Rommel returns to Africa

On the evening of 25 October 1942 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel landed in North Africa and resumed command of the German-Italian army at El Alamein. Only a month earlier he had left for treatment in Europe, and his deputy, General Georg Stumme, had died within the first twenty-four hours of the British offensive. Rommel came back a sick man, convinced that the battle could no longer be won, to an army which, after two days of the Eighth Army’s bombardment and attack, was losing tanks faster than it could repair them and had fuel for only a few days’ fighting.

The death of General Stumme

The British artillery preparation, begun on the evening of 23 October, had cut most of the telephone links between the headquarters of Panzer Army Africa and the front-line divisions. On the morning of 24 October Stumme still did not know how deeply the enemy had penetrated the minefields. The reports reaching his staff spoke of an attack on a broad front but suggested that the breaches could be sealed by local reserves. The general decided to see things for himself. Unlike Rommel, who drove to the front with an escort and a wireless vehicle, Stumme set off with only the army’s chief signals officer, Colonel Andreas Büchting, and a driver.

Near the front line the car came out onto open ground and came under fire – according to most accounts from machine guns and anti-tank guns in the sector where the Australians were attacking. Büchting was killed by a shot to the head. Stumme jumped out of the car and, it is assumed, clung to its side while the driver hurriedly reversed out of the line of fire. The driver did not notice that the general had fallen off. Stumme’s body was found by the roadside only the next day; it bore no wounds. He had suffered from high blood pressure, so it was concluded that he had died of a heart attack.

For a dozen or more hours the army was practically without a commander. After Stumme went missing, command was taken over temporarily by Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Thoma, commander of the Afrika Korps, who directed the fighting from his own command post, while staff business was handled by the head of the operations section, Colonel Siegfried Westphal. On the evening of 24 October the German northern armoured group – the 15th Panzer Division and the Italian 133rd Armoured Division “Littorio” – counter-attacked the British 1st Armoured Division from the area of a low rise that the British called Kidney Ridge. The British tanks were not driven back, and in the fading daylight dozens of vehicles burned on both sides.

A telephone call to Semmering

Rommel was at a military sanatorium in Semmering in Lower Austria. News that the British offensive had begun reached him on 24 October. According to his own account, published after the war in The Rommel Papers, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel telephoned in the afternoon: he told him that Stumme was missing and asked whether his health would allow him to return to Africa if necessary. Rommel said that it would. Late in the evening – shortly after midnight, according to some accounts – Adolf Hitler himself rang. He said that the situation at El Alamein was dangerous and Stumme’s fate still unknown, and asked whether Rommel could leave at once. The field marshal agreed.

On the morning of 25 October Rommel flew from the airfield near Wiener Neustadt to Rome. There the German military attaché and liaison officer to the Italian command, General Enno von Rintelen, briefed him on the army’s situation: almost no supplies were getting through by sea, and the fuel stocks in Africa were sufficient – according to the reports – for roughly three days of normal operations. Rommel noted bitterly that before leaving he had demanded a thirty-day reserve. Urgent representations at the Comando Supremo could no longer change much: for weeks the tankers sent to Libya had been falling victim to British submarines and to aircraft from Malta and Egypt. From Rome Rommel flew via Crete to Africa. He reached his headquarters at dusk, and late in the evening he signalled that he had resumed command. That same day his army received a new name: the German-Italian Panzer Army (Deutsch-Italienische Panzerarmee).

First decisions

The picture Rommel found at headquarters was grim. The infantry in the northern sector, bombed and shelled without respite, had suffered heavy losses: the Italian Trento Motorised Division had lost about half its infantry and most of its artillery, the 164th Light Division two battalions. The 15th Panzer Division, which for two days had been plugging gaps with counter-attacks, reportedly had only 31 serviceable tanks left out of more than a hundred. The men were on half rations, and many were sick. On the night of 25–26 October the 26th Australian Brigade took Point 29 – a low rise with an artillery observation post south-west of Tel el Eisa – and captured about 240 prisoners. From there the Australians threatened the rear of the coastal salient held by the 164th Division and Italian infantry.

Rommel concluded that the main British blow was falling in the north and decided to recover the lost positions. On 26 October he threw the 15th Panzer Division, the 164th Division and Italian units into a counter-attack on Point 29 (marked on German and Italian maps as Hill 28). The attacks, broken up by artillery fire and air raids, brought no decision; in the evening a Bersaglieri battalion fought its way onto the edges of the rise and pushed back part of the Australian 2/17th Battalion defending it, but the Australians were not dislodged from the hill. Rommel later wrote that “rivers of blood” had been poured out there over scraps of desert.

Even more important was a decision he took the same day. Until then the armoured reserves had been split between the north and the south of the front, so as to seal a breach wherever it occurred. Now Rommel sent north the 21st Panzer Division, a third of the Italian 132nd Armoured Division “Ariete” and half the artillery from the southern sector, and brought up the 90th Light Division from the El Daba area. He knew that the step was irreversible: with fuel stocks so meagre, the divisions could not return south if the British struck there again. The move took all night under constant attack by Allied aircraft.

On the same day, 26 October, airmen sealed the fate of the army’s supplies. Bristol Beaufort torpedo bombers sank the tanker Proserpina off Tobruk, carrying, according to British figures, about 4,500 tons of fuel, and during the night Vickers Wellington bombers destroyed the ship Tergestea, loaded with fuel and ammunition, in the harbour. On 28 October another tanker, the Luisiano, went to the bottom off the coast of Greece. The British knew the routes of many convoys because they were reading German and Italian ciphers. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring tried to save the situation by flying fuel in from Crete in transport aircraft, but the quantities were far smaller than what was needed.

The Snipe outpost

On the British side the first two days of the battle had brought a crisis in the minefield corridors: the armoured divisions of X Corps had failed to break through the German anti-tank screen, and infantry losses were mounting. According to British figures, by 26 October British units alone had lost about 2,000 men, Australian and New Zealand units about 1,000 each, and South African units about 600. Winston Churchill, reading in London the reports that the attack had stalled, is said to have burst out asking whether it was really impossible to find a general who could win a battle. Bernard Montgomery, meanwhile, decided, without breaking off the battle of attrition, to pull some divisions out of the line and form a reserve for the next, decisive blow.

On the night of 26–27 October two battalions of the British 7th Motor Brigade set out to occupy two points west of the depression known as Kidney, code-named Woodcock and Snipe. The King’s Royal Rifle Corps battalion did not reach its objective. Lieutenant Colonel Victor Buller Turner’s 2nd Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, dug in in a shallow hollow taken to be Snipe, with thirteen 57 mm (6-pounder) anti-tank guns and six more from 239 Anti-Tank Battery, Royal Artillery. On the morning of 27 October the outpost found itself in the very middle of the German-Italian counter-offensive.

The battalion’s positions were under fire all day, and at 4 p.m. Rommel threw the tanks of the 21st Panzer Division and the Littorio Division into the main attack. The isolated riflemen, with no way of replenishing their ammunition, beat off wave after wave. According to the citation for Turner’s decoration the battalion destroyed 35 tanks and disabled at least 20 more; the later findings of a British committee that examined the battlefield were more modest, speaking of 22 German and 10 Italian tanks and several self-propelled guns destroyed around the outpost. Wounded in the head, Turner himself helped to load one of the last guns still in action. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for the fight. In the evening the battalion was withdrawn without being relieved; only one gun could be brought back from the outpost. That same afternoon the 90th Light Division attacked the Australians on Point 29 without success – its attack collapsed under artillery fire and bombing before it could come to close quarters.

On 28 October the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions tried once more to strike the X Corps front, but the force assembling for the attack was bombed from the air for two and a half hours. It was Rommel’s last attempt to wrest the initiative from the enemy. The army’s evening report for that day, intercepted and read by the British, showed 81 serviceable German tanks and 197 Italian ones, most of them obsolete, against about 800 British. Rommel told his commanders that disengaging from the enemy was impossible because there was no petrol to do so, and that the army had no option but to fight it out at El Alamein.

Significance

Rommel’s return raised the morale of the German troops but did not turn the tide of the battle. The field marshal realised this from the first evening. By bringing his reserves north to halt the Australian advance along the coast, he used up his last tanks and fuel in counter-attacks against an enemy superior in men, tanks, artillery and air power. Montgomery gained time to regroup. On the night of 1–2 November his Eighth Army launched Operation Supercharge, which broke through the front south of the coastal salient, and on 4 November Rommel – against Hitler’s order to fight to victory or death – ordered a retreat. For Rommel it was his heaviest defeat in Africa and the beginning of a retreat that ended in May 1943 with the surrender of the Axis forces in Tunisia. The field marshal himself left Africa in March 1943 and never returned.