It is 1941 and the village of Beda Littoria in North Africa stands illuminated by the rays of a Libyan sun. Originally founded by Greek colonists as Balagrae and later edified by the Romans with a temple complex dedicated to the deity Asclepius, the village is one of the few remaining outposts of the Regio Esercito, clinging on to the tatters of Mussolini’s North African empire.
Under the roof of a building, shaded from the sun, two soldiers are engaged in a conversation. Their dusty boots and disheveled uniforms strongly hinting prolonged use and exposure to a harsh desert life where amenities are scarce and water is a luxury. Yet neither are Italian.
The peaked cap of the older soldier with a Knight’s Cross neatly cradled between buttoned collars is the revealing sign of a Wehrmacht commander and an important one at that, too.
Troubled by the heat, weary from lack of sleep and living on tinned sardines, bread and cold tea with a dip of lime, most often left untouched, the officer is a husk of a man he once used to be and virtually unrecognisable from the carefully framed portrait of him circulating Germany, as part of a powerful Nazi propaganda program, and which hails him as a hero of Deutschland.
A tidy collection of media that even at this very moment is creating the desired effect among the German population in strengthening Hitler’s stance, and justifying the ongoing war – peppered as they are with the right amount of admixture by the Wehrmacht’s Propaganda Division’s head, Joseph Goebbels, himself.
Yet the officer is not a character dreamed up by Goebbels. In fact, he is much more real than his photos being printed in the tabloids.
So real that not long after this photo was taken, a British military unit of twenty commandos had launched a daring raid at Beda Littoria with orders to capture or have him killed.
What had brought Rommel to Al Bayda?
However, it is not until one comes across the caption attached to this vintage photo, which reads, “Rommel in Al Bayda 1941”, is one able to connect the dots and find a hidden story emerging. Importantly, the sequence of events that had brought this 49-year-old Generalleutnant to stand in this corner of the earth with legs smartly parted in military style and hands clasped tight over the small of his back.
A decorated veteran of the World War I, an author and teacher at the military school in Dresden, and later the War School in Austria, Rommel was one of the brilliant military minds Germany had produced during the time frame of the second World War.
Swift in action and decision, never idle for long and notorious for disobeying commands for the greater good, he was the German general who had shocked British and American armies with his Fingerspitzengefuhl mobile warfare, and perhaps the only commander who was capable of winning the North African Campaign for the Axis powers, had he been properly supported and timely supplied with fuel, men and armour.
First commander of the Afrika Korps.
Selected by Hitler himself to be the first commander of the Deutsches Afrika Korps and later promoted to command the Panzergruppe Afrika and subsequently the Panzerarmee Afrika as a Feldmarschall, the events that had brought Rommel to North Africa had begun with the invasion of British Egypt by the Italian 10th army, shorty after Mussolini had declared war on Britain and her allies.
After gaining some initial success, the 10th, however, had found itself outclassed by the British in Egypt. A counter-offensive launched against it on the 9th of December in 1940 had all completely decimated it and allowed the British to capture a good portion of Mussolini’s Libyan territories and penetrate inland as far as 400 km.
This counter-offensive was known as ‘Operation Compass’ and was the first large British military operation by the British Western Desert army in the Western Desert. The Italians knew it as the ‘Battaglia Della Marmarica’.
The success of the British in Libya, not surprisingly, had alarmed Mussolini, and threatened with the loss of his African province, he had appealed to his ally, Adolf Hitler, for immediate assistance.
Hitler, in turn, anticipating the loss to free up British regiments for use in more vital battlefields, had created the Deutsches Afrika Korps in January 1941, and had it flown down to Tripoli as an expeditionary force under the command of his favourite commander, Erwin Rommel.
A month later in February 1941, Hitler, had additionally, promoted Rommel to the rank of Generalleutnant.
Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox: Farbound.Net Digital Wallpapers.
Rommel’s counter-offensive.
A recent participant in the invasion of France, and having observed the potential of a Blitzkrieg up close in Poland while serving as Hitler’s bodyguard, Rommel, as a commander, was used to taking the initiative and instinctively responding to battlefield situations.
It was a trait he had acquired during World War I as an infantryman in the Prussian Deutsches Heer, which had encouraged soldiers to capitalise on opportunities, and one that he was to exploit to the full in North Africa.
Beginning an offensive that had lasted over a year and witnessed a see-saw battle between his Afrika Korps and the much larger, better equipped, better supplied and better fed 8th British Army, comprising of British, Indian and Australian regiments. Rommel, in this phase of the war in Africa, had brought the Axis powers of Germany and Italy much closer to complete victory than they had ever achieved before or would attain later.
Der Wusten-fuchs. Rommel, the Desert Fox.
Here, in a barren landscape where temperatures at times soared over 120 degrees Fahrenheit, compasses were required to navigate miles of shifting sand, and swarms of flies drove both men and animals insane, Rommel established his reputation as one of the finest military tacticians in the world.
A defining path that he himself set in precedence in March 1941 by defying the orders of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht to act as a defensive force and launching a military reconnaissance that had quickly escalate into a full-fledged conflict and granted him the opportunity to force the British out of all Cyrenaica, barring the port city of Tobruk.
The cornerstone of Rommel’s victories, were not superior German armour or Panzers as often imagined, but tactical acumen and an uncanny ability to surprise the British – and despite the fact that by this time British intelligence had successfully infiltrated the Italian High Command and was constantly eavesdropping on German Communications.
Rommel had combined subterfuge with highly coordinated military tactics that had seamlessly synchronised tanks, artillery and anti-tank units to leapfrog from offensive to offensive in concentrated and mass attacks.
His strategy was so effective that it had vexed the British, alarmed Winston Churchill and called for an immediate reshuffle of the 8th Army’s command structure.
Furthermore, it also earned him the nickname of the Wusten-fuchs or the Desert Fox – a name that was given to him by the British forces and British Media in recognition of his cunning and daring.
The village of Beda Littoria.
During this time, the village of Beda Littoria was of little importance to both the Axis and Allied armies. It was neither a strategic location nor considered to be of any real military value. The village was briefly the headquarters of Rommel and later a station of the chief quartermaster of the Panzergruppe Afrika.
The village’s only claim to fame during the North African war was a failed assassination attempt on the life of Rommel, and which had taken place the night before the beginning of Operation Crusader in November 1941.
The British, frustrated by Rommel’s unconventional tactics, had sent a team of elite British commandos to capture or kill Rommel, under the assumption that the village was his headquarters.
Military funeral for the commando leader.
Unknown to the commandos, however, Rommel by then had shifted his headquarters closer to the besieged city of Tobruk and was not even in North Africa but celebrating his 50th birthday in Rome, Italy. Information of which, ironically, British Intelligence was privy to, but was not communicated to the commando team.
Detected after an alarm had been raised, many members of the commando team were captured after a firefight.
Although Rommel was a little indignant with the British for assuming he would be residing 250 kms behind the front lines. He, nonetheless, had ordered a military funeral with full honours for the leader of the commando unit, who had died from wounds suffered during the shootout at the villa in Beda Littoria.
The photo.
This rare vintage photo by an unknown photographer comes from the University of Oamr Almokhtar, at Al Bayda. It is possible that this photo was left behind by German troops during the retreat of the Axis forces from Libya and may have been produced by a soldier who wished to preserve the memory of his General in his own personal album. Rommel, after all, was a soldier’s soldier who had put the welfare of his officers and men before himself.
Both Montgomery and Patton held a deep respect for Rommel. While Montgomery had kept a portrait of the German commander in his command caravan. Patton had studied all his books and was the first American commander to adopt Rommel’s tactics for mobile warfare, and which he had used with devastating effect in Northern France.
To all three generals, the contest in North Africa during World War II was not a war. Montgomery saw it as a tennis match, while Patton, as a medieval joust.
I F I This is an Independent story produced to unravel the history behind this vintage photo of Erwin Rommel from Beda Littoria in North Africa, 1941. The story also sheds a bit of light on Erwin Rommel as a commander and the town of Bed Littoria in 1941. It has been created from facts curated out of literary and historical sources. I
