by David Irving
Day after day Rommel watched the tanks exercise at Wahn, marveling at the feats performed by these monsters—veritable fortresses that clanked and creaked their way up even the steepest inclines. It was no secret that the Western powers heavily outnumbered Germany in tanks and aircraft, but the German tanks were better. The best tanks in Rommel’s force were Panzer IIIs and IVs—twenty-ton behemoths, nearly nine feet tall, each with a five-man crew, a 320-horsepower Maybach gasoline engine and a top speed of about twenty-five miles per hour. Half of Rommel’s tanks were Czech-built 38Ts: the 38T weighed less than nine tons, because it had even less armor plate than the relatively thin-skinned Panzer III and IV, but it was faster, and its gun packed a bigger punch.
By April 1940, Rommel had steeped himself in the theory and practice of tank warfare and developed a few ideas of his own to surprise the enemy. He began taking his units cross-country in large and small formations, fast, and practicing radio procedures and gunnery. Evenings, he briefed all his officers, right down to platoon level, then did his paper work until eleven P.M. At six A.M. he was already up again, jogging through the woods along the Rhine. His stamina and condition were phenomenal.
Rommel’s Seventh Panzer Division and another, the Fifth, would be controlled by General Hermann Hoth’s Fifteenth Corps; Hoth had already won the Knight’s Cross in Poland, and Rommel liked him. Hoth’s corps was the armored spearhead of General Günther Hans von Kluge’s Fourth Army, which would advance into Belgium when Hitler gave the code word. After the main British and French forces had thus been lured forward to meet them, the real German breakthrough would follow across the Meuse—to Rommel’s left. This major thrust would, Hitler hoped, end in the rapid encirclement of the enemy. Such was the strategy underlying Hitler’s western campaign: the plan was his, and not the General Staffs. It was top secret.
From the Seventh Panzer Division’s rest area on the Rhine, all the way forward to the Belgian frontier, Rommel had signposted his designated route of advance with the symbol DG7, for Durchgangsstrasse [Throughway] 7. This violated all the rules of the General Staff; but Rommel meant to push that DG7 right through to the Channel coast ahead of all his rivals.
On May 5, a rainy Sunday, he wrote his “last letters” to Lucie and Manfred, to be delivered to them if he did not return from the coming battle. On May 9, Rommel was with Colonel Rothenburg watching his tanks and artillery maneuvering on the firing range at Wahn. At 1:45 P.M. the code word—“Dortmund”—reached Rommel. It meant that the attack in the west would begin at 5:35 A.M. the next day. He drove frantically back to the barracks in Godesberg, and seized a pad to write to Lucie: “We’re leaving in half an hour. Don’t worry. Things have always gone well so far, and it’s going to be all right. We jump off at dusk—how long we’ve been waiting for this moment!”
As dusk fell, he drove off down Throughway 7 in an armored command vehicle. The road was jammed with elements of the Second Corps, inexplicably crossing Rommel’s throughway. The chaos was awful—it was like a bad start to a horse race, with all the contestants fouling each other’s lanes. Rommel was enraged. Not until twenty minutes before zero hour did the last of his riflemen reach their allotted positions.
The air filled with German planes. As dawn came he could see that his engineers had crossed the Belgian frontier according to plan. He could hear no gunfire at all, just distant thumps as the retreating Belgians demolished bridges or blew up roads. In the first villages he drove through, followed by his radio truck and two dispatch riders, the response was quite unexpected: “We were greeted everywhere with shouts of Heil Hitler, and delighted faces,” he wrote in the first draft of his history of the campaign.
In Belgium, and then in France, Rommel renewed his fame. Over the next nineteen days his panzer division blazed its Throughway 7 across the countryside at breakneck speed. Rommel’s technique was to push forward boldly, ignoring the risk to flanks and rear, calculating that—as at Mataiur in 1917—the shock to enemy morale would more than offset the risk. His division poked like a long forefinger straight through the enemy line, sometimes advancing so fast that it became detached from the main fist of Kluge’s Fourth Army—and continued to race along its throughway on its own, with only the most tenuous connection in the rear to its logistical support. Rapid and determined enemy actions could have sheared this finger off, but as Rommel had calculated, the enemy was too confused and alarmed to move decisively.
Always, Rommel rode at the very tip of his panzer division. His command vehicle was a specially adapted Panzer III. Sometimes he would ride in Colonel Rothenburg’s Panzer IV command vehicle; sometimes he flew over the battlefield in the army’s light Storch observation plane and landed among the leading tanks. After two days, by late May 12, his division had reached the Meuse River. Rommel’s assault troops forced a crossing in rubber boats at 4:30 A.M. the next day, but took heavy casualties. Rommel himself, already hoarse from shouting orders, crossed that afternoon, oblivious of enemy small arms fire, in time to restore his troops’ dwindling morale. That night he ordered a pontoon ferry to be rigged up, and had his antitank guns and tanks hauled across the 120-yard stretch of water. The attack was resumed.
Onward through the Belgian towns of Flavion and Philippeville swept the panzer division. Rommel’s new tactics were paying off. His inventiveness never failed him. To provide a smoke screen for the Meuse crossing, he had simply ordered houses set on fire—just as at Longarone. To maintain security when radioing orders to his tank commanders, he had devised the Stosslinie system—a “line of thrust” penciled by all officers between two prearranged points on their maps; any point could be described by giving its distance along and from this line. To find out which enemy villages were defended, he devised his famous fireworks displays—the entire panzer regiment opened fire, thus provoking any defenders to betray their positions. If the enemy was holding, say, a wood, then Rommel just drove in, with every barrel shooting indiscriminately into it.
“The day goes to the side that is the first to plaster its opponent,” he later said. And in a private letter that he wrote to Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler’s adjutant, begging for a second panzer regiment (“There’s no hope through proper channels—too much red tape!”), Rommel stated: “The method that I have ordered, of driving into the enemy with all guns firing and not holding fire until they are already knocking out my tanks, has worked magnificently. It costs us a lot of ammunition, but it saves tanks and lives. The enemy have not found any answer to this method yet. When we come up on them like this, their nerves fail and even the big tanks surrender. If only they knew just how thin our armor is compared with theirs!”
His method did, of course, cause mishaps. One of his tank commanders, Ulrich Schroeder, described it in a private manuscript: “On the way we met a column of trucks coming toward us. They evidently mistook us for British and drove sedately on. Our front company let them come within a few yards, then let the truck drivers have it with machine gun fire. With horrible regularity they slumped over to the right in their driving seats, one after another, all dead. The trucks swerved off the road into the ditch, eight or ten of them, all ending up there in the same convoy spacing. Unfortunately, as we passed them we found out they were ambulances. So the front company was ordered to cease fire.”
On balance, however, Rommel’s rough tactics saved lives on both sides. His dramatic breaching of the Maginot Line extension was an example. Between this main bunker line and the French frontier were woods in which the French had dug forward fortifications. Rommel reached the wood at Cerfontaine on May 16, 1940. He wanted to get through it fast, so as to reach the bunkers themselves before dark—but how, without alerting the bunkers that he was coming? Rommel took the microphone and quietly ordered all tank commanders to drive through the woods, this time without firing a single shot. Their crews—gunner, radio operator, loader and commander—were to ride outside the tanks and wave white flags. He himself rode Colonel Rothenburg’s Panzer IV. Ulrich Schroeder recalled: “The
enemy was in fact so startled by this carnivallike procession that instead of shooting at us they just stood back to either side and gaped.”
With the woods now safely behind them, Rommel ordered the last battalion to about-face and cover them in case the troops there decided to fight after all. His tanks were arrayed behind a long hedgerow. At a signal from him, they fired smoke shells at the bunker ahead, while assault engineers crawled forward and burned out the closest bunkers with flamethrowers. At midnight, with the way ahead lit by the glare of fires, the Seventh Panzer Division began to roll through a gap blasted in the bunker line. The leading tanks fired into the darkness ahead; all the rest fired broadside to keep the enemy’s heads down. It was a fantastic spectacle. As they gathered speed westward, an inferno of gunfire began. The tanks roared through French hamlets with names like Solre-le-Château, Sars-Poteries and Semousies. Sleeping villagers were wakened by the thunderous sound and flung open their windows. Terrified civilians and French troops huddled in the ditches. Refugee carts laden with household goods, abandoned by their fleeing owners, were smashed under tracks or overturned.
None of the French had expected the bunker line to be breached so fast. “Immediately behind the bunker line,” wrote Schroeder, “we came upon astonished French troop columns—some fleeing inland, others pushing toward us.” After a while Rommel stuck his head out of the tank’s hatch. “Ahead of us,” he wrote, “the flat countryside unfurled in the moon’s wan light. We were through—through the Maginot Line.”
In that one night he and Colonel Rothenburg advanced thirty-five miles. His right-hand neighbor, the Fifth Panzer Division—far better equipped with tanks than was Rommel—was lagging about thirty miles behind.
Rommel did not pause until he reached Avesnes, his tactical objective. Even then he drove right through the town and waited in the hills to the west for the rest of his panzer division to catch up. Impatiently he sent his aide, Lieutenant Hanke, back down the road in a Panzer IV to hurry on the stragglers. “We waited with mounting impatience,” recalled Schroeder, “as we wanted to get moving again. . . . After about an hour we heard tank engines and tracks approaching from the rear. Rommel assumed this was the rest of our division, and ordered the advance resumed.”
In fact the sounds came from a French heavy tank unit, which had counterattacked in Rommel’s rear and already destroyed several tanks. All alone Hanke’s Panzer IV drove these attackers back—an act of bravery for which a grateful Rommel recommended him for the Knight’s Cross.
Rommel’s repeated radio calls for further orders for the division went unanswered. So he resolved that at dawn he would rush the bridge across the Sambre at Landrecies, eleven miles farther on. At 5:15 A.M. the panzer regiment moved off, followed by the motorcycle battalion belonging to Rommel’s division.
It was all so like the early victories over the Italians in 1917. There was no firing. Every French unit he met meekly surrendered and, at Rommel’s suggestion, began plodding eastward into captivity, the enemy evidently believing that their position was more precarious than Rommel’s, which was not so. That day he took 3,500 prisoners, according to his panzer division files.
One brave French lieutenant colonel tried to defy Rommel. “He looked like a fanatical officer,” recalled Rommel in his history. “His eyes burned with hatred and impotent fury. . . . I decided to take him with us. He had already gone on about fifty yards farther east, but he was brought back to Colonel Rothenburg. Rothenburg ordered him up onto our command panzer. But as the French officer curtly refused—three times, in fact—to come with us, there was nothing to do but to shoot him down.” Rommel often discussed this disturbing episode with Manfred. He took no pleasure in killing, but for a soldier it was sometimes necessary.
“A thousand yards east of Marbais,” he wrote, “a French car emerged from a side road on the left and crossed our armored car’s path. It was flagged down, and a French officer got out and gave himself up. A whole convoy of trucks had been following him, raising a lot of dust. I quickly decided to divert the convoy to Avesnes. Lieutenant Hanke swung aboard the leading truck. I myself stayed briefly at the crossroads, indicating by sign language and shouts that the war was all over for them and that they were to throw down their arms. There were machine gunners on some of the trucks, manning machine guns against air attack. I couldn’t see how long the convoy was because of the dust. After ten or fifteen had driven past, I went to the front of the convoy and drove to Avesnes. . . At length we reached the southwest entrance to the town. Without halting, Lieutenant Hanke swiftly led the truck convoy following us onto a parking lot and disarmed them. Only now did we realize that no fewer than forty French trucks, many carrying troops, had tagged along behind us.”
It would have taken only one trigger-happy Frenchman to end Rommel’s career there and then. He made no attempt to conceal his rank or person: his natty army uniform, his high-peaked cap, his medals and loud voice marked him out above his tank commanders, but he continued to lead this charmed existence, as countless episodes revealed. Here is Rommel, standing defiantly on top of a railway embankment, directing the battle while his men are being picked off one by one by Scottish snipers; or walking up to a motionless German tank, through a hail of fire, and rapping on the turret to know why it is not firing. And here is his new aide, Lieutenant Most, suddenly sinking to the ground at Rommel’s side, mortally wounded, with blood gushing from his mouth. Rommel reports laconically to Lucie, “Major Schraepler has come back already: his successor was killed just a yard away from me.” And here are Rommel and Major Erdmann, who commands his reconnaissance battalion, running for cover under heavy gunfire as a 150-millimeter howitzer shell lands between them; Erdmann’s back is torn open and he perishes instantly—Rommel is shocked but unscathed.
It is incidents like these that give a man a dangerous belief in his own immortality.
Once Lieutenant Hanke saved his life, near Sivry on the Belgian frontier. They had suddenly driven smack into a large force of French bicycle troops. Hanke mowed them down with his machine gun, “thereby extricating me as division commander from a very tricky situation,” Rommel admitted in his commendation of Hanke for bravery.
During this campaign and in all those that followed, there was a camera slung around Rommel’s neck. It had been given to him by Goebbels, and with it he took countless photographs. His captured albums are in a London museum, and they tell us as much about him as about the subjects themselves—we find ourselves seeing the war through Rommel’s eyes. As I turned the album pages, I saw the dramatic spectacle of Rommel’s division drive, in formation, across the French cornfields, the columns of trudging prisoners, French black troops, ducks in village ponds and fine horses gamboling with their newborn foals, oblivious to the onrush of war around them. Here too are bewildered refugees sitting near cart horses, disarmed troops in kilts at Rouen and the French war memorial at Fécamp.
A year later the weekly Frankfurt Illustrated published some of Rommel’s photographs. “Manfred got it out of the shopping basket,” Lucie wrote to Rommel on the day the magazine appeared, “and after a few seconds suddenly whooped with excitement and shouted, ‘Mama—look—it’s Papa!’ At first I thought you might be paying us one of your favorite surprise visits; but then he showed me the magazine with your picture on the front page, snapping pictures from your tank turret.”
For a while, Rommel was so far up front that the press could not keep pace with him. His friend Colonel Kurt Hesse, the former Potsdam lecturer—now touring the battlefield with a group of German war correspondents—found it almost impossible to catch him: “He was always ten miles ahead of us. Once French forces, including tanks, had already pushed in between the little advance party with which he spearheaded his attack and the main force of his division. Even this did not stop him from just driving ahead. ‘They will just have to battle through as best they can,’ was his only comment.”
Hesse wrote a description of Throughway 7: “I have never seen anyth
ing like the scenes along Rommel’s route of advance. His tanks had run into a French division coming down the same road, and they had just kept advancing right on past it. For the next five or six miles there were hundreds of trucks and tanks, some driven into the ditches, others burned out, many still carrying dead and injured. More and more Frenchmen came out of the fields and woods with abject fear written on their faces and their hands in the air. From up front came the short, sharp crack of the guns of our tanks, which Rommel was personally directing—standing upright in his ACV with two staff officers, his cap pushed back, urging everybody ahead. A feu sacre inflamed him: he brooked no opposition, from friend or foe. If somebody could not keep up, then let him stand back if only he, Rommel, and two or three tanks could reach the river Somme!”
Rommel caught sight of Hesse and barked at him: “In this war the commander’s place is here, right out in front! I don’t believe in armchair strategy. Let’s leave that to the gentlemen of the General Staff.” Hesse wrote that down, and Rommel’s next remark as well: “This is the age of Seydlitz and Ziethen all over again. We’ve got to look at this war like a cavalry action—we’ve got to throw in tank divisions like cavalry squadrons, and that means issuing orders from a moving tank just as generals once used to from the saddle.”
These tactics appalled the General Staff and aroused apprehension at the Führer’s headquarters. But on Rommel rolled. On May 18, he found that beyond Landrecies he had to pass through a sprawling forest concealing a big, well-guarded enemy ammunition dump. To avoid a time-consuming pitched battle, he used the same trick of waving white flags and having the crews ride outside their tanks. Again the gaping Frenchmen stood aside and willingly obeyed the tank commanders’ shouts of “A bas les armes!”