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From Afrika and the Sea
Try as he might, Ernie Pyle could not get inside the heads of the German prisoners. He was not accustomed to such difficulty. Pyle, a frail-looking, chain-smoking, Indiana-born war correspondent, had a gift for communicating with common soldiers. His popular newspaper column, syndicated in newspapers across the United States, offered readers a grunt’s-eye view of World War II that revealed more about the war’s terror, confusion, and boredom than did the official reports of generals and politicians. In November 1942—a year before Tropschuh’s suicide at Camp Concordia—Pyle had followed the first American troops into combat against the Germans after Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. At the age of forty-two, he crossed the Sahara Desert with infantrymen young enough to be his sons. He pitched his pup tent among theirs and shared their meals, bull sessions, and battles with the German Afrika Korps. Pyle understood what American soldiers cared about, what they thought of the war, what made them tick. But his interviews with the captured Afrika Korps men left him baffled. The Germans seemed utterly divorced from reality.
The reality that stared them and Pyle in the face was the utter defeat of the Afrika Korps on May 13, 1943. More than 170,000 captured Germans lined the dusty roads or camped in fields under the blazing sun in the Tunisian capital of Tunis. “Today you saw Germans walking alone along highways,” Pyle wrote. “You saw them riding, stacked up in our jeeps, with one lone American driver. You saw them by the hundreds, crammed as in a subway in their own trucks, with their own drivers.” The Germans were hungry, thirsty, and exhausted. Their tanks and armored vehicles, bearing the Afrika Korps emblem of a swastika and a palm tree, lay abandoned, wrecked, and smoldering on the desert floor. In addition to the huge haul of prisoners, the British and American troops captured twelve German generals and “vast quantities of guns and war material of all kinds, including guns and aircraft in serviceable condition.” American and British troops were astonished by the sheer number of prisoners and the acres and acres of captured equipment. For many Allied soldiers, however, the prevailing feeling was relief, “as if one has been holding one’s breath, and you have just let it go for the first time,” a British captain wrote to his father. American GIs kept asking Ernie Pyle if he knew when they could expect to go home.
The defeat of the Afrika Korps was not just a military disaster for Germany but a public relations one. Three years earlier, Adolf Hitler, at the height of his power, had dispatched the desert expeditionary force to Africa to bail out Germany’s feckless ally, Italy, which had tried to establish a colony in Africa but was being driven off the continent by the British. The British had been fighting World War II for two years before America was thrust into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Although the United States had joined the battle against the Japanese immediately after Pearl Harbor, it had waited for almost another year before sending its armies against the Germans, in North Africa. At first, the Afrika Korps had enjoyed success under its celebrated leader, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox.” It bloodied inexperienced American troops at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia and captured the supposedly impregnable British fortress of Tobruk in Libya.
The Afrika Korps captured the public imagination too, partly because of its distinctive gear—sand-colored uniforms, long-billed caps, goggles, and long dusters. Even the British declared Rommel a genius. But Rommel had relied heavily on stolen Allied secrets, and he often outran his supply lines. When his intel and supplies ran out, he was relieved of command in Africa and sent back to Europe sick and exhausted. The Allies gained control of the Mediterranean Sea and the skies over North Africa, and cut off the Afrika Korps’ food, fuel, ammunition, and reinforcements. The Germans were forced to retreat into encirclement at Tunis and then to surrender.
The Allied victory in North Africa was in some ways a poor substitute for a victory in western Europe, which Nazi Germany still held in a vise grip. But it gave American troops experience and confidence, and a base from which to invade Sicily and Italy. The Afrika Korps surrender had come only three months after Germany’s catastrophic defeat by the Russians at Stalingrad, which had changed the course of World War II. Pyle, with the aid of an interpreter, set out to hear what the captured Afrika Korps men thought of it all.
To his surprise, many of them seemed more defiant than defeated. “You seldom find a prisoner who has any doubt that Germany will win the war,” Pyle wrote in a column dated May 20. “They say they lost here because we finally got more stuff into Tunisia than they had.” They laughed when Pyle suggested the Allies might next invade Nazi-occupied Europe. They felt certain Germany would bring America to heel instead. They did not understand why America had gotten involved in the war. The more Germans Pyle interviewed, the more puzzled he became. “Whether from deliberate Nazi propaganda or mere natural rumor, I don’t know,” he wrote, “but the prisoners have a lot of false news in their heads.” Some of them insisted Japan was driving the Russians out of Siberia, when in fact Japan was not even at war with Russia. One prisoner declared that the Luftwaffe—the German air force—had bombed New York City. When Pyle told him that was ridiculous, “he said he didn’t see himself how it was possible.”
Beneath the Germans’ laughable misconceptions, Pyle found a disturbing truth: although the Germans seemed pleasant at first, “if you talk to them long enough you find in them the very thing we are fighting this war about—their superior-race complex, their smug belief in their divine right to run this part of the world.” An American photographer captured an image of a “super-arrogant” German prisoner contemptuously refusing a loaf of bread. Pyle concluded that if American soldiers got the chance to speak with the Germans as he had, “they would come out of it madder than ever before at their enemy.” The Washington Star newspaper printed Pyle’s column under the headline “Nazi Prisoners Bare Superior-Race Complex and Other Screwy Ideas.”
Not all the German prisoners felt the same, as their American captors would discover. But the soldiers at the heart of the Afrika Korps, particularly the officers and noncommissioned sergeants and corporals, were true believers in the Third Reich. Many had grown up in the Hitler Youth. Once in the German army, they had become even more certain of Nazi superiority by the ease with which the Wehrmacht had overrun western Europe. They were so confident that they brushed aside any development that challenged their beliefs. Their capture was just a short-lived setback on the road to conquest. Their faith in Hitler and Nazism was frozen in time. One angry Afrika Korps lieutenant, Willy Wulf, wrote to his wife: “After a victorious end to this war, retaliation for this will be taken. We have to suffer badly here, but nothing can break our morale.”
The Afrika Korps’ defiance was personified by its leader, Col. Gen. Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, who had replaced Rommel in Africa. Von Arnim was an aristocrat, descended from a long line of Prussian military officers, and a fiercely committed Nazi. He was a decorated veteran of World War I and had seen World War II at its most savage, commanding a Panzer tank corps against the Russians on the Eastern Front before being transferred to North Africa. In Africa, he had rounded up Jewish civilians for the hot, exhausting labor of building fortifications. Von Arnim initially had shared command of German forces in Africa with Rommel and sometimes had clashed with him, at one point withholding tanks from a planned offensive. After Rommel’s departure, von Arnim fumed over Hitler’s broken promises to send supplies and ammunition to Africa. When his superiors criticized him for “squinting over your shoulder”—for worrying about Allied attacks—von Arnim shot back that he had been “squinting at the horizon” for promised supplies that never arrived. Hitler ordered him to fight to the last man, but von Arnim reported fighting “to the last cartridge.” He ordered his remaining tanks destroyed, and surrendered. He was livid. The surrender was one of many examples of troops being captured or killed in great numbers because dictators like Hitler and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union demanded they hold territory that no longer was defensible.
