Rommel in the Desert



Rommel in the Desert

By Dr Niall Barr

The daring exploits of the Afrika Korps secured Rommel a reputation as a brilliant tactician. Dr Niall Barr looks beyond the myth and asks why this legendary commander never achieved a lasting victory.

Man of promise

The German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel achieved a rare feat for any military commander - he became a legend in his own lifetime - and he remains the best known German general of World War Two in the English speaking world.

In fact, Rommel was acutely aware of the power of propaganda in developing his career and reputation. He assiduously courted the German government's media machine, the Ministry of Information and Propaganda run by Joseph Goebbels. Rommel's interest arose from the fact that his position in the German army was entirely dependent on Hitler's patronage. Since he had never been staff trained, the normal professional route to high command was not open to him.

'... Rommel was acutely aware of the power of propaganda ...'

His book Infantry Attacks, however, which detailed his extraordinary feats of bravery in World War One, caught Hitler's attention, and the Führer gave him the command of his bodyguard battalion during the Polish campaign of 1939.

Rommel was then given command of the new 7th Panzer Division for the invasion of France in 1940. The rapidity of this promotion was extraordinary, but so was the young commander's performance in the new, rapid form of warfare known as blitzkrieg.

He seemed an obvious choice, then, to command the small 'blocking force' sent by Hitler to Libya in February 1941 to shore up Germany's failing Italian ally, Benito Mussolini. And it was here, in North Africa, that his true talents as a bold and daring commander of fast-moving armoured formations were properly revealed.

Surprise element

Rommel's attack in Egypt caught the Allies unawares © General Archibald Wavell, the senior British commander in Egypt, knew - through intercepted and decoded German radio transmissions - just how weak Rommel's force was when it arrived in Tripoli, and he calculated on having at least a few months to prepare before any German attack.

But Rommel attacked before the British were ready. And his lightning-fast offensive caught his opponents completely off balance. Very quickly the German forces, soon to be famous as the Afrika Korps, were established on the Egyptian frontier along with their Italian allies, while simultaneously besieging the Allied fortress of Tobruk in Libya. The camera loved Rommel, and Goebbels made sure that this victorious general now received plenty of attention from the German media.

'... his lightning-fast offensive caught his opponents completely off balance.'

Yet Rommel was unable to capture Tobruk, and during a series of swirling, bloody battles - codenamed Operation Crusader - in November 1941, he was eventually forced to retreat to his starting point at El Agheila. Much of the reason for this lay in the troubled field of Axis logistics.

The Axis supply lines were much shorter than those of the British, but virtually every Italian convoy to North Africa had to run the gauntlet of attacks from aircraft and submarines based at Malta. This difficult problem frustrated Rommel, but rather than accepting the reality of the situation, he simply blamed his Italian allies and his quartermasters.

Malta's stranglehold over the Axis supply lines was soon lifted when German airpower began to 'neutralise' the island and Rommel quickly bounced back on to the offensive, driving the British back to the Gazala line, just in front of Tobruk.

Battles of Gazala and El Alamein

Within days, Tobruk had fallen to Rommel's forces © The Battle of Gazala, fought from 26 May to 20 June 1942, was Rommel's greatest triumph. In a daring and risky move, he drove his army around the flank of the British army and into its rear.

Trapped against the British minefields, his Afrika Korps came within an ace of running out of ammunition and fuel, but his legendary luck held. He was able to repulse every ill-co-ordinated British counter-attack, and then destroy the British armoured forces in a climactic battle around 'Knightsbridge', near Bir Hacheim.

'... rumours of catastrophe for the Allies were in the air ...'

Within days, Tobruk had fallen to Axis forces, and Rommel was pushing his tired men into a drive for the Egyptian cities of Alexandria and Cairo. In the last days of June 1942, with rumours of catastrophe for the Allies in the air, it seemed that he might reach his goal.

However, the British Eighth Army, under the command of General Claude Auchinleck at El Alamein, managed to halt Rommel's headlong drive. Here Hitler's favourite general found himself in serious trouble. The Axis supply line was stretched beyond breaking point, and he could neither go forwards nor back.

Eventually, in August 1942, he launched his last desperate attempt to reach the Nile Delta, at Alam Halfa. This despite the fact that the petrol tanks of his tanks, trucks and half-tracks were virtually empty.

'Rommel was seriously ill after two years of constant fighting ...'

Stranded in the desert, the Axis forces dug themselves in, and laid minefields. Rommel, sick at heart and now seriously ill after two years of constant fighting, returned home. He was not with his army when, on 23 October 1942, the famous bombardment signalled the opening of the British offensive against his position, under the command of General Bernard Montgomery.

Rommel quickly returned to the desert, but he could not stem the tide of war. Having had two years of complete freedom in his independent command, he was shocked when he received a direct order from Hitler to stand firm at El Alamein.

This order, which Rommel attempted to obey even when he had decided on withdrawal, ensured that the bulk of the Axis army was destroyed. Rommel's spell of invincibility was broken.

Opponents' view

Ironically, one of the reasons for his towering reputation was due to his opponents. While most enemy generals had only ever received short shrift from British leaders, the British built up a myth around this man as a 'genius'. Churchill even went so far as to name him in the House of Commons.

At one point, Auchinleck became so frustrated by what he considered the Rommel 'bogeyman' that he forbade his troops to mention the German commander. Not surprisingly, such an order simply increased Rommel's status in the eyes of British soldiers.

This development had a clear purpose for the Allies. The image of Rommel as an extraordinary general helped take the edge off the numerous failings of the British army in the desert. It was, after all, easier to explain away the numerous defeats by highlighting their enemy's strengths, than it was to face up to British shortcomings.

The myth took on a life of its own. Rommel was the one German commander to receive sympathetic treatment in a number of biographies written by British officers after the war. Ultimately, this led to his immortalisation in the masterly film portrayal by James Mason - 'The Desert Rats'. Irony indeed.

'The Rommel myth took on a life of its own.'

There were some undoubted underlying truths behind the myth. Rommel was indeed a daring commander who took huge gambles to bring victory. And he never hesitated to punish the mistakes of his opponents. He was an inspirational leader, who led his men from the front and frequently drove to the right place at the right time on the battlefield.

Lucky breaks

Rommel's offensive was halted by the British 8th Army © He was lucky in that when he made mistakes he was frequently left unpunished by the less responsive British commanders. And he thrived as an independent commander in North Africa, operating with considerable freedom, unlike German commanders on the Eastern Front. He did not, however, work well in coalition with his Italian partners, whom he often treated with contempt.

'... Rommel thrived as an independent commander ...'

Some of his success can also be explained by factors other than his personality. The famous Afrika Korps of the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions was a fine example of the expertise in armoured warfare of the German Army. Since the 1930s, this army had developed a sound doctrine of warfare, and created powerful Panzer divisions of tanks, infantry and artillery. These formations were 'glued' together by comprehensive radio communications, and powerfully supported by tactical airpower. It was little wonder that these units proved difficult to beat.

Much of Rommel's 'fingertip feel' for the battlefield was due to his excellent signals intelligence. Signals Intercept Company 621, which listened into British radio transmissions, provided him with unparalleled tactical insights, and was actually responsible for many of his most striking successes. During 1942, the US Military Attaché in Cairo, through transmissions decrypted by Italian intelligence, gave him invaluable operational intelligence. When these sources were discovered and stopped by the British in 1942, his tactical feel was never again as accomplished.

Ultimate failure

Rommel's ignorance of logistics led to unsustainable assaults © Rommel possessed many military talents, but his flaws as a commander doomed him to failure. His lack of staff training meant that, for all his tactical success, he never properly understood the broader context of 'his' war in North Africa - or the fact that the campaign was essentially defensive for the Axis. Most importantly, his failure to understand the complex logistics of the North African theatre meant that his daring advances were never sustainable.

'... his flaws as a commander doomed him to failure.'

For all his talents as a commander, Rommel did not pass the one true test of generalship - he never achieved a lasting victory. Instead, his flaws dovetailed with the wider bankruptcy of the German army in World War Two. By focusing upon the detail at the expense of the broader operational picture, and by down-playing the importance of logistics, the German army fought brilliantly at the tactical level but was overwhelmed by the combined might of the Allies. Their strength lay in the fact that they were prepared not just to fight but to wage war.

Most importantly of all, Rommel - and indeed almost every other German army officer - failed to see, until it was far too late, that their narrow conception of military duty had trapped them in the service of a brutal, murderous regime. Ultimately, Rommel failed. He was defeated in Africa and then in Normandy, but the bright, if brief, flash of his brilliance in the Libyan desert continues to attract our gaze even to this day.

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