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.The out-side world is visible only through slits in the armor, narrowenough to keep out bullets.There is the stench of raw fuel andgun oil and sweat.The heat is stiffing when the turret hatch isbolted down, the metal already baking in the African sun, and thetemperature climbs impossibly as the heat from the engine andthe guns is added.The men wear black and work in shirt sleeves.Their machine is a citadel unto itself, with two and a halfinches of armor plate in front, a gun by Krupp s of Essen that canthrow a high-explosive or armor-piercing shot a mile or more,and two machine guns that can scythe away the enemy s nakedopposing infantry.But God help the five men if their machineshould founder Þö trapped in a treacherous slough of sand or itstrack blown off by a mine or shell.They are inside a mechanizedbomb, with hundreds of gallons of gasoline stowed behind them,100 shells in the racks beside them, and 3,750 machine gun bulletsin belts, all waiting to erupt and engulf them if one enemy pro-jectile should explode inside this space.Only in front is their ar-mor thick Þö to either side and in the rear it is only half as strong,and on top and below it is even thinner.The tank surges across the battlefield.Its tracks churn updense and choking plumes of sand.The noise inside is deafening.The 320-horsepower Maybach engine roars and races as thedriver shifts up and down through the manual gears.The hotspent-shell cases clatter around the metal deck.The tank stops,the gun barks, and then again, continuing until the enemy is de-stroyed or the target is lost.Here in the open desert the rules arethe same for both sides.Every tank commander instinctivelydreads the sight of enemy tanks appearing on his flank.He andhis opponent both try to come up behind low rises, bull down, so that they can open fire while exposing nothing of their bulk.Both know the penalty of error Þö entombment in a blazing tank,99 david irvingwith the hatch jammed and flames licking toward the ammuni-tion racks.A tank crew thirsts for battle but is immensely relieved whendelivered from it.Then they can lever themselves up into theopen air, emerging from their oven into the relative cool of thedesert heat; they can stretch out in the tank s shadow and brewcoffee.They are an elite, men of high esprit, like submarine menÞö their comradeship forged by shared hazards and the sharedintoxication of manning intricate, almost invincible machines.In Libya, Rommel found on his return, the tantalizing British re-treat had continued.El Agheila, a dirty fort and watering pointtwenty miles east of El Mugtaa, had just fallen to Streich s lightforces with hardly a fight on March 24.The British withdrewthirty miles to Mersa Brega, an Arab village straddling sand hillsnear the coast; it was a tactical bottleneck relatively easy to defend.The speed of Streich s advance put Rommel in a dilemma.As heexplained in a letter to Lucie, I ve got to hold my troops backnow to stop them from galloping on ahead. According to his directives from Berlin Þö and from GeneralGariboldi Þö he was not allowed to attack Mersa Brega until theend of May, when he would have the Fifteenth Panzer Divisiontoo.But his radio intercept company had arrived, with skilledEnglish-speaking operators listening in to the enemy s signals;and from these signals and Luftwaffe reconnaissance Rommelknew that the enemy were digging in and bringing up reinforce-ments.By May, the enemy defenses might be impregnable.OnMarch 31 he ordered Streich to attack Mersa Brega, regardless ofthe directives from Berlin.The British abandoned their positions,and Rommel ordered a strong belt of mines and antiaircraft gunsinstalled to prevent them from coming back.100 the trail of the foxIn a good humor, he drove forward to Streich s commandpost at noon next day. Na, when are we going to meet in Aged-abia? he called out.Agedabia was the next big town, fifty milesfarther up the Via Balbia Þö far beyond the stop line ordered byHalder.Streich could not tell whether Rommel was serious ornot, and purposely did not ask. We ll have to see about that, hereplied, matching his superior s bantering tone as closely as hecould.After Rommel had gone, Streich ordered his division toresume the advance next morning, April 2.He did not informRommel, and Rommel Þö most unusually Þö avoided contact withhim until 1:00 p.m., when he caught up with the Fifth Light sforemost troops, feigned surprise, and exclaimed: What s goingon here? Streich evenly replied, I thought we ought not to give a re-treating enemy any chance of digging in all over again.So I havemoved my whole division forward to here, and I m about to at-tack Agedabia. Rommel replied without a trace of anger, Those weren t myorders Þö but I approve. Thus Agedabia also fell at 4:00 p.m.that afternoon.Rommelreappeared in time to hear the great news.In his memoirs, Warwithout Hate, he subsequently took full credit.Several times afterward, Streich got a raw deal from Rommel, buthe is not a man to bear grudges.When I ran him to ground for aninterview, in an old peoples home outside Hamburg in northernGermany in 1976, he was a spry, slightly built, soldierly figure ofeighty-five Þö neatly dressed, going deaf, eating dainty cakes in a cir-cle of elderly ladies who cannot have asked him very often to recitethese dramatic weeks with Rommel.The conversation was not veryproductive, but it did bear fruit later.Out of the blue came alengthy sheaf of close typescript, written by Johannes Streich many101 david irvingyears before but never published, entitled Memoirs of Africa. Thewar diary of his Fifth Light Division has also turned up in privatehands, and bears out Streich s version in every detail.Now Rommel realized that the British had begun a general with-drawal from the bulbous peninsula of Cyrenaica; evidently theywere desperate to keep their remaining forces intact.Agedabia wasthe starting point of half a dozen desert tracks cutting across thepeninsula.Rommel determined to exploit them to the east.OnApril 2 a stern veto came from Gariboldi: This is in contradictionto what I ordered.You are to wait for me before continuing withany advance. Rommel did not wait.On April 3 he decided on a dramaticthree-pronged thrust across the peninsula.If he moved fastenough he might destroy the entire enemy force right there.Thesouthernmost prong of his thrust would cut clean across the de-sert, following an ancient caravan trail known as the Trigh el Abd;the trail led from Agedabia onward through Ben Gania, BirTengeder, Bir Hacheim and Bir el Gubi to the Egyptian frontier.A Bir was a waterhole Þö in theory.Rommel put Count Gerhardvon Schwerin, a spiky but experienced half colonel, in charge of amixed German-Italian force for this prong.Streich would leadanother task force on a parallel track and Þö since a passing Italianpriest had just tipped him off that even Benghazi, capital ofCyrenaica, was being abandoned Þö Rommel sent a reconnaissancebattalion straight up the coast road to the big port.They drove inthrough cheering crowds at 10:00 p.m.that evening, just as a furi-ous General Gariboldi was confronting Rommel about this dis-obedience of his veto.An orgy of destruction and murder had marked Benghazi ssecond change of owners in three months.The British had deto-nated 4,000 tons of Italian ammunition and fires were still raging102 the trail of the foxeverywhere
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