The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  That meant that strategic bomber operations against Austria—including perhaps Wiener Neustadt—would then begin in real earnest. He wrote privately to Lucie begging her to start looking immediately for somewhere else to live. “Best of all would be to move to Württemberg.’’ The longer she waited, the harder would be the house hunting, because soon everyone would be fleeing from the cities of the southern Reich. Lucie, of course, resisted leaving her beloved home.

  Kesselring had high hopes of bringing the enemy invasion offensive to a standstill—and even throwing them back into the sea at Salerno. On September 12 he obtained permission for a counterattack. But by September 16 eight enemy divisions had landed and were facing Hube’s four divisions. A fighting withdrawal began, northward up the Italian peninsula. Hitler authorized Kesselring to block the enemy’s advance by destroying bridges, roads, tunnels and railroad installations all the way. The Italians here had abetted the enemy—now their countryside would pay the price.

  This was the situation when Rommel left the hospital on the twenty-seventh. That afternoon, Field Marshal Keitel telephoned from the High Command asking Rommel to fly to the Wolf’s Lair for another meeting with Hitler to discuss their autumn strategy. This time Kesselring would also be present. When Rommel walked into Hitler’s conference room after noon on September 30, the Führer looked distinctly fatigued—almost ill. He was stooped, and he stammered and barely joined the laughter when General Jodl—discussing whether there was any place for beasts of burden in modern infantry divisions— snapped: “I ought to know: I’ve had to deal with asses and donkeys nearly all my life!” A lieutenant colonel, present for the first time, whose diary contains the only record of this discussion, wrote: “Only sometimes does the Führer’s belief in the correctness of his actions and his faith in victory show passionately through.”

  Rommel and Kesselring began by reporting the captures they had made in Italy under Operation Axis. They had already disarmed 800,000 Italian troops and transported 268,000 northward to Germany as prison labor. They had taken over 448 tanks, 2,000 guns and half a million rifles. This was not the most astonishing find, however. In three tunnels at La Spezia, Rommel’s troops had discovered a hoard of fuel oil for the Italian submarines and warships—38,000 barrels, the equivalent of 1,650,000 gallons of oil, hidden away by the same Italian High Command who had protested all the time that they could not escort supply convoys to Rommel in North Africa because their navy had no fuel! (Much more was found elsewhere in later weeks.)

  Göring then chimed in: “We have laid hands on hundreds of first-rate Italian fighter planes too.”

  Hitler’s face showed skepticism, but Kesselring agreed. Hitler exclaimed, “How have these cripples been getting away with it!”

  Göring said on impulse, “For years the Italians and the Duce have been quite deliberately tricking us. They just tucked away planes and raw materials. The Duce was so ignorant he ought to be shot.”

  This remark did not please Hitler, who had just gone to great expense and effort to free Mussolini from the mountain prison in which he had been held. “The real blame lies with the king and his generals,” he replied. “They’ve been planning this treachery for a long time.” Then he turned to Kesselring and Rommel: “Every day, every week, every month that we can hold up the enemy down in the south of Italy is vital to us. We must gain time, we must postpone the final reckoning. Things don’t smell rosy for the other side at all. They have just the same problems with manpower and materiel reserves as we do, and the time is going to come when they get fed up with it. There will come a certain point of time when we can no longer win the war by conquering the world, but only by keeping the war dragging on until the other side gives in.”

  The lieutenant colonel continued his diary account: “Several times the Führer then loudly proclaimed: ‘Time, time, time!’ ”

  But time was the one factor that Rommel could not offer. He proposed what at best would be a rapid, safe retreat in good order up the Italian peninsula to the Apennine line, ninety miles north of Rome. Kesselring, however, was doing unexpectedly well against the invaders, and on October 6 he submitted to Hitler a proposal for a final defense of Italy on a line only half as long, ninety miles south of Rome. He was sure he could hold this line at least over the coming winter. As a further bonus, Kesselring’s line would deprive the enemy of Rome, and of a springboard into the Balkans. Hitler and Jodl greedily approved.

  Rommel felt angry and frustrated that his advice had been ignored. He felt denied of what had been promised him and was rightfully his: the supreme command in Italy. He pointed to the one obvious drawback of Kesselring’s plan, namely that the enemy would surely bypass the line at sea and land farther north, on either side of Rome, for example. Kesselring, for his part, said he could not concentrate on the battle with Rommel breathing down his neck from northern Italy and glowering at his every move. These increasingly debilitating squabbles had begun with Salerno, when Rommel had refused to lend Kesselring two first-rate panzer divisions which, in Hube’s counterattack, might well have tilted the balance against the enemy. The other commanders watched the infantile backbiting with irritation. On October 13 Field Marshal von Richthofen observed in his diary: “Rommel’s take-over of all Italy is now said to be imminent. . . . Let’s hope there’s then a degree of uniformity in the goings-on down here. With Rommel as pigheaded and worn out as he is, it’s not going to be any easier doing business with him and his bunch, but anything’s got to be better than the way things are now.”

  On October 17 Hitler did indeed send for Rommel and confirm that he had decided to honor his promise. Kesselring, he said, was going to be posted to Norway—a backwater, of no military significance whatever in 1943. However, added Hitler, the High Command wanted Rommel to defend the line currently held by Kesselring, from Gaeta to Ortona, throughout the winter; in Jodl’s words, the line was “impregnable.” Rommel expressed powerful—and highly tactless— reservations. Before taking over as “Supreme Commander, Italy” (the title he proposed), he wanted to inspect Kesselring’s theater for himself. And he demanded a clear directive allowing a flexible campaign: “I will then submit to you an unvarnished appraisal of how the battle should be fought—as soon as you have announced my appointment.”

  At all this, Hitler felt a twinge of uneasiness. Speaking some months later, he was to recall: “At that time, Rommel predicted collapse in Italy as being only just around the corner.”

  It was evidently a fractious war conference, because afterward when Hitler’s adjutant Schmundt bumped into General Maximilian Hitzfeld—who had been Rommel’s adjutant in 1938—Schmundt exclaimed: “It’s getting harder every time to see eye to eye with Rommel.” Rommel himself cursed out loud about Keitel and Jodl and called them “assholes.”

  So this was Rommel in October 1943: domineering, obstinate and defeatist by any normal interpretation of those words; outspoken about his own rectitude, no matter how many of his sorrowing friends and admirers he alienated thereby; already worrying about the postwar era, about his personal property and his family’s fortunes; but still, instinctively, grasping at the largest, most purple mantle of supreme power that Hitler had to offer.

  THERE ARE VIVID impressions of Rommel at this time. One is by war correspondent Lutz Koch, who accompanied him on his visit to Mussolini on October 12. The Führer had liberated the Duce and reinstated him as the tattered dictator of a shrinking domain being invaded by a relentless enemy from the south and eroded by rapacious Nazi gauleiters from the north. While SS sentries pranced outside, Rommel ranted in German at the Duce, blaming him for the Axis defeat in Africa. A times he shouted so loudly that the puppet Italian ministers cowering in the courtyard could hear.

  The other impression is in the penciled diary compiled by General Kurt Dittmar, the German army’s widely respected wartime broadcaster. Under “November 8,1943,” Dittmar records his memorable visit to Rommel in Italy. His notes reveal the authentic Rommel:

  Exp
resses contempt for Fascism in Italy. Mussolini’s lack of credit. In discussion, Rommel says Mussolini is to blame for the failure of the Italian army. Built fortifications against Germany! The Führer has also begun gradually dissociating himself from Mussolini. He wrote a journal in captivity, pathetic attempts at self-justification, claims he strove his utmost for a satisfactory end.

  OKW [German High Command] didn’t have the faintest idea about Badoglio’s treachery, they took him as a man of his word right to the last moment Rommel’s damning verdicts on OKW operations staff: Jodl, Warlimont and rest are out of place, the whole bunch of them, they’ve been at their posts far too long. Bitter language about “impregnable defense positions” that exist only in the OKW’s fevered imagination. Says of the Führer, he’s very farsighted, but the officers around him—and he again lists them, from Keitel through Schmundt (yes, Rommel even includes his friend Schmundt!)—set aside any decision that takes actual situations into account.

  Rommel, one of our great historic figures. No defeatist.

  Rommel flew back from the Wolf’s Lair to his headquarters near Lake Garda two days after seeing Hitler, October 19,1943. He phoned Jodl, who confirmed that Hitler’s formal order appointing him Supreme Commander was “on the way.”

  But at 7:30 P.M. the picture suddenly changed. Jodl phoned back, and told Rommel: “The Führer’s order has been set aside for the moment.” What did this mean? Jodl would not say. Rommel met his new operations officer this day— Colonel Hans-Georg von Tempelhoff, thirty-six, an urbane, fair-haired veteran of the Russian front. Rommel showed him the blue chalk line on the map above Rome that marked his proposed Apennine line and directed him to write a detailed study of the best way to fight a flexible campaign of retreat from Kesselring’s present position up to the blue line.

  “It almost made my hair go gray,” wrote Tempelhoff to a friend in January 1944.

  Over thirty years later I found Tempelhoff living with his English-born wife, Marianne, in a villa at the foot of the Zugspitz mountain in Bavaria. There were many talks with him—because Tempelhoff was one of the key members of Rommel’s staff for the rest of the field marshal’s career and therefore a very important witness. He was open and pleasant and had an excellent memory, which at times his shrewd and overanxious wife tried to stop him laying too bare.

  He described how he and Rommel spent the next weeks preparing the Apennine line, touring the troops and inspecting the defenses. “I remember one visit to a big armaments factory in Milan,” Tempelhoff said. “There were big-caliber guns there, all neatly slit open down the barrel by the Italians so we could not use them.”

  And he remembered another occasion: “Once at supper Rommel—heedless of the white-jacketed flunkies hovering in the background—loudly announced, ‘We’ve all heard a lot of tales about new secret weapons. Take it from me, there aren’t any. The time is drawing nearer when we’ll have to make up our minds which side to make a deal with.’ One of the officers responded: ‘Either East or West.’ To which Rommel replied, ‘There’s no question of dealing with the East.’ ”

  Rommel was the last to discover that he had in fact talked himself out of a job at the Wolf’s Lair on October 17. Four days later, Richthofen learned it through the Luftwaffe grapevine, and wrote with private relish: “Seems that Rommel isn’t going to get the supreme command here in Italy after all. Evidently he put up a poor showing at his conference with the Führer, which doesn’t surprise me one bit.”

  Three days after that, the diary of Hitler’s manservant describes how he glimpsed Kesselring, Rommel’s arch rival, conferring with Hitler, then lunching together with him, Keitel, Jodl and Schmundt. After that, Hitler decided to give the optimist, Kesselring, the supreme command in Italy. It looked to Rommel as though he was headed for his gray homburg hat again.

  His misery was considerable; his hatred of the High Command became extreme. “Perhaps,” he wrote to Lucie a few days later, “I didn’t rouse enough hope that our position could be held. Perhaps the reservations I expressed before taking on the command were the cause. Perhaps there were quite different reasons. Anyway—for the time being Kesselring is to remain.”

  Think Victory

  WE NOW KNOW that it was Jodl’s staff at the High Command who had engineered this abrupt reverse in Rommel’s fortunes. One of them wrote six years later that while Rommel’s skepticism toward the Italians had been invaluable during the Nazi preparations to occupy Italy, his notorious lack of diplomacy would have made it impossible for him to work harmoniously with the Italians now that a Mussolini “government” had been restored. And, as Schmundt’s war diary as chief of army personnel observes, “Unfortunately Field Marshal Rommel is still obsessed by the retreat from Africa. Another job, having nothing to do with Italy, will be better for him.”

  But what could become of Rommel, and what of his tight-knit staff? The German public would never understand it if Rommel was merely shelved. This was Hitler’s dilemma—how to employ the myth-marshal created by his own propaganda machine.

  As a first awkward solution, Hitler arranged to keep Rommel’s army group staff intact: it would stand by to tackle whatever need arose. This should have appealed to Rommel’s mathematical mind—because mathematics is a science abounding with “solutions looking for a problem.” But to Rommel it was mortifying and humiliating. He felt that he had now finally been put on the shelf.

  It was Jodl himself who provided a solution to the Rommel problem. On October 30 he submitted to the Führer a bulky report from the Commander in Chief West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt—Germany’s oldest and senior serving field marshal. The document exposed the horrifying weakness of Hitler’s much publicized “Atlantic Wall,” under construction since August 1942 along the coastline of Europe facing England. There was virtually nothing to stop a determined enemy invasion comparable with their successful landings at Sicily and Salerno. The coastal fortifications must be overhauled and intensified—and rapidly. Jodl recommended that this would be an ideal job for Rommel and his staff—to take tactical command of the invasion battle, wherever the enemy finally launched it. But Hitler would not go as far as that. He told Jodl to draft a suitable order but to mention only “study assignments” for Rommel, not “tactical command”—that would be going too far.

  Hitler gave the news to Rommel at the Wolf’s Lair late on November 5. He underlined the job’s historic importance for the Reich. “When the enemy invades in the west it will be the moment of decision in this war,” he said, “and the moment must turn to our advantage. We must ruthlessly extract every ounce of effort from Germany.”

  Acting on Hitler’s direct instructions, Rommel was to study defense plans and devise possible counterattacks if the enemy did get a foothold. Hitler hinted to Rommel that he would be given tactical command when the battle started; but he did not inform Rundstedt of this promise. On the contrary, he had the forethought to send Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the High Command, secretly to Paris to assure Rundstedt that his position as Commander in Chief West was secure.

  More than that: “Should the time ever come for your replacement because of failing health,” Keitel advised Rundstedt, “the Führer wishes you to know that only Field Marshal von Kluge is in the running to succeed you.” The Führer was aware that Rommel was no great strategist, not supreme commander material, continued Keitel; but he was a dynamic soldier. “You’ll find Rommel a tiresome person because he doesn’t like taking orders from anybody. In Africa, of course, he very much ran his own show. But the Führer believes you are the one man to whom even a Rommel will show due respect.” Rundstedt accepted this obvious flattery with an obliging smile, and retired to his luxurious suite upstairs in the Hôtel George V.

  Rommel drew enormous energy from his brief, auspicious contact with the Führer. After he flew back to Italy to wind up his affairs, he wrote enthusiastically: “What power he radiates! And what faith and confidence he inspires in his people!”

  By selecting Rommel,
Hitler had reasoned that alone of the Nazi commanders, Rommel had years of experience of fighting the British and Americans. These enemies knew and feared him. Besides, Hitler wanted to give Rommel a real chance to regain his lost renown.

  Rommel, though grateful, was by no means serene. There is a record of his attitude during this time in the diary of his former interpreter, Dr. Ernst Franz. Franz called at Rommel’s Lake Garda headquarters on November 15,1943, to give him birthday greetings—Rommel was then fifty-two. Rommel learned that the new Nazi governor appointed by Hitler for Istria and Dalmatia had issued orders conflicting with his own, and he telephoned Jodl in Franz’s presence to protest. “Tell your man,” he bellowed into the phone, “that I won’t have his little viceroys meddling around with my orders!” His voice still trembling with emotion, Rommel resumed his conversation with his ex-interpreter: “I’m afraid I can’t wish you well for the future, dear Franz, because the war is as good as lost and hard times lie ahead. All our propaganda about secret weapons is only bluff.” Franz was profoundly shocked by Rommel’s pessimism.

  On November 21 Rommel bid farewell to Mussolini and Kesselring— separately—then flew out of Italy and went home. Scared that something might happen to Lucie and Manfred at Wiener Neustadt, he had managed at last to move them; he had sent them to live in a village near Ulm, in his native Swabia. They had been quartered at nearby Herrlingen in the summer villa of a Frau Laibinger—widow of an Ulm brewer killed in a British air raid—while the city of Ulm prepared a more fitting domicile for their honored guest. Here in the Laibinger villa Rommel rested in the bosom of his loving family for the rest of November.