What Did British Soldiers REALLY Think of Rommel's German Soldiers?

[00:00:13]For two years, the Western Desert chewed through men and machines at a rate that shocked veterans of every other front.

[00:00:19]Tanks burned by the dozen in single afternoons. Whole divisions vanished in days. By the autumn of 1942, the German army stood 60 mi from Alexandria. Egypt, the Suez Canal, the entire British position in the Middle East. All of it came down to whichever side could outfight the other in the sand. [music] And in the middle of all that killing, Irvin RML wrote a book about it. He called it owneras, war without hate.

[00:00:44]Britain and Germany both had long traditions of professional soldiering.

[00:00:48]Sandhurst on one side, the Prussianmies on the other, officer families who'd served for generations, codes of conduct that went back decades. On the Eastern Front, none of that survived. That war was extermination with no exceptions for anyone. North Africa was different.

[00:01:06]Empty desert, no cities to occupy, no civilians caught in the middle. Just two professional armies tearing into each other across thousands of miles of sand.

[00:01:15]Fighting the way their father's generation understood war to work. RML had won the Iron Cross as a young lieutenant in the First World War. The British commanders facing him had come up through the same kind of world. For two years, these two armies fought harder than almost anyone else in the entire war and somehow kept the old rules intact. This is what that war actually looked like.

[00:01:48]In November 1941, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons and said something that Parliament was not prepared for. Britain had been fighting in North Africa for 18 months. The Eighth Army had been beaten, pushed back, beaten again. Tobuk had been besieged twice. Commanders had been sacked and replaced and sacked again.

[00:02:08]The men in the Western Desert were dying in numbers that the newspapers were not fully reporting in a campaign that the British public had been told was going well and that was not going well. and Churchill, the prime minister of a country at war, stood up and told parliament that the man responsible for most of that damage was probably the outstanding commander in the present war. MPs who had been watching the North Africa campaign deteriorate for a year and a half heard their own prime minister praise the enemy general doing the deteriorating. The press was furious. The political opposition used it immediately. Praising a German general while British soldiers were dying in the sand felt to many in Westminster like a betrayal of the men doing the dying. Churchill's response to the fury was not an apology. It was not a clarification or a qualification. He doubled down. He said it again in January 1942 in even clearer terms. We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us. And may I say, across the havoc of war, a great general. To understand why Churchill said what he said, you need to understand what the Africa Corps actually was when it arrived in North Africa in February 1941. The British had spent the previous 3 months systematically destroying the Italian army in Libya. General Okconor's Western Desert Force had driven 130,000 Italian prisoners into captivity in a campaign of extraordinary efficiency and had done it with a force a fraction of the size of what it had defeated. The Italian army in North Africa had collapsed so completely and so fast that British commanders were beginning to think the desert war might be over by spring. Then RML arrived. What the Africa Corps brought to North Africa was not simply better equipment, though the equipment mattered. It was a specific command philosophy that the British army in 1941 did not possess in equivalent form. RML led from the front, not as a gesture, not for the cameras, but as a genuine operational method. He positioned himself at the point of decision, moved with his forward elements, and made his decisions in real time with real information rather than from a headquarters 50 mi behind the fighting where reports arrived hours after the situation had changed. His aid, HW Schmidt, who served with him throughout the desert campaign and wrote about it afterward with the specific observation of a man who had been present for all of it, described RML in terms that captured what made him dangerous. He was never where his opponents expected him to be. He was always where the battle was. In the opening days of the German advance in April 1941, Raml's forces drove across 600 m of Libyan desert in two weeks. The British formations in their path were not outfought so much as outmaneuvered.

[00:04:44]RML used his armor in ways that British armored doctrine had not prepared British commanders to counter. He mixed his tanks and anti-tank guns in a specific combination that drew British armor onto prepared gun lines and destroyed it. He drove through gaps in the British line that British commanders had assessed as impossible and used them to appear behind positions that had been considered secure. The British commanders facing him in those first months were not incompetent men. They were experienced officers operating within a doctrinal framework that RML's methods exposed as inadequate for the kind of mobile desert warfare he was conducting. One British tank officer from the first armored division who fought against the Africa Corps in the spring of 1942 described being on the receiving end of Raml's anti-tank tactics. He said that the first indication that something had gone wrong was usually a tank in front of him stopping and beginning to burn. By the time the anti-tank gun that had killed it was identified, the gun had moved.

[00:05:44]The German practice of moving anti-tank guns rapidly after each engagement before British counterbatter fire could find them meant that engaging them was a problem that resolved itself only by driving into them, which was precisely what [music] they wanted the British to do. Raml won repeatedly against commanders who outranked him in experience and often outnumbered him in men and equipment. The British military establishment's response to this was over time to construct a specific narrative. RML was a genius, an exceptional case, a phenomenon that did not reflect the general quality of German arms. This was partly true and partly self-serving. Easier to attribute defeat to one extraordinary opponent than to examine the doctrinal failures that allowed him to keep succeeding. The Allied High Command became genuinely alarmed that their soldiers were developing what amounted to a phobia.

[00:06:35]RML's name had acquired a specific weight in the Eighth Army's consciousness that went beyond professional respect. Officers briefing their men before operations were told not to use his name because using it had the effect of making the coming engagement sound more dangerous rather than less. The Desert Fox was a psychological weapon and the British command could not counter it because the weight came from the actual operational record, not from propaganda.

[00:07:01]When Bernard Montgomery arrived in Egypt in August 1942 to take command of the 8th Army, the first thing he did was address this specific problem. He issued a directive that instructed his officers to stop talking about what RML might do and to focus on what the Eighth Army was going to do. He did not pretend RML was not formidable. He studied him. In Montgomery's mobile headquarters, three caravans preserved today at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. He hung photographs of the opposing generals on the walls. RML's photograph was prominent. His staff confirmed that he said looking at them helped him think clearly about what he was going to do.

[00:07:38]Treating the study of his opponent as seriously as terrain or logistics. He had concluded that being outmaneuvered began with not understanding how the man doing the outmaneuvering thought.

[00:07:47]Montgomery named his two dogs RML and Hitler. Nobody asked him to explain it.

[00:07:52]The photographs and the dog's names together capture how he processed his opponent, not with contempt and not with fear, but with the focused attention of a man who decided the correct response to danger was understanding it. The fighting at the level of individual soldiers produced its own testimony.

[00:08:07]When it was close and sustained, it was as brutal as anything in the war.

[00:08:12]The siege of Tobrook in 1941, where the Australian 9th Division held a fortified perimeter against RML's forces for 241 days, produced fighting of a specific character. The Australians inside the perimeter conducted nightly patrols and raids into the German lines, not simply to gather information, but to maintain the psychological aggression that garrison fighting required. One Australian patrol commander who led raids against German positions outside Towbrook described the Germans they encountered. They were professional soldiers who reacted quickly, fought hard, and treated prisoners correctly.

[00:08:46]He said he did not enjoy fighting them.

[00:08:49]The highest form of respect one professional gives another. British prisoners taken by the Africa Corps found treatment consistent with the Geneva Convention. RML had standing orders that Allied prisoners receive the same food rations as German troops, not a small commitment in a campaign where both sides were chronically under supplied. His own fuel ran out at critical moments. Insisting on equal prisoner treatment in those conditions was a genuine operational commitment.

[00:09:16]One British officer captured at Gazala described his processing. He was treated with standard military courtesy received water and rations alongside the German soldiers and was evacuated to the rear within the Geneva Convention time frame.

[00:09:28]He said the Germans he encountered as captives were indistinguishable in conduct from any professional army soldiers. They were not friendly. They had just captured him and were processing him efficiently. But they were correct. He said this mattered more than he expected it to. The battle of Elmagne in October and November 1942 was the turning point that the Churchill quote had been unable to produce on its own. Montgomery had spent 10 weeks rebuilding the eighth army, its training, its doctrine, its logistics, its morale before he was satisfied that it [music] was ready to attack. He had resisted enormous political pressure to move earlier, including direct pressure from Churchill on the grounds that an attack launched before the army was prepared would produce the same result as the previous attacks. He was right.

[00:10:15]When the attack finally came on October 23rd, 1942, it was built on a material superiority that RML's supply situation could not match. The Africa cors war diaries compiled by German staff officers during the battle recorded in their own language what the outcome reflected. The heroic troops of the panzer army they wrote were denied victory due to enemy superiority in numbers and material and not in leadership and morale. This is a significant document. It is the official German military assessment of their own defeat written in the immediate aftermath and its argument, "We were better soldiers, but we had less of everything." Contains both truth and self-justification.

[00:10:58]The material disparity at Elmagne was real. Montgomery had 1,000 tanks to RML's 500. He had secure supply lines from Alexandria. RML had supply lines running across the Mediterranean under constant British naval and air attack, delivering a fraction of what the Africa Corps required. RML himself was not even in Africa for the battle's opening. He was in Germany receiving treatment for the health problems that 2 years of desert command had produced and flew back only when the scale of the crisis became clear.

[00:11:29]After Elmagne, the retreat began, 1,400 miles from Elmagne in Egypt to Tunisia, with Montgomery's eighth army following all the way. The Africa Corps lost 130 tanks and 1,000 artillery pieces during the retreat. The men who walked or drove those 1400 m were not the broken remnants of a defeated army in the conventional sense. They continued to fight rear guard actions with the professional quality that had characterized their operations from the beginning. One British unit commander who was involved in the pursuit from Elmagne to the Tunisian border described the Africa Cors rear guard actions with a specific assessment that appeared in his afteraction report. He said that even in full retreat, even without adequate fuel or ammunition, even knowing that there was nowhere they were going to reach that would solve their strategic situation, the German formations he was pursuing conducted themselves in the specific way of soldiers who had not accepted, that they were beaten, even when the mathematics said they were. He said it was the most professionally impressive sustained performance he had witnessed in the entire war, and he had been fighting the Germans since 1941. Private Jeffrey Glaster, a British soldier in the 8th Army, wrote a letter to Montgomery on December 23rd, 1942, 6 weeks after Elmagne during the pursuit through Libya. The letter is one of the most extraordinary documents of the Desert War because it captures in a single ordinary soldier's voice what the psychological effect of Raml's domination had done to the eighth army's sense of itself and what defeating him had reversed. Glaster wrote, "For the first time in my army life, I felt I belonged to something. For myself, thank you, sir, for this new feeling. You have made us proud to belong to the eighth army." He was writing to thank Montgomery. But the letter's power comes from its implication that before Alamneagne, belonging to the eighth army had not felt like something to be proud of because the eighth army had been the army that RML kept beating. The defeat of Raml was the restoration of a military identity that two years of desert fighting had damaged. The desert war ended in May 1943 when the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered. 250,000 German and Italian soldiers went into Allied captivity. The Africa Corps, which had arrived in February 1941 with two divisions and a commander who had been in Africa for less than 2 days before he started attacking, had run the British army across 1,800 mi of desert over 2 years, had come within 60 mi of Alexandria and the Suez Canal at its high point, and had been eventually stopped not by tactical defeat, but by a material disparity it could not overcome, regardless of how well it fought. What followed the desert war in British culture was something that had not been planned, but that reflected a genuine military reality. Desmond Young was a British brigadier who had been captured by RML's forces in North Africa. His capttors had treated him correctly. After the war, he spent years researching RML's career, working with RML's widow and the officers who had served under him. In 1950, he published RML, The Desert Fox, the first biography of RML, which sold 175,000 copies in Britain and was made into a film in 1951 with James Mason in the title role.

[00:14:43]Young's book established the framework that British public understanding of RML has operated within ever since. Raml as the exceptional German, the professional soldier, the man who burned the order to execute British commandos, the opponent who gave prisoners the same rations as his own men, the general who wrote a book called War Without Hate. The biography was criticized immediately by those who argued that it exculpated the German military establishment by making RML its representative figure. Malcolm Mugaridge wrote in the Daily Telegraph that chivalry towards a captured brigadier was in no wise incompatible with a foreign policy of perod. Richard Crossman, a Labour MP, objected to the portrayal of RML as an opponent of the Nazi regime. These were not unreasonable criticisms. Young's biography was openly admiring of a man who had commanded German forces for Hitler for the entirety of a war that Germany started and lost catastrophically. [music] Basil Little Hart, the most respected British military historian of his generation, compounded the process by editing the RML papers in 1953. RML's own writings, compiled from documents hidden in various locations after his death, edited by a man whose military reputation gave the project an authority it would not otherwise have possessed.

[00:15:56]Lel Hart had also conducted extensive interviews with surviving German generals after the war, and his subsequent histories drew heavily on their assessments. Later historians, including John Mesheimer, argued that little Hart had, in some cases, put words in his sources mouths to make his own pre-war theories look more precient than they had been. The broader argument about the Raml myth was made most clearly by historian Patrick Major in a 2008 paper for the German History Journal. His argument was that the British rehabilitation of Raml served a specific cold war purpose that had nothing to do with military history.

[00:16:32]West Germany was rearming as a NATO ally. For West Germany to rearm, the German military had to be rehabilitated as an institution. Britain's construction of the Raml narrative, the worthy enemy, the honorable opponent, the good German who hated what he was fighting for provided precisely the outside endorsement of the German military's professional competence and moral standing that West Germany could not provide for itself. The Raml myth, Major argued, was cold war politics in the language of military history. What the historical record shows, stripped of the post-war cultural construction, is something more complicated than either the myth or its critics allow. Churchill was not wrong. RML was an outstanding commander by any professional military standard. The Eighth Army soldiers who respected the Africa Corps were not suffering from a propaganda induced delusion. They were reporting their experience of fighting a genuinely capable force. The German rear guard actions from Elmagne to Tunisia were professionally impressive by any assessment. The prisoner treatment was by most accounts consistent with the laws of war. The Africa Corps's own assessment of its defeat, denied victory by material inferiority rather than by being outfought, contains enough truth to be credible and enough self-justification to require scrutiny.

[00:17:50]Montgomery did have more tanks. He did have more secure supply lines. He did have air superiority by the time of Elmagne. He also had the patience to rebuild an army that had been broken psychologically by 2 years of being outmaneuvered and the operational discipline to attack only when he was certain of the conditions required for success.

[00:18:10]Whether RML would have beaten a better supplied Montgomery commanding a better prepared eighth army is a question the Desert War does not answer because that battle was never fought. What was fought was the battle that actually happened and in that battle the eighth army won.

[00:18:25]Churchill said RML was probably the outstanding commander in the present war and doubled down when criticized.

[00:18:31]Montgomery hung RML's photograph on his caravan wall and named a dog after him and beat him at Elmagne. Private Glaster wrote that defeating RML had made him proud to belong to the Eighth Army for the first time. Brigadier Young wrote a biography that sold 175,000 copies in Britain. The 8th Army soldiers who were captured by the Africa Corps and treated correctly came home and told that story.

[00:18:54]The men who fought400 m of desert rear guard actions against an eighth army that was finally better supplied told their own. What the British really thought of RML's Africa Corps was not one thing. It was the specific mixture of professional respect and relief that comes from facing a capable opponent for two years and eventually beating him. It was the political utility of a worthy enemy in a postwar world that needed West Germany on the right side of the Cold War. It was the genuine admiration of soldiers who recognized in the men they were fighting a quality of professional competence that they understood from the inside. And it was the honest acknowledgement made by Churchill in the House of Commons before the war was won that the men killing British soldiers in the Western Desert were being led by someone who deserved to be taken seriously. He was right. The Eighth Army found that out over 2 years and 1,400 m of desert. And then they beat him. The Gazala battles of May and June 1942 were the low point of British fortunes in the desert and the high point of what RML's Africa Corps was capable of. Raml attacked the British defensive line at Gazala with a combination of frontal pressure and a sweeping armored hook around the southern end of the line that British intelligence had assessed as too long to be logistically sustainable. It was logistically unsustainable. RML sustained it anyway. His formations drove around the end of the Gazala line, fought through a crisis in which they were almost out of fuel and almost encircled themselves and emerged from it, having destroyed the armored strength of the eighth army and put British forces in full retreat toward Egypt. One British tank crewman from the fourth armored brigade, who fought in the Gazala battles described the engagement in terms that captured the specific texture of being on the wrong end of Raml's armored tactics. He said that they had been briefed that the German move around the southern flank would run out of fuel within 48 hours, that the logistics simply could not support it, and that the correct response was to hold position and let the Germans solve their own problem. He said they held position and watched the Germans solved their own problem by breaking through the British supply dumps and refueling from captured British petrol. He said this was the moment he understood that their assessments of what RML would and would not do had a consistent flaw. They kept predicting the limits of what was logistically possible and RML kept operating beyond those limits and finding solutions when he got there. The fall of Tbrook on June 21st, 1942 was the single most damaging British military defeat in the entire North African campaign. 35,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers went into German captivity in a single day. Churchill was in Washington when he heard the news in a meeting with Roosevelt. He described receiving the telegram as one of the most painful moments of the war. Not the most catastrophic strategically. The disasters of Singapore and Hong Kong and Creit were larger in scale, but painful in a specific way because Tbrook had been held for 241 days in 1941 and its fall in 1942 felt like the definitive statement of what Raml was doing to British arms. The prisoners taken at Tobrook were processed through the German military system in Africa and eventually transported to prisoner of war camps in Italy. One officer captured at Towbrook described the processing in his subsequent account. The German soldiers who took charge of the prisoners after the fighting stopped were professional in their conduct. The paperwork was completed. The prisoners were moved rearward in the correct time frame. The officer said that the men around him had expected something different, had halfpared themselves for something worse than the Geneva Convention, and that finding instead the standard procedures of military prisoner handling was itself an experience that required adjusting to. He said that the Africa Corps soldiers they had been fighting for over a year had in their conduct as captives confirmed something that the fighting itself had implied.

[00:22:48]They were professional soldiers operating within a recognizable military framework, not political soldiers operating outside one. The German side produced its own testimony. Schmidt Raml's aid wrote about the eighth army with the observation of two years at close range. He described the British, Australian, New Zealand, and South African soldiers as opponents whose stubbornness repeatedly surprised the Germans. He wrote specifically about Tobuk's 241-day resistance and the Australian defender's aggression. He wrote that an army capable of recovering consistently from the kind of failures RML was inflicting on it was not to be dismissed regardless of how many times it had been beaten. RML's private letters and diary entries in the RML papers contain assessments not written for public consumption. He was critical of British command structures, the committee approach to decision-making that slowed responses to his moves. He consistently respected British infantry, distinguishing [music] it from the armored command failures that let him destroy British tank formations. He wrote that the British soldier was brave and that the army's problem was not the quality of its men, but the quality of decisions made above them. Elmagne, October 23rd to November 4th, 1942, was different in character from everything before it. Montgomery built a setpiece battle that removed the mobile improvisation in which RML excelled and replaced it with a grinding attritional engagement where material superiority determined the outcome. RML returned from Germany on October 25th, 2 days into the battle and found a situation that his methods could not resolve. The British artillery was too heavy to suppress. The British minefields were too deep to outflank. The British tank reserves were too large to exhaust. He tried everything he had tried successfully before and found that Montgomery had prepared for all of it.

[00:24:38]One German tank commander from the 15th Panza Division who fought at Lmain and wrote about it subsequently described the experience of the second week of the battle with a flatness that conveyed its specific character. He said that by the time they understood what was happening, it was already too late to change it.

[00:24:55]The British were attacking in a way that absorbed German counterattacks rather than being broken by them. Each German response to a British penetration cost tanks and fuel and men that could not be replaced while the British losses were being made good from reserves they continued to draw on. He said he had never fought against an attack that seemed not to care about the local defeats being inflicted on it. He said it was the most unnerving military experience of his service. Two years of Raml repeatedly outmaneuvering a larger, better equipped British army. One battle in which a British commander negated what RML was good at, and one on terms British material superiority determined, a retreat of,400 miles during which the Africa Corps maintained its professional quality even after its strategic situation was irreversible. A final surrender in Tunisia, a quarter of a million men into Allied captivity.

[00:25:46]Churchill's assessment made in 1941 when the defeats were still happening was the most honest public statement any Allied leader made about what they were facing.

[00:25:55]By acknowledging RML's ability openly, he made the eventual defeat of RML more significant. You cannot have a great victory over an ordinary opponent.

[00:26:04]calling him the outstanding commander of the present war and then watching the eighth army beat him at Elmagne made Elmagne the defeat of a great general by an army that had learned through two years and 18800 miles how to do it before Almagne Churchill said we never had a victory after Alamne we never had a defeat he was speaking about more than one battle he was describing what it had taken to produce that battle the rebuilding of an army that RML had broken the finding of a commander patient enough to rebuild it before he attacked the accumulation of material that the British war economy could produce and the German supply system across the Mediterranean could not match and the specific psychological transformation in an army that had spent two years losing to the same opponent and had to find in itself the capacity to beat him. Private Glaster wrote to Montgomery on December 23rd, 1942, 6 weeks after Elmagne. For the first time in my army life, I felt I belonged to something. Thank you, sir, for this new feeling. You have made us proud to belong to the eighth army. The letter's power comes from its implication. Before Alamine, belonging to the eighth army had not felt like something to be proud of. They had been beaten repeatedly by a force usually smaller and almost always less well supplied. They had watched commanders sacked and replaced. They had held Tobuk for 241 days and then lost it in one. They had been pushed back to 60 mi from Alexandria [music] with a commander they had not heard of arriving to tell them the retreating was over.

[00:27:34]That sentence, "For the first time I felt I belonged to something," contains the entire story of what the Africa Corps did to the eighth army over 2 years and what beating it meant. The Africa Corps through its excellence had made belonging to the eighth army feel like belonging to a losing formation.

[00:27:51]Elamine changed that and the men who had been through all of it understood in a way nobody who had not been there could fully understand what it had taken and what it meant to have done