Book review: Gorenberg demythologizes the ‘Desert Fox’

Yet, he is still connected to this time and place, for the war in North Africa presented a more ominous threat to Palestinian Jews than the Nazi occupation of Europe. The threat was Erwin Rommel, whose generalship has been a source of mythological fear and admiration. 

 

The war in North Africa started as Mussolini’s romantic, but futile, attempt to restore a lost Roman empire. It was a sideshow in the Nazi scheme of things until Rommel arrived in 1941 to save Mussolini. The Italians were far more brutal with civilians, including Libyan Jews, than Rommel’s Afrika Korps, which by all accounts abided by the laws of war. But nobody worried that the Italians who sent Jews to concentration camps in Libya, would invade British-held Egypt, let alone Mandatory Palestine. 

The book could have been called “Stop Rommel.” He is the backbone of a narrative enlivened by Palestinian Jews, and a cosmopolitan array of Cairo-based diplomats, desert explorers, spies, playboys, intelligence agents, Egyptian politicians, adventurers, who Gorenberg weaves like a fugue which comes together in the inevitable finale: the Second Battle of El Alamein. 

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the central theme of this book, it is always lurking in the background because of the threat posed by Rommel and his military ambition. Gorenberg investigates how much of a Nazi he was. He certainly relished German conquests. Poland, he thought, was grateful, for Germany’s occupation, he told his wife in one of many letters home. At least until El Alamein he worshiped the fuehrer who kept promoting him for his blitzkrieg style of warfare, but Nazi ideology seems to have eluded him. When an SS killing unit headed by Walter Rauff, inventor of the gas van, arrived at Rommel’s forward HQ in Egypt during the closing days of the First Battle of El Alamein, presumably to coordinate plans for the extermination of 75,000 Jews in Egypt to be followed by 400,000 more in Palestine, Rommel gave orders through an adjutant that Rauff should wait in Athens until called for. 

In Palestine, the Palmah was building fortifications at Har Megiddo in expectation of Armageddon, fearing invasion not only from Sinai but also from Vichy Syria by a German army which seemed to be storming though southern Russia. Moshe Dayan lost an eye in southern Lebanon while sabotaging communications there.

None of these fears came to anything, as they did in Europe, but Gorenberg’s characters were not to know. His novelistic skill holds us and his characters in suspense. 

When, quite suddenly, after his greatest victory at Ghazala, Rommel took the British-held port of Tobruk in Libya, drove his Afrika Korps down the coast into Egypt, ousted British and commonwealth forces from Mersa Matruh and reached El-Alamein, barely 100 km. from Alexandria, in a single week, he was a slingshot from Cairo and halfway to Palestine. The German advance was so fast that some Panzer units are said to have overtaken retreating British troops, armed with British weapons and supplies captured along the way. 

The residents of Cairo understandably responded with different emotions. Panic was one. British diplomats burned state papers at the embassy; Arab waiters, however, painted up “Wilkommen” signs in the garden of Groppi’s coffee house. 

But Rommel did not prevail. And that is a mystery Gorenberg seeks to explain. What is going on above the desert surface cannot be understood without observing the shadow war where “the decisive role of intelligence and espionage” plays out. 

Churchill was so upset that the Germans had invaded Egypt, that he came over in early August, fired Gen. Claude Auchinleck and appointed a local commander, Gen. William Gott, in his place. However, Gott’s unescorted plane was shot down by six Messerschmitts days later near Cairo. Nobody seems to have asked if an intelligence failure was involved. Bernard Montgomery, who helped crush an Arab revolt in Palestine in 1938, was hastily sent out from London, some say providentially, and took command in mid-August. 

The “Desert Fox” had seemed destined to wipe out the Brits. Military historian Basil Liddell-Hart called him the “master of desert warfare.” But the British finally outfoxed him. And it was not so much Monty’s but, with due respect to Churchill, possibly Auchinleck’s doing. Auchinleck wisely changed his mind about facing Rommel at Mersa Matruh. He left only a token force there to give the impression of a last stand, while he shortened British supply lines and lengthened Rommel’s. 

He chose El Alamein, an excellent location for a last stand, because it forced Rommel’s army into a bottle-neck 40 miles wide between the impassable Qattara Depression and the sea. There, during the whole month of July, he held Rommel’s blitzkrieg army to a draw and stalled his attempt to reach Alexandria for supplies. 

But, Rommel was still in Egypt, on Britain’s turf, and it was now Montgomery’s war. Unlike previous commanders, who forbade even the mention of “Rommel”, for fear of demoralizing the troops, Monty hung his portrait in his headquarters; the better, he said, to read his mind for the decisive battle ahead. 

Whether or not he did, reading the enemy’s mind was exactly what the code breakers of Bletchley Park were doing for him. They cracked “every German air force and army Enigma key used in the Battle for the Middle East.” Alan Turing was the most prominent because he died young and tragically. The last of them, Patricia Bartley Brown, died at 103, the week this book was published. 

Apart from visiting Bletchley and El Alamein, Gorenberg scoured archives in half-a-dozen capital cities in Europe and America to collate bits of intelligence information from one archive with bits from another, and sometimes a third to get a truer picture of the shadow war, and much more besides. 

The Bletchley code breakers were the first to learn that Germans were massacring Jews in Russia. Using their intercepts, Churchill spoke on the radio, August 24 1941, of a German “crime without a name.” He did not mention Jews, but he did mention German police perpetrators. They swiftly changed their codes. 

The German police code, however, was nothing compared with the Enigma machine’s quintillion combinations. Explaining how Enigma was hacked would have been instructive but might have made Gorenberg’s narrative incomprehensible to the layman. Bartley-Brown’s obituary describes a simpler German diplomatic code that she broke.

 “It was a double additive code system. The message was initially encoded to produce a stream of five-figure groups, each of which represented a German word or phrase. Then two machine-generated streams of five-figure groups were lined up beneath the encoded message and added to it using non-carrying arithmetic – for instance, 7+5 producing 2 rather than 12.” 

As Gorenberg points out, when codes are cracked and messages come streaming through, one must ask, are they reliable? Can they be used without blowing the source and stopping it up? “There’s a constant contradiction between giving it out and holding it back.” 

Whenever possible, decoded messages were camouflaged. By cracking an Italian naval code, British hackers located and stopped an Italian tanker bringing supplies to Rommel in Libya. Auchinleck said he relied heavily on this kind of information. A reconnaissance plane was sent to the location so the Italians thought they had been spotted by chance. The ship turned back, and the Italians were none the wiser. 

But Italians were no mean spies. In Cairo, the Italian embassy employed the British embassy’s local workers to make wax copies of safe keys diplomats left on desks. They then broke in when staff were out to steal, copy and return entire cypher books, unsuspected. Naturally, the Italians had keys to most embassies in Rome where they stole codes from the US embassy. Consequently, Rommel too was being fed information, most of it transmissions to Washington from the US intelligence chief in Cairo, whom he knew as his “Good Source.” In the week Tobruk fell on June 21, Rommel learned that weary British troops would “turn, fight and try to save Egypt” at Mersa Matruh. 

This priceless information contradicted local German intelligence which told Rommel the British were building strong positions at El Alamein, but he was so confident in his “good source,” which had never failed him, that he proceeded to Mersa Matruh, took it in three days, and rushed on to El Alamein to mop up, and was stopped. Now it was Rommel’s turn to retreat, but even a partial retreat was not possible, under Hitler’s orders.

By rushing to Mersa Matruh so soon after the leak from his “good source” Rommel compromised the source. As Rommel approached El Alamein days later, the “good source” went dead. He did not yet realize that it would not resume. He was half-blind.

When Montgomery arrived in mid-August Rommel was a sitting duck. a victim of hubris, elementary logistical failure and an incorrect use of intelligence. 

It is tempting to think the inaccurate intelligence information was an intentional ruse, but Gorenberg says the intelligence chief’s undoing was due to carelessness, and not just his own. A year later a US intelligence agent visiting Bletchley Park learned there that an order had gone out to change the codes several days before Tobruk was taken, but for unknown reasons was never sent. Had it been, Rommel would not have received the strong hint that Mersa Matruh was his for the taking. Had his source not then been blocked, he would have received a more accurate update. The master tactician of desert war would have thought through his strategy a little longer and prepared better for the showdown at El Alamein or avoided it. 

Montgomery, meanwhile, bided his time and continued to build up the Eighth Army. On the last night of a full moon on October 23, he ordered 900 artillery guns to fire at the German positions. Ten days later Rommel retreated in violation of Hitler’s orders. 

It was, said, Churchill, the end of the beginning. How much it owed to a piece of carelessly transmitted intelligence information we might never know for sure, but it does raise questions about accepted accounts of the war in North Africa, the sideshow that became a centerpiece of Allied victory, and Rommel’s alleged genius. 

Gorenberg is to be commended for making a riveting read out of a difficult subject – the wartime role of military intelligence – which brings a hugely important dimension, and, a human one, to any history of war in the past century.■