The Trail of the Fox by David Irving

Author:David Irving [Irving, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781872197401
Publisher: Focal Point Publications
Published: 2013-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Art of Disobedience

FOR THE NEXT THREE days, from December 13 to 15, 1942, the crucial withdrawal of Rommel’s panzer divisions from the Mersa Brega line was beset by the fuel crisis. Montgomery must have been aware of it from the Ultra intercepts, but he signally failed to exploit it. Meanwhile relentless air attacks harried Rommel’s troops. The one and only highway was scarred and cratered by bombs, the shoulders on either side strewn with blazing hulks of transport. More than once Rommel ran into dive bomber attacks, and had to hit the ditch. The next three gasoline ships were all sunk. Fifteen hundred enemy vehicles were sighted circling warily around his army in the desert, but there was enough gasoline left for only thirty miles. Said the Rommel diary: “It means that the Afrika Korps has already been outflanked.” Was this the end at last?

The two German panzer divisions bringing up the rear of Rommel’s retreat, with their fifty-four remaining tanks, never came closer to annihilation than on the afternoon of December 15. But General Fehn, their commander, ordered the tanks of the Twenty-first Panzer Division to empty all their remaining gasoline into the tanks of the Fifteenth Panzer, so that at least one division’s tanks could fight on during the night and protect the other until more gasoline could be trucked forward. Thus the Germans managed once more to extricate themselves from the enemy’s jaws of encirclement before they fully closed; they scattered Shermans, armored cars and enemy troops in all directions as they burst through to the west again.

That evening the enemy’s Radio Cairo and the BBC were heard crowing that Rommel and his army had at last been “bottled up” at Nofilia—a town on the coastal highway that Rommel had in fact slipped through already—and that at that very moment Montgomery was “hammering home the cork.”

Rommel burst out laughing: “Provided we get some gasoline tonight, they’re going to find the bottle empty.”

Radio Cairo now announced that Nazi troops trapped at Nofilia were “fighting desperately” to break out. The Rommel diary noted with some glee: “In reality, just one platoon of the 115th Regiment got cut off. And they have managed to escape, too, leaving only their transport behind.”

German aircraft observed that even the road from Mersa Brega to Nofilia was deserted, so evidently Buelowius’s lethal handiwork and booby traps were forcing the enemy to make tortuous detours instead. And there was proof that Montgomery was also encountering logistical problems: eight American bombers landed in error at Tamet airfield—still in German hands—and were found to be airlifting gasoline from Tobruk to Montgomery’s leading units. The Germans did not let the gasoline go to waste.

Rommel had driven off along the desert road to Buerat early on December 17. The landscape here was very different. “It’s already spring where we are now,” he wrote home. “The air is spiced with the fragrance of a thousand flowers.” His staff were impressed by the Buerat defenses and the deep antitank ditch,

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