The presence of generals, even of the Corps commander himself, upon the battlefield not only speeded up decision making but improved the morale of the fighting soldier for he could see for himself that the commanders were undergoing the same privations and sharing the dangers of battle with him. To the German front line soldier in Africa the generals were not shadowy figures in a headquarters miles removed from the fighting but were physically present upon the field of battle. This personal presence helped to produce a good esprit de corps. By contrast the Italian and British High Commands were remote and their decisions arrived at usually after staff conferences had often been overtaken by events leaving new crises to be resolved. It was not uncommon for Rommel or indeed any senior commander to take over the direction of a battalion in battle, a situation which may not have been very comfortable for regimental officers but did produce results. It is recorded that once, at Mechili, while flying over his advancing columns Rommel saw a unit halted for no apparent reason and radioed to the officer commanding that unless the advance was renewed he would land his Fieseler Storch and take over command. The unit moved on.
Erwin Rommel
The personality of Erwin Rommel dominated not only the Axis armies but, indeed, the whole African campaign. As a young officer during the First World War he had been awarded the highest German decoration for bravery, the Pour le Merite, for an action on the Italian Front and in the inter-war years he had produced a number of text books on infantry tactics. After serving as commander of Hitler's Escort Battalion in Poland Rommel had mken over command of 7th Panzer Division and in a most determined way had converted the minor role of his division into the spearhead of the panzer force which defeated the western Allies during 1940. Hitler had personally chosen Rommel to command the Africa Corps and was to have his faith justified.
If only Rommel's faith in Hitler had met with the same loyalty then, there is no doubt that the Axis powers would have been strategically successful in the nghting in Africa but Rommel was the victim of his superiors. The supplies hich they promised him either never arrived at all or were reduced in number before they reached Africa. He was to see artillery pieces of new and startling power, which had been promised to him, sent to the 5th Panzer Army in Tunisia. His armies were halted when the flow of petrol stopped, the artillery ceased firing for lack of ammunition, the tanks he asked for were diverted to other fronts, and against all these breaches of faith he could make no protest for he was entangled in an extraordinary hierarchy of command.
Africa was an Italian theatre of operations and Rommel as commander of only the mobile forces of the desert army was subordinate to an Italian general. Then the person of Kesselring, the German Supreme Commander South was interposed and the Commando Supremo in Rome was often in accord with Kesselring's points of view. Between Rommel and Hitler there also stood the OKH and the OK.W, not to mention Benito Mussolini who was not only the de facto Head of the Italian State but also a personal friend of Hitler.
Each and all of these layers of obstruction prevented Rommel from achieving the objectives which he had set himself and his men. He was a tireless soldier and demanded of his troops the same indifference to hard conditions and to privations that he himself had. He drove his men hard and his vehicles to the limits of their endurance, allowing his soldiers little tune for rest and his panzers less than adequate time for maintenance. His whole attention was concentrated upon the objectives of righting and winning the desert war. Not for him the problems of logistics and the difficulties of supply. His attitude to his desert quartermasters can be best summed up in the plea which Churchill made on another occasion, 'Give us the tools and we shall finish the job'. But for the greater part of his service in Africa Rommel was bedevilled by two factors which negated the victories which he won and prevented him exploiting the successes which had been achieved. The first of these was a lack of supplies and the second was the over elaborate command structure which allowed him no freedom of action or of manoeuvre.
Rommel led his men from the front and the charge that he neglected staff duties to direct operations personally is a valid one but the peculiar conditions of desert warfare demanded the presence of a taskmaster on the battlefield.
He was a poor subordinate and like Nelson preferred not to see — or in his case hear - the orders, warnings, and injunctions which his superiors at every level of command gave him on the conduct of operations. With the ebb of the Axis tide at El Alamein in October 1942 the Commando Supremo had its revenge upon the man who had come to the desert and had made it an area which bore the imprint of his military genius. Demands for his resignation were made each time his understrength armies were forced from one untenable position to another. And always he had to face the lack of supplies, the unkept promises, the demands to carry out some other task above the capabilities of his armies until at last he returned to Hitler to make one more desperate plea for supplies that would enable a bridgehead in Tunisia to be held. Flamboyantly, Hitler promised Rommel that he would lead an Axis army against Casablanca — so little knowledge of the true situation did the German leader have — and with that Rommel had to be content. He never returned to Africa and thus avoided seeing the Army which he had so often led into victories pass into the bitterness of final defeat.
The Italians
It is not the purpose of this book to dwell upon the defects of the Italian Army in general or upon the faults of those Corps and divisions, in particular, which fought the campaign in Africa. There can, however, be no doubt that the Italian service was weak, badly led, and poorly armed and equipped. Mussolini may have boasted that behind him stood eight million Fascist bayonets but this was oratory and not fact, for even had he had eight million men there would not have been the arms available to outfit them. Italy had prepared her Army in the early 1930s and when her infantry and tank arms went into battle against the British they did so equipped with obsolescent weapons and were fully aware of their inferiority vis-a-vis their enemies. For the Italian Army to have fought at all knowing of the British crushing superiority would have been sufficient; that they fought for three years is a memorial to their incredible endurance and bravery.
From the highest level down to that of junior commanders the structure was defective. The whole system of messing was completely wrong and the Germans were astonished at the disparity in ration scales between the Italian commissioned ranks and the men they led. The officers ate first and best; the men last, badly, and sometimes not at all. The officers lived almost at a peace-time level. There was even a mobile brothel in a large caravan. The comradeship of danger shared was missing; a sense of purpose was absent. The Italian Army lacked spirit and with the defeat by Wavell only weeks before the first German troops found the morale of their allies to be dangerously low. The Italians had such an inferiority complex about the ability of the British that many considered any attempt at defence to be worse than useless.