BY THE TIME PAT CLAYTON had reached his POW camp in Italy, Almásy and Ritter had arrived in Tripoli. Rommel had already been there for an initial reconnaissance, taking to the air on the afternoon of 12 February to examine what he called ‘the soil of Africa’. He concluded, ‘The flight confirmed me in my plan to fortify Sirte and the country on either side of the coast road and to reserve the motorised forces for mobile defence.’1
The new commander of German troops in Africa had been informed of his appointment by the Führer personally on the afternoon of 6 February. Adolf Hitler had already announced Führer order No22, after disaster had overtaken the Italian 10th Army: ‘The position in the Mediterranean on strategically political and psychological grounds demands German aid. Tripolitania must be saved.’ However, he saw it as a defensive move, insisting, ‘It is not possible either for the Italians or for ourselves to launch an offensive against Egypt.’2 At first only the 5th Light Division was sent to stiffen the Italians. Consisting of a panzer regiment and reconnaissance battalion, as soon as the magnitude of the disaster became apparent it was reinforced by the 15th Panzer Division.
On 19 March Rommel flew to Hitler’s HQ to make his report; the Führer was friendly and awarded him the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross in recognition of outstanding leadership of the 7th Panzer Division in France the year before. They briefly discussed the situation in Africa, then Rommel was seen by the General Staff. He was told clearly that the High Command had no plans for decisive action against the British in North Africa, but he might conduct limited operations. Rommel however had his own ideas and already had a better understanding of German possibilities in the desert than those at OKW.
So as not to rub salt in Italian wounds, in theory Rommel was junior to the new Italian commander in Africa, General Italo Garibaldi. However, the staff of the Afrika Korps were soon drawing up plans for Operation Sonnenblume (Sunflower) – the deployment of German troops to North Africa – with little consideration of their allies, other than how best to exploit them. These plans were intended to throw the British back to Egypt, and ultimately to take the great prize of the Suez Canal and Cairo.
By this time the British Western Desert Force was dangerously depleted; its veteran troops, the Australian 6th Division and the newly arrived New Zealanders had all been sent to Greece. This left the British thin on the ground and no match for Rommel’s panzers. Panzer Armee Afrika soon broke through what was no more than a border patrol by the 2nd Armoured Division and took Benghazi within three days. British Generals Philip Neame VC and Richard O’Connor were captured near Derna, and by 11 April – after less than a month – the Germans were besieging Tobruk.
Almásy and Ritter arrived in Tripoli in time to watch the panzers leaving, clanking east in a cloud of dust. With them they had a small crew of drivers and wireless operators, all handpicked Abwehr men operating within the framework of the Brandenburg Lehr Regiment. Admiral Canaris had told Ritter that his unit should ‘work with but not for Rommel’.
Major Nikolaus Ritter had got wind of German intervention in Africa early in 1941. He rushed off to see Canaris, to try and sell him his plan to get General Aziz el Masri out of Egypt and set him up as a rallying voice for Arab nationalists. Canaris and Ritter had first met in 1937, soon after the latter had returned from the US. He had served in the First World War as an infantry officer, after which he went to the US in the 1920s to start a new life. He prospered in the textile business and married an American woman with whom he had two children. During the Depression his business suffered badly so he opted to return to the ‘New Germany’ where the future looked better. He needed an assisted passage to Germany and his application led to a summons and interview at the German Embassy in Washington, where, to his surprise, he was taken to the office of Lieutenant General Freidrich Von Boetticher, the military attaché. Boetticher suggested he should re-join the German Army, even though Ritter was 40. Back in Germany he was assigned to the Luftwaffe, and to the Abwehr’s air intelligence unit in Hamburg. A strange posting, he remarked, ‘as I knew nothing of flying or intelligence work.’
Ritter was even more astounded when, in July 1937, Admiral Canaris himself ordered him by signal to extend ‘intelligence work immediately to cover the air force and aviation industry in the United States.’ He was stunned by this.
For the moment I forgot my surroundings and my new work. My life in the United States, with all its ups and downs, passed in review before my eyes. It was difficult to reconcile myself to the idea of working against the country which I loved best next to my own native land.3
Having got used to the idea, Ritter realised that the best person to go to the US was himself. He went to see Canaris personally to sell him the idea. In his writings Ritter gives the impression that he did not overly take to the head of the Abwehr. He found him ‘colourless’ and; ‘his gestures were considered. He spoke carefully and softly. His eyes were an indefinable blue … In short he was hard to describe.’ Perhaps Canaris’s inscrutable air irritated Ritter.4
The Admiral was opposed to Ritter going to America. The mission had followed a request from the Luftwaffe to try and obtain the design of the Norden bombsight, and eventually Ritter managed to convince Canaris that he was the best man for the job. He pointed out that he ‘knew the country’ spoke American English like a native and more importantly he ‘had not been working at intelligence long enough for the Americans to be aware of it.’ Canaris advised him to ‘stay clear of all official Germans’ for they had little ‘understanding of our work’.
On 11 October 1937 Ritter boarded the Bremen at Bremerhaven for the trip to New York, where he arrived six days later. Ritter met his contact Hermann Lang, who worked as an inspector in a Manhattan factory making the Norden bombsights. Lang may have been disenchanted with the US as he had been waiting to become an American citizen for ten years. Being of German origin he was easy to recruit, and the Abwehr gave him the codename ‘Paul’. His task was to take blueprints home (blueprints which should have been locked in a safe after use) and copy them, before returning them to the factory. His drawings were then smuggled out of the US in an umbrella. In the end it made only a small difference to the German war effort, as the Germans had developed a very similar sight, the Eagle Apparatus.
‘My dear fellow, you can’t be altogether right in the head’ was the reaction of Canaris to Ritter’s General El Masri scheme. ‘It won’t work. Forget it Ritter.’ Yet four weeks later Canaris called Ritter at his Hamburg desk, saying he had reconsidered the scheme, and that Ritter had three weeks to get it off the ground. The next day Ritter was on his way to Budapest to see Almásy (see Chapter 2). Early in February the Major was back in Berlin at the Abwehr headquarters on Tirpitz Ufer reporting to Canaris, outlining the details of his plan. The Admiral approved them and Almásy and Ritter were on their way to North Africa.
The ‘Ritter Commando’ as it came to be known kicked its heels in Tripoli, and was soon 1000 miles behind the fluid front line. Almásy spent his time producing a military-geographical study of the Libyan Desert, and gave his expert advice to Rommel’s staff on the use and modifications of vehicles and equipment for desert conditions.
The front line stabilised near the Egyptian frontier, the Afrika Korps tanks having run out of fuel. For days they had only managed to keep going with captured supplies of fuel and water. The 5th Light Division pushed on to Tobruk; on 7 April Churchill had telegraphed General Wavell: ‘You should surely be able to hold Tobruk.’5
Ritter’s small group moved forward to Derna on the Libyan coast to establish itself there. Almásy met Rommel for the first time and offered to lead a German battalion to Upper Egypt to start an insurrection amongst the Egyptian Army and population but Rommel apparently turned it down due to lack of vehicles and fuel.6
By this time Ritter and Almásy had come to the attention of the people at Bletchley Park, the Government Code and Cypher School in Buckinghamshire. The Abwehr’s messages were being monitored by the Radio Security Service (RSS); Mavis Lever and Margaret Rock would later manage to reconstruct the main Abwehr cipher machine, and could read an Abwehr message by December 1941.7 However even before this, Captain Hugh Trevor Roper, head of the RSS, managed to identify Ritter as ‘a man of great importance’.8
Having settled at Derna, a small town on the coast where thousands of swallows had assembled for their annual spring migration to northern Europe, the commando began to set up Operation El Masri. Radio contact was made with the Egyptian General, via a portable transmitter smuggled into the Hungarian Legation in Cairo inside a diplomatic bag. There an operator codenamed ‘Martin’ sent encoded reports to the Germans via Budapest, until the British persuaded the Egyptian government to withdraw diplomatic privileges from the ‘nest of spies’, which cut off communications.9
The transmitter was removed to the Hungarian Church of St Theresa in Shubra where it was hidden under the altar. The church and the mysterious Father Demetrios came to the attention of British Intelligence and it was observed that it was ‘visited by many doubtful people’. The transmitter was used by the Father in Operation El Masri.10
See here for a list of abbreviations used in the below notes
1 Lewin, p.32
2 Carell, p.6
3 Farago, L. The Game of the Foxes p.40–41
4 Whiting, p.34
5 Carell, p.13
6 Bierman, p.132
7 Sebag-Montefiore, H., Enigma p.129
8 KV 2/87
9 Sansom, p.77
10 KV/2/1467