Rommel

[Gauss]

 

[Gauss]

1. Baptism of Fire

THE GERMANY into which young Erwin Rommel was born on 15 November 1891, was without doubt a country fit for a Field Marshal, but perhaps not for the kind of Field Marshal which Rommel was destined to become. He was born at Heidenheim, near Ulm, the capital of the state of Wurttemberg. Rommel's father was a schoolteacher, specialising in mathematics, as had his father before him. His mother was the daughter of a former president of the government of Wurttemberg. The Rommel family circle typified the stolid, worthy world of middle-class officialdom in provincial Germany, tinged with the practicality, commonsense and unemotionalism which is said to be the hallmark of all Swabians from that corner of south-west Germany.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the area that eventually became Germany was a patchwork of small independent states, like Wurttemberg, which existed under the competing influences of Austria and Prussia. After 1830, these states started to join forces with Prussia, first in a customs union, the Zollverein, which was a free trade area under Prussian leadership, and then to advance step by step into a political union which culminated in the Second Reich - the German Empire - in 1871.

Naturally, the militaristic character of the Second Reich was not immediately established, even in Prussia or the northern regions. South of the River Main, the states had a more liberal reputation than those of the north. The bourgeoisie there had no great love either for strong central governments or for the military. The army had held a relatively low place in Swabian society before 1870. Military service was looked on much more as the prerogative of aristocrats or the lower classes. By the time Rommel was born, the fusion of these states into an empire had the momentum of twenty-three years. He did not grow up a typical young Prussian militarist at all, and to the end of his life, his Swabian virtues of fairness and lack of' extremism seemed unshakeable. But the society around him during boyhood, youth, even early maturity was one which could hardly be ignored, and must to some extent have conditioned him and helped shape his attitudes.

By the 1890s, the old liberalism and scepticism towards the military which before 1870 had been prevalent all over Germany - Prussia included - was almost extinguished under a wave of patriotism and pride of arms which followed the Prussian victories over Austria in 1866 and France in 1870.

Though the states remained semi-independent within the Reich, young Germans came to discover that the one common experience that they had was service in the army. The armies remained technically separate until 1918, but after 1871 their training and outlook was standardised - and they soon became completely dominated by the traditions and influence of the Prussian army.

The army then began to enjoy a much greater measure of social prestige. It was no longer a haven merely for aristocrats and peasants. The bourgeoisie flocked to join it. When they failed to attain regular commissions, they joined the Reserve. Society as a whole became permeated with military attitudes too. A general obeisance to and reverence for the royal army took hold. Indeed, it extended to the wearer of any uniform. The rigidity of the military hierarchy infected the outside world, and carried these attitudes to seniority and status into civilian life and into the bureaucracy. The warm afterglow of Prussia's military victories was fanned with German nationalism, and the heat welded the empire still more firmly into one unit. The schools to which young Rommel went during the 1890s were teaching that it was the royal army which had gloriously achieved the new unity of Germany; the unification process was depicted entirely in terms of the victories, as though the army alone was the agent of this complicated historical process.

The anniversary of the formation of the Reich took second place to the anniversary of the battle of Sedan, which had confirmed Germany's victory over France in 1870. Society thrilled to the endless rhythm of military bands, the erection of martial monuments, the whole ordered pomp and self-importance of a people stuffed out with ceremonial. It is true that in the south, where Rommel grew up, this respect for the uniform, any uniform, was less marked than in the north. But gradually, as the old order changed under the press of industrialisation, expansion and prosperity, the army assumed a more respectable place even in south German society. The old idealism associated with Prussian puritanism, sacrifice and service was replaced with a new spirit of materialism and cynicism. Externally, the army seemed the only body determined to stand out against this decadence. Internally, this was not the case. Morality was condoned only if it was orthodox; independent minds were discouraged. The officer class was impressed with the fact that it owed its allegiance to the Kaiser alone. The Kaiser himself, addressing new recruits at this time, told them that they must be prepared to fire on their parents if need be, in the cause of the Reich. He described the Reichstag and its deputies as 'a rabble without a country'. Under these influences, how could the officer class avoid becoming more and more aloof from the civilian world; more and more subject only to the political control of the Kaiser? Later, when the Kaiser was deposed after 1918, the army was reconstituted and was called on to show allegiance to the Weimar Republic. It naturally did so with a certain amount of distaste.

Later still, during the rise of Hitler, it might have moved itself to defend the values of Weimar if it had ever embraced them. But nostalgia for the old order was still strong, and the army - reared in this tradition of apolitical allegiance whatever the social consequences - went down to Hitler almost without a fight.

When Rommel died, at the age of fifty-two, he had served in the German army for just over thirty-four years. Of those thirty-four, just over six were spent in battlefield conditions. His exploits during those years of battle were so spectacular that it is easy to forget what a very large part of his adult life, indeed of his whole life, was spent not on the battlefield, but in an environment which must have been partly conditioned by the peacetime military or the middle-class world of the time. Out of battle, he was in a sense indistinguishable from the thousands of other provincial middle-class Germans who grew up in the bosom of the thrusting young Reich; who saw it collapse at the end of their youth; who, as young men in their thirties and forties, saw it rise again as a psychotic phoenix under Hitler and finally disappear in the ashes of the Berlin bunker as they approached middle age.

The most important parts of Rommel's life are clearly compressed into a few electrifying years of battlefield service between 1914 and 1917 and again from 1940 to 1943. But to understand the paradoxes of the man, one must see the kind of background from which he came, and to which he used to go home, which informed him as a man, and as a German - if not as a general- and that background is essentially one of small-town Germany. On the battlefield, Rommel was often a man of genius; off it, he was essentially a small-town German with a drabness about him that hardly seems compatible with the romanticised image his military exploits have earned for him.

Of all the great names who belong to the history of German arms between 1860 and 1940, Rommel stands out, as a man apart. The history of German arms and the German army tends to be seen in terms of the general staff, which dominated the organisation and development of the army at a time at which individual commanders were becoming subordinate to the idea of total war, and to the massive power and organisation which an industrial state could apply to the business of war if it was properly mobilised. Naturally, individuals had a great influence on these developments, from the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst revolutions of 1806 through a line which included the two von Moltkes, von Schlieffen, Ludendorff, von Seeckt, Schleicher, Halder and even Guderian. But the great significance of these men is that they made their contribution from the centre. Rommel made his from the wings. In their writing and thinking and organising, they changed the German army by developing its central organisation and philosophy. Rommel did not belong to this great general staff tradition. His effect on the German army and its tactics came through the example he gave on the field of battle, rather than through any administrative or policy-making process at the level of grand strategy or in the general staff.

Rommel was an outsider as far as the general staff was concerned. It was not just that his social origins were not equal to the 'vons' - the junker counts and the patrician families who had traditionally provided so many cadres for the small self-perpetuating body of officers who, with great skill, kept their hold on the German general staff. It was that all his life he was more at home in the execution of decisions than in the formulation of policy. He was an instinctive rather than an intellectual fighter. In peacetime, Rommel showed none of the fire and imagination of his battlefield exploits. It took the smell of gunpowder, almost literally, to excite his senses.

Rommel was not, however, an outsider from the great generality of the German army to which he belonged for so long and within which his career at first developed along such very conventional lines. His military career took him from a teenager to a man well into his forties as a more or less straightforward, uncomplicated, reasonably compliant member of that military community which grew up in the Second Reich and which showed remarkable powers of survival through all the buffetings which it received between 1910 and 1940.

Rommel joined the army in July 1910, having abandoned his first thought of becoming an engineer. He signed up with his local infantry regiment, the 124th (6th Wurttemberg), starting as an officer cadet, which meant serving in the ranks before being sent on to the war school. After three months, he was promoted Corporal, after six Sergeant, and in March 1911 went to the officers' military school at Danzig. He was commissioned the following January and then returned to his regiment in Weingarten.

While he was in Danzig, Rommel met and fell in love with a young language student, Lucie Maria Mollin, the daughter of a Prussian landowner and the cousin of a colleague in the military academy. They did not become formally engaged until 1915, but were married in 1916, and then went through twelve years of marriage without a child. Manfred, their only child, was born in 1928. After he met Lucie - Lu as he came to call her - Rommel appears never to have looked at another woman - possibly he had not looked at one before, either. But after 1911, until his death, there was a constancy in his emotional and family life which is almost uncanny - he was slightly formal, fair but strict and astoundingly punctilious about writing letters to her, sometimes two or three on the same day, even when on the battlefield. His emotional upsets, such as they were, seemed to be entirely concerned with his military world. His wife and son provided a backcloth to his life which came to life and colour only at the very end, when he chose, under duress; to take his own life as much for their sake as for his own.

For the two years before the outbreak of war, Rommel was a young subaltern in charge of recruits at Weingarten. By all accounts, he was the epitome of a conscientious, efficient but rather dull young regimental officer, mature before his time, fair to his juniors, respected rather than loved, and that perhaps more for his proficiency than for his humanity. He showed every sign of turning into a good major at the end of a long, worthy but essentially unimaginative career in regimental soldiering.

All this was to change when Rommel went to war. He fought with great distinction through the First World War as a young infantry officer, winning medals for bravery which were normally reserved for senior officers. He was lucky to spend much less of his war in the trenches than did most other young men of his age, on either side. Indeed, most of his battle experience was gained in conditions in which he was given a much freer hand as a junior officer than he might have had in the trenches.

After the war, Rommel was to write about his exploits in a slim volume called Infantry Attacks which became a kind of training manual for the German infantry. It was illustrated with his own sketches, and showed early signs of the graphic narrative power which races through his diaries of the Second World War. In those later diaries, one gets the worm's-eye-view of war but enhanced with the perspective given by the commander. In Infantry Attacks, it is merely the worm's-eye-view of a junior officer in the infantry. But slim and modest though the volume was, it had a revolutionary effect on Rommel's subsequent career. It was brought to Hitler's attention during the 1930s, and Rommel with it. The result was that, whereas he might have spent the Second World War as an infantry officer, perhaps commanding an infantry division or an army corps, and probably perishing in Russia or Normandy because of his passion for the front line, instead he became a Field Marshal.

On 2 August 1914, Rommel's regiment marched out to war, with bands playing, drums beating, crowds cheering. They were on their way to the 'threatened frontier' in the west. But Rommel was not with them. He had to stay behind in Weingarten for a few days to bring up reserves, champing lest he miss the first fight. He need not have worried. A few days later, he was at the front of the battlelines, savouring his first taste of a way of life which changed him from the shy, conscientious young man that he was, into what Brigadier Desmond Young, in his biography, Rommel, describes as 'the perfect fighting animal'.

Rommel's first action was with three other men from his platoon against fifteen or twenty Frenchmen whom he found barring their way. Characteristically, he rushed at them, shouting. He was repulsed, but this instant reaction to finding himself in a tight corner was one which he was going to demonstrate over and over again in his combat career. In his second action, a few days later, Rommel collapsed from sheer exhaustion and the severe stomach trouble which was to plague him throughout his life. He was reprimanded for being found asleep, and for falling off his horse from sheer fatigue. Late in September 1914, he was wounded in the leg when, typically, he charged three Frenchmen with a bayonet because he had run out of ammunition. Back in the line, in the Argonne area, in January 1915, he won his first decoration for bravery. Another nine months in the trenches followed before Rommel was posted to a mountain unit, in which his talents as an infantry subaltern with plenty of dash, initiative and energy could be put to better use than in the static trench warfare on Germany's Western Front. He spent a quiet spring and summer in mountain training in the ridge of South Hilsen, and was then posted to the Eastern Front at Siebenburgen to take part in operations against the Rumanians.

By a historical irony, it was as a company commander against the Rumanians that Rommel found himself in a situation which was to be reversed to his disadvantage many years later when he was commanding the German army in Africa. During one company advance, he gave orders to a platoon commander not to advance farther. The junior officer, seeing what he thought was an exploitable opening, disobeyed and advanced deeper into the enemy lines. Then he called for help to consolidate his position, which was otherwise too much exposed. Rommel was angry, and said that no help could come. 'I was none too elated with this course of events. Why did the platoon fail to stay in its place as ordered? Should I commit my last reserves as requested by the platoon commander? No, little as 1 liked it, I could not help the platoon.’ Years later, the same situation overtook him, but in reverse. He, too, in command of the African forces, was instructed not to advance. Yet advance he did, and in a most spectacular and convincing way. But when he called Berlin for help to hold his new and much extended position, no help came. By the tone of his great disappointment at the time, it is doubtful if he remembered the early strategic lesson which he himself had taught another junior officer in the Carpathians.

In May 1917, Rommel found himself back on Hilsen ridge facing the French. Then, in August, he returned to the Carpathian front, where his actions against the Rumanians and Italians were to climax his First World War career, first in August, in the assault on the heavily-fortified Rumanian position at Mount Cosna, and in October, against the Italians at Caporetto. At the end of the battle of Caporetto, writes Brigadier Young, 'He had been continuously on the move for fifty hours, had covered 12 miles as the crow flies in mountainous country, had climbed up to 7000 feet and had captured 150 officers, 9000 men and 81 guns' - all this, ironically, after he had had orders not to attack! For his action at Caporetto, Rommel was awarded the 'Pour le Merite' which was normally won only by generals and had been awarded to only about two or three junior officers before him. He was also promoted Captain. But his war was now effectively over. One or two further exploits followed Caporetto but, too soon for his own tastes, he was posted away to a junior staff appointment, in which he stayed until the end of the war.

So these brief but spectacular campaigns as a young man were all the fighting experience Rommel was to gain until nearly twenty-three years later, when, approaching middle age, he led a tank division across France. His innate characteristics remained consistent as he passed on up an ever-ascending scale of military power, with the attendant inhibitions and complications of effective command. Yet these early experiences of war must also have left their mark on him, for he always seemed to think of battle as a kind of wild dance, an adventure, in which he had to pit his imagination - actually his genius - against improbable odds. The tactical acrobatics which he performed as an infantry subaltern naturally became much more difficult with larger formations. Perhaps they were also less compatible with the role of an army commander in the huge and complex effort required of a nation at war and fighting on several fronts.

However, even in 1917, Rommel's tactical techniques showed themselves to be the natural and inspired precursors of the Blitzkrieg principles which were later codified by Captain B. H. Liddell Hart in England and adopted by the Germans during the mid-1930s. They were then put into devastating effect in the opening campaigns of the Second World War. Rommel's tactics relied basically on deep penetration behind enemy lines, and unhesitating decisions to attack in the rear. He always assumed that the rear areas would capitulate to a surprise offensive. When he assaulted a position, he immediately set about securing the flanks of his narrow bridgehead and then pushing as many forces as possible on through the gap which he had created and secured, so that they broke out and expanded on the other side - tactics which, years later, Liddell Hart was to describe as the ‘expanding torrent'.

a special tag to @Desert Fox is in order

 

[Desert Fox]

Rommel, one of the few men who have come to symbolize armored warfare in its early stages. A Knight amongst the many Knights who fought so loyally under the banner of the Third Reich, often times against heavy odds and yet achieved so hard earned a victory despite this. And even during the years of suffering defeat after defeat at the hands of numerically superior enemy forces, often times due to limited resources available to his own troops, he remained loyal and steadfast in the service of his Fatherland like a true soldier even to the bitter end.

R.I.P. Desert Fox

 

[Psychic]

Rommel, one of the few men who have come to symbolize armored warfare in its early stages. A Knight amongst the many Knights who fought so loyally under the banner of the Third Reich, often times against heavy odds and yet achieved so hard earned a victory despite this. And even during the years of suffering defeat after defeat at the hands of numerically superior enemy forces, often times due to limited resources available to his own troops, he remained loyal and steadfast in the service of his Fatherland like a true soldier even to the bitter end.

R.I.P. Desert Fox

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Wasn't he poisoned on Hitler's orders?

 

[!eon]

Move on Rommel's last seven months.

 

[Desert Fox]

Wasn't he poisoned on Hitler's orders?

Rommel was falsely implicated by other traitorous generals who were involved in the July Plot due to their envy of him being on favorable terms with the Führer and the other Nazi party officials, not to mention Rommel was adored even by the common Germans who were aware of his exploits against the French during the Invasion of France and the British in North Afrika. To add further insult to the injury Rommel wasn't the typical aristocratic Prussian officer like most of the July Plotters, thus they had more reasons to envy him and thus drag him down with them. Of course, we know this now but at the time Germany's situation on the European continent was a dire one and due to constraints in time and resources a thorough investigation could not be carried out to absolve Rommel. However, it is historically inaccurate for many to claim that Rommel was rebellious to Hitler, either overtly or covertly. In fact he was one of the few German Generals Hitler held in much high regard and he was loyal to his Führer even up till his death and served him well.

Just before he committed suicide Rommel is quoted as having said:

'I loved the Fuhrer and I love him still. I am innocent of any involvement in the assassination attempt. 'I served my Fatherland to the best of my ability and would do so again.' -Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel

Rommel, The Enduring Myth of the 'Good Nazi'- Daily Mail

 

[Gauss]

2. Between the Wars

SIX WEEKS AFTER THE ARMISTICE of November 1918, Captain Rommel was reposted to his old regiment at Weingarten, and prepared to settle down in the same barracks in which he had enlisted as a young officer cadet eight years previously. In the summer of 1919, he was sent to Friedrichshafen to command an internal security company. In January 1921, he was promoted to the command of an infantry regiment at Stuttgart, remaining there as a captain for nine years. There seemed but few highlights. In 1927, he and Lu went on leave to Italy to revisit the scenes of his former triumphs. Armed with a camera he took the first of many thousands of pictures which he later used to illustrate his war diaries. In 1928, on Christmas Eve, his son Manfred was born. In October of the next year, Rommel was posted as an instructor to the infantry school at Dresden. It was while lecturing there on his Great War experiences that he had the idea of publishing his lectures as the manual, Infantry Attacks. In October 1933, he was promoted Major and sent to Goslar to command a mountain batallion, with which he stayed until October 1935, when he was sent as a lieutenant-colonel to teach at the war academy at Potsdam, just outside Berlin. In November 1938, he was appointed to command the war academy at Wiener Neustadt, leaving only shortly before the outbreak of war.

But, by then, the years of obscurity were already over for him. A month earlier, when Hitler had marched into the Sudetenland, Rommel had been in attendance as the commander of his bodyguard. He had at last come to the Fuhrer's attention. Six years from that first assignment for the dictator, Hitler was to give orders that Rommel was to die. But during those years he was to catapult the brilliant officer into high rank, give him an army, an independent command (a rare, almost unique phenomenon under Hitler) and finally promote him to the rank of Field Marshal. How had those placid and domestic years of peacetime soldiering prepared Rommel for such an outsize but tragic destiny?

Between 1919 and 1938, Rommel's military career was modest, orthodox, almost tranquil, compared with the turbulence which raged about in German politics outside his family and regimental circle. Rommel seemed to arrive at that moment in 1939 at which war was declared almost as an innocent, largely untouched by the great convulsions of the 1920s and 1930s. In a sense, that is the reason for which he had been selected in the immediate aftermath of the first war, but to understand the full extent of Rommel's insulation from these events, it is necessary to go back to November 1918, when the Kaiser was deposed and Germany surrendered to the Allies.

The country's collapse was total. There was disintegration at home and defeat in the field. It is true that the myth of the ‘stab in the back' - that the German army was let down by Berlin politicians when it was still quite capable of defending the country - gained some currency in the years immediately following the war, and particularly following what were seen as the humiliating terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty. But compared with the subsequent dismemberment of Germany in 1945, the 1918 peace formula was a respectable affair.

At the time of the armistice, Germany was ruled by a council of deputies and by the general staff. Both the political and military leadership feared the rise of Bolshevik groups in the country, and the prospect that Germany would be torn in two by civil war between Bolshevik groups and the right-wing bands which were also forming. Even the army itself was in danger of internal disintegration into soldiers' councils and local groups of young officers and NCOs who objected to the armistice and were later to form what became known as the Free Corps. Rommel had some personal experience of this when he had to cross Germany soon after the war to bring Lu home to Weingarten from Danzig and was jostled and insulted by hostile groups of citizens on the way. The period which he spent in charge of the internal security company at Friedrichshafen was characterised also by a certain taste for lawlessness shown in both the unit he was commanding and the society outside. But he himself showed no inclination to get involved even in military politics.

The army's Chief-of-Staff at the time was General von Seeckt, who masterminded the transition from the large royal army of the now vanished Reich, into the select cadre which soldiered on during Germany's twilight years of the 1920s, until it was ready to provide the basis for Hitler's great military expansion in the 1930s. Von Seeckt had to nurse the army through a period of great loss: the loss of its figurehead - the Kaiser - and the loss of that image of the German Reich which had sustained it and had been the absolute focus of its energies for fifty years. He had to see that something replaced the monarchy as the object of the army's loyalty and as a source of their ultimate purpose and inspiration.

In the end, this became nothing more than a spirit of self-preservation. The survival of the German army as an independent organism during the 1920s nourished von Seeckt and his officers more than any other ulterior purpose. A vague, rather nebulous idea of the need to preserve some expression of cohesion within the German commonwealth may have provided a slightly larger context of inspiration. But basically, von Seeckt's legacy to the German army was to inculcate an effective will and instinct for survival, yet at the price of ignoring those other forces which were at work among the remaining German population - a population clearly less single-minded, less dedicated, less preoccupied with this one predominant purpose than were von Seeckt's chosen men.

For the Peace Conference at Versailles, von Seeckt proposed that Germany should retain a unified army of 400,000 men, but that the army's traditional judicial and political autonomy within Germany should be abolished so that it could no longer be regarded as a state within the state. This figure was initially reduced to 300,000, and by the end of the Peace Conference, von Seeckt had had to accept an army reduced to a strength of 100,000 men, of whom only 4,000 would be officers. The German army was aghast at the peace terms. In March 1920, there was an attempt by the Free Corps to stage a right-wing putsch against the government and the general staff. A detachment of the Free Corps marched on Berlin. The government retreated to Dresden, and then to Stuttgart. In four days, the putsch crumbled, but in the meantime von Seeckt had found himself forced more and more to perform the function of the traditional Commander-in-Chief, a post which had been abolished under the peace terms.

He was acutely conscious of the danger of a war breaking out within the army itself, and strove to prevent this by insisting that officers should insulate themselves from politics. In this, Rommel was, for von Seeckt, the archetype of the young officer whom he planned to retain in the four thousand allowed him. Von Seeckt's mission after Versailles was not only to preserve the German army at the size laid down by the victorious powers at the Conference, but to organise it entirely as a cadre for expansion some day into a much larger army. He used to say that he did not know when Germany would again need a large army; he knew only that she would. His young officers were thus picked with great care from the pool left over from the imperial army, which had never been entirely disembodied after the armistice. They all knew that their historic mission was to husband Germany's military resources for a better day. At the time, it was only natural for a young German like Rommel - of patriotic inclination and no great political sensitivity - to accept all von Seeckt's premises and work for the day on which the German army could once more come into its own.

In all this, Rommel was no exception to the generality of all those other young officers who made up von Seeckt's four thousand. Of course, the army was not entirely immune from the political alarums which broke out periodically in Germany during that time. Hitler had infected young officers here and there, and when he proclaimed his first abortive coup in Munich in 1923, a number of them rallied to him, particularly from the Infantry School. They were later dismissed.

Von Seeckt retired in 1926 and was succeeded by General Schleicher, who had to contend with the rise of Hitler's private party army, the SA or Stormtroopers, but who never fully recognised the danger which this organisation presented. He was intrigued by its potential, since it consisted mostly of former officers and men who had not been able to stay in uniform when the army was cut to peacetime proportions. He clearly hoped that, by co-operating with them, the army might be able gradually to bring them under its control, and to this effect some arrangements were made whereby army training depots gave military instruction to SA groups. But the army itself never seemed to be wholly convinced. In Ulm, close to Rommel's home, two subalterns in an artillery regiment were found to have formed Nazi cells and were dismissed. When Hitler assumed power in 1933, Schleicher, who had briefly preceded him as Chancellor, made noises suggesting that the army would resist the Nazi regime. But they were only noises, and there was no resistance.

With Hitler as Chancellor, the SA started to flex its muscles. It now numbered about 400,000 in twenty-four army groups, clearly reminiscent of the old Free Corps. It continually asked the army for instructors. The army kept a watchful eye on it, but friction increased. As the SA leader Rohm became more and more importunate, the two armies – SA and regular - seemed bound for total duplication of their training and command functions. Then, on 30 June 1934, in 'the night of the long knives', Rohm was arrested and killed, along with many other of Hitler's opponents. A month later, President Hindenburg died and Hitler achieved supreme power as both President and Chancellor. For the army, it was a crucial moment at which they were required to sign a new oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer and Chancellor in one.

The oath of allegiance was one more momentary worry for the army, coming on top of the growing internal unease which the rise of the private organisations had provoked between those officers whose political sympathies lay with the Nazis and those whose traditional view was that the Stormtroopers were bad for the regular army and therefore bad for Germany. Rommel obviously must have been aware of the strains within the army, but this does not seem to have affected him unduly. His first brush with the new order was modest, arising out of his pride in his unit rather than from any deep-seated ideological antipathy to the Nazi party, and it did not occur until 1935. Rommel's mountain battalion at Goslar had been chosen to provide a guard of honour for the Fuhrer himself. Rommel was told shortly before the parade that a single file of SS men would take position in front of his troops, to look after Hitler's safety. He told the SS that his battalion would not turn out under these conditions. He was asked to see Himmler and Goebbels, to whom he then explained that he thought that the proposal was an insult to his battalion. They agreed, and the proposal was dropped. The parade took place without the SS file, and Hitler's safety was adequately looked after by Rommel's mountaineers. At this meeting, Rommel met Hitler only officially as the guard of honour commander, and it was not until later, when he had been commander of Hitler's permanent bodyguard in the drive into Sudetenland, that he started to get on reasonably close terms with the Fuhrer.

Considering his proximity to Hitler after coming to the Fuhrer's attention, Rommel kept remarkably clear of any party or political involvement. It was naturally in keeping with Rommel's character and outlook to regard the private armies, the SA and SS, with considerable distaste - perhaps as a temporary aberration with which the Fuhrer would soon dispense when his power was consolidated. But it would also have been in keeping with his character only to observe and not to involve himself with the moral, political or philosophical implications of something of which he knew so little. Things which were happening in Germany, even within the army itself, and which were outside his immediate focus seemed remote to a man like Rommel, with his innate practicality and remarkable narrowness of interest and perspective.

Was he, for instance, affected by the new oath? It is not known. Was he any more alarmed than most other German citizens by the Rohm massacre? Doubtless not. Did he register concern at the subsequent intrigue and blackmail used by Hitler to discredit his War Minister and Commander-in-Chief? There is no sign.

Of the Fuhrer himself, Rommel clearly shared the view of most Germans, though, as war became more imminent, not the view of the general staff. After 1935, the army was embarked on a colossal programme of expansion which in a sense fulfilled all the careful and clandestine preparations which had been laid originally by von Seeckt. But it did more than that.

The purity and absolute dedication of the von Seeckt army obviously suffered in the heady expansion. New men came in, and the preoccupations of expansion took many senior officers' minds off the unwelcome effects of Nazi rule which were evident to those who wanted to look. Between 1932 and 1938, the number of generals rose from thirty-two to nearly four hundred. But Rommel was not among them.

In June 1937, Hitler ordered his forces to keep themselves in a permanent state of readiness for immediate mobilisation. Of course, they were not technically, nor indeed psychologically, ready for any kind of war. In February 1938, Hitler removed his War Minister and army Commander-in-Chief after the most amazing sage of blackmail, intrigue and skullduggery which involved some unsavoury exposures of the methods used by the regime against those whom it disliked. Later that year, in August, General Beck, the Chief-of-Staff, resigned when he saw that his attempts to induce the general staff to prevent the inevitable slide towards war had failed. A month later, his successor, General Halder, organised a plot to unseat Hitler, but was foiled by Chamberlain's decision to visit Munich and conclude the ill-fated agreement with the Fuhrer. The amazing thing about Germany's onrush to war after 1938 is how little the general staff seemed to want war and how powerless they apparently were to prevent its happening. There was widespread plotting and dissatisfaction with Hitler, which continued right into the war. There is no sign, however, that Rommel was ever privy to these early movements of dissidence, probably because at that period he was still comparatively junior and certainly right outside the small circle of general staff officers who still held the real positions of influence within the army, even if the army as a whole had such little influence outside.

For all that, when war was declared, Rommel – recently promoted Major-General - was once again at Hitler's side. Throughout the Polish campaign, he commanded the Fuhrer's bodyguard and was obviously well placed at the centre to see the devastating effect achieved by the invading German Panzer divisions applying all the tactical principles of the Blitzkrieg. When the campaign was finished, Hitler asked him what command he would like. In his own words, Rommel made the 'immoderate' request for a Panzer division, 'though many others were more qualified' and though, as he later confided, it did 'not suit the gentlemen at the Army Headquarters'. The request was granted. On 15 February 1940, Rommel assumed command of the 7th Panzer Division. His predecessor in command of the division was General Stumme. Though he did not know it at the time, it was hardly a good omen. When Rommel returned to fight and lose the second battle of Alamein, thirty-four months later, it was again General Stumme whom he came to replace. But in the meantime, there was a harvest of triumphs to be won, and, more important, Rommel, the fighting animal, was back in the fight. The years of mediocrity were behind him for good.

 

[Sine Nomine]

"THE ROMMEL PAPERS" by B.H Liddell Hart.... @Desert Fox @Gauss go through it, if you haven't it is mainly composed from notes and diary entries by Field Marshal.

 

[Gauss]

3. Race across France

ON 10 MAY 1940, the day on which Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain, Hitler invaded the West. In the space of a week, his Panzer divisions had burst through Holland and Belgium to reach the Channel coast. Within three weeks, the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force - a quarter of a million men - had been evacuated across the Channel in any vessel they could find. On 5 June, the Germans were on the Somme; on the 9th they crossed the Seine; on the 14th they entered Paris; they had reached the Rhone valley by the 16th. That same night, a new French Cabinet under Marshal Petain sent Hitler a request for an armistice, which was in effect a notice of capitulation. There was some token negotiation while the Nazi divisions roared on. When France's surrender became effective on 25 June, it was a bare six weeks since the German tanks had first rolled forward into the hilly and wooded country of the Ardennes.

The German army's success had been spectacular, though neither inevitable nor predictable. When the offensive was launched, the Germans had 136 divisions against an equivalent of 156 divisions in the allied British, French, Dutch and Belgian armies. The Germans had 2,800 tanks, against 4,000 for the Allies, and their tanks were in no technical way superior to those of the Allies. Only in the air were the Germans superior in both the numbers and the quality of their fighter-bombers, but this need not have been - indeed was not - a decisive superiority.

The Germans' decisive advantage lay not so much in their technical superiority as in the way in which they used their divisions, particularly in the tactics of deep and narrow penetration which had been pioneered throughout the 1930s by a small group of German Panzer officers led by Heinz Guderian. In May 1940, he was commanding a Panzer corps which was to form the spearhead of the German offensive and advance so fast that it frightened Hitler almost as much as it frightened the French. In fact, only ten of the German divisions were armoured, but most of them were used with devastating effect by concentrating them on a narrow front. Yet there was nothing inevitable about their victory. Allied blunders throughout the lightning campaign gave a quite unjustified aura of invincibility to the Panzers. It might have been a very different story had the British and French previously made any attempt to study the implications of this kind of Blitzkrieg attack. There were great potential weaknesses in the technique, provided the defending forces maintained their balance and kept their nerve. But in 1940, the Allies did neither of these things.

As it was, the whole campaign for the fall of France, Belgium and Holland was split into two distinct phases. The first three weeks until 5 June consisted of two advances by the German forces. The northern advance, across a fairly broad front into Holland and northern Belgium, managed to lure forward the Allied divisions to meet what they expected to be the main German attack along the Channel coast. The other, and as it turned out more menacing attack involved three Panzer corps on the German left flank, advancing initially through the Ardennes forest region, which all strategists had believed was impassable to armoured troops. From there, they swept round through Luxembourg and southern Belgium in a wide left flanking movement which threatened to encircle the forward placed Anglo- French divisions, to cut off their line of supplies from northern France, and perhaps even cut off the British from access to the Channel ports. By 5 June, they had routed the British and French armies, caused the complete evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force and overrun Belgium and Holland. They lay along the line of the River Somme, from the coastal area round Abbeville to the northern end of the old Maginot line of defences, which ran down the Franco-German border from Luxembourg to the Swiss frontier.

The second phase was from 5 to 25 June. The German forces executed three violent penetrations deep into the rest of France. On the right wing, on which Rommel and his division were, the forces went from Abbeville to Cherbourg and then on through Brittany and down the French west coast as far as Bordeaux. In the middle, the Panzers thrust straight into the heart of France, reaching Angouleme and Clermont Ferrand in the Massif Central by 25 June. On the left wing, Guderian's Panzer corps started by advancing due south to the Swiss frontier and then swung back eastwards towards the rear of the Maginot line to capture large numbers of French troops whom they surrounded and trapped against the Rhine.

Major-General Rommel's 7th Panzer Division was in the 15th Panzer Corps commanded by General Hoth. Like most of the other armoured divisions, Rommel's force made some quite spectacular advances during those summer days and nights. Perhaps its most decisive contribution to the overall campaign against France was in the crossing of the River Meuse, which took place after only two days of fighting. The glory and panache of that night-and-day runaway dash through a bewildered France was something common to most of the Panzers. But only Rommel's division was lucky to have at its head a man who not only led the division most of the time from the very front, who not only laid some of the guns himself, shouted orders to the infantry men going into assault, jumped on the turrets of leading tanks to replace wounded crewmen; who not only did these things in a manner quite uncharacteristic of the average divisional commander, but who also wrote it all down in a war diary of quite exceptional vividness and pace.

The contrast between the war diaries of Rommel and those of General Franz Halder, the army's Chief-of-Staff, tells almost all that needs telling about the difference between Rommel's kind of officer - the fighting, rather than thinking soldier - and that archetypal German staff officer who had been at the top of the general staff for the previous one hundred years. And what a contrast! In Berlin, the fastidious Halder, staff officer and plotter par excellence, is almost sensually methodical in his staff appreciations and planning notes; meticulously recording the administrative minutiae which are the lymph glands of military history; showing a twitch of pain here and there at the Fuhrer's excesses, or at some logistical carelessness; but otherwise without emotion. Rommel, by contrast, is in a paroxysm of movement and excitement as the battle swirls round him; the narrative racing ahead with him in the leading vehicle; a man possessed, sustained almost to addiction by the adrenalin of war. There is no time for introspection, little for logistics, hardly a moment in which to consider the foibles or faults of other people - friend or foe. In a pause for breath, he writes an almost breathless note to the faithful Lu: 'slept like a top, everything going well, don't worry,' or some such ritual exhortation. Before the battle, Halder is finding time to fuss about the late hours kept by young officers; in what currency should the soldiers receive their pay?; Hitler's nerves; has there been a leak? With Rommel: 'Dearest Lu, we're packing up at last; let's hope not in vain; don't worry yourself, everything will go all right.' Two days later, the day of the Meuse crossing, he came up for breath for the first time: 'everything is wonderful; I am hoarse from giving orders and shouting.'

Rommel's natural courtesy and sense of marital duty would hardly have allowed him to admit to himself, let alone to Lu, that here, on the battlefield, he was closer to ecstasy than he could ever have been sitting by the hearth at Wiener Neustadt, however much he was to claim, some years later in the desert, that those years at the war academy were his happiest.

When Rommel had taken over his command in February, he had had no previous experience of Panzer warfare apart from what he had seen from his central position in Hitler's bodyguard during the Blitzkrieg into Poland the previous September. In the intervening period, he had tried to make up for this by intensive training with his division. But two months was hardly long enough, and though married to all those battlefield instincts which he had shown twenty-five years previously as a young infantry subaltern, Rommel's first few weeks in action were marked by administrative and command mix-ups which were clearly the products of over-enthusiasm and inexperience.

The pace and distance of the 7th Panzer Division's sweep from the German frontier to Cherbourg earned it the subsequent title of the 'Ghost Division'. A look at the map shows what a staggering advance it was for one division's work over six weeks, even by modem war standards. In his very first action, on 10 May, Rommel's division brushed through some fairly light opposition from French forces. Rommel, in character, had trained his men to react instantly and aggressively to any encounter. 'I've found again and again in encounter actions that the day goes to the side first to plaster the opponent with fire', he wrote. His motor-cyclists were trained to drive on with machine-guns firing at anything which smacked of the enemy. The whole division thus echoed the behaviour of that aggressive young man who had won his spurs in the Argonne.

By 12 May, Rommel's division had reached the River Meuse, where it found that the bridges at Dinant and Haux had just been blown by the retreating French. This was to be the division's first real test, and Rommel's. Indeed, the Meuse crossing was also the first real test of the whole invasion, and many would argue that its speedy outcome dictated the course of the rest of the campaign, at least psychologically, in the effect which it had on the morale of the French generals as much as on that of their men.

Certainly, the crossing involved Rommel's division in its first really hotly-contested action, of which there were not to be all that many more during its swift advance across northern France. To start with, the men recoiled from the fire which was bearing down on them from the French defenders on the other bank. Rommel was everywhere: giving orders along the bank; riding in the turret of a leading tank which was fired on several times; directing rifle companies himself; rallying his men and generally bringing the authority of his rank as divisional commander to bear decisively at the platoon and company level. Without. doubt, it must have had a galvanising effect on the energies of his men, who must have been as unused as most private soldiers to the spectacle of their Major General, a shadowy figure at the best of times, enduring the same dangers as themselves, and for all the world behaving like a junior officer and an apparently, fearless one at that. Indeed, whatever rank he achieved, and whatever age,Rommel, with his youthful lust for battle, remained very much a junior officer at heart.

Rommel's 7th Panzer Division was not the only German division to cross the Meuse that day. But it was the one which most effectively consolidated its position on the far bank, and in that sense its crossing was perhaps the most decisive. Troops of Reinhardt's and Guderian's corps were also across, but were less solid on the western bank, and it was almost certainly the effect of Rommel's bridgehead which persuaded the French commander to order a general withdrawal to a new defensive line. In the ensuing confusion, the French opened up a gap in their line through which poured Guderian's Panzers until they had blasted a breach about sixty miles wide.

The breakout after the Meuse crossing soon brought the Panzers to the Channel coast. But the very speed and success of the sweep was very nearly its undoing. Hitler lost his nerve, and called a halt. He was haunted by the danger of the French army counter-attacking against the Germans on their by then very exposed and extended left flank. The commanders in the front line could see the improbability of this, in view of the total disorganisation which their sweeping attacks had caused in the French divisions. But back in Berlin there was less confidence. At Rommel's level, there was no sign or justification for Hitler's doubts, nor, indeed, was he affected by them. At Guderian's level, commanding the next corps, there was every sign.

On 15 May, General von Kleist, Guderian's superior commander, became nervous of the speed of the advance and ordered a twenty-four-hour halt. Guderian protested and secured a day's postponement for the order. But when it was finally enforced, on 17 May, he resigned his command, and was brought back the next day only after a compromise formula had been worked out with von Kleist, whereby he was allowed to continue advancing as a 'reconnaissance in force'. The whole front then started to advance again at speeds and over distances which were something previously unheard of in war. Reinhardt's corps achieved thirty-seven miles one day; Rommel's division fifty miles in one twenty-four-hour period, which included an unprecedented night match.

After the Meuse crossing on 13 May, and until he was brought to a temporary halt outside Arras by two British tank regiments, Rommel's advance was almost literally headlong. We see him in his armoured car, holding a conference with his regimental commanders as they race along at forty mph, a whole column of vehicles behind him struggling to keep up. We see him negotiating for the speedier surrender of the garrison of Philippeville by giving permission for the French officers to keep their batmen and have their kit picked up for them. But the scene is not always so light-hearted. In one incident in the crush of vehicles, Rommel came across a staff car containing a French Lieutenant-Colonel. As Rommel and his column drove up, the Frenchman's 'eyes glowed hate and impotent fury and he gave the impression of being a thoroughly fanatical type'. They decided to take him on with them in one of their tanks, but the Colonel 'curtly refused three times to get into one of the tanks. There was nothing for it but to shoot him.'

Rommel was also very lucky. Time and again during the campaign, he exposed either himself individually or his whole division to risks which could have been disastrous had they been faced with a more collected enemy. Many times, Rommel escaped while those around him were wounded or killed.

As the Panzers crashed on through the night, we get a picture of French villagers rudely awakened by the din of vehicles and the shouting of soldiers; troops bivouacked by the road, 'their faces distorted with terror', lying huddled in ditches and hollows; refugee columns all over the roads, carts abandoned as their owners in panic fled into the fields. 'On we went at a steady speed, towards our objective', was the Panzer commander's laconic commentary.

Rommel's major advance in those first few days, towards the village of Le Citeau, was made with him leading the first column, believing that the rest of the division was following along rapidly behind. In this he was wrong: he was in fact alone with a Panzer battalion and part of a motor-cycle battalion. His division was strung out for miles behind him along a thin salient which was threatened on every side by French forces. As a result of his night march, he had far outstripped the other Panzer divisions on either flank. He set out in his armoured car to return along the line of his advance and look for the rest of the division. The French were still very much in evidence on either flank of the line of advance. Indeed, here and there they were still dominating the road itself. Rommel had to spend the whole day driving up and down the line looking for his scattered division and attempting to collect his troops. At any time, had the French been less demoralised and disorganised, a concerted attack on Rommel's undefended flanks would have been very serious for the Panzers. Rommel got away with it, though there were complaints from his staff at the breakdown of contact between them and their commander.

This was a complaint which was to be levelled again and again at Rommel - not without justification. His natural enthusiasm for the battle, and his profound belief that the commander must lead from the front, not only to infect his men with his confidence and enthusiasm but also to see for himself what was going on, naturally became more hazardous as the formations under his command became larger, and the area covered by the battle more extensive. At the head of a Panzer division in France, it was easier for him to command in this way. He was part of a much larger front which was advancing at speed, and the quality of the opposition was clearly not presenting much of a threat. Indeed, one of the main impressions of Rommel's diary is how very few troops of the total divisional establishment of 12,500 he seemed to have with him most of the time. Because he was always at the front, or darting about looking for other units, there is none of the feeling of mass movement which one finds in other commanders' accounts of war, written from the centre.

At Arras, Rommel had, for a few moments at least, one of his most severe encounters in the French campaign. It was also the first time that he found himself fighting against British troops. His plans to by-pass Arras to the south, and swing round it, nearly foundered under the counter-attack by two British tank regiments. They represented the spear-head of two British divisions which had been ordered to counterattack against the Germans, to protect the right flank of the British Expeditionary Force as it withdrew from Belgium back towards the Channel.

Rommel's encounter at Arras, though inevitably dramatic, was in fact only a very minor engagement. Yet this minor setback seemed for a moment to dent the Germans' confidence. In his battle report, Rommel over-dramatised and exaggerated the extent of the opposition and the scale of the fighting. The corps commanders were also concerned. At the High Command, Hitler felt that his own nervousness had been vindicated. With hindsight, one can see what a very thin film of confidence coated the whole German direction of the invasion, and, indeed, that in mobile war, the pendulum can so easily and so swiftly swing between a strong will and a faint heart.

Rommel, however, was largely unaware of the pendulum. On 2 June, Hitler visited his division while it caught its breath. To Lu: 'The Fuhrer's visit was wonderful. He greeted me with the words "Rommel, we were very worried about you during the attack." His whole face was radiant and I had to accompany him afterwards. I was the only divisional commander who did.'

After a few days' rest, the division swept on again. Rommel crossed the Somme. He forced the division to continue its advance across country, even those vehicles which were not designed to go off the roads. To achieve more speed, he took command of the leading battalion, but when the division reached the Seine, he found the leading infantry milling about with no clear plan to cross the river. He was very angry, but once again it was he who had overreached himself; and his division. 'I had no idea where the main body of the division was', he wrote - an extraordinary admission from the divisional commander himself.

On 10 June, Rommel's division reached the sea west of Dieppe, after a non-stop run of sixty miles in pursuit. The next day, he walked into St Valery beside the leading column of tanks to receive the British surrender. On the same day on which Rommel's division captured St Valery, it secured its first mention in Halder's diary, incongruously interspersed between passages during the rest of that week in which Halder was working out the way in which the German army would soon have to be reduced to a peacetime establishment now that the war was largely over. In a few days, while Rommel was still racing across northern France to the Cherbourg peninsula, Hitler was already giving Halder instructions to start reducing the army to 120 divisions from its current strength of 159.

Out in Normandy, Rommel had orders to advance as fast as he could before the armistice was signed. He covered 150 miles on 17 June before being halted south of Cherbourg. Again, the bulk of the division, struggling along behind its lightning commander, had proved unequal to the task. It took the wrong turning and was out of touch with Rommel for most of the night. For the final assault on Cherbourg, Rommel once more had to go back to the rear: 'my most important job was to get the rest of the division into action'.

Finally, on 19 June, the garrison at Cherbourg surrendered, and for Rommel the campaign was over. The division's assault on Cherbourg had been launched over a period of four days and 220 miles. To Lu: 'There were some bad moments for us and the enemy was at first between 20 and 40 times our superior in numbers. However, by buckling to quickly, we succeeded in carrying out the Fuhrer's special order to take Cherbourg as fast as possible.' The division's casualties since 10 May were 682 killed, 1,646 wounded and 296 missing, with only 42 tanks lost. It captured 97,000 prisoners, 458 tanks and armoured cars, 4,000 lorries and several hundred guns.

The division was then ordered south to Rennes. Rommel told Lu that the war had turned into a lightning tour of France. Halder, breaking off from a dispute with Field Marshal von Runstedt ('he uses language one, would not think possible .between German Generals'), had time to remark that 'fighting has ceased; now the paper work begins' - the comment of a staff officer. Rommel's perspective, as usual, was more excited and dynamic: 'At last the armistice is in force, we're now less than 200 miles' from the Spanish frontier and hope to go straight there so as to get the whole Atlantic coast in our hands.. How wonderful it's all been!' And then, as when he first went to war: 'Something I ate yesterday upset me, but I'm better again already. Billets middling' - the comment of a campaigning soldier.

 

[Gauss]

that guy's face needs more meat

Your concern is appreciable but I am pretty sure no general in history ever cared about the needs of his face.

 

[third eye]

My thanks & appreciation for creating this thread.

 

[Psychic]

Rommel and staff during the campaign for France, (June 1940)

General Erwin Rommel and staff observe 7th Panzer Division practicing a river crossing at the Mosel, spring 1940.

An artistic depiction of General Major Erwin Rommel leads the vanguard of his vaunted 7th Panzer (Ghost) Division past an abandoned French Char B tank on its epic drive from the Ardennes to the English Channel.


@Gauss add pictures in your posts to make them more interesting to read. Add maps as well to help understand the battles to the readers.

 

[AUSTERLITZ]

Great general.Man of honour.Inspirational leader.Superb divisional/corps commander but not ideal army group commander material.
His strengths were tactics,personal example,energy and intuition.
Weaknesses - No understanding of logistics(partly due to no staff experience),recklessness.

He's one of the greats no doubt,but also got great press both in germany and britain.He's not germany's best general of the war,though he is certainly in german top 5.Also never served in russia -the front that made and unmade german generals.Top 2 would be manstein & model then rundstedt.Then its a throwup between guderian,rommel and kesselring.

 

[!eon]

Great general.Man of honour.Inspirational leader.Superb divisional/corps commander but not ideal army group commander material.
His strengths were tactics,personal example,energy and intuition.
Weaknesses - No understanding of logistics(partly due to no staff experience),recklessness.

He's one of the greats no doubt,but also got great press both in germany and britain.He's not germany's best general of the war,though he is certainly in german top 5.Also never served in russia -the front that made and unmade german generals.Top 2 would be manstein & model then rundstedt.Then its a throwup between guderian,rommel and kesselring.

Heinz Guderian of course has upper hand than Erwin Rommel. Though he was not promoted to Feldmarschall because of his differences with Hitler but he gave new practical concepts. Rommel's quality was his tactics, which was also present in Guderian.

 

[Gauss]

4. The Desert Element

IN MARCH 1941, Italian troops in Eritrea captured a British army intelligence summary which said: 'Detachments of a German expeditionary force under an obscure German general, Rommel, have landed in North Africa.' It was already a little out of date in March 1941, since not only had the Germans landed, and Rommel with them, but they were already taking a rather more positive role than the Italian troops whom they had been sent out to join.

Rommel's historical reputation springs from his campaigns in the North African desert. The exploits of the 'Ghost Division' may have captured the imagination of the Germans through skillful use of the official information services, and probably ensured that, when Hitler was casting around for a German commander to take over in North Africa, he was quite ready to accept Rommel. But it was not until he arrived in Africa and led his joint Italian-German army up and down the desert almost incessantly for twenty-five months - always against British troops - that his reputation spread outside the confines of Nazi domestic propaganda to win for him a permanent place in the history of war.

After the fall of France, Rommel's division wintered quietly in Bordeaux with little to do even as an army of occupation. Rommel spent most of the time working on his war diary of May and June 1940, and discussing it with his staff officers. He was promoted to Lieutenant-General in January 1941, and then in early February received a summons to Berlin. After it, he wrote to Lu: 'Now I shall be able to do something for my rheumatism.' It was the nearest he could get, without breaching security, to telling her that he had been posted to Africa. He went straight to Tripoli and was to stay in Africa for more than two years.

During those years, he was twice to march fifteen hundred miles eastward up the desert into Egypt, and twice to flee fifteen hundred miles westward down it, with the British army performing the same movements in reverse. General J.C. Fuller, the military historian, explains in The Decisive Battles of the Western World why Libya was for so long the 'racecourse of the war' and why

... each army in turn galloped forward until its momentum was exhausted and then was compelled to gallop back to avoid annihilation. The reason centred almost entirely in supply and, like a piece of elastic, the line of supply of both armies could be stretched with comparative safety to between 300 and 400 miles from its base - Tripoli on the one hand and Alexandria on the other. But as these two main bases were over 1400 miles apart, to try to stretch them farther before intermediate bases were established was to risk snapping the elastic. The supply problem of both sides was how to increase the elasticity of their respective supply systems. This could only be done by building up stockpiles at their respective main bases and step by step pushing forward the advance bases. As both sides were separated from their homelands by the sea, the tussle was governed by sea communications.

Of course, the clarity of General Fuller's analysis and its implications were often lost on both sides as they trundled through the sand. And although the main principles explained by him do account for the almost uncanny symmetry with which the desert battle ebbed and flowed, there were, needless to say, several additional factors which entered into the equation. Along with fundamental issues of supply, there were the factors of Rommel's personality and the personalities of the British commanders who opposed him; the harassment or lack of support which all commanders received at one time or another from London and Berlin; the morale of their troops; and exhaustion, disease, pressure from allied elements, even the weather played a not inconsiderable part now and then. Then there were disparities in equipment: tanks with more or less armour plating, guns with longer range or greater armour-piercing power, anti-tank guns which stopped tanks and anti-tank guns which did not. And under it all, vast, antiseptic, cruelly naked and inhospitable, exposer of folly, wrecker of equipment, dry and still, windswept and waterlogged, with its suffocating heat and the chill of long unfriendly nights, with all these things and more, but at all times dominant - the desert, a vast sand table on which these tiny armies swirled and pirouetted like opposing fleets at sea.

Although the main supply bases at either end of the desert were at Tripoli and Alexandria, the fighting effectively took place in an area well short of both bases, an area bounded at either end by natural bottlenecks at which the broad southward expanse of the desert narrows into a relative defile next to the sea, leaving a width of about forty miles before the land to the south becomes impassable to armies. In the west, this bottleneck was at El Agheila on the border between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, where Rommel made his first assault in March 1941. In the east, it was at El Alamein, eighty miles west of Alexandria, where the desert fell away in a steep escarpment into the Qattara depression, about thirty miles from the coast. Between these two narrows, the desert battleground stretched out for about six hundred miles in length and at places up to one hundred miles wide. From Rommel's first position at Sirte, looking east, the coastline swept away to the north creating the bulge of northern Cyrenaica, with Benghazi at its western end and Derna at its eastern end, joined by a coast road, with other desert tracks going straight across the middle through Msus, Mechili and Gazala. Fifty miles further along the coast from Gazala was Tobruk, which as a port assumed vital importance for the British advances, and which "Rommel failed to capture in his first year - a failure which certainly inhibited any plans he might have had for advancing further eastward into Egypt.

Tobruk was just over a hundred miles west of the Libyan-Egyptian border, which was marked by a wide frontier fence of barbed wire entanglements which stretched southwards through the desert past Sidi Omar and Fort Maddalena. Just inside Egypt, the coast road wound through a pass at Halfaya, with natural defensive positions, and then continued virtually without interruption through Mersah Matruh, Fuka and El Alamein before ending up in Alexandria. A railway ran westward from Alexandria to the Egyptian frontier, but once in Libya - until one reached Derna - the only lines of communication were the coast road - in good order - or a variety of tracks across the desert. Most of the fighting took place on a kind of plateau which rose up in a steep escarpment from the coastal area and was negotiable in a north-south direction only at a few places.

The military geography of the desert was remarkably simple. Along its entire length there were only a few places at which troops stayed to defend fixed positions. Apart from the natural bottlenecks at either end, if one was retreating one way or the other, one would not retreat inch by inch, but go back in leaps and bounds - from Agheila to the Gazala line which provided the western defence of Tobruk; from Gazala to the Sollum/Bardia line on the frontier; from there to the base area at Mersah Matruh. Between these places there was no position to defend, and there were few airstrips to enable one to bring any appreciable tactical air power to bear on the battle. The desert campaigns were basically a war of maneeuvre between accepted fixed points up and down the sand table.

So this was Rommel's element. Between his arrival in Africa in February 1941 and his final departure in March 1943, Rommel's campaigns can be divided into four distinct periods - advance, retreat, advance, retreat.

In the first phase, he was in the ascendant from March 1941 until November 1941. He pushed the British back from their positions threatening Tripolitania, and advanced as far as the frontier with Egypt. Then, in November 1941, phase two opened with a tactical defeat in the battle called 'Crusader', and the first retreat began. By the time it ended, he was virtually back where he had started. Phase three replaced phase two almost before the latter was really finished. In January 1942, Rommel performed a lightning turn round, and converted his retreat into another advance, which this time took him, by May, to the Gazala line, by June to the capture of Tobruk, by July into Egypt and to the El Alamein defence line at which he was finally brought to a halt at the first battle of that name. There was then a pause while both sides found their breath. Phase four opened up at the end Of October 1942, with the second battle of El Alamein. Rommel was dislodged from his defensive positions and forced into a continuous retreat which did not stop until he reached Tunisia the following March, more than fifteen hundred miles to the rear. When he left Africa that month for good, with his largely broken and surrounded army behind him, the Axis cause in Africa was virtually at an end.

It is doubtful, however, whether any such dramatic and disastrous developments were anticipated by Hitler and the German general staff when they chose to send Rommel to Africa in early 1941. The desert war had started in September 1940, when Graziani, the Italian commander, pushed his divisions into Egypt against virtually non-existent British defences, and soon reached Sidi Barrani. There he started to consolidate his position. This gave the British time to prepare a counter-attack which was duly launched in early December 1940. About thirty thousand British troops were sent in against the Italian army, which numbered - in the forward areas alone -nearly three times their strength. By 8 February, when Rommel was in Berlin, the British army had taken Tobruk, forced the Italians out of Cyrenaica, captured nearly 130,000 prisoners and was occupying El Agheila in a position threatening Tripolitania. Rommel later noted in his diary that if Wavell, the British Commander-in-Chief in Cairo, had continued his advance into Tripolitania, no resistance worthy of the name could have been put up against him. The Italian army in Africa had almost ceased to exist. In fact, Wavell was prevented from exploiting his victory by the decision of the British Cabinet to divert many of his troops from the North African theatre to the defence of Greece.

Although it has been argued that Wavell, if unhindered by the short-lived and disastrous plan to send troops to Greece, could have sent his army commander, General O'Connor, another six hundred miles on to capture Tripoli, Churchill turned the plan down in favour of Greece. Indeed, he went further: he cajoled Wavell with the vast numbers of men on the ration strength of Middle East Command who could not be 'rowing their weight in the boat', and, in a fit of fury one night at a defence committee meeting, railed at the Chiefs-of-Staff that 'it was not more troops that Wavell needed out there, but firing squads and courts martial'.

So, at the time at which Rommel arrived, his opposing commander was experiencing just- that lack of interest and support which he himself was destined to suffer from Berlin for most of his time in Africa. The question is, however, had he ever been led to expect anything else? The British Cabinet after the Greek fiasco soon returned to the view that the Libyan campaign was, for Britain, the vital strategic engagement, worthy of all the time and military resources that could be applied to it. For the High Command in Berlin, however, the Africa campaign, certainly at its inception - and perhaps really for its duration, was a sideshow designed as a holding operation, originally conceived to prevent the Italians from being forced out of Africa.

When Rommel answered his summons to Berlin on 6 February, he was told that on account of the Italians' critical situation in Africa, a German Africa Corps was to be formed with two German divisions - one light and one Panzer - and was to be sent to Libya to help Graziani. Rommel was to be the corps commander and was to move off immediately. The first German troops would arrive by mid-February, the 5th Light Division by mid-April and the Panzer Division by the end of May. Ominously for Rommel, he was also told that, though he would be in command of the Italian motorised elements, he would be subordinate to the Italian Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Graziani. His command relationships with the Italians were destined to create endless trouble for Rommel in the two years in which he was in Africa.

After receiving these instructions from the German Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, Rommel went to see Hitler in the afternoon and Halder the following morning. Hitler told him that he had been recommended as the man who could most quickly adapt himself to the unknown conditions of desert warfare. But apart from these pleasantries, what were Hitler's real intentions in sending Rommel to Africa? As it turned out, Rommel's genius on the battlefield, and his distance from Berlin, enabled him so to transform the situation he found in Africa, and to create there a whole new range of possibilities for German strategy, that he assumed that his leaders in Berlin would also revise their original evaluation of the relative unimportance of his mission. In this he was mistaken. They never really did so, except under the occasional and temporary influence of a particularly spectacular victory by the Africa Corps.

Throughout Rommel's time in Africa, and for months even before he went out there, the whole weight of German military preoccupation had been concentrated on the preparations for the gigantic attack on Russia - Operation Barbarossa - which was to be launched in June 1941. Week after week, Halder's diary is full of massive planning operations involving staff work on a quite unprecedented scale. In contrast, we find him noting on 16 January that, 'The war in Africa need not bother us very much. Even now the military situation is better than a year ago, but we must not risk the internal collapse of Italy. Italy must be saved from that. It will be necessary to send some help.' Halder told Rommel, therefore, that his main task was to see that Graziani did not retreat the remaining five hundred miles from Sirte to Tripoli without a fight. He was asked to send in a staff appreciation from Rome after speaking to the Italian High Command, and to keep in touch with General Paulus, one of Halder's assistants.

A month later, on 10 March, Rommel was told by the OKH (the German supreme army command) not to advance too far until the 5th Division arrived. On 11 March, he flew home to report to Hitler and his generals. He told them that the British position in the bulge of Benghazi offered favourable conditions for him to carry out a successful attack: He would not be able to attack further eastwards, towards Tobruk, until he had dislodged the British forces from their positions along the Jebel Akhdar, which stretched from Benghazi to Derna at the northern end of the bulge. It was agreed between them, and von Brauchitsch repeated to Rommel, that they did not believe that the Africa Corps was yet strong enough to undertake major operations, but should start to prepare for a drive on Tobruk the following autumn. The OKH then turned its mind to its other operations in Finland, Rumania, Albania, Greece, Norway, Algiers and Yugoslavia - and, of course, the ever-dominant planning for Barbarossa.

One can see what Rommel had to contend with in his superiors, but one can also see what Halder and the OKH had to contend with in Rommel. Even allowing for the great difficulties created by the very different temperaments of Halder and Rommel, they were clearly from the very first meeting talking two totally different languages born from almost diametrically opposite perspectives. Halder was to become obsessed with the Russian venture; yet Rommel was not milk-white either. We shall see also his increasing incapacity to appreciate that his own part in German grand strategy was, at that stage; only minor. How exasperating it must have been for him to advance across hundreds of miles, and apparently overturn all the accepted strategic premises in the Middle East, without these implications making any impact on those obsessive 'Barbarossans' in Berlin! But this is one of the main paradoxes of Rommel's life. He had been born and reared in the rigid orthodoxy of the Second Reich. Here he was now, a man whose behaviour between the wars suggests that he had been faithfully inculcated with the virtues of obedience to authority, and of the subordination of tactics to the grand strategy, yet who repeatedly failed to see that, however spectacular his victories in the desert and however imaginative his plans for exploiting them, German strategy at the time was ineluctably caught up in the Russian operation; and that campaign had a momentum and a scale which would have required more than the victories of two enterprising German divisions in the North African sideshow to alter its course. It may have been shortsighted of the Halders and the Hitlers as they peered obsessively at their maps of the Ukraine, but in terms of their original instructions to Rommel, one can hardly accuse them of letting him down. The young subaltern in Rommel's company who had advanced too far in the Carpathians twenty-five years earlier had received short shrift and no help from Rommel when he appealed for it. It was a bitter lesson for Rommel the Field Marshal to have to relearn himself.