Chapter 25

(FEB 1941 -1943 GENERAL ROMMEL AND THE AFRIKA CORPS)

On a Hollywood set made of paper Mache and lighted by reflection, the famous American actor Humphrey Bogart laughed out loud when he saw the single slow drop of water dripping down the rocky interior of a shallow cave carved out of the side of a waterless Wadi leading back to the coastal highway that would bring them back to the Allied lines. He was the tank commander of a single surviving Allied tank leaving the battle with Field Marshall Rommel that had decimated the joint command. The actor immersed in his role imagined the circumstances of his situation and accepted the fact that he had made a mistake in replacing the water cans with additional gas cans to insure they would have enough fuel to make it back from the battle if they were lucky enough to survive the overwhelming odds.

Surprisingly, that almost seventy year old film summed up the chaos and brutality of armored warfare on terrain of shifting sands. The filthy, bearded tank commander was no strategist but he had enough common sense to understand that their tanks were not up to the quality of the German armor and that when tanks are outnumbered and out maneuvered, their best course of action is to take evasive action and take a retrograde movement in order to survive.

The slow drip of water, of course, is what saved him and his crew in addition to the supposed Turk they had picked up from the desert sands and the little Italian Corporal that had joyfully surrendered almost unable to believe his good luck at being captured by actual Americans before he became cannon fodder.

The flavor of the dirty and chaotic fighting in North Africa was caught on black and white film in that bygone era with educational clarity. It was not a hit in the United States because most Americans couldn’t understand how a murdering dictator could have a general like Erwin Rommel to fight his battles against the righteous might of the Allied forces saving civilization from an evil Axis power.

Rommel’s credo of “Duty, Honor, and Country” went a long way in explanation of his mystical exploits on the battlefield. He was a soldier’s soldier and even the lowest enlisted man was willing to take the risk of certain death just to follow his orders. They knew he never gave an order without the careful analysis of keeping casualties down in the ranks of the men serving under him.

Always a pragmatist, he originally thought their chance of military control of the civilized world was a possibility. Then, when he became more aware of the so-called “final solution” and the genocide of the Jews and other segments of society, he was riddled with fresh doubts but continued to slog on with the orders from Berlin.

When he was advised that “Operation Barbarossa” had begun, he almost committed suicide because the Fuhrer had undertaken his Eastern promise in direct contradiction to his impassioned explanation that the distances were too far, the tanks were not equipped properly and that the men needed warmer clothing in the eventuality that they found themselves short of the Kremlin as winter approached. He had studied the movements of the master strategist Napoleon and knew with draining certainty that the flower of the German Wehrmacht would be ground to dust on the muddy roads of mother Russia just as Napoleon had learned the lesson the hard way at a cost of a generation of French fighting men and a stain on his military expertise.

He managed to put that behind him and concentrated on taking the fortress at Tobruk only to be advised three days before the beginning of his long retreat from that untaken defensive position that the Japanese Imperial Fleet had attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbor with great loss of life and ships by the United States.

Shortly after starting that long retreat, which he liked to call a retrograde movement in another direction, he isolated his person inside his tent and refused to see or review another communication. A sense of depression feel over him as his considered his options. Finally, he decided that he would soldier on as best he could under the circumstances and figure out some way of removing the evil dictator from his seat of power. He had no doubt that the absolute power of the Third Reich reached even into his command with spies and informants for the Gestapo lurking in the corners and observing his every movement. He decided he would be careful of his verbal opposition and make no move that could be construed as being counter-Hitler in context.

In December of 1941, the main headquarters of the Vichy government was a beehive of activity as communications were flying in every direction. I noticed that some of the poorly hidden Jewish populace was in a joyous mood as if they hoped their redeemer would soon emerge from the far-away lands of the new world. I was besieged with many of the refugees peppering me with questions about Roosevelt and how the American government viewed the terrible conditions for all Jews in Europe. I did my best to explain to them that in the main, the American public had been shielded from the dreadful realities of life and death in a concentration camp and the determination of the Fuhrer to remove every trace of the Jews from European society and culture.

I made certain that everyone I met and everything I did was right out in the open because my “followers” were out in full bloom ever since the entry of the United States of America into the war on December 7th, 1941 made it less plausible that the great leader Hitler would be able to guide his people through a war against most of the populated world. As an American, I would high on the suspected foreign agent’s list down at the French Militia headquarters and every move would be scrutinized with great caution.

It was beginning to look like the ideal time for me to change my base of operations from Marseilles to a more central location like Paris and possibly hook up with one of the resistance movements forming to fight the German invaders. I had to be extremely careful because I did not want to disrupt any British support personnel for the resistance and it was a well-known fact that most of anti-Nazi resistance groups were mostly communist in their attitudes and political belief. I already knew that was a sore point after the war and it helped to explain some of De Gaulle’s actions with regard to hints of anti-Americanism at the highest levels in French government post World War Two.