'Connor himself and most German generals take a different view.]

  Still, Egypt was safe, the Axis power in North Africa broken and British prestige in the Middle East restored. For the first time since the Battle of Britain, people at home had something to celebrate.

  Two months later there was consternation in Cairo and British stock slumped as quickly as it had risen. Gradually the details of the disaster filtered through. Benghazi evacuated - that was unfortunate but no doubt “according to plan”; 2nd Armoured Division, recently arrived from England, destroyed as a fighting force, its commander, Major-General Gambier-Parry and his headquarters captured at Mechili; 3rd Indian Motor Brigade overrun there in its first action; 9th Australian Division invested in Tobruk; Lieutenant-General Sir Richard O'Connor, promoted and knighted for his recent success, “in the bag” with Lieutenant-General Philip Neame, V.C. and Lieutenant-Colonel John Combe of the 11th Hussars; Bardia, Sollum and Capuzzo gone; the enemy back on the escarpment east of the frontier wire; the threat to Egypt greater than ever. Not even “a Cairo spokesman” could succeed in convincing the world that this was merely “a propaganda success,” not even the honeyed tones of the B.B.C. commentator, Mr. Richard Dimbleby, gloss over it.

  Not, at least, so far as the Egyptians were concerned. A cynical and realistic race, especially where their own interests are involved, they saw the red light quickly. The Italians - they had never thought much of them. But these Germans, what soldiers! Real professionals, like our own Egyptian Army. It was to be hoped that they would respect property in Cairo and not play tricks with the currency. Perhaps it would be as well to keep up one's Italian and even to learn a little German.... Meanwhile, better continue to be civil to the British, just in case.... But no need to overdo it. Neither then nor later did they ever entirely desert Mr. Micawber. There were, however, notable variations in the temperature of their affection for him.

  Though the fog of war lay rather unnecessarily thick on our command in the forward areas and there were several “regrettable incidents,” there was no mystery about Gen eral Wavell's defeat. The seeds of it were sown when the Chiefs of Staff telegraphed to him, immediately after the fall of Benghazi, telling him to be prepared to send the largest possible army and air forces from the Middle East to Greece. When those forces were duly dispatched, he lost “practically the whole of the troops which were fully equipped and fit for operations.”

  In the last resort, the statement must overrule the soldiers, for they alone see the whole picture. It may be that, for political reasons, the British Government could not have refused to send help to Greece, even though the Greeks showed no great enthusiasm for it, the help was necessarily insufficient and the dispersion of effort made failure on both fronts inevitable. Those who find comfort in “second guessing” may argue that the dispatch of British troops convinced Hitler that there was some secret agreement between the British and Soviet Governments and postponed the invasion of Russia by several vital weeks. The evidence hardly seems to support them. What is certain is that the loss of 57,000 trained men led directly to a major defeat in the Middle East.

  General Wavell, or his Intelligence Staff, made one mistake for which he was, characteristically, the first to take the blame.

  From the information available to him, he calculated that not before May at the earliest could there be a German offensive against Cyrenaica, even if it were a fact, for which there was no direct evidence (indeed, such evidence as there was seemed to contradict it), that German troops were on their way to Tripoli. When, at the end of February, they were reported to be already in Libya, he still considered that no attack was likely before the middle of April and hoped that it might not materialise before May. In fact it was launched on March 31st.

  Even this error was very far from being entirely his fault. In 1939 and 1940 the policy of appeasement was still being actively pursued and, because His Majesty's Government “wished to do nothing that might impair their existing relations with Italy” (relations which, on Mussolini's side, were founded about equally on dislike and contempt for the apparently toothless lion), he had not been permitted to set up an intelligence service in Italian territory. In North Africa he had no agents at all before Italy came into the war and it was not possible until long afterwards to “plant” them. Thus the 5th Light Motorised Division was able to land in Tripoli without his knowing anything about it.

  Like many another British general before him in the early stages of a war, General Wavell was called upon to shoulder “responsibilities for which my resources were completely inadequate.” He shouldered them uncomplainingly and soon had a revolt in Iraq and a minor war against the Vichy French in Syria added to them for good measure. Having dealt successfully with the latter, he was removed from his command. Such, at any rate, was the impression made upon the troops in the Middle East, and explanations, whether well-founded or not, that he needed a rest or was being translated to a sphere of even greater responsibility did not change their feeling that he had been kicked upstairs for having failed to do the impossible in Greece. It was not the last time that, having rendered outstanding services to his country, he was to find himself treated with barely perfunctory politeness by his country's government.

  Such were the circumstances of the disaster in Cyrenaica. But if, in the early summer of 1941, one had stopped the first passer-by in the streets of Cairo and asked him the reason for this astonishing reversal of fortune, it is odds-on that he would have replied in one word: “Rommel.”

  Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

  CHAPTER 2

  “Our Friend Rommel”

  TO: ALL COMMANDERS AND CHIEFS OF STAFF

  FROM: HEADQUARTERS, B.T.E AND M.E.F.

  There exists a real danger that our friend Rommel is becoming a kind of magician or bogey-man to our troops, who are talking far too much about him. He is by no means a superman, although he is undoubtedly very energetic and able. Even if he were a superman, it would still be highly undesirable that our men should credit him with supernatural powers.

  I wish you to dispel by all possible means the idea that Rommel represents something more than an ordinary German general. The important thing now is to see that we do not always talk of Rommel when we mean the enemy in Libya. We must refer to “the Germans” or “the Axis powers” or “the enemy” and not always keep harping on Rommel.

  Please ensure that this order is put into immediate effect, and impress upon all Commanders that, from a psychological point of view, it is a matter of the highest importance.

  (Signed) C. J. AUCHINLECK,

  GENERAL,

  COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, M.E.F.*

  [* Although I remember this order very well, as do most people who served in the Middle East, I have been unable to obtain, even from its author, a copy of the original. I have had, therefore, to rely on a retranslation of the translation preserved amongst Rommel's papers by his family. There may be slight verbal discrepancies between the two versions but the sense is the same.]

  In any war, the number of generals who succeed in imposing their personalities on their own troop
s, let alone those of the enemy, is far smaller than generals themselves may like to believe. Take World War I, when it was said with some truth that few British soldiers knew the name of their Divisional commander. How many of the “high brass” meant anything to the “other ranks”? Haig, well, they had heard of him, of course. His “backs to the wall” order in 1918 had a human ring about it. But it was not until the survivors were demobilised and came to learn how he was devoting his last years to their welfare that that remote, solitary and slightly unsympathetic figure made any positive impression. Indeed, in the long span from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Montgomery, the senior British generals who were heroes in the eyes of the private soldier could be counted on two hands and would include some very bizarre figures.

  As for World War II, “Monty” himself, “Bill” Slim and “Dickie” Mountbatten all had the common touch in an uncommon degree. So had Alexander, who, one imagines, never gave it a thought. So, in some strange fashion, had Wavell, in spite of his extreme taciturnity. In the U.S. Army there were Omar Bradley, “Blood-and-Guts” Patton, and a few more, including MacArthur and “Ike” himself. But the soldier's general remains a rare bird and the general who is known to the rank-and-file of the enemy a still rarer one.

  Amongst such, Rommel was a phenomenon, a nonpareil. The instruction quoted at the beginning of this chapter gave rise to much discussion and some derision when it was issued in Cairo. Nevertheless it was necessary and, indeed, overdue. For Rommel had so identified himself with the Afrika Korps, had so impressed himself upon his opponents, was getting such a “build-up” from British and American war correspondents, as well as from even pro-British newspapers in Cairo, that he was already the best-known and not far from the most popular figure in the Middle East. Mr. Churchill spoke of him as “a master of war.” Our own troops referred to him, half-affectionately, as “that b---- Rommel,” which, as I learnt not long ago, was precisely how he was referred to by the Afrika Korps itself. When they added, as they often did, “You've got to hand it to the b----,” it needed no psychologist to see that the sporting spirit of the British soldier could easily produce a mild inferiority complex. That did, in fact, occur. Newcomers to the desert and even a minority of the old “desert rats” were inclined to explain: “We bumped into Germans,” as though that in itself was a sufficient excuse for failure. To the few who remembered the quite unwarranted accents of pity and corntempt with which we used to speak of “poor old Fritz” in the first war, it seemed that there was a real danger of Rommel and the Afrika Korps securing a moral ascendancy. Perhaps those rather too easy victories over the Italians had not been very good for us after all.

  Granted the build-up, it is still hard to see why Rommel so quickly became“un type dans le genre de Napoleon,” a bogey to the back-areas and to civilians in Cairo, as well as a more personal and proximate menace to those further forward.

  Though he emerged like the Demon King from a trap, unfortunately anticipating his cue, even our Intelligence Staff knew very little about him, either as a soldier or as a man. This was because the British had largely relied upon their French allies for “profiles” of German generals and for those personal details which enable a commander to estimate his opponent. The sudden collapse of France cut them off from this contact and thedossiers doubtless remained in the French Ministry of War, to be read by the subjects of them. Thus the War Office was able to supply General Wavell and his staff with only a meagre report about Rommel. From this it appeared that he was a rather impetuous individual who had done well in the first war and as a divisional commander in the invasion of France but was by no means in the top flight of German generals. It was suggested that he was a keen Nazi and that his selection for North Africa was due to party favouritism.

  The background was both sketchy and incorrect. Indeed, the most fantastic stories about Rommel's origin and early career are still afloat. For example, in that otherwise well-documented book,Defeat in the West , by Milton Shulman, we are told that he was a member, with Goering, Hess, Roehm, Bormann and more of the sort, of the Free Corps, a group of “irresponsible, swashbuckling men” who grew “increasingly more aggressive and brutal in their suppression of disorders” in Germany after the Armistice in 1918 and supplied “the most promising leaders of the bullying gangs of the latter-day Hitlerite S.A. and S.S.” Other reports say that he was the son of a labourer and one of the first of the Nazi storm-troopers; others that he was an N.C.O. who rose from the ranks during the first war; others that he was a policeman between the two wars.

  The truth is less highly coloured. Rommel was, from first to last, a regular officer and, as is shown by the extract from hisWehrpass or record of service, printed at the end of this book, from the day he joined his regiment to the day he died, he was never off the rolls of the German Army. He never belonged to the Free Corps, he was never a policeman, he was never a member of the Nazi Party, still less a storm-trooper, and his connection with Hitler came about quite fortuitously.

  The source of some at least of the legends is not difficult to discover. In the summer of 1941 an anonymous article about Rommel appeared in Goebbels' paper,Das Reich. This article, which was commended to the attention of the foreign correspondents in Berlin, announced that Rommel was the son of a workingman, that he left the army after the first war to study at T�bingen University, that he was one of the first storm-troop leaders and became a close friend of Hitler and so on and so on.

  Rommel saw the cutting in North Africa and reacted violently. What did they mean, he wrote to the Propaganda Ministry, by circulating fabricated stories about him? The Propaganda Ministry tried to get out of it by saying that perhaps Oberleutnant Tschimpke, author of a book about the 7th Panzer Division, which Rommel commanded in France, had supplied the information. Rommel then found time, the battle of Halfaya Pass being over, to turn on the unfortunate Tschimpke. Had be in fact given this information and if so what didhe mean by it? Tschimpke replied to Rommel denying that he had done anything of the sort. He also wrote to the Propaganda Ministry to ask why they had got him into trouble with the general. The answer, fromPresseabteilung der Reichsregierung, Abt. Auslandspresse, Gruppe: Information, Wilhelmplatz 8-9, dated October 10, 1941, and signed “Heil Hitler, Dr. Meissner,” was one of those comic masterpieces which explain why, in the long run, German propaganda could never be effective. What had been written about General Rommel in the article, said the doctor, could do no harm to the reputation of that excellent man. Indeed, it could only do good, by making him a more familiar and sympathetic figure to the foreign war correspondents. Perhaps, he concluded, it would have been a good thing, from the propaganda point of view, if the statements, though admittedly incorrect, had, in fact, been true.

  Tschimpke sent the letter to Rommel, who preserved it amongst his papers. He also preserved a strong dislike and suspicion of any one having anything to do with propaganda or “public relations.” The first victim was an unfortunate young officer named Berndt, who came out to join the Afrika Korps after service in the Propaganda Ministry. Reporting to Rommel, to whom he had been personally commended, he was promptly told to go out that evening, his first in the desert, and make a “recce” behind the British lines. Berndt was a brave and intelligent young man and returned from this unpromising assignment with some British prisoners and valuable information. Thereafter Rommel made an exception of him and later used to send him back to Berlin with reports which he did not wish to go through staff channels. But visiting publicists were always suspect.

  What were the facts, which Dr. Goebbels' young men could easily have ascertained from the Ministry of War or from Rommel's family, if they did not already know them?

  Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel was born at noon on Sunday, November 15th, 1891, at Heidenheim, a small town in Wtirttemberg, near Ulm. His father, also Erwin Rommel, was a schoolmaster and the son of a schoolmaster. Both father and grandfather were mathematicians of some distinction. Since those were the days when learning was still m
ore highly regarded in Germany than loyalty to a political party, Herr Professor Rommel was much respected in Heidenheim. In 1886 he married Helena, eldest daughter of Karl von Luz, President of the Government of W�rttemberg and thus a prominent person in those parts. There were five children of the marriage: a son, Manfred, who died young, a daughter, Helena, unmarried and now teaching at the well-knownWaldorfschule at Stuttgart, Erwin Rommel himself and his younger brothers, Karl and Gerhardt. Karl is almost completely crippled from malaria, caught while serving as a pilot in Turkey and Mesopotamia during the 1914-18 war. Gerhardt supplied the only touch of exotic colour to the otherwise conventional Rommel family by abandoning agriculture to become an opera singer. This profession he still pursues, without any great success and to the mild embarrassment of his relations, at Ulm.

  In 1898, Rommel's father became Director of theRealgymnasium at Aalen, in other words headmaster of a school in which “Modem Side” subjects rather than classics are taught. In 1913 he died suddenly after an operation. His wife outlived him by twenty-seven years and died only in 1940, when her second son was already a Major-General.

  “Tough” is the adjective most obviously appropriate to Rommel of the Afrika Korps but as a small boy Erwin Rommel was the reverse of tough. “He was a very gentle and docile child,” says his sister, “who took after his mother. Small for his age, he had a white skin and hair so pale that we called him the `white bear.' He spoke very slowly and only after reflecting for a long time. He was very good-tempered and amiable and not afraid of any one. When other children used to run away from the chimney-sweeps, with their black faces and top hats, he would go up solemnly and shake hands with them. We had a very sunny childhood, brought up by kind and affectionate parents who taught us their own love of nature. Before we went to school we used to play all day in the garden or in the fields and woods.”