Crucified (24 page)
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Fingerspitzengefuhl,
they called it.
Fingertip feel for the battle.
The sixth sense—"an intuition in the fingers"—that made Rommel a legend on both sides of the front line.
In the First World War, he had earned the Iron Cross and the Pour le Merite, or the Blue Max, a Prussian military award that was also won by Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron. In the Second World War, Rommel had added the Knight's Cross to his medals. Because the enemy never knew where his 7th Panzers would strike next, they earned the nickname "the ghost division."
"Where Rommel is,
there
is the front!" bragged his soldiers, for unlike lesser leaders, he directed his tanks from the thick of the battle. Oblivious to exploding shells and the threat of capture, Rommel flung himself into the fray with a gift for improvisation, tossing aside the musty manual of accepted military tactics.
Blitzkrieg!
Lightning war.
That
was Rommel's genius.
He had exported those blitzkrieg tactics from the plains of Europe to the desert wasteland of Cyrenaica, the eastern half of Libya. There, around the Roman fort of Tobruk, the battle for control of the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal, and the Arabian oil fields swung back and forth like a pendulum. Since biblical times, only camel caravans had ventured across this almost treeless landscape of sand and stone. Vipers, scorpions, and loathsome flies plagued anything that moved. Without warning, a sandstorm could blow in, whirling billions of tons of lashing red grit in fierce winds that infiltrated everything—tents, eyes, noses, engines, and even wristwatches.
Into this godforsaken hell burst the Afrika Korps. Panzer tanks had already spread the swastika from the gates of Russia to the Pyrenees of Spain, and now they'd brought it to the sands of the Sahara. The Panzer—a fire-spewing monster with a high-velocity cannon that could rumble across the desert in a nothing-can-stop-it drive—was the perfect weapon for this kind of war.
The men of the Afrika Korps were toughened by this terrain—hair tangled, skin blistered, eyes reddened, lips cracked, and bodies browned from the broiling sun. Tanks left in the open—and there was no shade—became like ovens set to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Dehydration drove some men mad.
The food was terrible. Gastric ailments were rampant. And the slightest scratch from a thorn bush festered for months, a permanent running sore on arm or l
eg.
But then there was Rommel.
Der Wiistenfuchs.
The Desert Fox.
Here was a man who liked nothing more than to trick his opponent into surrender. Time and again, this modern-day Hannibal had outmaneuvered his foe, snatching victory from the brink of defeat. A favorite trick was to drag bundles of brushwood behind his supply trucks. The billowing clouds of dust created the illusion of an oncoming full-scale assault.
As the British withdrew to stage a defense, Rommel would circle around and attack from another direction.
The Desert Fox.
Prophetically, he had actually kept a fox as a pet on the Western Front in 1915.
In January 1942, the current onslaught had kicked off. The Afrika Korps had seized Benghazi and pushed the British east, all the way back to Tobruk. Rommel rode in the Mammut—German for "mammoth"—an armored command vehicle that he'd captured from the British. With black-and-white Wehrmacht crosses painted over its bluish British camouflage, the Mammut reflected the realities of war.
The victor and the vanquished.
Today—June 20, 1942—Rommel was up and ready for action by 5:30 a.m. As always, he was dressed in full uniform.
His riding boots and breeches spread beneath his stocky frame, and his tunic was open to display the crosses at his throat. His cap was shoved back jauntily to his close-cropped, receding hairline. Above the gold-braided peak sat an over-sized pair of sun-and-sand goggles. These, too, were booty from one of his conquests, and Rommel had turned them into the trademark of his heroic image. Now, as the rising sun glinted off the lenses, his blue eyes scanned the sky for the gull-winged silhouettes of Stukas about to dive.
Boom . . .
Boom . . .
Boom . . .
Artillery pounded the perimeter of Tobruk as the planes came into sight. One after another, 150 Stukas dropped their noses and plunged down, wheel sirens screaming, on the minefield protecting the British fortress. Fountains of dust plumed up from the bunkers as the dive-bombers, engines snarling, swung away low over bloodied heads.
Infantry commanders stood up and blew their whistles, the signal for engineers to rush into the chaos of choking dust and smoke to stretch a steel bridge across the anti-tank ditch.
Around them, soldiers fought hand-to-hand with the Mahrattas and Gurkhas of the Indian Brigade. By eight o'clock, the anti-tank ditch was spanned and the way was open.
Panzers poured into the fortress.
Riding in a troop carrier with his combat squad, Rommel trundled through the gap in the wake of his tanks. Traffic jams clogged the breach as trucks blew up, hurling fragments of razor-sharp rock and shrapnel into the air. Panzers fanned out around the wrecks and rumbled toward the harbor, their engines growling as the drivers shifted gears.
The ancient outpost of Tobruk, seventy miles this side of the Egyptian border, was both the best harbor in North Africa and the final obstacle in Rommel's relentless drive to the Suez Canal and the precious oil fields beyond. It blocked a twenty-two-mile stretch of the coastal highway that ran like a strand of licorice along the former caravan route from the Holy Land to Gibraltar.
With Tobruk in British hands, the supply lines for the Afrika Korps had to detour inland along a desert trail. British tanks could dash out of the fort and cut the Germans' supply lines at any time.
Today would end that threat.
The heart of Tobruk was its grungy port. The harbor wasn't big—two and a quarter miles long and a mile wide—but it was sheltering and deep. The far shore was protected by a lofty, tongue-shaped promontory, and that's where the Italians had built the town. Currently, ships weighing anchor in a desperate bid to escape the war by sea were flaming, exploding, and sinking in a graveyard already cluttered with the half-submerged funnels and masts of bombed wrecks.
The men in the tanks saw the battle through slits narrow enough to keep out bullets. If a track got blown off, the five soldiers within were trapped in a mechanized bomb with hundreds of gallons of gasoline, an arsenal of cannon shells, and almost four thousand machine-gun rounds, all primed to explode if the enemy scored a hit. Dozens of tanks were already knocked out of action, long tongues of flame curling out of every hole. Their hulls seemed to bulge and convulse from the havoc inside. Rivulets of molten aluminum seeped from the engines like tears, and black smoke roiled from burning rubber and oil. Around the gutted turrets sprawled headless, limbless corpses. From below one jammed hatch, shrieks punctuated the battle.
By afternoon, columns of British prisoners shuffled past Rommel, their heads bowed in defeat. The sun was setting as the Germans fought their way into town and turned their guns on the ships still moored in port. By nightfall, Tobruk was almost theirs.
Rommel ate a meal cooked from captured British goods.
With his head against the window, he slumped asleep in the seat of his car. His staff lay wrapped in blankets on the hard ground outside. The stars were blotted out by a pall of smoke smudged red by fires.
At sunrise, Rommel drove into town.
So many times had Tobruk been besieged during the war that hardly a building remained that wasn't flattened or crumbling to rubble. Four miles out of town, the Desert Fox ran into General Hendrik Klopper, the commander of the garrison.
There, the British surrendered at 9:40 a.m., and Rommel told the commander to follow him back to Tobruk.
"See to repairing the water supply," he told the short, wiry South African. "You and your officers will also be responsible for maintaining order among the prisoners."
"My officers demand to be segregated from the blacks," countered Klopper.
"No," said Rommel. "Blacks are South African soldiers, too. They fought side by side with whites. You'll share the same cage."
Meanwhile, the men of the Afrika Korps labored at gathering booty. In desert warfare, what counts is the capture or destruction of enemy hardware. From the rubble, Tobruk gave up two thousand vehicles and thirty usable tanks, four hundred guns, and enough fuel to fill the Germans' Panzers for a blitzkrieg into Egypt. There was even beer galore—with blue Lowenbrau labels!—bought by the British in Lisbon.
"General?"
"Yes?" said Rommel.
"What do you make of this?"
The soldier who'd waved him over was crouched beside the wall of an ancient building that had been hit by a tank round during yesterday's conquest of the town. The breached wall was actually two walls with sand packed in between. Sand flowing out of the open hole had bared a large pottery jar, also cracked by the Panzer's blast.
"I found these in that pot," the soldier informed Rommel.
He held out two papyrus scrolls and a bundle of wrapped-up relics. "One of the scrolls is a map."
The general studied the artifacts. "I like maps," he said.
"I'll see if an expert can figure out what the sketch depicts."
The soldier relinquished the bundle. "Your battle trophy," he said.
Miles away in Germany, Hitler was ecstatic. Trumpets interrupted radio broadcasts with the news that Rommel had taken Tobruk. A bridge was named for him. Movie theaters showed newsreels around the clock. In the Reich Chancellery, Hitler stood at the map table and rubbed his hands with glee.
A colonel unrolled charts of the Nazis' spreading domination.
The British were in retreat from the Arctic to Cyrenaica, and the blitzkrieg in Russia was advancing on the Caucasus. The next day, the radio announced: "The Fiihrer has promoted the commander of Panzer Army Afrika, Colonel General Rommel, to the rank of field marshal."
Field marshal!
The highest rank there was.
A rank for life, with a secretary, horse, car, and driver.
To be a field marshal was to be immortal.
By the time the news reached them, the Desert Fox and his men were on the move. "Mount up! Raise a lot of dust!" That was Rommel's order. With the road to Egypt open, the Afrika Korps charged toward the coastal railway stop where the Desert Rats were digging in to mount a last stand.
Rommel was heading for El Alamein.
He had the relics with him.
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Now it was two years later and the war was all but lost. The Battle of El Alamein had proved to be the turning point. The Americans had rearmed the British Eighth Army with Sherman tanks; Churchill had sent a new commander, the bloody-minded Monty Montgomery; and Operation Torch had landed U.S. warriors with pistol-packing General George Patton in Algeria and Morocco. Loss after loss had reduced Hitler's Reich, until the only option was for Rommel to negotiate a treasonous surrender with Churchill behind Hitler's back.
To that end, the Judas package was on its way to Britain.
Had Rommel been able to foresee how well the D-day invasion would go, he could have passed the Judas package to the Allies here in France. But plans were too far advanced by June for the conspirators to change the smuggling route. The package containing Hitler's atomic secrets and—for safekeeping and to show good faith—the biblical relics found in Tobruk was already aboard the
Black Devil.
A week from now, hopefully, this nightmare would be over, and Germany would be spared obliteration.
"Spitfires!" barked the air sentry in back of Rommel's car.
Wrenched from reliving his glory days at Tobruk, the field marshal craned around in the front seat. The sight of eight enemy planes around Livarot had them using evasion tactics wherever possible. For miles, they'd followed a treed lane that ran parallel to the highway. The car was back on the main road when the lookout spied two marauding Spitfires thundering in behind them at treetop height.
"Speed up! Pull off!" Rommel shouted.
The driver hit the gas.
The car raced toward a narrow side road three hundred yards ahead, but before it could reach it, the lead Spitfire opened up with its machine guns and wing cannons. Rommel saw the flashes and shell explosions stitching a line of potholes at the car. Then the barrage of bullets tore up the left side, shattering the driver's shoulder and arm and peppering the field marshal's face with fragments of hot metal and glass.
Careening down a long hill, the car crashed into a tree, spilling out its occupants before it overturned in a ditch.
His skull caved in, Rommel was thrown clear. Blackness engulfed him as the other Spitfire swooped down to strafe the car and pick off survivors.
GERMANY, NOW
They stood on the rim of the pit, gazing down at the
Ace of
Clubs
as the clouds overhead slid sunlight and shadow along its fuselage.