Intercepted Communications for Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

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On land, meanwhile, superior leadership, communication and use of intelligence enabled Rommel’s Afrika Korps to drive the British Eighth Army out of Libya into Egypt. By the end of June, Rommel’s juggernaut was about 90 miles from Alexandria. Just beyond lay Cairo, the Suez Canal and Palestine.

The opposing war machines, like boxers pausing for a breath, stopped to face each other along parallel lines running southwestward just outside the town of El Alamein. Adolf Hitler, optimistically discussing the expected capture of Alexandria, said, ‘It is only to be hoped that the American [Fellers] in Cairo continues to inform us so well over the English military planning through his badly enciphered cables.’

Inevitably, the British came to realize that sensitive information was leaking to the enemy. The Afrika Korps was still blitzkrieging the Cyrenaican coastline when security officers approached Fellers to, in his words,’see my security measures for the [Black] code.’ Fellers, however, apparently allayed any suspicions the British might have had about his being the source of the suspected leaks because they directed their investigation elsewhere. At least five suspicious-looking Axis signals had been picked up by Allied stations beginning on January 25. One actually cited ‘a source in Egypt.’

Then, on June 26, a German radio station broadcast an evening drama offering’scenes from the British or American information bureau.’ Nazis listened aghast as the radio play featured an actor portraying the U.S. military attaché in Cairo and described his gathering of information to relay to Washington. Thirty-six hours later, on June 29, Rommel lost his ‘gute Quelle.’

Whether or not the incredible radio broadcast alone had allowed the Allies to pinpoint the cause of the leak, Colonel Fellers left Cairo in July after a tour of nearly 21 months. Assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington, he was, recalled a colleague, ‘the most violent Anglophobe I have encountered.’ Fellers was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the citation recognizing his reports as ‘models of clarity and accuracy.’ Given the temporary rank of brigadier general, he next was assigned to the Southwest Pacific theater. After V-J Day, Fellers became military secretary to General Douglas MacArthur, with whom he had been friends since serving under him in the prewar Philippines. Fellers died of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., in 1973 at the age of 77.

Fellers’ successor at the Cairo embassy encoded reports to Washington in the M-138 strip cipher, which Axis cryptanalysts had not broken. Rommel nevertheless could take heart from one of Fellers’ last radiograms. It described ‘considerable British panic’ in Cairo because of the Axis presence at the capital’s doorstep. On July 10, however, with Rommel’s main forces lured well inland in the ninth day of a new offensive, the Australian 9th Division charged his Tel el Eisa salient overlooking the sea.The defending Italian Sabratha Division was mauled in the attack, and the 621st Signal Battalion’s tents, radio vans and antennas were overrun.

Seeböhm was mortally wounded in the fighting. The papers in his camp told the Allies just how much tactical information they had lost due to poor radio security since early 1941. Captured documents also confirmed the part played by Fellers’ reports in the Axis strategy.

As a sidebar to the North African intelligence war, controversy still exists over whether or not intercepted communications resulted in the death of the officer Winston Churchill selected to head the Eighth Army’s forthcoming counteroffensive against Rommel. On August 7, Lt. Gen. William Gott, who had been involved in the earlier Gazala defeat, was flying in a Bristol Bombay aircraft to take up his new command. As it prepared to land at El Alamein, the unescorted transport was ambushed and destroyed by six Messerschmitt Bf-109Fs. Gott’s place was taken by General Bernard Montgomery, who, though controversial, was considered a far abler officer.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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