Rommel leaves Africa

On 23 September 1942 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel flew from North Africa to Europe. He had been ill and exhausted for weeks, and his doctors had concluded that without several weeks of treatment he would not be fit to command. During his absence Panzer Army Africa, dug in opposite the British Eighth Army at El Alamein, was taken over by General of Panzer Troops Georg Stumme. Rommel left convinced that he would return if the British attacked – and return he did, but only once the great battle was already under way.

A sick commander

Rommel had spent most of the previous eighteen months in Africa without any lengthy break. The summer of 1942 had brought him his greatest triumph – the capture of Tobruk and a field marshal’s baton – and then the halt at El Alamein and months of gruelling fighting in the desert heat. According to the accounts of those around him and his later biographers, he suffered from recurrent stomach and intestinal complaints, circulatory problems and low blood pressure, fainting fits and extreme fatigue. The army’s physician, Professor Horster, is said to have diagnosed him in August with chronic gastroenteritis, nasal diphtheria and serious circulatory disorders; other accounts also mention liver trouble. These diagnoses are known mainly from Rommel’s letters to his wife and from the recollections of members of his staff, published after the war in The Rommel Papers, rather than from medical records.

As early as the end of August Rommel reported to Berlin that he was no longer able to command, and proposed as his successor Colonel General Heinz Guderian, who had been without a post since December 1941. Hitler did not accept this candidate. Rommel therefore led the last offensive against Egypt himself, launched on the night of 30–31 August. The Battle of Alam el Halfa ended in defeat: lack of fuel, air attacks and a well-prepared defence forced his divisions back to their start lines. After that the question of sick leave became urgent, and the German high command agreed to a replacement.

The choice fell on Georg Stumme, an experienced commander of mobile troops who in 1940 had been Rommel’s predecessor at the head of the division that became the 7th Panzer Division. In the summer of 1942 Stumme commanded a panzer corps on the Eastern Front, but when the plans for his corps’ offensive fell into Soviet hands in June, Hitler had him court-martialled. Convicted and quickly pardoned, he was given a chance to redeem himself in Africa. He arrived in Africa on 19 September and spent a few days at Rommel’s side familiarising himself with the situation. At the same time General Wilhelm von Thoma took command of the Afrika Korps in place of Walther Nehring, who had been wounded at Alam el Halfa.

The Devil’s Gardens

Before he left, Rommel settled how his army was to defend itself. He knew that the Eighth Army, reinforced with tanks, guns and men by every convoy, would sooner or later go over to the offensive, and that his divisions had neither the fuel nor the strength to fight a mobile battle against it. He therefore decided to receive the attack in a deeply fortified zone. Along the entire length of the front, from the coast to the Qattara Depression, German and Italian engineers laid two main belts of minefields, several kilometres apart and linked by transverse belts into a kind of honeycomb of boxes. The forward edges of these fields were held only by weak outposts, while their interior, densely mined and bristling with booby traps, was covered by fire from the flanks. The Germans called these fields the “Devil’s Gardens” (Teufelsgärten). By October nearly half a million mines had been laid in them, most of them anti-tank mines, including many British ones captured at Tobruk and Mersa Matruh. The main line of defence lay only behind the second belt.

Rommel deployed his infantry so that German battalions were interspersed with Italian ones – he did not trust the staying power of the less well armed Italian divisions and wanted to “stiffen” them. He split his armoured reserves into two groups, northern and southern, each made up of a German and an Italian division, so as to be able to seal off a breach quickly wherever the blow fell. For the High Command of the Wehrmacht he drew up a lengthy report in which he once again listed how much fuel, ammunition and manpower the army needed to hold the front. He expected Stumme to stick to this plan and, in the event of a major offensive, he would break off his treatment and return.

Rome and Berlin

On 23 September Rommel flew to Rome. On 24 September he met Benito Mussolini in the presence of Marshal Ugo Cavallero. By his own account he warned that unless supplies increased the army would not hold its position at El Alamein, and that Mussolini and the Italian high command were underestimating the gravity of the situation. He himself had the impression that the men he was talking to did not grasp how much the fate of the whole campaign depended on it; the Italians, for their part, regarded him as a commander who neglected matters of supply and blamed all his setbacks on his ally.

In Berlin Rommel was a propaganda hero. Adolf Hitler presented him with his field marshal’s baton at the Reich Chancellery – Rommel had received the promotion on 22 June, the day after the capture of Tobruk. Most accounts date this ceremony to 30 September, some to 1 October. On 30 September Rommel also sat on the platform when Hitler opened the Winterhilfswerk winter relief collection at the Berlin Sportpalast. At the beginning of October the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, arranged a press conference for him with German and foreign journalists – the only German field commander for whom such an appearance was organised during the war. According to a contemporary record, Rommel said that the army stood a hundred kilometres from Alexandria and Cairo, held the gateway to Egypt in its hands and intended to make use of it. These words, repeated by the press, were meant to show the world that North Africa was in safe hands. In private conversations Rommel was far more pessimistic and spoke of the need for a fundamental increase in supplies.

Treatment and return

From Berlin Rommel went for treatment to a military sanatorium at Semmering, a spa in the Alps of Lower Austria, where he was accompanied by his wife Lucie. From there he followed the reports from Africa, but on his doctors’ advice he was to remain in Europe for at least several weeks. During this time Stumme faithfully kept to the plan he had been left: he extended the minefields and tried to improve co-operation with the Italians and the supply situation, although – as he wrote to his superiors – he did not believe that the front could be held without a marked increase in supplies.

On the evening of 23 October General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army opened the Second Battle of El Alamein with a massive artillery bombardment, and its engineers began clearing lanes through the “Devil’s Gardens”. The next day Stumme drove to the front to assess the situation in person. His car came under fire, the officer accompanying him was killed, and Stumme himself – probably as a result of a heart attack – fell from the vehicle and died; his body was not found until the following day. On 24 October Hitler telephoned Semmering and asked Rommel whether he felt fit enough to return. Rommel, not fully recovered, flew to Africa via Rome and on the evening of 25 October once again took command of an army that had already been fighting for two days.

Place in the war

Rommel’s departure came at the moment when the campaign in North Africa was ceasing to be a war of manoeuvre. After Alam el Halfa the initiative passed to the British, and the Axis army could only wait for the offensive and hope that minefields and anti-tank guns would offset the Eighth Army’s superiority in tanks, artillery and aircraft. The defensive system Rommel had prepared proved hard to break – the Second Battle of El Alamein lasted nearly two weeks and cost the British heavy losses – but it could not make up for the shortage of fuel and supplies.

Rommel’s absence in the first hours of the battle and Stumme’s death threw the German command into confusion at a critical moment. Historians differ, however, on whether Rommel’s presence from the first day would have changed the outcome; most believe that, given the balance of forces and the supply situation at the time, the Axis army had no chance of holding on in Egypt. At the beginning of November, after a day of wavering between Hitler’s order to fight to the last man and the threat of his army’s annihilation, Rommel began a retreat that ended only in Tunisia.

The contrast between his optimistic words in Berlin and the real situation at El Alamein captures well the role Rommel played in the propaganda of the Third Reich. Presented as the invincible “Desert Fox”, in those weeks he was above all a sick, tired commander who knew that his army had reached the limit of its capabilities.