by David Irving
At the other end of the forest was the village of Pommereuil. Rommel’s tanks formed up in a defensive “hedgehog” on top of the hill beyond the village, tails in, guns pointing outward. On the far horizon they could see Le Cateau, their next objective. He collected the commanders. “Your route now will be Le Cateau—Arras—Amiens—Rouen—Le Havre,” he bellowed. “Fuel up! Advance!”
They were stunned at Rommel’s words. Le Havre was on the English Channel, and they had barely slept for a whole week. Soon, however, he and his tank commanders were fighting off determined attempts by the French to wipe out their “hedgehog.” To make matters worse, the tanks were nearly out of gasoline and after a while Rommel learned why. The rest of his division was still back in Belgium, and his chief staff officer, Major Otto Heidkämper, having heard nothing from him and having written off both him and Colonel Rothenburg as lost, had made no attempt to send them fuel. Heidkämper’s conclusion shocked Hitler’s staff. The Führer himself later sent word to Rommel: “Your raid cost me a sleepless night. I couldn’t see any way of extricating you from that snare.”
Somehow, in the confused way of battles, the French relaxed their grip on Rommel and he escaped again. But weeks later he still fumed at Heidkämper’s feebleness. “I’m going to get rid of him as soon as I can,” he snarled in one letter. “This young General Staff major stood back some twenty miles behind the front, terrified that something might happen to him and the operations staff, and naturally lost contact with the combat group I was commanding at Cambrai. Then, instead of rushing everybody forward to me, he drove back to Corps Headquarters and got them all worked up into believing that my division was slipping out of their control. To this day he still thinks he was a hero.”
Rommel had taken Cambrai with little opposition, capturing 650 enemy troops there on the nineteenth and 500 more the next day. But on May 20, he felt as though he had butted his head into three feet of solid masonry: for the first time he came up against British professional soldiers, the enemy he learned to respect, fear and admire every time they crossed his path over the next four years. By the twenty-first, Rommel was in a jam. The enemy were regrouping for a desperate attempt to break out of the Flanders pocket, and Rommel’s infantry and guns were now confronted by a tank they could not stop—the slow, cumbersome but heavily armored Matilda Mark II. The standard 37-millimeter shell was useless against it.
Rommel must have been dog-tired, but he did not show it in this crisis at Arras on May 21. He personally directed the fire on the approaching Matildas. He found by harsh experience that only the heavy flak, the big eighty-eight-millimeter guns, had sufficient muzzle velocity to stop these brutes. “With the enemy tanks so dangerously close,” he wrote in his manuscript, “only rapid fire from every gun could save the situation. We ran from gun to gun. I brushed aside the gun commanders’ objections that the range was too great.” It was here that his adjutant Lieutenant Most was killed one yard away from him. Moments like these distinguished the true-born battlefield commander, and Rommel’s example inspired his troops to stand their ground that day.
After the bloody fighting at Arras, the Seventh Panzer Division briefly rested. Equipment was repaired, tanks were refueled, letters written. Hitler had ordered all the panzer forces to halt anyway on reaching this canal line, running westward from La Bassée. On May 26 Hitler lifted the order. Rommel immediately threw a bridgehead across the canal. A rifle regiment got across, but a machine gun battalion to its right was prevented by heavy sniper fire. This unit’s history relates that Rommel himself now appeared: “He complained that we weren’t doing enough to combat the British snipers and climbed up on top of the railroad embankment, then, standing upright amid the enemy fire, proceeded to dictate targets to the antitank gun crews of Numbers Four and Seven companies. One after another their leading gunners and gun commanders were shot dead, clean through the head, but the general himself seemed totally immune to the enemy sniping.”
By the afternoon of May 27, Rommel’s troops had established two makeshift bridges. To the chagrin of Lieutenant General Max von Hartlieb, who was senior to Rommel, the corps commander, Hoth, now placed the Fifth Panzer Division’s two tank regiments under Rommel’s temporary command for the coming attack on Lille. This was a powerful reinforcement indeed, and Rommel was very impressed by the large numbers of brand new tanks in the regiments. He called a conference of both divisions’ tank commanders—and had a blazing row with Colonel Johannes Streich, of the Fifteenth Panzer Regiment, who pointed out that Rommel was not reading the maps right.
At the end of the conference there was a ceremony that surprised Rommel and staggered the others present. His aide Karl Hanke appeared, wearing his steel helmet and “full warpaint,” saluted him and announced: “On the Führer’s orders I herewith bestow on Herr General the Knight’s Cross.” (This made Rommel the first divisional commander to get the award in France—and the obvious Nazi Party string-pulling caused wry faces among the other officers.) At six P.M. Rommel began his push northeastward from the canal.
Lille was one of France’s biggest industrial cities, and Rommel was determined to get there first. When his panzers reached the day’s interim objective, he heard that his rivals’ divisions were bivouacking for the night. Jubilantly, he decided to press on—“Mount up! Start engines! Advance!”—and he alone continued the attack.
This action blocked the enemy’s escape to Dunkirk, where the evacuation of the British army across the English Channel had already begun. Now far in front of the main German forces, Rommel found he was taking fire from both enemy and German guns. He was exhausted, but he badly wanted to be the first German in Lille. “After one and a half hours’ sleep, I took fresh troops forward to the front line, and fuel and ammunition for the tanks,” he wrote to Lucie. That was the night that Major Erdmann was killed a few feet away from Rommel.
The next morning he himself drove into Lille, out of sheer eagerness. The war nearly ended for Erwin Rommel there and then, because the streets were still swarming with enemy soldiers. He rapidly reversed his car and escaped unharmed.
By his coup he had trapped half the French First Army. Infantry divisions moved up to occupy Lille and allow Rommel’s troops a few days’ rest. “I’ve been in action for days on end,” he wrote, “constantly on the move in a tank, armored car or staff car. There’s just no time to sleep at all. In a mechanized division you’ve got to be damned fast. So far I have been, hence the Seventh Panzer Division’s huge successes—about which the public still knows absolutely nothing.”
In the rest area, Rommel rapidly composed an interim dispatch on his campaign. He had taken 6,849 prisoners, captured forty-eight light tanks and knocked out eighteen heavy and 295 light tanks. (“Not bad for Thuringians!” he observed triumphantly to Lucie.) He proudly sent copies of the dispatch to Hitler and to Schmundt. His ulterior purpose in doing so was quite clear from a candid remark to Lucie: “I’ve got to act fast, or the same thing will happen as happened after [Hill 1114].” The memory of that Pour le Mérite awarded to the wrong officer in 1917 still rankled him. When Rommel was in a philosophical mood in later years, he liked to quote: “Victory in battle can boast of many fathers; but defeat is an orphan.”
Hitler was impressed by the dispatch. The upshot was that Rommel, alone of all the division commanders, was invited to meet Hitler on June 2, 1940, when the Führer called his commanders to Charleville in the Ardennes to discuss the last acts in the defeat of France. Hitler put on his familiar avuncular act. “Rommel,” he cried, “we were all very worried for your safety during those days you were on the attack!” At the secret conference that followed, Hitler told his generals that the new offensive would begin on June 5. France would be given the coup de grâce. General Wilhelm von Lech noted in his private diary these words of Hitler’s: “It will be easy to find a basis of peace with Britain. But France must be smashed into the ground, and then she must pay the bill.”
Back in action, Rommel forced his panzer
division across the Somme—which he found to be a wretched little stream rather than a river—early on June 5, using two railroad bridges that the enemy had failed to demolish. For a few hours, enemy artillery pinned him into a small bridgehead. His men took large numbers of black prisoners—French colonials fighting for a fatherland they were seeing only now for the first time.
At four P.M. he began his dramatic thrust southward. He had thought up another brilliant new idea, the Flächenmarsch or “formation drive” in which the entire panzer division steamrolled across the open, undulating countryside in a box formation. A tank battalion formed the front and sides, while the rear was brought up by antitank and reconnaissance battalions. The rifle regiments filled the center of the box, their wheeled transport following the tracks flattened through the waist-high corn crops by the tanks. Up hill and down dale they rolled, around the villages, through the hedgerows—spewing fire and leaving behind pillars of smoke and wrecked enemy equipment, while herds of riderless horses stampeded along in the wake like the end of a disastrous steeplechase. On some farms the carts were ready harnessed and laden with furniture. Petrified women and children cowered beneath them as this deadly monster engulfed their farmsteads. Rommel’s officers shouted to them to stay where they were.
Never before had a panzer division moved so fast. It was averaging forty or fifty miles each day. The enemy was never ready for him. At Thieulloy a British truck convoy was overrun and looted; it was rich in cigarettes, chocolates, canned sardines and Libby’s canned fruit. There were tennis rackets and golf clubs too—Rommel guffawed, observing that the British had clearly not been expecting the war to take its present nasty turn. His approach caused chaos behind the French lines. At Elbeuf, a woman rushed up and caught him by the arm: “Vous êtes anglais?” Rommel shook his head. “Oh, les barbares!” she screamed, and vanished back into her house.
With a bit more luck, he would even have been able to rush the Seine bridges at Elbeuf, but a handful of determined men there managed to blow them up before Rommel arrived. He reached the river at Sotteville toward midnight on June 8. Rommel’s was the first German unit to arrive at the Seine.
The adjutant of a tank battalion described the arrival: “Our battalion HQ was billeted on Anthieux [near Elbeuf]. I found a château there, but its heavy oak gates were closed and didn’t open even after much ringing. So I forced it open with my tank. The château was well furnished, but abandoned by its owners. We inspected the various rooms and decided on who should sleep where. We had just finished upstairs when we heard voices downstairs: General Rommel and the division’s adjutant, Major Schraepler, were also looking for a billet. Rommel asked me which room he could have—‘I just want to sleep a couple of hours, then get moving again.’ He then really did sleep only two hours, lying fully dressed on a sofa, and drove on again before the rest of my battalion even arrived. While he was sleeping I picked some strawberries in the garden. When he awoke I served them to him on a rhubarb leaf, to his evident delight.”
On June 10 Rommel’s troops saw the sea at last. It was near Dieppe. At his order, the Twenty-fifth Panzer Regiment drove flat out toward the coast. When it arrived, Rothenburg smashed his sturdy Panzer IV right through the seawall and drove the tank down the beach until the waves of the Channel were lapping around its gray-painted hull. Rommel, riding with him, clambered on top, to be photographed for the press back home. Then they backed out and rolled on toward Fécamp, through wildly cheering crowds who tossed flowers into their path—again mistaking them for Englishmen.
Twenty-four hours later Rommel was on the cliffs south of Saint-Valéry. On the narrow path below the brow of the cliffs they found thousands of British troops cowering, waiting for the flotilla of small boats lying offshore to come and rescue them. They waited in vain. The French admiral in authority had until now refused permission for the evacuation; the French High Command was still hoping to launch a counterattack toward the Somme. Now Rommel had come, and his guns drove off the rescue flotilla. Grenades were dropped onto the cliff path, forcing a steady stream of prisoners to the top.
Rommel called on Saint-Valéry to surrender by nine P.M. The French troops wanted to accept, but not the British. They built barricades with their bare hands and fought like wildcats all day. So at nine P.M. Rommel called down heavy artillery and a terrifying dive bomber attack on the town. That did it. When he drove in the next morning, through narrow streets full of trucks, tanks and equipment that the enemy had hoped to salvage and take back to England, there was little fight left in the defenders. The commander of the French Ninth Corps surrendered to him in the market square, followed by eleven more British and French generals. Newsreel cameras filmed the scene.
The British were rather annoyed at the way things had turned out. Major General Victor Fortune, who had commanded the Fifty-First (Highlands) Division, eminently disliked having to surrender to such a youthful general. The French smoked cigarettes and accepted their defeat with more aplomb. One gray-haired general, old enough to be Rommel’s father, clapped him in typical Gallic manner on the shoulder and advised him: “You are far too fast, young man.” Another Frenchman asked with morbid curiosity which was Rommel’s division. Rommel told him. “Sacre bleu!” exploded the Frenchman. “The Spook Division again. First in Belgium, then at Arras and on the Somme and now here, again and again our paths have crossed. We call you the Spook Division.”
For four days the Spook Division enjoyed the Channel sun beaches and hotel wine cellars. At 5:30 A.M. on June 16 this idyll ended. The division crossed the Seine over a Wehrmacht bridge at Rouen and raced south. The next day Rommel heard on the car radio that the French were appealing for an armistice. Hitler ordered his army to occupy the French Atlantic coastline fast, clear down to the Spanish frontier; and Rommel covered the distance at an incredible speed. On June 16,100 miles. On the seventeenth, 200. It was a wonder that the tanks survived.
He met no resistance until June 18, at Cherbourg, France’s most important deepwater port. Hitler had ordered its immediate capture. Although his division was outnumbered twenty times or more, and the fortress guns were still powerfully intact, Rommel took Cherbourg in his stride—that day the stride was over 220 miles. “I don’t know if the date’s right,” he wrote to Lucie on June 20, “as I’ve rather lost touch, what with the combat actions of the last few days and hours.” He added, “Only by striking fast were we able to execute the Führer’s specific order that Cherbourg was to be captured as rapidly as possible.” Later he wrote, “I’ve slept seven hours now, and I’m going out to look over my troops, the immense booty and our prisoners—there are twenty or thirty thousand in and around Cherbourg.”
Thus ended Rommel’s blitzkrieg through France. He and the Spook Division had taken 97,000 prisoners, at a loss of only forty-two tanks.
Despite the brilliant success, tongues began to wag in the German officer camps. Many generals were frankly envious of the glory that Rommel had earned. Others, like General Georg Stumme, who had commanded the Seventh Panzer Division before him, were quietly impressed. Rommel’s corps commander, Hoth, praised him in public—for instance, at the division staff dinner later that summer. (Rommel proudly noted, “He says that my predecessor, Stumme—who was regarded as a real dynamo in Poland—is a lame old cart horse compared with me, and much else. Of course all this was said under the influence of much alcohol, but it does my commanders a lot of good to hear how highly their corps commander rates our division’s achievements.”) But in private Hoth expressed interesting reservations.
In a confidential report on Rommel in July, he warned that the general was too prone to act on impulse. Rommel would be eligible for a corps command, said Hoth, only if he gained “greater experience and a better sense of judgment.” Hoth also accused Rommel of being ungenerous about the contributions others had made in the battles Rommel won.
Kluge, the Fourth Army commander, echoed this criticism. When Rommel invited Kluge to contribute a foreword to a manuscript on
the campaign, Kluge agreed—but gently pointed out to him that several of the book’s diagrams and references had been falsified to the Seventh Panzer Division’s advantage. The part played by the Luftwaffe, he said, and particularly the dive bombers, was virtually ignored. Rommel’s left-hand neighbor, the Thirty-second Infantry Division, was shown making much slower progress than it really had.
Nor would Kluge accept Rommel’s caustic references to his right-hand neighbor, Lieutenant General Hartlieb’s Fifth Panzer Division. Hartlieb, in fact, had formally complained to Berlin about Rommel. It seems that Rommel had used up all his own bridging tackle on the first day, and so on May 14, when he wanted to bridge the Meuse, he had helped himself to Hartlieb’s tackle. Hartlieb insisted on its return, but Rommel refused, saying that his own division was going to cross first. This delayed Hartlieb’s movements for hours on end. Rommel then had the gall to complain that the Fifth Panzer Division was falling too far behind! (Colonel Streich later added a sidelight. “Rommel seized this opportunity to filch my own heavy tanks for use in his division’s advance as well,” he wrote. “When my general, Hartlieb, protested, he was told that General Hoth had sanctioned it; I myself don’t believe for a minute that Rommel asked his permission. Our infantry took very heavy casualties as a consequence.”)
At the river Scarpe on May 25, the same thing happened again, and there was a furious scene. Later Rommel piously claimed in a letter to Bodewin Keitel, the army’s chief of personnel: “No coarseness resulted that I am aware of.”
Johannes Streich later commented in a manuscript: “During the war a book entitled The Spook Division was published. In it, various operations successfully executed by our Fifth Panzer Division were cynically claimed by the Seventh Panzer. That the Seventh Panzer took far heavier casualties than any other division in the west, including even infantry divisions, shows how ruthlessly Rommel treated it.”