Rommel the Messy

My dad always spoke highly of the German Field Marshall from World War II, Erwin Rommel aka the Desert Fox. In his book Messy, Tim Harford talks about how being messy can help you in many way (“Messy” is used in both the literal and figurative sense through the book). One of the benefits of being messy is that you could win far more! And guess who Harford talks about at length as an example of winning through messiness? Yes, Erwin Rommel.

During World War I, when he was a Lieutenant, Rommel learned a lesson during a dangerous skirmish with the French that he made his philosophy for warfare:

“On the battlefield opportunities arose from confusion, and (he) tried to generate more opportunities by creating more confusion. His rapid movement and bold independent action created a feedback loop: the enemy would be confused; that would produce unpredictable openings; Rommel would seize those openings, creating more chaos and further opportunities.”

But wouldn’t that confusion work both ways, sometimes for and sometimes against him? Yes, of course, but, here’s what was happening:

“Rommel triumphed repeatedly by creating a chaotic situation that nobody understood – and trusting, usually correctly, that he could improvise his way through the mess before his enemies did.”

Later during World War I, when he was a company commander, he was supposed to support a German offensive against Venice. Instead, he found a secret path to the Italian lines, attacked from an unexpected angle and seized many positions. As the Italians regrouped and got ready to attack Rommel’s relatively smaller group, Rommel surprised them by counterattacking instead of defending. They scattered in disarray and Rommel now had 1,500 prisoners. He continued these surprise attacks through the night, and was so successful that the rest of the German army thought the battle was won and didn’t even bother to join the fight!

During World War II, Rommel, now a General, commanded a panzer division that invaded France. As was his style, he went far ahead of the rest of the army, and ended up attacking the French from behind! Nobody knew where he was or what he was upto, not the Germans, and certainly not the French. Rommel took 97,000 prisoners during that blitzkrieg.

In 1941, Rommel was asked to help the Italians defend against the British in Libya. Heavily outnumbered, Rommel was afraid that the British would attack before reinforcements arrived. So he bluffed, by driving his panzers in continuous loops around Tripoli thereby creating the illusion that he had far more panzers than what he actually had. He also commissioned dummy tanks. It worked: the British weren’t sure how big a force they were fighting and didn’t attack!

Next, Rommel disobeyed orders and decided to attack the British as they tried to move from Tripoli to Cyrenaica. Here’s Harford’s summary of what he did:

“To call this daring is an understatement. It seemed insane.”

And his tactics were as usual creating absolute chaos, for all sides:

“But while the Germans were in chaos, the British were in a worse state: bewildered, outflanked and desperately trying to withdraw around a congested coastal road.”

Six days later, Rommel had won Cyrenaica! Over the next year and a half, Rommel’s small force marched over a thousand miles of desert from Tripoli to Alexandria. The British were so terrified that they even made a list of assets to destroy in the region should they be forced to surrender!

So does being messy always lead to wins? Ah, says Harford, not only should you be more adaptive and flexible than your opponent, it helps a lot if your opponent is what the Germans call “schwerfällig”, or as Harford puts it, “slow, tidy-minded and unwilling to improvise”. And the British in North Africa were apparently just that – schwerfällig, the yang to Rommel’s yin.