On the evening of 17 November 1941, a detachment of British Commandos attacked the supposed headquarters of Erwin Rommel. Thanks, however, to the absence of their target, the raiders failed to accomplish their mission of kidnapping the famous Desert Fox.
Paradoxically, the success of Operation Flipper, as the raid was called, would probably have led to disastrous consequences for the war effort of United Kingdom and her Commonwealth. That is, in the days that followed the attempt to take General Rommel out of play, he made a series of decisions that hobbled the ability of Panzerarmee Afrika to deal with the British offensive that began, in earnest, the following day.
Over the course of the previous summer, Rommel had become excessively fond of two sources of information: radio messages intercepted by his signals intelligence unit and reports from long-range reconnaissance aircraft. Thus, when the former failed to detect signs of an incipient offensive, and flooded airfields grounded the latter, he dismissed other evidence of an impending attack as the product of a deception campaign. In particular, when he received reports of tank columns moving behind the line of Axis fortifications of the western border of Libya, he placed them in a box marked ‘fake news’.
Ironically, the British had, indeed, taken great pains to feed Rommel a steady diet of disinformation. However, rather than raising clouds of dust in the desert, the British had imposed strict radio silence on advancing formations and, at the same time, created a great deal of phony-baloney radio traffic in places far from the battlefield. In other words, the blokes and boffins on His Majesty’s Service had tailored their program of deception to the peculiar tastes of their famous adversary.
Had the Commandos managed to put Rommel in the proverbial bag, command of Panzerarmee Afrika would have passed to Lieutenant General Ludwig Crüwell. An old cavalryman with considerable experience in the art of fighting for information, Crüwell believed the reports sent in by reconnaissance units on patrol in the open desert. Indeed, he made several attempts to bring these to the attention of his boss, along with the recommendation that the two German armored divisions in Libya. To put things more plainly, the decapitation of Panzerarmee Afrika would have replaced a leader who had fallen prey to a bespoke disinformation campaign with one who had done a much better job of orienting himself.
Moreover, had he been in command of Panzerarmee Afrika on 18 November 1941, Crüwell would probably have used the business end of that formation - the two armored divisions of the Afrika Korps - to strike the attackers in the flank. (In our own timeline, this was the course of action that Crüwell recommended to Rommel on that fateful day.)
The maneuver proposed by General Crüwell might have succeeded. Then again, it might have failed. Such, after all, are the fortunes of war. That said, an attack by the concentrated might of the Afrika Korps would have stood a much better chance of inflicting a decisive defeat on the attacking British columns than the small-scale actions permitted by General Rommel.
A single incident proves little, a counter-factual case even less. Nonetheless, whenever I read of an attempt to assassinate a leader - and that happens a lot these days - I find myself thinking of Operation Flipper and the ‘own goal’ that, in all likelihood, would have resulted from its success.
Notes:
This post draws heavily on Rainer Kriebel Inside the Afrika Korps: The Crusader Battles, 1941-1942 (London: Greenhill, 1999) and the magnificent work done by the folks who run The Crusader Project.
While you have just learned the outcome of Cassandra’s Curse, a decision game published by The Tactical Notebook in 2023, you may, nonetheless, enjoy working through the attempts by Ludwig Crüwell to mitigate the worst effects of the (less than properly vulpine) attitude of the Desert Fox.
For Further Reading:
Might be a lesson in there as well about not believing your own BS. When one looks to behavior in organizations those that flourish tend to have very open communication both ways. Up and down and down and up. It takes a lot for smart and experinced leaders to check their egos at the door of the briefing room. There was a guy named MacArthur who said the Chinese would never cross the Yalu River for example….how’d that work out?!?
If the target of a deception campaign, as part of a larger Information Operations strategy, is the mind of the enemy commander (or his staff?), then the UK effort here was most effective. The problem is that you would not know until afterwards if you really were successful, unless you had Intel sources inside the target commander’s HQ that can verify that. Observation and Assessment continuously.