Partisan for Rommel
By NIGEL NICOLSON ET it be said at once that The Rommel Papers* are 1- historically important, humanly- revealing and unfailingly 4 interesting. It could scarcely be otherwise. Here is the most famous and likeable of all German Generals, a man hugely publicised, even adulated, by his enemies, engaged at the crucial points of all the crucial campaigns in the West, writing partly in close retrospect and partly in hurried scribbles from the actual battlefield, about his motives, plans, triumphs and defeats, about his colleagues and his masters, his allies and his enemies. Never was there a sharper close-up of the other side of the hill. He accompanies the leading scouts of the Afrika Korps. He confers with Hitler and Mussolini. He puts it all down just as it happened just after it happened. It is a book that makes the English reader alternately glow and glower with excitement or nobly suppressed rage.
Rommel was conscious of his own legend. At one point he remarked that the disadvantage of a great military reputa- tion was that he was expected to bring off startling coups with inadequate resources. He could speak more plainly than most to his political chiefs, though in the end his plain speaking led to his enforced suicide. His contemporary letters to his wife, in spite of all the dangers of Gestapo censorship, are frank and critical. Perhaps he foresaw his own doom; certainly he foresaw, after Alamein, the defeat of his country. He wished to put on record the difficulties by which he was faced, his prevision of disaster. He was a Napoleon, justifying himself before history having failed to change it.
The editor of this remarkable volume, Captain Liddell Hart, contributes to the Rommel legend a great deal more than mere annotation and arrangement. He is avowedly an admirer of Rommel, just as Rommel was of him. " The impact that Rommel made on the world with the sword," he writes in the first sentence of his introduction, " will be deepened by his power with the pen. No commander in history has written an account of his campaigns to match the vividness and value of Rommel's." Later we read of Rommel's " clarity and high degree of accuracy," and we are told that it is surprising to find " that such a thruster had been so thoughtful," that his military genius combined, as so rarely, " the conceptive with the executive," and that it is impossible to find, except perhaps in Guderian, a rival to his acuteness of time-sense and the unexpected move.
These claims, coming from so high an authority, need careful examination. Rommel was not, by any standards except the mediocre, a great writer. He is always readable because his subject is always of outstanding interest. But there is not a paragraph, scarcely a phrase, in his account of events which lend themselves to graphic description, that would cause wonder for its conciseness or originality. Only in his narrative of Alamein does his style rise above the pedestrian, and then it is the sheer magnitude of his tragedy which breaks through the written words. A page in this book from the pen of Rommel's Chief of Staff, General Bayerlein, about the characteristics of the British soldier, and another account by the same writer of the bombing of his Division in Normandy, are better examples of military analysis and reporting than anything by Rommel himself. Rommel's writing is no more than pleasing and clear. It is better than Caesar's, poorer than Napoleon's or Wavell's. He disliked the Press, apparently read little outside technical books and, to do him justice, would no doubt have been astonished and dismayed by the claim that his pen was as mighty as his sword.
Nor was he a thinker. There is a certain melancholy in him, amounting sometimes to self-pity, though he does not often whine. He never reflects (at least, in this volume) upon human nature, war or the rightness of his cause. War to him was a game. His fairness to his opponents is based upon professional respect, and his summings-up smack-of the post-mortem or the match tea. His only remark on religion was made before the *Edited by B. H. Liddell Hart. (Collins. 25s.) Agedabia battle in January, 1942: " I have complete faith that God is keeping a protective band over us and that He will grant us victory." It would not have struck him as strange that his opponents were simultaneously making exactly the same claim. Politics are not mentioned, perhaps because it was too dangerous; and his fall came through military disagreement with Hitler, rather than any doctrinal opposition. Even when he speaks of global strategy, his judgement is questionable. For instance, when reflecting on the African campaign, he argues that the war could have been won by a full-scale offen- sive through Egypt into the southern Russian front. He admits that this " final strategic objective " would have necessitated the withdrawal of most of the active Divisions from the Western Front, and does not explain how the Allied invasion of France could have been simultaneously countered.
His main role and reputation lay in the field half-way between strategy and tactics, and it is here that Captain Liddell Hart makes the strongest claims for his pupil. Of course Rommel was a great general. Of course his dash, his personal leader- ship and courage, his grasp of country and his sense of timing were supreme. Never were they better exemplified than in his command of the 7th Panzer Division in May, 1940. A sketch- map in Rommel's own hand shows how far he advanced ahead of his neighbours across the Meuse, like a long tongue stuck out into the faces of his enemy; and his dash to Cherbourg a few weeks later, when his Division advanced 150 miles in less than twenty-four hours (" this far exceeded any day's advance which had ever been made in warfare "), makes exultant reading.
These successes, however, were made with great local superiority of armament and cohesion. His real test came in the later stages of the African campaign. At the battle of Alam Haifa, which both sides now agree to have been the real turning- point, and again at Medenine, Rommel fell completely into the trap set for him by Montgomery. Neither Rommel, nor Captain Liddell Hart, fully admits this essential point. Mont- gomery is represented throughout by both author and editor as a cautious, clogging commander, his successes as freaks of chance and overwhelming material superiority. Rommel speaks of the British commander's " astonishing hesitancy " in the closing stages of Alamein, at the very moment when- Mont- gomery, as Sir Brian Horrocks reminds us elsewhere, was ordering his Corps Commanders to break through " even though they lost every tank in the process."
Every soldier is permanently astonished at the failure of the other side to realise the weakness of his opponent. When Rommel arrived in person with a triumphant Panzer Division at Thala in Tunisia, he " was forced to the conclusion that the enemy had grown too strong for our attack to be maintained." The " enemy " were two companies of my own battalion, which arrived in Thala after Rommel, in the middle of the night, without their heavy weapons and with no knowledge whatever of the situation or the: ground. We, too, commented at the time on his " astonishing hesitancy." He withdrew without a fight.
On many other points Rommel's narrative needs firmer, less partisan, editorship. There is no mention of the break-out of the Guards Brigade from Tobruk, no mention of the political significance of the campaign in Greece to counterbalance its apparent military folly, and no comment on Rommel's strange under-valuation of the role of Intelligence in the field. When we come to the sections dealing with Rommel's plan for defending France's coast against invasion, we are astonished by his blindness to the immediacy of the Allied threat. Rom- mel's plan would have involved , the laying of 200,000,000 mines alone. There could not possibly have been time to execute these works, but without them his major plan was doomed. On this vital point there is far too little editorial criticism.
It is not as. if Rommel had merely been allowed to state his own case. Captain Liddell Hart's object was to consolidate a reputation. In many passages he is less fair to the Allies than Rommel himself. This book is of great importance. But it needed an editor less wedded to the idea of his hero's invinci- bility in all but the most impossible conditions of war.
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