Yet it was not to be. His able desert scout Lazlo Almasy, was out on the extreme southern flank of his turning maneuver when he reported an enemy force emerging from the south. First believed to be no more than a reconnaissance, it soon coalesced into a strong mechanized attack, lightning swift, and completely unstoppable. The enemy was said to have a brigade of heavy armor, the likes of which the world had never seen. The German Pak 50mm AT guns simply bounced right off the monster tanks, so massive that the German infantry deployed on defense literally could not believe what they were seeing.
Rommel could not know it at that moment, but he was under attack by warriors from a far flung future, in equipment so advanced that his forces would have no chance of ever defeating it. Even the superb 88mm flak gun, a weapon which he had used to savage British armor up until that point, was completely ineffective against these new enemy tanks. At point blank range it might penetrate between 100 and 120mm of armor, and it was striking a target with protection that could resist over ten times that in RHA Armor equivalent. When Rommel saw that, with his own eyes, he knew that his only recourse was a swift and hasty retreat to save his panzers from almost certain destruction.
Even after that shattering setback, he persisted after being heavily reinforced and resupplied, and set his mind on taking the vital port of Tobruk. In that action, he had come so close to success that at one point, General Montgomery had taken up a rifle himself and was firing at German troops near the harbor. Then, troops had arrived that threatened to push shut the gate he had broken down to gain entry to the British fortress, and his vaunted Hermann Goring Brigade had been forced to withdraw. His deep southern flank was again being threatened by that unstoppable heavy British armor. By now he had determined that it was a small force, perhaps one of a kind, a prototype unit being tested in this cauldron of war. He fell back, took up a line of defense near Gazala, and there he sat, impudent, bruised, sulking behind entrenched positions screened by wire, mines, and covered by all the artillery he could command.
The swift moving battles that had characterized his campaign had now returned to the morass of the first world war. Finally his enemy sought to push him west, and his last stubborn defense at Gazala was eventually broken again by that heavy armor threatening his deep southern flank. Back he went, all the way to Agheila, leaving most of the Italian infantry to defend the highlands of Cyrenaica and fall back on Benghazi. Again he set his men to digging their trenches. He was pushed out of Agheila, fell back to Mersa Brega, where Hitler had ordered him to stand to the very last, though his every instinct was to move west again, and get as far from those terrible enemy tanks as he could.
In that battle, he finally saw one up close. It had struck a mine, disabling its massive steel tracks, and for some reason, the British had chosen to gut it with explosives and leave it on the field, something they had never done before. In all his many actions against that brigade, only one of those tanks had been killed in the past, by a deadly Stuka pilot that had put his bomb right on target. This second death was a suicide, which seemed very strange to him. There it was, looming in the smoke of its own death, and Rommel just stood there, hands clasped behind his back, looking at the behemoth with a mixture of dread and awe. There it sat, the bane of the Desert Fox, seeming to mock him, even in the throes of its own death.
There was the demon that had stopped him from taking Egypt and reaching the Suez Canal as he had promised his Führer. There was the nightmare that had haunted him over hundreds of miles of empty desert, a nemesis so powerful that if his enemy had such a beast, he knew there would soon be no chance for Germany in this war.
But he never saw those tanks again. When O’Connor sought to break out through his defense at Mersa Brega, the attack was not led by the heavy brigade, but by the old clattering Matilda IIs and new American Grants. By comparison, they seemed like small toys, and he could not understand why the British had refused to use the hammer they had in hand. He had ordered his engineers to recover that last fallen beast, dragging its metal carcass back to Sirte, and then Tripoli for shipment to Toulon. He remembered one last night before he sent it on its way, just standing there, seeing the dull moonlight play over its rugged contours. The main gun had been spiked with a grenade or some other explosive, but it was still longer than any of his heavy artillery pieces, and more deadly.
He stopped O’Connor at Mersa Brega, the first time he had fought since Bir el Khamsa without being forced to yield the ground to save his army. He stopped the British, right in their tracks. Then, at his leisure, and still wary of his open flank to the south, he slowly withdrew to the Buerat line near Sirte. He did so more for logistical reasons than anything else, much to the chagrin of the Italians. All he would do is hand the enemy the empty desert, but he would shorten his supply line by hundreds of miles, while lengthening theirs. It was the same logic he used to justify his withdrawal from Buerat to Tarhuna, where he now stood on this cold night in February, looking up at the merciless steady fire of the stars.
He wondered where his nemesis had gone, until he got news that the brigade had withdrawn to Tobruk. Then came the unaccountable report of a massive explosion at that harbor, and he never saw the enemy that had defeated him again. After some months reorganizing and re-equipping, O’Connor finally came at his Tarhuna line. Rommel’s counterattack had been swift and bold, a complete success. And instead of trying to drive all the way north to the coast as he might have in the past, he simply smiled, held his lean panzer divisions by the reins, and consolidated his position while the British staggered back from the heavy blow he had delivered.
It was another stubborn victory in his mind, and a reaffirmation that he could still fight, still win, and was not inevitably doomed to defeat here after all. Yet now the presence of two other Allied armies in Algeria to the west would complicate all his plans. He had already dispatched his 10th Panzer Division, and all the Hermann Goring troops. Now Kesselring wanted another panzer division to help bolster that front, where the aristocratic von Arnim was clearly overmatched.
If they think they are going to pick my army apart like this, and leave me sitting here defending Tripoli while von Arnim delights the Führer with his counterpunches, then they are sorely mistaken. There was a new army in the field there now, a new force—the Americans. From all accounts their troops were as arrogant as they were inexperienced, a slovenly raw green force that was succeeding only because von Arnim was so badly outnumbered.
So I will propose something else, he thought. If they want my veterans at their beck and call, then I will lead them. It will be my hand that delivers this attack on the Americans, and I will shatter them completely, teaching this impudent General Patton a lesson he will never forget.
At the meeting with Kesselring, he proposed he send not one panzer division west, but two, and that he would go with them. He believed he could fall back to Mareth, the best defensive position in North Africa, and hold there easily while he took his best troops west to deal with the Americans. It was the same decision the Germans had made in the old history, only this time they would be stronger when they came. It would be his last chance for glory here, perhaps his last dance in the desert. But he would restore his honor, reclaim the laurels of victory, and show the Führer that he was completely deserving of the Field Marshal’s baton that had been bestowed upon him.