Killing Rommel Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Historical Note

  Epigraph

  WHEN my dad died, his closest friend came forward as…

  Book One An Englishman

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Book Two The Long Range Desert Group

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Book Three The Inner Desert

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Book Four The Desert Fox

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Book Five Benina

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Book Six Wilder’s Gap

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Steven Pressfield

  Excerpt from The Profession

  Copyright

  For Nancy

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  WHAT FOLLOWS is a work of fiction, but its basis in reality is fact.

  All details of the trucks and tanks are historically accurate, as are desert geography and place names, campaigns of the war and timing of battles, equipment, weapons, nomenclature and all wireless and operational protocols. All military units are real, with the exception of T3 Patrol and “the Regiment” of 22nd Armoured Brigade, which are fictional. Everything about Rommel’s history and death is true. All incidents concerning the reconnaissance and outflanking of the Mareth Line in late 1942–early 1943, excepting those involving T3 Patrol, actually happened.

  Patrol designations and commanders of the Long Range Desert Group are historically true and their orders are as they were issued in fact. Where actual historical characters appear—Jake Easonsmith, Paddy Mayne, Nick Wilder, Ron Tinker, to cite the more prominent—all actions that they are said to perform before and after the central patrol are exactly as the real individuals performed them. Other characters are composites or inventions.

  Only men who do not mind a hard life, with scanty food, little water and lots of discomfort, men who possess stamina and initiative, need apply.

  From the initial British Army Circular,

  North Africa, summer 1940,

  seeking volunteers for what would

  become the Long Range Desert Group

  WHEN my dad died, his closest friend came forward as a mentor and surrogate father to me. This was not without its challenges since Chap—his full name was R. Lawrence Chapman—lived in England, while my family’s home was in Manhattan. Chap’s profession was publishing, so he got to New York regularly on business; I remember him taking me to the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden every winter, in the days when the indoor track and field events were held in an arena so dense with cigarette smoke that you could barely see from one side to the other. Summers, I visited Chap and his wife, Rose, in London and at Rose’s brother Jock’s cottage at Golspie in Scotland. Chap and Rose had a stepdaughter, Jessica, who was exactly my age, and two sons, Patrick and Tom, a couple of years older. The four of us were inseparable.

  Chap had lost his own parents when he was quite young, so he was sensitive to the needs of a boy without a father. He took me trekking and fly-fishing; he taught me how to brew a cup of tea and how to write a declarative sentence. Chap was quite a celebrated editor and publisher; it was not unusual to find writers like Harold Pinter and John Osborne sitting down to supper. Chap was also, though he never talked about it, a war hero. He had won a DSO for his service in North Africa during World War II. DSO stands for Distinguished Service Order. The only British decoration higher is the Victoria Cross, the equivalent of our Medal of Honor. I was too young to understand much of this then, but I was impressed all the same.

  I remember Rose showing me a photo album once at their flat in Knightsbridge. There was Rose, circa 1939, looking as glamorous as Gene Tierney in Laura. And young Lieutenant Chapman, as dashing as Tyrone Power. I squinted at yellowing snapshots of youthful Englishmen and New Zealanders of Chap’s unit, the Long Range Desert Group, posing beside wilderness-rigged trucks armed with .30-caliber Brownings and twin .303 Vickers K machine guns. You could see the “sand channels” mounted on the vehicles’ flanks—perforated steel tracks that the men used for extricating trucks stuck in the soft sand. Rose said that such patrols routinely crossed hundreds, even thousands of miles of waterless, petrol-less desert, where there was no mercy and no hope of rescue if anything went wrong.

  Sometime in the early seventies, Chap began writing a memoir of this experience. I was eleven or twelve then; I remember Chap sending Jessica and me to the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane to look up Army records for him. The documents had only recently become declassified; there was a stamp on the first page of each that read

  MOST SECRET TILL 1972

  Jessica and I got five pence apiece from Chap for copying these papers, which was big money in those days. Chap worked at home in his study, a tiny cubby littered with his war journals and diaries, correspondence with former comrades, maps of North Africa and operations reports in English and German. I was fascinated. I plagued Chap with question after question, most of which he was patient enough to answer.

  It was not till the early nineties, however, when I became a historian myself that my thoughts returned seriously to Chap’s memoir. I was visiting him and Rose in Scotland; Chap and I were playing the Struie golf course, next door to Royal Dornoch. I asked what had happened with the document. It was in a drawer at home, Chap said. He had finished it but never shown it to anyone except Rose. I asked if I could see it.

  “No, no, it’s a mess. Besides, I can’t publish it.”

  Chap expressed a number of reservations, largely about the personal nature of the material. He feared, he said, causing pain to the still-living widows and grown children of the men whose deaths he described in his pages. I could see that his own grief was deep and keenly felt. Still, as a writer, you can’t let stuff like that stop you, and Chap knew it.

  “Can you at least tell me what the book’s about?”

  “It’s not even a book. Just…I don’t know…an account.”

  “Of what?”

  “Nothing really. One patrol. Not even a successful one.”

  I managed to drag out of Chap that the operation’s objective had been to locate and kill Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the legendary Desert Fox.

  Now I was really hooked. I pressed Chap to show me a few pages. He wouldn’t budge. I accused him of being a chicken writer. He was exhibiting, I said, all the symptoms of publication terror that he always told me his own writers showed.

  “C’mon, Chap, you can’t be tough on them while letting yourself off the hook.”

  “They’re professional writers,” he said. “I’m not.”

  Back in the States, I found myself unable to let go of curiosity about Chap’s story. I began researching the era. The Long Range Desert Group, I discovered, was one of the first of those units that would come to be called “special forces.
” It had been based in Cairo and at various oases in the Libyan desert; its missions were raiding and reconnaissance behind enemy lines, against the Italians and Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The LRDG was small and secret. Rommel himself had declared that man for man it had done more damage to the Axis cause than any other outfit in the North African campaign.

  On August 31, 2002, Chap had a heart attack. He was okay; he recovered quickly. But on Christmas Day two years later he had another. I flew over. I was getting worried. Rose never left Chap’s side. Three nights after Christmas, Chap took her hand. He said he didn’t think he would see the New Year. By ten-fifteen he was gone.

  The funeral was at Magdalen College, Oxford. I was amazed at the turnout. Over four hundred mourners filled the cloister, including three Booker Prize winners, all of whom Chap had either edited or published.

  The morning before I had left New York, a parcel had arrived from Rose.

  Chap wanted you to have this. He said he won’t be a chicken writer any more.

  It was the manuscript.

  I read it on the flight over, then twice again over the next three days. You have to be careful when you take in something like that, to evaluate it objectively and not get carried away by the emotion of the moment or by your personal affection for the writer. Still, I knew from the first page that this was special. It was all Chap, the best of him as I knew him, and other sides I’d never gotten a chance to know, including his love for Rose, which brought me to tears more than once. But best of all was its portrait of men and of the desert war. Chap’s Englishmen and New Zealanders were by no means professional soldiers. They had not trained all their lives for war, as had many of their Axis enemies, yet they rose to the occasion when necessity demanded. Chap’s own story was that of a civilian who, under exigency’s law, embraced the virtues of war and was transformed by them.

  Chap’s memoir brought forward a second theme that was, to me, equally significant. This was the self-restraint, even chivalry, that distinguished the conduct of combatants on both sides throughout the North Africa campaign. Because the forces clashed in open desert far from civilian population centers, there was little if any of what we call today collateral damage. The flat, vacant waste, coupled with the extreme nature of the elements and the terrain, lent a sort of “purity” to the conflict. Machine-gunners routinely held their fire when enemy soldiers bailed out of disabled tanks. Stretcher bearers were permitted to dash into the open to evacuate the wounded. In frontline dressing stations, wounded men of Axis and Allied armies often received treatment side by side, on no few occasions from German and British medical officers working shoulder to shoulder. The leading exemplar of this code was Rommel himself. When orders from Hitler mandated the execution of captured British commandos, Rommel tossed the document into the trash. He insisted that Allied prisoners receive the same rations and medical care as he himself was given. He even wrote a book about the conflict called Krieg ohne Hass (War Without Hate). Memoirs of the North Africa campaign attest that, fierce and brutal as much of the fighting was, relations between individual enemies retained a quality of forbearance that seems, today, almost impossible to imagine.

  This chapter is the introduction to Chap’s memoir. The full document follows. It was my decision not to render the text into American English but to leave it in the mother tongue as Chap wrote it. I have edited it slightly for U.S. readers and have added a brief epilogue, whose aim is to bring up-to-date the lives and deaths of the officers and men Chap wrote about, since the time he completed his pages. To avoid using footnotes or a glossary, I have taken the liberty of blending into the text as unobtrusively as possible clarifications for such English-isms or shorthand as Chap occasionally employed—e.g., military acronyms such as KDG ( for the King’s Dragoon Guards, an armored car regiment). Where period slang appears, I’ve tried to shape the surrounding text so that the meaning is clear—or at least decipherable—from the context. These alterations excepted, the final text remains as close to Chap’s original as I could make it.

  Book One

  An Englishman

  1

  DURING THE FINAL months of 1942 and the early weeks of 1943, it was my extraordinary fortune to take part in an operation behind enemy lines whose aim was to locate and kill Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander-in-chief of German and Italian forces in North Africa.

  The operation—the term “raid” was never employed—was authorised by Lieutenant-General Bernard Law Montgomery, commanding Eighth Army; planned by the office of Lieutenant-Colonel John “Shan” Hackett, of G Raiding Force; and carried out by elements of Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling’s SAS, the Special Air Service, reinforced by irregular troopers of Major Vladimir Peniakoff’s No. 1 Demolition Squadron, more familiarly known as Popski’s Private Army, as well as officers and other ranks of the Long Range Desert Group. The operation placed its hopes of success not in firepower, since its heaviest vehicles were unarmoured one-and-a-half-ton Chevrolet trucks packing no armament bigger than .50-calibre aircraft Brownings and 20mm Breda guns, but on cunning, audacity and surprise. Attempts on Rommel’s life had been made before. These, however, had struck at lightly defended rear areas, to which their target had withdrawn temporarily for rest or recuperation. The operation in which I took part aimed to strike at the heart of the German Afrika Korps in the field.

  If this scheme sounds driven by desperation, it was. At the moment of the operation’s initial planning—summer ’42—Rommel and Panzerarmee Afrika had just finished routing the British Eighth Army in a series of battles in the Western Desert. German armour had driven our tanks and men across all Libya, over the Egyptian frontier, to the very gates of Alexandria. Churchill had just sacked the army’s commanders. In Cairo, the code books were being burned. Rommel stood one push from Suez and the Middle East oilfields. Russia was then reeling under attack from 166 Nazi divisions. With Arab oil, Hitler’s war machine could break the Red Army’s back. Nor would rescue quickly come from America. The U.S. had barely entered the war; full mobilisation lay months away. The Allies were staring global defeat in the face.

  Could a commando raid in North Africa make a difference? It could, the planners in Cairo believed, if it could eliminate Rommel. Rommel was the heart and soul of Axis forces in the desert. “The Jerries have no general who can replace him.” This was Major Jake Easonsmith, our commander, speaking at the initial briefing. “Kill him and the beast dies.”

  But could such a strike succeed? It might, paradoxically, because of Rommel’s own personal bravery and his audacious style of command. The Desert Fox led from the front. His mode of leadership was to place himself physically wherever the action was hottest, heedless of his own safety. “Rommel isn’t reckless,” declared Easonsmith. “He has simply found that in mobile warfare the commander’s presence at the point of action is essential.”

  Rommel was notorious among his own junior officers, we were told, for materialising unannounced at forward positions, stepping down from his Fieseler Storch scout plane or his “Mammoth” Armoured Command Vehicle, occasionally from a tank or a staff car or even a motorcycle upon which he had hitched a ride. It was not exceptional for Rommel to issue orders directly to his regimental commanders or even, in the heat of the moment, to take personal command of units as small as infantry companies.

  Such boldness had nearly got Rommel killed more than once. He set his plane down by accident one time amongst an Allied formation and winged away, barely, with bullets whizzing round his head. Another time he escaped capture when he ran out of fuel on the frontier wire, again amidst Commonwealth troops. Rommel was rescued a third time by the staff car carrying one of his own generals who happened, emulating his mentor, to be as far forward as Rommel was.

  Rommel’s trademark aggressiveness, it was hoped, could render him vulnerable to a surprise thrust. If Allied raiders could use the deep desert routes to move undetected into the German rear; if they could manoeuvre forward undiscovered; if they could fix Rommel’s posit
ion…if a skilled and daring party could do all this, they might be able to land a blow that would change the course of the war.

  My name is Chapman, Richmond Lawrence. In September 1942 I was a lieutenant in the 22nd Armoured Brigade, 7th Armoured Division. I was a tank officer. I commanded theoretically a “recce” (reconnaissance) troop of four A-15 Crusaders. I say theoretically because in action the turnover was so swift and violent, both from enemy fire and from mechanical breakdowns, that a troop could be down to two tanks or even one of its original kind, then reconstituted overnight with different types fresh from the repair depots—American Grants, British Crusaders, and the U.S.-built aircraft-engined Stuarts that their crews called Honeys. Likewise the men turned over. That is another story. The point for this tale is that, at that time, circumstances conspired to export me from the Armoured Division and translate me into the Long Range Desert Group.

  My presence amongst this company was in a technical capacity only; I had been PTDed (“personnel temporarily detached”) to the formation with an eye to assessing “the going” over which the patrols would travel—meaning the terrain’s suitability on future occasion to bear tanks and heavy transport. I was by no means the first tank officer so assigned. Advisers from the Royal Armoured Corps regularly hitch-hiked on LRDG patrols for similar purposes; Royal Air Force officers did the same, scouting out potential landing grounds in the inner desert.

  The mission of the Long Range Desert Group was raiding and reconnaissance in the enemy’s rear. At the time I joined it, the unit operated in patrols of five or six trucks, with one officer and fifteen to twenty men. Patrols were entirely self-contained, carrying all their own petrol, water, rations, ammunition and spare parts. In addition to its own combat operations, the Long Range Desert Group conveyed spies and agents on covert assignments and provided transport and navigation for assault parties of the SAS and other commando outfits. The group’s greatest joy, however, was to work “beat-ups,” their slang term for attacks on enemy airfields, motor assembly areas and convoy routes.