The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  Rommel had now moved into Keitel’s little villa at Pullach, outside Munich— the train’s stifling heat had been affecting his health. He sent Corporal Böttcher to fetch his field-gray uniform from Wiener Neustadt, so that he would be ready for his personal appearance on Italian soil. “This new job is much more to my liking than the Balkans,” he wrote, “but it’s not going to be a piece of cake. We can imagine only too well what the Italians have up their sleeve—a quick jump over onto the other side, lock, stock and barrel.” On August 4 he added in a mocking tone: “The King of Italy can’t seem to find the way out. Evidently the British and Americans haven’t given him even the faintest hope of mercy. That leaves him only one choice—either anarchy in his own country or continuing the fight at our side. I expect I’ll soon get to know him face to face.” Two days later, he hit a note a full octave higher: “Kesselring will probably have to quit soon—I expect he’s seething with rage. Mussolini probably won’t come back. Evidently the Party was indeed very corrupt; it was swept aside in a matter of hours. Mussolini is said to have been a failure in every respect. On the other hand, it suits us down to the ground to have only one great man leading Europe”— meaning Hitler.

  The Italian High Command reacted with increasing firmness to Operation Alarich. They tried to obstruct rail and road movements of Rommel’s inflowing divisions. They began moving their own Italian divisions northward—away from the Sicilian battlefield!—toward the Alps. Rommel showed great diplomacy. He instructed Feurstein to soothe General Gloria’s ruffled feelings, and to talk only of “securing the Alpine passes as a common duty of both the German and the Italian forces.” “Try and keep things cool,” Rommel said. “Otherwise we’ll send the SS.” On August 8, however, came the incident that finally convinced him that the new Italian regime was plotting to defect to the Allies. An SS task force sent forward to the naval base at La Spezia was halted and turned back; this could only mean that the Italian navy was being readied for an early escape to the enemy. “It’s not a pleasant situation with these shifty, two-faced Italians,” he said the next day. “To our faces they utter protestations of eternal loyalty in the common battle, but they trip us up wherever they can, and it looks as though they’re making a deal behind our backs.”

  On Hitler’s orders, Rommel flew to the Wolf’s Lair again on the eleventh. He arrived in time for the noon conference and found Himmler, Göring, Dönitz and the paratroop general Kurt Student also standing at the table. “Discussing Italy, the Führer turns out to agree with my own views,” noted Rommel in his diary. “Führer appears to intend sending me in quite soon. Like me, he doesn’t believe in the honesty of the Italians. . . . The Führer says the Italians are playing for time; then they will defect. . . . The Führer evidently wants to adhere to his old plan of restoring Fascism to power, as this is the only way to ensure that Italy will stand unconditionally by us. He has sharp words of condemnation,” continued Rommel with pleasure, “for the work of [Ambassador Hans von] Mackensen, Rintelen and Kesselring as they—particularly Kesselring—even today still totally misinterpret the Italian situation and blindly trust the new regime.”

  At lunch, he sat next to Hitler who gossiped with him with noticeable pleasure. (“Again and again I find that he has complete confidence in me,” observed Rommel.) Afterward Rommel outlined his own proposals to General Jodl, chief of the High Command operations staff. “I think I ought to be given command of all Italy,” said Rommel, “with two armies, north and south. I could then come under Italian orders, but my army group headquarters would be near Rome so as to exert an influence over the Italian High Command.” Jodl raised some level-headed objections, but Rommel believed he had gotten his own way as usual. At the evening conference, Hitler instructed him to call on the Italian military leaders in person and find out what they were up to. Thus a showdown was inevitable.

  An SS guard of honor waited for Field Marshal Rommel as he, along with Jodl, stepped from his plane onto Italian soil at Bologna airfield at ten A.M. on August 15. That was just the start. An entire battalion of motorized SS troops accompanied him and Jodl as they drove to the attractive Italian villa outside the city where they were to meet their “allies.” After Italian sentries had taken up positions around and in the villa, the Waffen SS took up positions in a ring around them—the giant, blond Germans standing head and shoulders above the Italians, and occasionally marching up and down outside the main entrance in a thunderous goose step. Rommel, Jodl and all their colleagues carried loaded revolvers in holsters. Seldom can one ally have regarded another with such mistrust—and with such justification: at that very moment emissaries of the Italian High Command were furtively negotiating with the enemy in Madrid.

  This did not prevent their spokesman, General Mario Roatta, one of the foxiest members of the Italian General Staff, from protesting: “We cannot permit you to express any doubts as to the propriety of our conduct and orders. To express such doubts is a profound insult to us.”

  In Rommel’s papers is a twenty-page account of the meeting; there is also a twenty-eight-page shorthand account in Italian army files. Both make entertaining reading. General Jodl did not mince his language. He asked Roatta right at the start about reports that Italy was withdrawing its army from France: “Is it definite that these divisions are destined for southern Italy—for Sicily—or are they destined for the Brenner?” Roatta first indignantly refused to reply to “such a tendentious question,” then denied that the divisions were going to be used to defend the Alpine passes against the Germans. General Jodl persisted, expressing the High Command’s amazement that while Germany had loyally rushed forces into Italy for its defense, “to our surprise there has been a simultaneous Italian move in the opposite direction, toward the Alpine passes!”

  Roatta answered the rest of Jodl’s accusations evasively or diplomatically—he bravely protested and denied, marshaling arguments of increasing complexity. He forthrightly objected to the arrival of the SS division, considering them, as strong Nazis, kin to the overthrown Italian Fascist regime. “We object to their political physiognomy,” he said. Jodl replied they were just a mechanized division like any other. According to the Italian note, Roatta retorted: “How would you like it if we sent a Jewish division into Germany, for example?”

  Rommel hardly spoke. The Italian protocol on the meeting noted that he smiled only once. Any smiles on Italian faces vanished when Jodl announced: “You will please take note of the fact that the new German troops arriving in Italy are subject to the orders of Field Marshal Rommel.” The High Command had decided unilaterally that Rommel should command all German and Italian troops in northern Italy; Kesselring would command in the south. Roatta’s plan was very different.

  Taking a map, he indicated that all Rommel’s forces should move from the north to central and southern Italy; only Italians would be left in the north. To the Germans the intention was plain enough—to establish a barrier across the peninsula, one that would cut off the Germans’ escape after the forthcoming Italian defection to the enemy. Jodl cabled to the High Command: “Grounds for suspicion remain undiminished.” Hitler therefore ordered the rapid evacuation of Sicily to begin, out of concern for German troops there.

  Rommel’s return to Italy caused an uproar in the Italian High Command. General Vittorio Ambrosio wrote a furious letter two days after the Bologna meeting, demanding his withdrawal: “Marshal Rommel may have eminent qualities as a commander, but he is still affected by events in North Africa, Tunisia and particularly El Alamein. Last winter the Italian High Command procured his recall from Tunisia and then ensured that he would not be sent back there. In the circumstances it seems most inappropriate for Rommel to assume command in Italy.” The Germans turned a deaf ear on Ambrosio.

  That afternoon, August 17, Rommel drove to Lake Garda in northern Italy to set up his new headquarters; but the Italians were not helpful—they refused permission for him to lay telephone lines from there back to Munich.

  The SS div
ision also reported that tank traps had been built on the highway farther south, between Florence and Pisa, that were obviously aligned only against German movements. Rommel wondered how long it would be before the Italian High Command came out in its true colors.

  THAT LUCIE AND Manfred were still housed in Wiener Neustadt, not far from the Messerschmitt aircraft factories, worried Rommel deeply. He knew from Alfred Berndt—now Goebbels’s special expert on air defense—just what had happened a few weeks ago in Hamburg. Forty-eight thousand civilians had been incinerated in one great fire raid. Goebbels had ordered two million non-essential civilians to evacuate Berlin, the next likely target. The first big raid hit the Reich capital on August 23, and next morning Gause learned that he had lost his house and everything; Frau Gause had returned home from East Prussia to find only blackened, smoldering ruins.

  Rommel telephoned Lucie from Munich, urgently, and told her it was vital to crate up their most precious possessions in good time and remove them to safety. “You see how suddenly it happens!” he wrote next day. “Rather do without the sight of most of our favorite things for the time being, and know them safe in the country, than see them burn.” “Even their basement burned out,” he added in another letter. “We must get our family papers, carpets, silver, clothing and linen into safety, and fast.” To this list he added as afterthoughts their oil paintings, his cameras, the photograph signed by the Führer, a Samurai sword mailed to him by the Japanese embassy—Rommel could not find time to attend the award ceremony—and the hunting guns. When he learned that all Gause’s money had been in the bank—also destroyed—Rommel anxiously instructed Lucie: “Take care you don’t have too much money in your savings account at Wiener Neustadt. Find out if accounts are automatically transferred to other banks when one is bombed out—I don’t expect that the little savings bank at Wiener Neustadt does this.” That was real Swabian prudence.

  Most of their precious belongings could be taken by truck to the remote farm of an old First World War comrade, Oskar Farny, deep in the Bavarian countryside. Rommel had already sent him trunks full of diaries and papers. On August 22, he had flown over to see Farny, landing his Storch plane in one of the fields. They lunched on trout, had crab with afternoon tea and reminisced about their times in the Württemberg mountain battalion. After a while Rommel asked Farny point-blank: “What do you think about the war?”

  Farny tried to conceal his embarrassment. “If our field marshals start flying into the country and asking the farmers questions like that,” he replied, “then the war’s not going well.”

  Rommel nodded agreement, and said: “No doubt about it.”

  SINCE EARLY August, Rommel’s safe had contained secret orders for Operation “Axis.” When Hitler signaled the code word Axis, Rommel was to swoop down on the Italian forces massing in northern Italy, disarm the troops and take over the coastal defenses. It would not be easy. General Feurstein warned him privately that there were nearly 40,000 Italian troops in the Forty-fourth Infantry Division’s area alone. Rommel hinted that the code word might be issued very suddenly. “When fighting breaks out with the Italians, you are to strike hard and fast with your heaviest weapons, including the Nebelwerfer”—the rocket missile that had terrorized the Americans at Kasserine. Rommel did not underestimate the seriousness of the German troops’ position if, as he expected, the enemy staged a seaborne landing at La Spezia—in the north, right in Italy’s “groin”—and the Italian regime simultaneously switched to the enemy side. “Our men would have to fight on two fronts,” he explained to Lucie.

  The one strategy that Rommel considered most unlikely was the one the enemy subsequently adopted: landing right on the toe of Italy and crawling all the long, exhausting way up the boot. He believed the British would go straight for La Spezia, where the Italian fleet was anchored, thus securing a bridgehead behind the last easily defended “garter” line—the Apennine mountains, from Leghorn across the peninsula to Rimini.

  In fact, Rommel—as usual—differed strongly from Kesselring, who wanted a concentration of their strength in southern Italy. Richthofen, the Luftwaffe commander, had visited Rommel on August 17 and argued Kesselring’s case: “If we give up southern Italy,” he pointed out, “my Luftwaffe will not be able to hold out in the north.” (The best airfields were in the south.) In his plane back from Munich, Richthofen wrote in his private diary: “We see eye to eye on how to treat the Italians. But he lacks any overall view. Sees things only from the narrowest possible army standpoint, regardless of the strategic situation. Seems downright pigheaded, thinks just in tactical terms, with a bit of a tic since Africa about his supply problem.”

  The British Eighth Army landed two divisions right down on Italy’s toe-nail, at Reggio di Calabria, on September 3. Rommel was ordered to report the next morning to Hitler. Rommel’s diary noted: “The Führer makes a tranquil, confident impression. He wants to send me to see the King of Italy soon. He agrees to my Italian campaign plan, which envisages a defense along the actual coastline, despite Jodl’s objections (which don’t hold water in a modern war).” They dined together at eight-thirty Hitler seriously warned Rommel to be on guard when visiting the King of Italy.

  “The Führer has forbidden me to touch any food there,” wrote Rommel-adding pointedly, “He’s concerned about my health.”

  Events now came with dramatic swiftness. It was September 8, a hot and airless day all over Europe. Rommel had already sent his luggage down to his new army group headquarters near Lake Garda in northern Italy, but to avoid compromising Operation Axis, he himself was still in Munich. That evening, radio stations all over the world began announcing that Marshal Badoglio had already signed Italy’s surrender to the Allies. Badoglio and Roatta denied it for two hours, then admitted it was true. At 7:50 P.M. the German High Command telephoned the code word Axis to Rommel and Kesselring. At 8:20 P.M. it was confirmed in writing: “Marshal Badoglio agrees accuracy of Allied radio broadcasts about Italian surrender. Code word Axis takes immediate effect.”

  Unfortunately, Rommel’s diary is missing for the next weeks, but events can be picked up from his letters, from the war diary of Army Group B and from Italian files. “Now Italy’s treachery is official,” he wrote to Lucie on the ninth. “We sure had them figured out right. So far our plans are running smoothly.” Rome was seized by German troops, and General Rainer Stahl, a tough Luftwaffe commander, took charge. In Milan and Turin there were Communist-inspired uprisings. Rommel’s troops and the SS moved ruthlessly to put them down. In beautiful old Florence there were battles with Italian tanks. The Italian fleet ran to sea from La Spezia and steamed toward enemy-held havens—there was nothing Rommel could have done to prevent their escape. Badoglio, Ambrosio and Roatta fled with their king and crown prince to the mercy of the enemy.

  The next day the U.S. Fifth Army launched its seaborne invasion of Salerno, south of Naples. Decoded American radio traffic revealed that the Italians had disclosed the locations of their minefields to the enemy. Kesselring’s directive from Hitler was to stage a fighting retreat “if necessary” northward toward Rome—but the American invasion troops put up such a temptingly poor showing against General Hube’s defenders that he decided to try and defeat them then and there.

  Meanwhile, north of his demarcation line just below Florence—from the island of Elba to Ancona—Rommel set about disarming and rounding up the Italian army. He was not gentle. “In the south,” he explained in a letter, “Italian soldiers are already fighting against us side by side with the British. In the north, we’re disarming them and packing them off to Germany as prisoners. What an infamous end for an army!” The next day his staff left for the new headquarters near Garda. The diary of General Feurstein’s Fifty-first Corps describes an inspection visit by Rommel on the fourteenth. Rommel realized that he had pitifully few troops to defend hundreds of miles of Italian coast, so he laid down a basic rule that was to become a mania for him throughout 1944 as well: “Everything available is to be ins
erted along the coast itself. No reserves are to be held. The enemy must be warded off while still afloat.” After dealing with the extraction of military and economic booty from his half of Italy, and the arrival of a railroad gun battery to command the entrances to La Spezia and Leghorn harbors, Rommel ordered: “If anybody gives shelter to British escapers, they must reckon with the execution of their entire family.” Then he flew to his headquarters.

  That evening, misfortune befell him. At nine P.M. he was quite well, but ninety minutes later he was writhing in agony. He was violently sick and crippled by abdominal pains all night. He was rushed to the hospital and operated on for appendicitis. A week later they removed the stitches, and on the twenty-seventh he was discharged from the hospital. Of his stomach incision he joked to Lucie: “You’ll just have to look the other way.”

  Many times, as he lay in the hospital, he had heard the air raid sirens sound. All Germany was wondering which city would be the next to suffer Hamburg’s fate. Everywhere, painted arrows told the public which way to flee if fire storms broke out again. With a start, the field marshal realized that since Kesselring obviously would soon have to evacuate all southern Italy, the enemy would obtain the magnificent airfields at Foggia.