Rommel had seen one flank of the enemy attack from his hilltop position, aghast as the heavy armor blasted away his defense. His mind was awhirl, the shock of the battle on him as heavily as it was on his men. He heard the frantic calls for artillery, the resounding crash and swell of the battle, and he knew the sounds of his division well enough. This was one he had seldom heard before. There had been those hours, in the headlong rush across Cyrenaica, when Streich would stop and complain about the fuel situation, or columns would be lost and immobilized in the drifting sand, but this was something else-it sounded like a word he would stubbornly refuse to speak aloud, even in his own mind-defeat.
He knew his flank had been crushed, and now he had two divisions strung out for over fifty kilometers between this place and the roads leading to Tobruk. How big was this force that had attacked him? From all reports the men seemed to say they had seen no more than ten or fifteen British tanks in any given place. But what were they? He listened to the wide eyed reports of his officers and Sergeants as he passed among them, and they all said the same thing. These were massive, unstoppable heavy tanks, something altogether new. Yet in spite of their size and power, they could move like gazelles, firing at the gallop, and hitting targets with deadly precision. They had torn the German defense apart in ten minutes. Then the smaller vehicles came, fast and furious, with a lethal flak gun that was chopping up the infantry positions. Any time they tried to get a heavier gun into position to engage, the long, evil barrel of those tanks would rotate and fire, blasting it away at impossible ranges with pinpoint accuracy.
Rommel had heard quite enough, and through the shock and dismay he realized now that discretion was the better part of valor. If he didn’t act quickly, his Afrika Korps could disintegrate into a mass of confusion and disorder. Any thought he had about pressing further east was now gone. It would be all he could do to save his two divisions and get back to Tobruk.
So he moved, a grey ghost racing in his staff car, from one frantic unit to the next, field glasses in one hand, a map in the other. “We ran into something we did not expect,” he told the men. “It is my fault. Now I want you to move your battalion here. Get any vehicle that can still move on this road and follow it west. Our defense was too hasty. We’ll find better ground to the west and regroup.”
Units of 15th Panzer and 5th Light were all intermingled now, but the troops still cooperated and moved off as he ordered. The German command structure was so flexible, and the unit training so thorough, that his units retained tremendous cohesion, even in a confused retreat like this. Rommel watched them go. The ones who had not yet seen the enemy tanks were the bravest, ready and quick to move with any order. The men coming back from the front line were quite different, sallow eyed, pale, bloodied and dispirited. He did his best to rally them, worrying now that the infection of their loss would soon spread through his army.
In time he managed to get his divisions sorted out, and was grateful that the British attack seemed to stop. He had gathered together elements of his recon battalion as a fire brigade to throw in should the enemy persist in their attack, but they stopped two kilometers south of Bir el Khamsa.
Thank god for that, he thought. They must be strung out as badly as we are. What I need to do now is extricate my battalions and get to better ground. I’ll consolidate later, but now it is time to move. Then I’ll huddle with the division commanders and we’ll determine what to do next. He heard nothing from Streich for some hours, until he was told the man was reported dead. So he took personal charge of the division, driving them west with tireless energy.
The Desert Fox had been outwitted by the British. The sudden appearance of this enemy armored force had completely unhinged Rommel’s plan. As one unit after another peeled off and began the retreat, it exposed other units in the long line that stretched nearly eighty kilometers along the stony escarpment that pointed north to Sollum and Halfaya Pass. And he had the Italians to worry about as well. Once he was satisfied he had his two divisions moving as he wished, he sped off north to find the Ariete Division where it was operating on the main road just south of the escarpment.
As the day lengthened, a shadow fell over his mind and soul that whispered that unspeakable word-defeat. They would get half way to the Egyptian border before the retreat would halt for the night, and he would spend long hours helping the columns get fuel wherever they could find it. That was his main concern now. Though he knew he would not sleep that night, or have any time to spend writing his dear Lucie about what had happened, he was already composing the letter in his mind.
