War and Remembrance (89 page)

The Commandant is resourceful under pressure. In this business he has to be. He has a brainstorm. Colonel Blobel has seen the kommando at work in Crematorium II, he says. There’s a fine working gang, well-fed fellows with strong backs, no better stuff in the camp. They are due to be liquidated when their work is done. The crematorium fires off next week. How about it? Kommando 1005 can have the Crematorium II kommando. Will that do?

This is highly satisfactory to Blobel. The two officers shake hands on it, and open another bottle of brandy.

Before they stagger off to bed, at three o’clock in the morning, they have agreed at length that their work is dirty but honorable, that the SS is the soul of the nation, that front-line soldiers don’t have it as tough, that obedience to the Fiihrer is the only salvation for Germany, that the Jews are the Fatherland’s eternal enemy, that this war is the historic chance of a thousand years to root them out for good; that it only seems cruel to kill women and children, that it’s one hell of a rotten job, but the future of European civilization and culture is at stake. They are seldom this frank about the things that trouble them, but to a surprising extent they find themselves kindred spirits. Arms around each other’s shoulders, they lurch to the bedrooms with almost loving good-nights.

A week later, trucks take the crematorium construction kommando to Cracow. Before the work gang leaves Auschwitz, word comes down from the Labor Section about Kommando 1005. It is just a postponed sentence of
death. Still, escapes from 1005 are reputedly easier. In Cracow they board trains for the north. Mutterperl and Jastrow carry identical rolls of undeveloped film, slipped to them after they were searched, stripped, and issued different clothes for departure. Both men have memorized Resistance names and addresses in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and a destination for the films in Prague.

* * *

(from
World Holocaust
by Armin von Roon)

In his history, Winston Churchill calls the Battle of El Alamein “The Hinge of Fate.” Actually, it was an interesting textbook encounter, a revival of World War I tactics in a desert setting. The double political impact of El Alamein and Torch was certainly serious. Just as America was dipping a gingerly toe into the European war at one end of North Africa, the legendary Desert Fox was driven from Egypt at the other end. The world was amazed. Spirits rose among the Allies and fell in Germany; Italian morale collapsed.

Nevertheless, despite the great distances and colorful battles, North Africa was a secondary theatre. Once Hitler backed off from the Mediterranean strategy, his last chance to win the war, the front dwindled to a costly and tragic sideshow; and when he too late plunged into Tunis in force, it became a military hemorrhage. Typically, Churchill devotes some twenty pages to El Alamein, and about seven pages to Stalingrad and Guadalcanal combined. Historical myopia can go little further.

What Churchill fails to mention at all, of course, is that his own stupid interference with his army commanders created the North African situation in the first place.

Mussolini took Italy into the war in 1940 as France was falling, after the British had left their ally in the lurch at Dunkirk. The Italian dictator thought he could snatch spoils on the cheap from two defunct empires, so from his huge arid territory in Libya he launched an invasion of Egypt. It was a case of the hyena mistaking an ailing lion for a dead one, and biting prematurely. The British air force and navy were still almost intact. So was their Middle Eastern army. They not only counterattacked by land and air and sent the Italians fleeing westward; they also marched light forces south and took Somaliland and Abyssinia. This cleared the Red Sea and the whole East African coastline for British shipping.

Meantime, along the Mediterranean coast the Italians were routed. Wherever the British armored columns appeared the Italians gave up in droves, though greatly outnumbering the enemy. It appeared that England had North Africa won, to the very border of neutral French Tunisia. This meant sea and air control of the Mediterranean, with the gravest consequences for us.

Absorbed though Hitler was at that time with his plan to invade Russia, these events roused him to dispatch an air wing to Sicily, and a small armored force to Tripoli to stiffen the collapsing Italians. And so it was that there came on the scene the immortal ROMMEL. In February 1941, when the then little-known junior panzer general landed in Tripoli, the Italians were on their last legs. His Afrika Korps of ten thousand men was quite inadequate to hold off the fast-approaching British forces. But Churchill, with his worst blunder of the entire war, gave Rommel his historic chance.

At that time, the feckless Mussolini was in trouble in,Greece, and Hitler wanted to pacify the Balkans before our assault on Russia. That we might invade Greece to clean things up was apparent. Anticipating this,
Winston Churchill halted the march of his victorióus African forces, yanked out four of their strongest divisions, and shipped them to Greece!
His old Balkan mania, which had led to his Gallipoli disgrace in World War I, was cropping out again.

In both wars Churchill was haunted by the absurd fantasy that the polyglot squabblers of the Balkan peninsula, that patchwork of small countries formed of the debris of the Ottoman Empire, could be induced to unite and “rise up against Germany.” This time his folly cost England a disastrous defeat in Greece and Crete, the “little Dunkirk,” and her chance to secure North Africa as well. By the time the defeated divisions returned to Libya, their equipment battered, their élan gone, Rommel was entrenched, and the Desert War was on. It would take two years of hard fighting and the whole gigantic Anglo-American invasion to retrieve Churchill’s idiocy, and win for England what she had in hand before he threw it away.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
No great man fails to make mistakes. Churchill’s shift of forces from Africa to Greece was mistimed. Churchill doesn’t admit this, in his unabashedly self-serving though fine six-volume history called
The Second World War.
One has to read a few other books, including works like Roon’s, to get a clearer idea of what really went on.
—
V.H.

The North African desert war oscillated for a year and a half between two port bases fourteen hundred miles apart: Tripoli in Libya, Alexandria in
Egypt. A game of hare and hounds went on turn and turn about. First the Afrika Korps, then the British, stretched their supply lines to attack, ran low, and withdrew to base.
Supply
so far governed this war that Rommel wrote,
“Any desert campaign was won or lost by the Quartermaster Corps before a shot was fired.”

In Erwin Rommel’s masterly desert tactics, the ruling concept was the
open southern flank.
On the north lay the Mediterranean. To the south lay the sandy void. Conventional rules of land war melted before the oceanlike open flank. It was Rommel’s flank moves that won victory after victory, as he kept varying his tricks to bedazzle his stolid foe.

But a desert army’s range, like a fleet’s, is dictated by the amount of fuel, food, and water it can carry along, with the reserve needed to double back to base. The dashing Rommel was somewhat neglectful of this limitation; fortunately his good staff kept it in mind. It was something Adolf Hitler could never understand. His mentality was that of a World War I foot soldier. In Europe adequate supply lines were taken for granted, and our troops could live off fruitful invaded lands like France and the Ukraine. The picture of armored columns proceeding through vast sterile flat voids was beyond Hitler. He saw the newsreels regularly at Headquarters, but they made no dent in his obtuseness.

I was present on two occasions when Rommel flew to the Führer’s HQ in East Prussia to plead for more supplies. Goring was there once. The bored uncomprehending glaze in the eyes of the two politicians must have sickened Rommel. Hitler’s response each time was the same: airy-fairy chaffing of this great field general as a “pessimist,” voluble promises to improve supplies, warm assurances that Rommel would “pull it off no matter what,” and a new medal.

Göring reacted only once, when Rommel was describing the power of the new American Tomahawk fighter-bomber that the British were using. At this pinch of his Luftwaffe toes he smirked, “Nonsense, the Americans are good at making only refrigerators and razor blades.”

Rommel retorted, “Reichsmarschall, the Afrika Korps will appreciate a large issue of such razor blades.”

But Rommel’s fearless talk to the bigwigs came to nothing. To save Mussolini’s face, the African theatre was maintained as an Italian command; and the Italians broke promises of more supplies as fast as Mussolini made them.

Rommel’s great storming of Tobruk in June 1942 marked the high tide for us. Coming when Sevastopol was falling to Manstein and our U-boat sinkings were spiking upward, the fall of Tobruk shook the world. The British
retreated all the way to the El Alamein line in Egypt, only eighty miles from Alexandria. The Tobruk booty was lavish — gasoline, food, tanks, guns, ammunition, in quantities known only to the enemy, never to us. The worn and spent Afrika Korps, like a starving lion that has caught and devoured a gazelle, came back to roaring life. Rommel demanded freedom to drive for decisive victory. Hitler gave him the green light. On to Suez; maybe to the Persian Gulf!

Those were heady days in the map room. In my mind’s eye the pallid puffy-faced Führer still leans on the table map of North Africa with stiff arms, his favorite posture, wearing the very thick reading glasses the public never saw, lifting a pudgy white hand to sweep it with a slight tremor from Tobruk across Suez, Palestine, and Iraq to the mouth of the Euphrates. Unfortunately, the Führer tended to fight his wars with just such visionary arm sweeps. Logistics bored him. He either dismissed these gritty supply realities, or terrorized with screaming fits generals who pressed him too hard about such mundane details. Since his fearsome willpower did sometimes work wonders, he had become accustomed to demanding the impossible.

This time he really demanded the impossible of Rommel, for he used the fall of Tobruk as an excuse to cancel “Operation
Herkules,”
the capture of Malta. The small but strong fortress island base lay athwart Rommel’s supply line, a hundred miles off Sicily. Mussolini yearned to capture it. But Hitler, his mind on the eastern front, had hemmed and hawed for a year, and now he dropped the plan. This was a radical error. Malta’s interdiction was ceaseless, and each tanker, each ammunition ship, that was sunk weakened Rommel. Hitler believed that Luftwaffe bombardment would neutralize Malta, but the British patched their airstrips, flew in more aircraft, slipped in more submarines, fought through in convoys, and kept the garrison supplied.

Tobruk convinced Hitler and Mussolini that the superman, Rommel, could manufacture victories out of thin air, and that his complaints about supply were prima donna tantrums. Pressure for supplying him relaxed. The Tobruk cache melted away as he drove up to El Alamein, and made an assault late in August which barely failed. And still supplies did not come. His own reputation was strangling him.

On the British side, the fall of Tobruk had the opposite effect.

Churchill was in Washington at the time, and Roosevelt asked how he could help. Never bashful, Churchill at once demanded three hundred Sherman tanks, the U.S. Army’s brand-new weapon. Over the army’s grumbling, Roosevelt granted this request; added another hundred Grant tanks, and a lot of new antitank guns and other matériel. At highest priority a big convoy
sailed off for Egypt via the Cape of Good Hope. When this convoy unloaded in September, the munitions and supplies it delivered
alone outweighed everything the Afrika Korps had on hand to fight the Battle of El Alamein.
Meanwhile, the British had been heavily rearming Montgomery too, via the Mediterranean. Moreover, Persia’s refineries and the military reserves in Palestine were there to draw on.