Destiny in Desert , The Road to Alamein - Jonathan Dimbleby
In marked contrast to the atmosphere at Eighth Army headquarters, Rommel’s mood was bleak in the extreme. In the days following their retreat from Alam el Halfa, the Panzer Army began strenuously to fortify a line, which ran along a forty-mile front between the sea and the Qattara Depression, a mere eight miles to the west of the Eighth Army’s forward positions. On the face of it, the Axis forces had the advantage. As Rommel was to explain, ‘we constructed our defensive system’ to ensure that the Panzer Army could hold out against ‘even the heaviest British attack’. Once the British crossed the no-man’s land between the two armies, they would find themselves entering a minefield, laid with some half a million explosive devices. Beyond the minefield, they would face the artillery, tanks and motorised divisions of the entire Panzer Army, a formidable if not impenetrable barrier.
But fortifications alone would not be enough to stop what Rommel described, for the benefit of both Hitler and Mussolini, as ‘the finest troops of the British Empire’. His confidence sapped by what he called ‘the battle of supplies’ which he now had to wage ‘with new violence’ against both Comando Supremo and OKW, Rommel nonetheless did what he could to alert the Axis leaders to his worsening predicament. The immediate cause of this crisis was the intensity and impunity with which the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force bombarded both the Italian convoys and the North African ports held by the Axis powers. In September , RAF and Royal Navy attacked Axis supply routes from their basses in Malta and Alexandria and had sunk almost one third of the Axis cargo ships bringing vital supplies to Panzer Army struggling in Egypt. In October the Panzer Army had received only 40 per cent of what its commander regarded as their ‘absolute minimum needs’.
Observing this shortfall, logistics officers in the German General Staff concluded that it had become impossible to sustain the African theatre. However their superior officers – with very few exceptions – drew the obvious lesson that at the root of the problem was the strategic failure of OKW and Comando Supremo to recognise, let alone to eliminate, the threat from the British garrison on Malta. In early September Rommel despatched a stark warning both to the Führer’s headquarters and Comando Supremo in Rome, that without ‘the uninterrupted flow of the supplies essential for life and battle … the continued successful maintenance of the African theatre of war will be impossible’. The shortages were so acute, he complained, that the bread ration for the troops had been halved, they were undernourished, and many who had served in the desert for over a year were utterly exhausted. According to Rommel, this aggravated another predicament: the weakening performance of the Italians under his command. They were unable to make quick decisions, their tanks and artillery had limited range, their officers were inexperienced, their men were poorly led, and unless they were supported in the line of defence by German ‘corset stays’ they were incapable of withstanding a bayonet charge by the British.
Rommel’s angry but woebegone litany may well have been affected by a recurrence of his debilitating sickness. He was once again suffering from low blood pressure and near-fainting fits caused by the gastrointestinal problems brought on by excessive physical and psychological stress. By September his ailments were serious enough for his physician to order him home on extended leave. Writing to his wife on 9 September, he affected to be in good spirits, but alerted her to the fact that ‘the doctor is pressing me hard to have a break in Germany and doesn’t want me to postpone it any longer … On the one hand, I’m overjoyed at the prospect of getting away for a while and seeing you, but on the other I fear I shall never be free of anxiety about this place, even though I won’t be able to get to the front myself.’
On the 23rd, with no sign of any improvement in either the flow of supplies or his health, he flew from Derna to Rome ‘with a heavy heart’ for an audience with Mussolini. Despite his stark warning that, unless the fuel, ammunition, weapons, and provisions he required were forthcoming, the Axis would be forced to abandon North Africa altogether, Il Duce still seemed incapable of recognising the gravity of the predicament, a failure Rommel attributed in part to the Panzer Army’s previous successes on the battlefield.
Mussolini’s public utterances continued to be as bombastically fascistic and self-delusional as ever: the Americans posed no threat to the Axis because they were more interested in making money than war; he would in due course preside over a peace settlement as a result of which Italy would soon be able to ‘direct the whole life of Europe’. In private he was far less assured. Comando Supremo had delivered him a pessimistic diagnosis of Axis prospects in North Africa which, for once, even he was unable to ignore.
During the summer, when their staffs warned of an imminent Anglo-American invasion of North Africa – which, coincidentally, they also referred to as ‘a second front’ – both Mussolini and Hitler ridiculed the suggestion. In a letter to Il Duce in early August, the Führer went so far as to write, ‘I consider this second front idea to be totally insane.’ Quite what was in Mussolini’s mind is impossible to discern. By his own account, Il Duce continued to believe – like many in OKW – that ‘a great pincer movement with the Germans storming the Caucasus and Rommel’s German–Italian armies conquering Egypt’ would bring ultimate victory. However, Comando Supremo’s prescient anxiety about a second front in North Africa – which they also advised would almost certainly lead to an invasion of southern Italy – clearly affected him; so much so that, by the autumn, he had already been persuaded of the need to reinforce and, if necessary, impose a formal occupation on Tunisia to repel any possible Anglo-American landings on the African shore of his Mediterranean Lake.
When Rommel’s failure at Alam el Halfa was reported to him, he lapsed into what his Foreign Minister, Ciano, described as a ‘black mood’, during which he said nothing at all about Egypt for three days. When he finally gave vent to his dismay, he not only indulged in ‘one of his periodic attacks on the Army’ with which ‘everything’ was going wrong on all fronts, but also vented his anger specifically at Rommel. ‘As always,’ Ciano noted drily, ‘victory finds a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.’
Mussolini’s capricious behaviour was doubtless exacerbated by his persistent ill health. The gastro-enteritis by which he had long been afflicted in times of crisis now flared up so sharply that he was sometimes unable to conceal the pain. He lost a great deal of weight, which made him seem aged and haggard. On his return from his ill-fated visit to North Africa, where he had suffered acutely, he was diagnosed with amoebic dysentery, the prescribed cure for which failed to achieve its purpose. It was noted that he was increasingly stricken by indecision and that his once elephantine memory was deserting him. One of his physicians even feared that his ill health had been so aggravated by the stress of war that his days on earth were numbered. None of this was allowed to be mentioned in public; any suggestion that his health was failing him was forbidden and foreign journalists knew that to refer to it was to court instant expulsion.
On 27 September, after an absence of three weeks, Ciano had a meeting with Mussolini, at which he noted his father-in-law’s loss of weight. Otherwise, he found him calm and clear-minded, though depressingly aware that ‘military events’ – the stouter than expected resistance by the Red Army at Stalingrad (where Italian troops were tied down alongside the Wehrmacht) as well as the humiliation in Albania and the setbacks in North Africa – had ‘cut deeply into the morale of the population’. Ciano himself had just had a meeting with Rommel, who told him that he was about to take a six-week break from the front, prompting Mussolini to observe that the Panzer Army commander would never return to the desert and that he was ‘physically and morally shaken’. As Ciano observed morbidly, ‘We are starting the winter with a state of mind in which, at the worst, we should be at the end of the winter.’
Rommel left Rome for Berlin bearing vague assurances of future supplies and a farewell injunction from Mussolini to the effect that it was imperative to seize the Nile Delta before the arrival of the Americans. In Berlin he discerned that a spirit of optimism still prevailed. In an attempt to prick this bubble of complacency, Rommel did not waste time on the niceties but instead laid out his troubles, reiterating that without greater support and more supplies of every kind it would not be possible even to hold on in North Africa, let alone defeat the Eighth Army. His list of demands included 11,000 reinforcements (to be drawn from the Wehrmacht and the Italian army) in addition to an unspecified number of thousands required to bring every unit of the Panzer Army up to strength and 17,000 replacements for those members of his Afrikakorps who were exhausted by long service in the desert; more bombers and fighters to restore parity with the RAF and to deny Malta to the British; more submarines and motor torpedo boats; and more shipping to carry the many thousands of tons of fuel, ammunition and provisions needed to sustain the line at El Alamein. If these demands made sense in their own terms, Rommel must have known that they would be regarded as quite unrealistic, even ‘preposterous’, when every available Axis soldier, tank and aeroplane was being thrown at the Red Army, which was showing a degree of resistance on all fronts which Hitler had not anticipated.
Berlin appeared to be in denial about the situation at El Alamein. At one point, when Rommel stated that the RAF had ‘shot up my tanks with 40-mm. shells’, Goering retorted ludicrously, ‘That’s completely impossible. The Americans only know how to make razor blades.’ Rommel replied, ‘We could do with some of those razor blades, Herr Reichsmarschall.’ To avoid any further dispute, he produced one of the offending shells which had been fired at a tank from a low-flying RAF bomber, killing almost the entire crew.
Hitler, focussing on gesture rather than strategy, seized the opportunity to present Rommel with the field marshal’s baton which he had bestowed on him after his triumph at Tobruk the previous June. The ceremony took place in the Reich Chancellery, where obsequious courtiers noted that Rommel committed a faux pas by failing to remove his gloves before shaking hands with the Führer. Afterwards, Goebbels, as Propaganda Minister, made sure that Rommel was suitably fêted by the German populace. He was paraded alongside Hitler at the Berlin Sports Palace, where the Nazi Party staged a ‘Winter Help’ rally and where, by his account, he was ‘somewhat alarmed to be greeted by an ecstatic crowd’. There was also a press conference at which – with a bravado that certainly did not fit reality of situation – he found himself declaring, ‘We are now one hundred kilometres from Alexandria and Cairo and have the gateway to Egypt in our hands. We intend to go into action! We did not go all the way there in order sooner or later to be pushed back. You can be certain of one thing: we shall hang on to what we have.’
The ambiguity in this declaration of intent – which promised in one breath to advance, but in the next, not to retreat – was not apparently noted by his fans at the stadium. His speech not only served its rousing purpose but led Goebbels to note in his diary both that Rommel was ‘just the sort of National Socialist general that we need’, and that Hitler had declared his youngest field marshal to be gifted with ‘personal courage and exceptional imagination’ that would make him ‘the future commander-in-chief of the army’.
None of this adulation impressed Rommel (or so he says in his Rommel Papers written in hindsight. Others in the ceramony noted he was quite impressed and deluded about final victory in presence of Hitler and Goebbels ) or solved his predicament. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the Führer’s planning staff continued to believe that the Panzer Army’s position on the Alamein Line was secure and – unaccountably – that, in any case, Montgomery would not attack until early in 1943. By this time, they told themselves, Rommel would be strong enough to turn the tables once again and advance on the Delta. This complacency, betrayed in an official memorandum which stated, inter alia, that ‘OKW does not consider the offensive has failed, on the contrary it reckons with its resumption’, was shared by Hitler, who continued to believe that the Eighth Army would be unable to break through Rommel’s defences. So in a way Rommel (or myth around him created by wartime propaganda) was victim of its own success. Thus, garlanded with his new baton and a chestful of false promises, Rommel retreated to the mountain resort of Semmering near Vienna, where, accompanied by his wife, he was supposed to rest and recuperate but where he succeeded only in worrying about ‘the plight’ of his army in Africa, as a result of which, he noted, ‘I was of course incapable of attaining real peace of mind.’