War and Remembrance (90 page)

In fact it was now no contest. Rommel has been much criticized for not declining battle and withdrawing from El Alamein, for the British buildup was becoming monstrous.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
Roon here gives a table showing British advantages of five to one or better at El Alamein in tanks, planes, and troops. Dubious, but the figures in British accounts are lopsided enough.
—
V.H.

But Rommel
could not
leave. So poor were his logistics, so badly had the Supreme Command failed him, so costly was the interdiction from Malta, that the Afrika Korps virtually lacked the gasoline to pull across Libya. Rommel had to stand and fight, using up in battle what fuel he had. Beyond El Alamein lay Alexandria, a richer supply dump than Tobruk; beyond that, Suez still beckoned. He had beaten the British often. He had their measure. One more fight, one more victory, and all might yet be well!

El Alamein was a long-prepared British fall-back position, well fortified and mined. The front stretched some forty miles from the coast to the Qattara Depression, where steep cliffs dropped to a vast bog of salt marsh and quicksand, two hundred feet below sea level. It was perfect for the World War I mentalities in charge of England’s forces, and unsuited to Rommel’s desert tactics.

He too sowed stupendous mine fields nine miles deep all along the front, mainly with captured British mines. He fortified the high ground, husbanded the fuel and ammunition, begged and pleaded and raged for more supplies, and waited for the enemy to attack. But his opponent, Bernard Montgomery, was in no hurry. Montgomery combined a flair for flamboyant and belligerent rhetoric with extreme caution in planning and fighting. Eisenhower once called him a good “set-piece commander.” Montgomery wanted his set piece against Rommel to be a sure thing.

Erwin Rommel was not a well man, and his health gave way. He flew back to Germany on sick leave. When the battle began he was still in the hospital, and the Anglo-American armada was already on the high seas, bound for French North Africa.

Montgomery attacked on the October full moon. One thousand massed artillery pieces laid down a Verdun-like barrage; waves of infantry then crossed the mine fields to seize advanced positions; sappers cleared mines yard by yard in narrow corridors; and behind them came crawling the tanks. It was heavy, unimaginative, slogging warfare, orthodox as a Sandhurst field exercise. Montgomery had the weight of men, shells, and metal, and was not trying tricks. Our troops and some superior Italian divisions, well dug in all along the line, stoutly resisted. By daylight the attack was bogged down in the mine fields, facing rings of heavy antitank guns.

Hitler ordered the Desert Fox from his sickbed to fly to El Alamein and resume command. The unequal battle raged for a week. Throwing in men and machines with World War I abandon, Montgomery failed to break through. Rommel fought back brilliantly, switching his dwindling handful of tanks here and there, virtually counting his shells and gasoline jerrycans before each counterattack.

In London, Churchill was impatiently waiting for the breakthrough. He wanted to order the victory bells rung throughout England, for the first time in the war; just as Mussolini had flown over to Libya in July —entourage, white horse, and all —for his grand entry into Alexandria. But as the days dragged on, the bell-ringing had to be put off. In plain fact, the Afrika Korps had Montgomery stopped. Concern in Alexandria and in London grew that the engagement might have to be broken off, a desert stalemate very much like the Western Front in 1916.

But the attrition became too much for Rommel. His tank force was shrinking away. His shells were almost gone. He had no air support; and the RAF pounded him at will. Having no tanks left to consume gasoline, he could now use what fuel remained to truck his forces back to Libya. This he decided to do, but he made the terrible mistake of telegraphing Hitler for permission to withdraw. The answer of course shot back,
Hold fast at all costs, no retreat, the troops must write a glorious new page in German history,
and so forth and so on.

This delayed the loyal Rommel’s escape by a full forty-eight hours, and forced him to abandon his Italian infantry division in order to save the Afrika Korps. Two days earlier he might have extricated the lot, but now he had to put first things first and preserve his striking arm. Montgomery was slow in pursuit, and the Desert Fox made good his retreat to Libya and to Tunis.

Such in truth was the vaunted “Hinge of Fate” Battle of El Alamein.

By October 1942, the Afrika Korps was already all but done for, due to the criminal failures of supply. After the most formidable preparations, Montgomery placed the pistol of the Eighth Army at the prostrate Rommel’s
temple, pulled the trigger — and missed. The Desert Fox sprang up and escaped. That is essentially what happened.

That the needed supplies could always have been sent in a flood — troops, tanks, fuel, aircraft, antitank guns—was amply proved, too late, once the Anglo-Americans landed. Stung in their sensitive political nerves, Hitler and Mussolini rushed whole armies to Tunis by air and sea, gradually building up to almost three hundred thousand men. Such reinforcements to Rommel in July would have carried German arms to the Persian oil fields and to India. Slipping away from his dawdling pursuers, Rommel crossed the continent in a great fighting retreat, took command of the Tunis pocket, and made a shambles of the Allies’ Mediterranean timetable. But the dream of Suez and beyond was over.

The Anglo-American North African campaign was a poor show even before Rommel entered the picture. The key was the Bizerte-Tunis port area at the Sicilian Narrows, scarcely one hundred miles from Europe. The British wanted to land near there and dash for the objective. But the American army, facing its first battle test, feared venturing so far inside Gibraltar Strait. What about German air power, the inexperienced Yank generals asked; what about possible intervention by Spain, which could cut off the expedition’s supply lines? They wanted a cautious landing in the rough Atlantic surf at Casablanca, on the outer bulge of Africa, connected to the key terrain only by a single rickety railroad line. The final compromise plan retained the Casablanca landing, with beachheads inside Gibraltar much too far from the main objective. Axis reinforcements crossed the Mediterranean by sea and air and seized Tunisia first.

Yet winning the race for Tunis was but a snare into which the two dictators blundered. With all of Fortress Europe to defend, we could not in the long run triumph in North Africa against the rich and untouched American industrial system. Our armies in Tunis were foredoomed to become as big a prisoner bag as the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Even Rommel’s generalship could not avert this, though he did wreck the Allies’ plan for a quick win. North Africa was our most useless defeat, under our best general; another disaster of the
Führerprinzip
in war.

Roosevelt got out of the Torch landing just what he wanted: a “victory” to pep up his home front, a battleground where his raw recruits and bright-buttoned generals could make their first mistakes (they made many) at a light price, and a plausible second front to placate the Russians. Marshall was right in predicting that the sideshow would lengthen the war by at least
a year, but meantime the politician Roosevelt reaped his profits. The easy Torch success froze Spain in her neutrality, kept Turkey quiet, and ensured the early fall of Mussolini.

All this Roosevelt accomplished in French North Africa at a cost of about twenty thousand Americans killed or captured, and less than half as many British casualties. When one adds that in four years of war that brought the U.S.A. de facto world hegemony, America lost in all theatres less than three hundred thousand men in battle deaths —
about equal to the force we lost at Stalingrad
—while the Russians sacrificed something like eleven million soldiers, and we lost perhaps four million, one must call Franklin Roosevelt’s overall war strategy a work of malevolent genius.

Churchill never did ring his bells. Rommel had pummelled the Eighth Army too badly before retreating. Moreover, with Torch about to go with green American troops, Churchill may have feared a debacle there. In any case, he thought better of it, and even in defeat, Rommel silenced the church bells of England.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
In view of Roon’s exalted estimate of General Rommel, one sentence from Rommel’s
Memoirs
may be in order here: “The battle which began at El Alamein on the 23rd October, 1942, turned the tide of war in Africa against us and, in fact, probably represented the turning point of the whole vast struggle.” In this matter Rommel evidently shared Churchill’s “myopia.”

Rommel is an important and controversial figure in any discussion of military ethics. He was implicated in the generals’ plot on Hitler’s life in 1944. Most of the generals remained slavishly loyal to Hitler, and the Führer sent two of these to finish off Rommel. They offered him the choice of a public trial for treason, or a quiet death by poison (with a cover story of a heart attack) and a “hero’s funeral,” with safety guaranteed to his family. He took the poison, and they delivered him dead to a hospital. Hitler duly proclaimed a day of national mourning for the great Desert Fox.

Rommel had fought for Hitler to the last. When he was murdered, he was already a broken man, done in by illness and a bad automobile accident. He knew about the extermination camps. He considered the Führer incompetent to command. He bemoaned the waste of life and property in continuing a lost war. He hated the whole Nazi gang that was sacrificing what was left of Germany to prolong their clutch on power. Yet he went on fighting until he was incapacitated; and then he took the poison that the Führer sent him by the hands of his fellow generals.

Rommel’s career is some sort of object lesson for military men in the difficult borderline between steadfast loyalty and criminal stupidity.

As for Roon’s assertion that “Americans cannot take battle losses,” I have heard that a little too often from Europeans. A Russian general once told Eisenhower that his way of clearing a mine field was to march a couple of brigades through it. We Americans fight differently, when we can. Yet in the Civil War we fought some of the most sanguinary battles in history, and the South was living on grass and acorns when it quit. Nobody knows yet what the American people can do in the last extremity.

Our moral climate does seem to be going to hell in a handbasket
—
I am writing in 1970, the “counterculture” era —but my superiors were making that complaint in the 1920s, the “flaming youth” era, which then more or less included me.
—
V.H.