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.We can only guess which way we aregoing by compass and speedometer.We zigzag, westrain our eyes ahead, sometimes the sky lightens,sometimes it turns dark red.We see three dispatch rid-ers in the sandstorm, their heads bent, their motorcy-cles covered; we take them with us and grope our waytoward the airfield.There we find more stragglers.Weask them how the attack is going.Nobody knows.Slowly we feel our way along the telephone line, andsuddenly we find that we are just outside the fort ofMechili.There are weapons and equipment lyingaround, and hundreds of prisoners cowering on theground while the sandstorm rages and covers every-thing Þö like a blizzard in dense fog.In the fort s yard the division commander [Gen-eral Streich] reports to the general: Mechili has fallen.We have taken 1,700 prisoners, including seventy offi-cers and a general, and we have captured quantities ofguns, trucks and food. Thus Rommel missed the party at Mechili.So did Colonel Ol-brich s main tank force; it did not arrive until noon.His tank tur-rets were jammed tight by the sandstorm anyway.Rommel ap-proved the suggestion that the turrets should be dismantled andcleaned, and he sent Schwerin s force and a pursuit group alongthe desert track to Derna on the coast.Lieutenant Behrendt hadtaken the same desert trail to Derna on the day before in an eight-wheeler, and had driven right into the beautiful, well-laid-outport.The British had already passed through, and Arabs flockedin brightly colored cloaks around the Wehrmacht trucks, offeringeggs, oranges, dates and other delicacies for sale.Gustav Ponath s111 david irvingmachine gunners had followed in Behrendt s tracks, and after aheavy fire fight had established a foothold at Derna airfield.When Rommel drove onto the airfield at six-thirty that evening,April 8, Colonel Ponath proudly announced the capture of 900prisoners, including four more generals Þö one of them Sir Rich-ard O Connor himself.Ponath added that his machine guns weredown to literally their last belt of ammunition each.His troopswere worn out, but Rommel was relentless.He ordered Ponath tocontinue eastward at once along the highway, toward Tmimi andTobruk.Disenchanted with both the colorless General Streich andColonel Olbrich, Rommel handed over command of the leadingunits reaching the highway from the desert to Major GeneralHeinrich von Prittwitz, who had only just arrived in Libya in ad-vance of his division, the Fifteenth Panzer.This was a slap in theface for Streich; but the successes that Rommel had achieved soeasily against a startled and fumbling enemy had dangerously in-flated his estimate of his own ability.Speed was all that mattered.His intention for April 9 was that an Italian infantry divisionshould kick up dust west of Tobruk, while the Fifth Light Divi-sion circled around it inland and attacked unexpectedly from thesoutheast quarter. I had imagined that the Fifth Light was al-ready on the move, he later wrote Þö forgetting that he himselfhad sanctioned the dismantling of the turrets for cleaning.Whenat 6:30 p.m.he found the panzer regiment still doing this atMechili, way back, he again lost his temper at the inoffensive Gen-eral Streich.By his unexpected strike across the peninsula, Rommel hadcertainly caught the British on the wrong foot Þö for a reason thathe never dreamed of.All his secret communications with theGerman High Command were being encoded by the Enigma ma-chine, rather like a small, wooden-boxed electric typewriter.The112 the trail of the foxNazi code experts had pronounced this machine absolutely safefrom enemy code breakers.The messages were radioed in thiscode to Rome, and transmitted by wire to Hitler s headquarters.Deep in the English countryside, however, the enemy had con-structed a far superior machine, as big as a house, capable of de-coding the secret Enigma signals.Radio listening posts fed theGerman signals to the machine, a large multiservice organizationtranslated and interpreted the fantastic results and they weretransmitted back, marked Ultra Secret, to the enemy com-manders facing Rommel.It was the biggest secret of the war.However, more than once Rommel disobeyed the orders is-sued to him in Enigma code.For example, on this occasion, inApril 1941, the British knew only of the orders issued to Rommelto stand fast at Benghazi; not yet knowing Rommel, they had as-sumed he would obey.This explains the surprised collapse of theBritish defense of Cyrenaica when he advanced.But now WinstonChurchill had signaled from London that Tobruk was to be heldto the death without thought of retirement. On the night of theeighth the main Australian force, retiring from Cyrenaica, hadreached Tobruk and began manning its Italian-built fortifications,in pursuance of Churchill s order.Rommel did not realize this.Early on the tenth he was stillconfident, and he predicted: The enemy is definitely retreating.We must pursue them with all we ve got.Our objective is theSuez Canal, and every man is to be informed of this. As he was dictating these words into the Afrika Korps wardiary, the machine gunners of Ponath s battalion reached Kilo-meter Stone 18 on the Via Balbia, eleven miles short of Tobruk.Heavy artillery fire began to drop around them.By a supremeeffort, Ponath managed to take his storm troops 2,000 yardscloser, but here murderous antitank and machine gun fire sweptthe road.The German troops dived for what little cover there was113 david irvingand waited for heavy artillery support.Farther back down theasphalt highway, Prittwitz arrived at Schwerin s command post insome perplexity. Rommel has sent me to take command of theattack.But I ve only just arrived in Africa Þö I don t know the firstthing about the troops or the terrain. Schwerin briefed him andthe general snatched some sleep.At sunrise, Rommel stood at the new general s tent flap,bawling to know why the attack on Tobruk was stagnating. TheBritish are escaping, he bellowed.Prittwitz flushed pink withconfusion.Schwerin loaned him his car and driver, and saw themdrive off at high speed down the highway toward Tobruk.Theywere driving into the unknown.Rommel had no maps or airphotos of the fortress.He had no notion of its defenses.He mighthave survived the next few minutes, but Prittwitz did not haveRommel s nine lives.The astonished machine gunners, now atKilometer 16, saw the car with the general s pennant racingthrough them from the rear.A gun crew nearest to the highwayscreamed a warning: Halt! Halt! Prittwitz stood up in hisspeeding car and shouted back: Come on! Forward! The enemyis getting away! At that instant a British antitank shell slammedinto his car and tore clean through him.He and his driver werekilled outright.Schwerin found out at once. I saw red, he said in 1976. Imarched straight over to the famous white house where Rommelhad set up his headquarters.Rommel drove up, and I informedhim that the general that he had just sent up front was alreadydead.That was the first time I saw him crack.He went pale,turned on his heel and drove off again without another word. Rommel drove south of Tobruk to inspect the lie of the landthere.A number of trucks and a twenty-millimeter gun were inhis party.A lookout spotted two small vehicles speeding andbumping along their wheel tracks, catching up from the rear.114 the trail of the foxThrough his telescope, Rommel saw that one was a British com-mand car Þö the other looked like its German equivalent.He was abrave man, but also prudent. Get the gun ready, he ordered,and all the trucks halted [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.We can only guess which way we aregoing by compass and speedometer.We zigzag, westrain our eyes ahead, sometimes the sky lightens,sometimes it turns dark red.We see three dispatch rid-ers in the sandstorm, their heads bent, their motorcy-cles covered; we take them with us and grope our waytoward the airfield.There we find more stragglers.Weask them how the attack is going.Nobody knows.Slowly we feel our way along the telephone line, andsuddenly we find that we are just outside the fort ofMechili.There are weapons and equipment lyingaround, and hundreds of prisoners cowering on theground while the sandstorm rages and covers every-thing Þö like a blizzard in dense fog.In the fort s yard the division commander [Gen-eral Streich] reports to the general: Mechili has fallen.We have taken 1,700 prisoners, including seventy offi-cers and a general, and we have captured quantities ofguns, trucks and food. Thus Rommel missed the party at Mechili.So did Colonel Ol-brich s main tank force; it did not arrive until noon.His tank tur-rets were jammed tight by the sandstorm anyway.Rommel ap-proved the suggestion that the turrets should be dismantled andcleaned, and he sent Schwerin s force and a pursuit group alongthe desert track to Derna on the coast.Lieutenant Behrendt hadtaken the same desert trail to Derna on the day before in an eight-wheeler, and had driven right into the beautiful, well-laid-outport.The British had already passed through, and Arabs flockedin brightly colored cloaks around the Wehrmacht trucks, offeringeggs, oranges, dates and other delicacies for sale.Gustav Ponath s111 david irvingmachine gunners had followed in Behrendt s tracks, and after aheavy fire fight had established a foothold at Derna airfield.When Rommel drove onto the airfield at six-thirty that evening,April 8, Colonel Ponath proudly announced the capture of 900prisoners, including four more generals Þö one of them Sir Rich-ard O Connor himself.Ponath added that his machine guns weredown to literally their last belt of ammunition each.His troopswere worn out, but Rommel was relentless.He ordered Ponath tocontinue eastward at once along the highway, toward Tmimi andTobruk.Disenchanted with both the colorless General Streich andColonel Olbrich, Rommel handed over command of the leadingunits reaching the highway from the desert to Major GeneralHeinrich von Prittwitz, who had only just arrived in Libya in ad-vance of his division, the Fifteenth Panzer.This was a slap in theface for Streich; but the successes that Rommel had achieved soeasily against a startled and fumbling enemy had dangerously in-flated his estimate of his own ability.Speed was all that mattered.His intention for April 9 was that an Italian infantry divisionshould kick up dust west of Tobruk, while the Fifth Light Divi-sion circled around it inland and attacked unexpectedly from thesoutheast quarter. I had imagined that the Fifth Light was al-ready on the move, he later wrote Þö forgetting that he himselfhad sanctioned the dismantling of the turrets for cleaning.Whenat 6:30 p.m.he found the panzer regiment still doing this atMechili, way back, he again lost his temper at the inoffensive Gen-eral Streich.By his unexpected strike across the peninsula, Rommel hadcertainly caught the British on the wrong foot Þö for a reason thathe never dreamed of.All his secret communications with theGerman High Command were being encoded by the Enigma ma-chine, rather like a small, wooden-boxed electric typewriter.The112 the trail of the foxNazi code experts had pronounced this machine absolutely safefrom enemy code breakers.The messages were radioed in thiscode to Rome, and transmitted by wire to Hitler s headquarters.Deep in the English countryside, however, the enemy had con-structed a far superior machine, as big as a house, capable of de-coding the secret Enigma signals.Radio listening posts fed theGerman signals to the machine, a large multiservice organizationtranslated and interpreted the fantastic results and they weretransmitted back, marked Ultra Secret, to the enemy com-manders facing Rommel.It was the biggest secret of the war.However, more than once Rommel disobeyed the orders is-sued to him in Enigma code.For example, on this occasion, inApril 1941, the British knew only of the orders issued to Rommelto stand fast at Benghazi; not yet knowing Rommel, they had as-sumed he would obey.This explains the surprised collapse of theBritish defense of Cyrenaica when he advanced.But now WinstonChurchill had signaled from London that Tobruk was to be heldto the death without thought of retirement. On the night of theeighth the main Australian force, retiring from Cyrenaica, hadreached Tobruk and began manning its Italian-built fortifications,in pursuance of Churchill s order.Rommel did not realize this.Early on the tenth he was stillconfident, and he predicted: The enemy is definitely retreating.We must pursue them with all we ve got.Our objective is theSuez Canal, and every man is to be informed of this. As he was dictating these words into the Afrika Korps wardiary, the machine gunners of Ponath s battalion reached Kilo-meter Stone 18 on the Via Balbia, eleven miles short of Tobruk.Heavy artillery fire began to drop around them.By a supremeeffort, Ponath managed to take his storm troops 2,000 yardscloser, but here murderous antitank and machine gun fire sweptthe road.The German troops dived for what little cover there was113 david irvingand waited for heavy artillery support.Farther back down theasphalt highway, Prittwitz arrived at Schwerin s command post insome perplexity. Rommel has sent me to take command of theattack.But I ve only just arrived in Africa Þö I don t know the firstthing about the troops or the terrain. Schwerin briefed him andthe general snatched some sleep.At sunrise, Rommel stood at the new general s tent flap,bawling to know why the attack on Tobruk was stagnating. TheBritish are escaping, he bellowed.Prittwitz flushed pink withconfusion.Schwerin loaned him his car and driver, and saw themdrive off at high speed down the highway toward Tobruk.Theywere driving into the unknown.Rommel had no maps or airphotos of the fortress.He had no notion of its defenses.He mighthave survived the next few minutes, but Prittwitz did not haveRommel s nine lives.The astonished machine gunners, now atKilometer 16, saw the car with the general s pennant racingthrough them from the rear.A gun crew nearest to the highwayscreamed a warning: Halt! Halt! Prittwitz stood up in hisspeeding car and shouted back: Come on! Forward! The enemyis getting away! At that instant a British antitank shell slammedinto his car and tore clean through him.He and his driver werekilled outright.Schwerin found out at once. I saw red, he said in 1976. Imarched straight over to the famous white house where Rommelhad set up his headquarters.Rommel drove up, and I informedhim that the general that he had just sent up front was alreadydead.That was the first time I saw him crack.He went pale,turned on his heel and drove off again without another word. Rommel drove south of Tobruk to inspect the lie of the landthere.A number of trucks and a twenty-millimeter gun were inhis party.A lookout spotted two small vehicles speeding andbumping along their wheel tracks, catching up from the rear.114 the trail of the foxThrough his telescope, Rommel saw that one was a British com-mand car Þö the other looked like its German equivalent.He was abrave man, but also prudent. Get the gun ready, he ordered,and all the trucks halted [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]