General Erwin Rommel – Len Deighton

Rommel was not one of the war's great generals.  Many Germans express surprise that the British and American public know his name: they think of him as a product of Nazi propaganda.  Rommel led from the front and his style suited divisional command.  He became a hero for Allied front-line soldiers who seldom if ever saw their own top commanders at the front. British generals preferred to have their HQs about 60 miles behind the fighting fronts. Besides, Rommel had for his Afrika Korps exceptional leaders such as Cruewell, Nehring and Bayerlein.  But all that said, few other men could have inspired this mixed and demoralized German-Italian desert army in the way that Rommel did.  He revelled in popularity and delighted in the sort of informality that the desert provided to both sides.  In his paper Modern Military Leadership he wrote:

The commander must try, above all, to establish personal and comradely contact with his men, but without giving away an inch of his authority when an attack is ordered the men must never be allowed to get the feeling that their casualties have been calculated in advance according to the laws of probability.

The deciding factor in Rommel's North African campaign was the shipping and the ports. Even Tripoli was in no way equipped for the massive traffic that such armies demanded.  Had the Axis coaxed the French for use of Tunisian facilities and used Tripoli and other less good Libyan ports with impeccable efficiency, and given proper attention to their road transport, they might have mustered the strength to capture Egypt.

Then, having captured the port of Alexandria and got it working, they might have fed through it reinforcements enough to occupy Egypt and the Canal Zone.  Even then such a strategy would almost certainly have faltered; German factories after the summer of 1941 were to be hard pressed by the demands of the Russian front.

Such a scenario was never a real possibility.  Rommel's fatal flaw was his inability to see the importance of logistics.  He liked to blame the Italian navy for his shortages, and historians have too readily accepted this judgement.  In fact, Italian merchant seamen were nothing less than heroic in their performance.  John Ellis reckons that the Axis forces were getting an average 800 tons per  division per day, and points out that 'voracious US armoured divisions in North West Europe required only 600 tons of supplies per day, including fuel .

It was Rommel's own land-supply movements that brought him down.  In fact his troubles arose from a combination of his own daring and improvisation and a disregard for the terrible problems such impulsive decisions made for his supply staff.  He is quoted as saying that he left logistics to his staff officers.  It is significant that his supply officer in 1941 had the lowly rank of major.

As an indication of this major's problems, the trucks taking 1,000 gallons of fuel from the docks at Tobruk to Alamein consumed 120 gallons of fuel plus 9.6 gallons of other lubricants.  Wastage and spillage in the hot climate would account for at least 10 per cent.

Deduct fuel needed for the return journey, and they will have brought no more than 636 gallons to the front.  But still more fuel was needed to bring up ammunition and food and all the other supplies.  The map reveals that Tobruk, 300 miles from the front, is the key to supplying the desert war. It spent much of the war in British hands, and when in German hands it was a favourite target for the R.A.F bombers.  Tripoli Rommel's main port was often 1,500 miles from his front!  For their supplies the British used whenever possible the coastal railway out of Alexandria.  It was economical and efficient.  When Rommel captured 300 miles of it (in 1942) he did little to keep it functioning.

There can be no doubt that much of Rommel's reputation as a general was due to his skilful use of intelligence.  Many tactical moves were based upon secrets picked up by his highly efficient Fernmeldeaufklarung.

This mobile radio monitoring service listened to everything it could pick up; casual battlefield chat, tank to tank calls, headquarters messages and supply depot reports. Rommel's traffic analysts reaped a rich harvest, for British units in 1941 had not learned of the dangers that poor radio discipline brought.  In addition to this tactical intelligence, Rommel was receiving something even better than the British Enigma intercepts: the intercepted messages sent to Washington by the United States military attache in Cairo.

At this time the British were showing this American everything and anything that he wanted to see.  Not only did his messages contain details of British armour strengths and positions, they also reported forthcoming operations such as commando raids.  Instead of the spotty information from the Enigma intercepts, Rommel was  getting material about air, land and sea operations and getting it with a speed and continuity that BP could never equal. The most knowledgeable historian on this subject remarks:

And what messages they were!  They provided Rommel with undoubtedly the broadest and clearest picture of enemy forces and intentions available to any Axis commander throughout the war.

Determined defence of Tobruk by Australian infantry and British artillery denied that port to Rommel even when the remainder of the British army had retreated back to the Egyptian border.  Now Rommel came to a stop and concentrated on Tobruk.

Rommel's unexpected advance in April 1941 surprised Berlin and prompted the high command to send a senior observer, Generalleutnant F. Paulus, to find out what this upstart Rommel was doing.  Tall and slim, Paulus was one of the army's brightest staff officers and an expert on mobile warfare. His work as chief of staff for the 6th Army during its victorious campaigns in Poland, Belgium and France had resulted in him being selected to be deputy chief of the general staff and told to produce a strategic survey for invading the Soviet Union.  Paulus, nicknamed 'the noble lord', was an oldfashioned but meticulous theoretician, who bathed as often as possible and wore gloves to protect himself against dirt.  He had been Rommel's conmpany commander in the 1920s and did not care for his cavalier way of waging war.

Arriving on his inspection tour on 27 April, Paulus voiced great reservations about Rommel's proposed attack on Tobruk, which had now become a fortress.  His scepticism proved well founded after concentrated bombing and shelling made no more than a dent in the Tobruk perimeter and both sides settled into a state of siege punctuated by bloody clashes at night.  The Tobruk perimeter consisted mostly of rock-hard ground, so digging trenches or foxholes was not easy.  Given the lack of cover, the Australians had to endure baking heat where a careless movement brought accurate sniper fire.  On the night of 5-6 May, the defenders were given new hope when for the first time a ship brought supplies into the beleaguered port.  From now onwards destroyers would make regular nightly visits, and each week reinforcements would be exchanged for wounded men.

The caustic report resulting from Paulus's inspection tour said that Rommel's supply lines were overstretched, his men exhausted and his reserves inadequate.  He was told to forget about reducing  Tobruk and withdraw to Gazala or Mechili and operate within his resources.

The Enigma experts at Bletchley Park sent the intercepted signal to Churchill, who reasoned that if Rommel was weak and overextended this was the chance to knock him reeling back to Cyrenaica.  It was especially urgent since Enigma signals also revealed that 15 Panzer Division would soon be reinforcing Rommel.  Ignoring the warnings of everyone around him, Churchill took all the fighter planes and tanks to be spared in Britain and loaded them onto a convoy which, against more advice, he sent through the Axis-dominated Mediterranean.  Four of the five freighters got through with 238 tanks and 43 Hawker Hurricane fighter planes and docked in Alexandria in mid-May.

While this newly arrived equipment was distributed and made ready, a limited offensive, code named Brevity, was launched.  Its object was to capture key areas in preparation for a major offensive to come.

One account of the desert war, says: "Operation Brevity began at dawn on May 15, and it soon became evident that neither Rommel nor his local commander .. . were either aware of or in agreement with the conclusions drawn by Paulus."  The British attack captured one of its objectives, Halfaya Pass, but was otherwise a failure.  Rommel's signals intelligence had given him good warning of what was coming, and even a weak and over-extended Afrika Korps was too much for the British as he staged a counter-attack that recovered the Ilalfaya Pass.

And when the British armour was unloaded from the convoy that had come through the Mediterranean at such risk it proved to be a mixed collection. Eight out of twenty tanks required a complete overhaul.

Many of the others were already halfway through their effective life and some of the Matildas were in need of major repairs.  All of them required 'tropicalization' and painting.  Long before the armour was fit for battle, Rommel's 15 Panzer Division reinforcements had arrived.

On 15 June, in the terrible desert heat of summer, the promised British offensive, Operation Battleaxe, began. Repeatedly the Germans enticed the British tanks on to their well concealed guns.  Only thirteen 8.8-em guns were in action but their role was decisive.  The British stuck to their 'naval battle' tactics, sending in tanks to fire broadsides at enemy tanks.  Despite the consequences, some of the tank units many of them smart cavalry regiments preferred this  dashing style and didn't want support from infantry and guns.  There was no sign that the British, at any level, were learning lessons from their chronic losses. After only three days' fighting Wavell sent Churchill a cable: "I regret to report the failure of Battleaxe."

Churchill sacked him.

The Germans were getting acclimatized to the desert.  In the first few months they were given a monotonous diet of black bread, tinned sardines, tinned meat and grated cheese.  This sort of diet led to medical problems, particularly jaundice.  It also spurred them into action.  British stores were coveted if only for the change of menu they provided.

"Our black bread in a carton was handy," said a German war correspondent, 'but how we used to long to capture one of your field bakeries and eat fresh white bread!  And your jam!" When ally ovens came, fresh bread remained scarce; the German quartermaster supplied the Afrika Korps with the standard field bakeries fired by logs.  In most of Europe logs were easy to find, but they are not common in the desert. Fresh bread remained scarce.

Though the desert war seemed to come to a stop, this was an illusion.

In fact the whole war was changing.  There were changes of men, of methods and of machines.  On 22 June Germany invaded Russia.  It would be months before this took full effect, but from now on the Eastern Front would always dwarf the North African fighting.  Henceforth Rommel's calls for men, armour, transport and fuel would be subordinated to other more urgent needs.

Wavell was dispatched to India.  The day-to-day demands upon him had been greater than anyone could have imagined.  He had been fighting too many battles hundreds of miles apart with skinny resources.  Sir Claude Auchinleck came to Cairo as the new commander-in-chief for the Middle East.  The appointment of a number of subsidiary commanders ensured that he would never have the power that Wavell had wielded.  New aircraft arrived and Bostons, Marylands, Beaufighters, Tomahawks and tropical Hurricanes were to be seen flying over the desert.  There were new Crusader tanks, new ideas and even a new name for the desert army: the Eighth Army. 

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Rommel’s Arrival – Len Deighton

Erwin Rommel, who was appointed to command the Deutsches Afrika Korps on 12 February 1941: "In the evening the Fuhrer showed me a number of British and American illustrated papers describing General Wavell's advance through Cyrenaica.  Of particular interest was the masterly co-ordination these showed between armoured land forces, air force and navy."

Events moved quickly. A British intelligence summary dated March 1941 said: "Detachments of a German expeditionary force under an obscure general, Rommel, have landed in North Africa."

Stripped of much equipment and transport (which had been sent to Greece), tired, depleted and untested units made up much of the British army facing Rommel in North Africa.  Wavell and his staff in Cairo were not unduly worried. They comforted themselves with the belief that the Italians in Tripolitania could be disregarded and that German reinforcements would not be sufficient for any attack to be started in the near future.

The code crackers at Bletchley Park were keeping tabs on Rommel. When Churchill asked what was happening, he was supplied with German OKW, High Command of the Armed Forces, signals showing the approximate arrival dates of components of the Afrika Korps.  Although Cairo frequently complained of Bletchley Park's slowness, this time there was no delay in passing on these figures to Wavell.

By early March Wavell's director of intelligence was telling him the Afrika Korps might attack very soon.  He showed Wavell the sort of plan he thought might be on Rommel's desk.  Wavell dismissed it.

 Without disputing the figures from London, his staff- guided by the way the British army did such things calculated that Rommel could not be ready before May.  His supply line was long and he would need considerable time to prepare reserves and dumps before going into action.

In Berlin the German army's C-in-C, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, came to the same conclusion as Wavell.  He told Rommel that there could be no question of staging an offensive in Africa in the near future.  The Italian high command took the same view.  But Rommel was aggressive and ambitious.  He saw that Berlin was hoping that the Western Desert fighting might lull into a stalemate, and he had no intention of letting his command become a backwater.  He was determined to make war, and he was in a hurry.  When his ships arrived he kept the dockside lights on, and worked all night unloading despite the danger of air raids. The armoured cars that were swinging from the cranes in Tripoli in mid-February were in action ten days later.

The remarkable General O'Connor had been sent away to rest and the fighting army was now commanded by General Philip Neame, a man of outstanding valour, as his VC indicated, but lacking experience of mechanized desert fighting.  Rommel knew from intelligence and air photos that British units were short of transport, which meant uncertain supply lines all the way back to their depots in Egypt.  He saw them building de fences and that proved they had no intention of attacking him. In fact Rommel was in a situation exactly like that of General O'Connor when he had faced the Italians a short while before.

Still unconcerned, on 30 March Wavell told Neame that the enemy could not 'make any big effort for at least another month'.  At 0944 hours the next day, armoured cars of the Stahnsdorf 3rd Reconnaissance Unit having already advanced to El Agheila led the attack.  Behind them were the tanks of the 5th Panzer Regiment.  The following day Stuka dive-bombers and Rommel's 8.8-em dual-purpose guns were seen in action.

The use of these Flak guns in an artillery role was a great surprise, just as it had been at Arras, before Dunkirk, and in Spain during the civil war. The chronic failure of British military intelligence to record that the 8.8-em gun was a dual-purpose weapon is in sad accord with a signal Wavell sent to the CIGS in London estimating that Rommel's armoured division was equipped with 400 tanks, when its true strength was 168 tanks and 30 recon vehicles. 

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The Western Desert - Len Deighton

The desert is a virtually uninhabited region about the size and shape of India. It stretches from the River Nile to Tunisia about 1,200 miles away to the west, and 1,000 miles south to the place where there is enough light rain to produce scrubland.  The western part of Libya was called Tripolitania.  Here stands Libya's largest city,  Tripoli, through which most Axis supplies passed.  In eastern Libya, which was called Cyrenaica, the port of Tobruk was equally vital for the supply services. The British held Tobruk for most of the war.

Bordering the Mediterranean there is a flat coastal strip from Alexandria in Egypt to Cyrenaica.  The seashore, made of limestone sand, is of a memorable whiteness, especially in the summer when the sea is blue.  Few and far between, there are towns and villages with miserable palms, bushes and patches of cultivated ground.  Many of the names on the map in this region El Daba, Fuka and Buq were no more than names: no houses, no people, no drinking water.  Here in summer it becomes too hot to fight.  In winter there can be a heavy rainfall which turns the dust-like sand into sticky mud.  Most of the fighting took place in this northern strip of the desert, which is about 40 miles wide.  But the strip was not manned; this was not a war of fixed fronts, rather a war of forts secured by barbed wire and vast minefields and moving columns.  There were no civilians to get in the way, just rodents and reptiles and dense clouds of flies.

"The Desert," said General Rommel, 'is a tactician's paradise and a quartermaster's hell."

The coastal region is higher than the desert behind it.  Sooner or later anyone travelling southwards encounters the Great Sand Sea.  In some places there is an escarpment which drops away steeply, forming an obstacle that makes movement south difficult for wheeled and even tracked vehicles.  This is why the El Alamein region became so vital for the defence of Egypt; for here the Qattara Depression and the sea produce a narrow strip where an army can stand and fight without fear of being outflanked.

At El Agheila the Great Sand Sea comes near enough to the coast to provide another place where an army can rest its flank.  Except at these two spots, an army can find long-term security only by means of a fortified perimeter around a water supply, and a port through which supplies can come. So it was that the entire North African campaign was fought for possession of three places: El Alamein in Egypt, El Agheila in Cyrenaica, and the port of Tobruk about halfway between them.

Along the Libyan coast there was a good road; the via Balbia.  The section of the road the British built in Egypt was a simple layer of asphalt which could not withstand the continuous weight of heavy vehicles. Alongside their road the British built a very useful railway, but by the end of 1940 it didn't go beyond Mersa Matruh (almost 150 miles short of the Libyan frontier).

 Other roads in the desert were just tracks leading over broken stone and pebbles or various sorts of sand.  Most of the sand is powdered clay that produces clouds of white dust, making even half a dozen walking men visible for miles.  It gets in your eyes and your hair and your clothes and your drinking water.  It gets through even the finest dust-filters, and nothing you see or eat is without a coating

Despite the discomfort, most of the soldiers soon got used to the desert. They revelled in the informality that prevailed in this inhospitable place, and it became normal in most units for officers and men to dress as they wished.  Sun helmets were soon discarded, along with all the myths about the noonday sun that the Empire's Englishmen had enshrined in dress regulations for a hundred years.  It became fashionable for officers to be seen brandishing fly-swatters and dressed in corduroy trousers, coloured scarfs, suede boots or even sandals.  In the hot weather many other ranks wore nothing but khaki shorts and boots and, despite the endless tinned food, remained healthy.

Most of the desert could be traversed by motor vehicles, and hard sand made good 'going', although there were always horrifying rumours of parked tanks disappearing into quicksand after a shower of rain.  But along the western frontier of Egypt and sprawling westward, unmapped and ever-changing, there stretched the "Great Sand Sea'.  About 600 miles long and 150 miles wide, it is probably the greatest continuous mass of sand dunes in the world, and some of the dunes are 400 feet high. Thus, for all practical purposes, the Libya-Egypt frontier is only about 200 miles long.  However the 'sand sea' is not impassable for dedicated travellers.

"To get a heavy truck up 200 or 300 feet of loose sand at a slope of 1 in 3 you have to charge it very fast .. . But it takes a lot of confidence to charge at full speed into what looks like a vertical wall of dazzling yellow," said Brigadier Bagnold while lecturing at the Royal Geographical Society.  To an expert the colour, curvature and ripple marks in sand reveal good going.  Soon after war began, a group of soldiers many of them given ranks overnight started modifying and equipping Chevrolet trucks for the purpose of exploring and outflanking the Italians in Libya.

This small band of New Zealanders, led by men who had known the open desert for many years, was named the "Long Range Desert Group' and their strange and dangerous war became something of a legend.  They came out of the southern desert at first to observe,  and later to attack.  By studying the vehicle tracks, they could read the movements of enemy traffic as a Bedouin can estimate the age, breed and condition of every camel that has left a print.  In the desert the LRDG found tracks that had been left by Fords of the Light Car Patrols of 1916. And still today the marks of Second World War armies can be seen right across the southern desert."

Their journeys in the south took men far from medical aid or supplies, and required a special sort--of nerve.  The climate was more extreme than anything known in the coastal strip.  There were winds so hot that they could cause collapse.  One matter-of-fact report described dead or dying birds in the shade of every rock.

Distances were vast.  One patrol went south far enough to make contact with French outposts in Equatorial Africa and found there Frenchmen who wanted to fight Germans.  A wounded soldier was taken 700 miles in a truck for treatment at a French post in Tibesti.  After that he went 3,000 miles by air to Cairo.  Water and fuel were treasured; a truck was towed more than 1,000 miles to get it repaired.  By the same measure, patrols would destroy all Italian transport at an outpost and sever it from the world.  Sometimes things went wrong.  Sharing only two gallons of water and one tin of jam, two Guardsmen and a New Zealander walked across the desert for 10 days, covering 210 miles. 

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UNIQUE AFRIKA KORPS PHOTOS -Download PDF

UNIQUE AFRIKA KORPS PHOTOS

German Uniforms III

Africa ‘Records’

GOING FOR THE GOLD

During Rommel's pursuit following the defeat of the British Eighth Army in the Battle of Gazala, the 33rd Reconnaissance Battalion of his Panzerarmee Afrika advanced 158.7 kilometers (about 100 miles) in twenty-four hours on June 26-27, 1942. This is apparently a world's record for a single day's advance against resistance. There have been swifter performances, but all were against an opponent who was offering no opposition.

SURVEYS?!

One of the surveys of American combat veterans who had fought in North Africa indicated that the average infantryman had a restricted, and somewhat inaccurate, view of what was trying to kill him. This was the first time U.S. troops came up against the Germans. When asked what the "most feared" weapon was, 48 percent of the troops surveyed said it was the German "88mm artillery gun." When asked what the "most dangerous" weapon was, 62 percent of the GIs named the "88." The Germans very rarely used their 88mm gun as artillery; it was primarily for antiaircraft and antitank work. In these roles, the "88" had acquired a fearsome reputation, and these U.S. troops assumed that anytime they were hit by German shell fire, it had to be the dreaded "88." But the GIs had the percentages right. Artillery was the major cause of casualties among the infantry. The next most dangerous thing mentioned was mortars (17 percent), followed by the deadly German light machine guns (6 percent). Interestingly, none of the troops feared rifle fire, or considered it "dangerous." This was also quite accurate. The most dangerous weapons were actually artillery (including mortars) and these accounted for over two thirds of all casualties.

These surveys were used by many senior officers to set policy. But they were also ignored by other officers who had their own firmly held visions of reality (for example, most commanders of black troops paid no attention to surveys explaining the causes of poor morale among their men, which consequently tended to remain poor). The surveys were, however, one of the remarkable innovations of World War II and their use continues to this day.

In North Africa truck convoys from rear-area ports to Rommel's Italo-German panzer army consumed almost as much fuel as they delivered.

"NOW WHAT WOULD ARCH DO IN A CASE LIKE THIS... ?"

 During his campaigns in North Africa in 1941-1943, Rommel carried with him a well-worn copy of the German translation of Generals and Generalship, written by Sir Archibald Wavell, one of his opponents.

THE FIRST RULE

In early 1943 Ruth Baldwin Gowan, an ace reporter for the Associated Press, arrived in North Africa. There were a number of people who objected to her presence, holding that women could not make good war correspondents. Such doubts were dispelled at the highest levels.

It seems that shortly after Ms. Gowan arrived in North Africa she chanced to run into George S. Patton, the ultimate no-nonsense soldier. After being introduced, Patton gave her the once-over. Then he asked, "What is the first law of war?"

Ms. Gowan replied quickly, "You kill him before he kills you." "She stays," said a smiling Patton, much to the disappointment of those who expected him to send her packing with an earful of soldierly profanity.

WHAT PRICE GLORY?

In November 1942 the 3rd Infantry Division went ashore in North Africa. Over the next thirty months the division fought in Tunisia, Sicily, central Italy, Anzio, southern France, Alsace, and Germany. This experience made the 3rd one of the five hardest hit U.S. divisions (3rd, 4th, 9th, 36th, and 45th) in the war, which collectively ran through an average of 176 percent of their personnel during the European campaign. As a result, by the end of January 1945 one company in the division had just 2 men left of the 235 who had come ashore at Casablanca. One of them was Audie Murphy, who had risen from private to lieutenant while accumulating twenty-four decorations, including a Medal of Honor. The other man was a supply sergeant.

BUT NCOS ARE THE BACKBONE OF AN ARMY

At the outbreak of World War II the Italian Army had 53,000 officers, but only 40,000 NCOs. This was one reason for the relatively poor performance of the Italian Army in the opening phases of the war. In order to have his "Eight Million Bayonets," Mussolini had to sacrifice quality for quantity. Once the prewar army was subjected to some rigorous wartime experience it quickly got better, and some of the toughest fighting of the North African campaign was actually done by Italian troops, such as Bir El Gobi, Giarabub, the breaking of the British 7th Armored Division at El Alamein, and the defense of the Mareth Line. But it was those initial reverses that set the pattern of the press releases.

FIREPOWER KILLS

During the opening barrage of the Battle of El Alamein on October 23, 1942, the artillery of the British Eighth Army fired some 530,000 rounds in twenty-four hours, for an average of 22,083.3 rounds per hour, or approximately 1 round every 2.8 minutes from each of the 1,030 guns and howitzers available.

LILI MARLENE

The first interpreter of the "street-lamp song"  is Lale Andersen (1905-1972).

The most famous song of World War II, and the only one popular on both sides, was "Lili Marlene," a sentimental air in which a battleweary soldier on some far-off front recalls a woman who used to meet him "underneath the lamppost, by the barracks gate."

"Lili Marlene" had its origin in a poem written in 1923 by Hans Leip, a World War I veteran who had in mind a number of women he had known during the Kaiser’s war. Several attempts were made to set the poem to music over the next few years, none of them very successful. Then in 1936 Norbert Schultze, a minor tunesmith, wrote new music. In 1939 the song was recorded by the Swedish-born singer Lala Anderson and it became moderately popular. Shortly after the occupation of Yugoslavia, a German armed forces radio station was established in Belgrade. One of the men assigned to the station had a close friend in the Afrika Korps who had been fond of the tune. So he played Lala Anderson's recording of "Lili Marlene" for his friend, airing it for the first time on the night of August 18, 1941. He soon made the song the signature of his musical program, playing it in full each night at 9:55, shortly before he went off the air.

German troops in North Africa picked up the song and were soon followed by their Italian comrades. It was not long before it became popular among British troops as well, since they too listened to Radio Belgrade, which played much better popular music than did BBC influenced British military radio. The British passed on their enthusiasm for the tune to their American cousins during the Tunisian campaign, and it became even more popular after the German but decidedly anti-Nazi Marlene Dietrich recorded it, and even starred in a film based on it. Eventually translated into several different languages (there are English, French, Italian, Spanish, and even Hebrew versions), "Lili Marlene" retained its popularity among veterans, particularly German veterans, after the war. Leip and Schultze were still collecting royalties of about $4,000 a year into the early 1970s.