The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  HITLER’S FORMAL directive instructed Rommel to inspect the defenses of the entire coastline confronting England, starting in the north. On December 1 his staff assembled at the Munich railroad station and boarded his special train. For two weeks they toured the Danish coast. They marveled at the well-stocked food stores and the abundance of luxury goods that were just memories in war-torn Germany.

  The weather was bleak, the countryside monotonous—not at all like the sleepy valleys and defiles of his native Swabia. He thought it most unlikely that the enemy would invade Denmark, for the simple reason that the balance of air power here was in Germany’s favor. Isolated coastal gun batteries were the only defensive strongpoints. His telling comment, dictated to his new young staff officer Lieutenant Hammermann, was: “The main battle line is drawn too far back from the coast.” This restated the important principle that he had established in northern Italy: that massive invasion forces were best defeated at the beaches.

  On December 14 he took off for southern Germany and a few more days’ leave. It was a long flight from Denmark to Bavaria. Rommel watched the unbroken cloud banks glittering beneath his Heinkel in the afternoon sun. Facing him across the folding table was his new engineer expert, the bushy-browed General Wilhelm Meise. After a while, Rommel began to think out loud. “When the invasion begins,” he said, “our own supply lines won’t be able to bring forward any aircraft, gasoline, rockets, tanks, guns or shells because of the enemy attacks. That alone will rule out any sweeping land battles. Our only possible defense will be at the beaches—that’s where the enemy is always weakest.”

  Meise listened fascinated as Rommel described how he had decided to create an impregnable swathe of minefields and bunkers, six miles wide, along the entire Atlantic wall—like his terrifying El Alamein line, but fifty times as long. “I want antipersonnel mines, antitank mines, antiparatroop mines—I want mines to sink ships and mines to sink landing craft,” the field marshal exclaimed above the roar of the Heinkel’s engines. He took a sheet of paper. “I want some minefields designed so that our own infantry can cross them, but not the enemy tanks. I want mines that detonate when a wire is tripped; mines that explode when a wire is cut; mines that can be remote-controlled, and mines that will blow up when a beam of light is interrupted. Some of them must be encased in nonferrous metals, so that the enemy’s mine detectors won’t register them. . . .” And with a few deft lines he began drawing just what he had in mind.

  Meise later wrote: “Quite apart from Rommel’s greatness as a soldier, in my view he was the greatest engineer of the Second World War. There was nothing I could teach him. He was my master.”

  THE NEW ROMMEL family home would soon be ready. In 1942 the state had confiscated a villa in Herrlingen which was a Jewish old peoples’ home and begun converting it as a night refuge for the mayor of Ulm when the air raids began. But the Party had accused the mayor of “desertion” of his city, so the villa and its spacious grounds were still vacant. The city of Ulm willingly agreed to rent it to the celebrated field marshal. In December 1943 Russian prisoners were still excavating a twenty-foot-deep air raid shelter for the villa, and landscaping work in the gardens was incomplete; so Rommel again spent the two or three days with his family at the villa of the brewer’s widow. But one day he did stroll over to see his future home with his ex-adjutant Hermann Aldinger, who was directing the landscaping. He encountered the mayor of Herrlingen and asked two curious questions that the mayor still remembered ten years later. The first was: “Are there many Prussians around here? Don’t let so many Prussians come and live here!” And “What do you think of the war?” was the second—to which the gasping mayor could think of no safe reply.

  On December 18 Rommel arrived back in France for the first time since relinquishing command of the Spook Division in 1940. The balance had shifted grimly for the Germans since then. Now Hitler was facing the British Empire, the United States and the USSR, and Italy had changed to the enemy side. Air raids of 2,000 or 3,000 bombers were a commonplace. Millions of enemy troops were known to be training for the assault on Hitler’s “Fortress Europe”—and nobody yet knew where they would land. Rommel’s job was to stop them.

  He was quartered at Fontainebleau outside Paris, in Madame de Pompadour’s elegant château. It was a far cry from the battle trailer and tent of the Libyan desert, and Rommel did not like it. The next day, as he drove into Paris to pay his respects to Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the newspapers were full of his arrival. “Evidently I can’t be displayed soon enough to the British and Americans,” wrote Rommel—and it pleased him that his name still counted for so much.

  It was a long time since he had last seen Rundstedt. At sixty-eight, he was still Germany’s most senior soldier; he was the Grand Old Man, respected even by the French. He was loyal to the Reich, but ailing and decrepit. His eyes were circled and puffy; his skin was pale; his thinning hair was plastered to his scalp. He seldom began work before ten each morning, and he wasted hours reading detective novels or Karl May adventure stories, or playing with a big dachshund in the hotel conservatory. His attitude to Hitler was ambivalent. He damned him frequently—“Without Hitler’s consent I can’t even move my own sentry from my front door around to the back!”—but each time Hitler sacked him—in 1938,1941 and again in 1944—Rundstedt meekly accepted the new high office that the Führer subsequently gave him. Rundstedt was too ambitious an old soldier just to fade away.

  After lunch he briefed Rommel on the situation here in the west. He concluded, speaking in English (an affectation common among General Staff officers): “To me, things look black.” Rommel was frankly appalled by the lethargy of Rundstedt’s staff. He recalled only too well how the British had checkmated him in North Africa in early 1942 by laying over 1 million mines in two months; yet in three years only 1,700,000 mines had been laid here in France, and that figure was increasing at the rate of only 40,000 per month. He wrote that day to Lucie, “I’m going to throw myself into this new job with everything I’ve got, and I’m going to see it turns out a success.”

  In November 1943 the surviving Rommel diary resumes—now evidently kept for him by his much-decorated, one-eyed staff officer Lieutenant Hammermann. Among Rommel’s family papers I also found the war diaries of Rommel’s Army Group B. And the official files of the armies, corps and divisions in the west also still exist. Together, this material is extremely informative about the coming historic battles.

  But I chanced upon another source. I called on Lieselotte von Salmuth, a courtly, gray-haired widow then living in a rambling, echoing house in Wiesbaden full of the memories of her late husband. Colonel General Hans von Salmuth commanded one of the German armies in France in 1944, under Rommel. After several hours’ polite conversation, she suddenly said: “You know, I still have all my husband’s papers and diaries. They’re upstairs, in the attic. Nobody is ever going to see them.” She must have noticed my ears prick up. She smiled sweetly and said: “Nobody, not even you.” I left her an hour later and began a correspondence full of veiled entreaty. When I next set foot in her drawing room, there was a dusty brown leather suitcase on the floor. It contained all her husband’s papers.

  Right from the start, Rommel put his money on one hunch: that the most probable coastline to be invaded was the Fifteenth Army’s sector, extending from Belgium to the river Somme in France. He set out to tour it, with newsreel teams and war reporters in attendance.

  On December 20 he drove up to General Hans von Salmuth’s army headquarters, a rich, comfortable château near Tourcoing, for lunch. Salmuth was a hard-bitten Prussian-school commander, who had seen tough combat on the eastern front. Condescending toward Hitler’s “inspector,” Salmuth later admitted an instinctive dislike of generals like Rommel. But Rommel had Hitler’s ear, and if this helped inject fresh forces into the western front, then Salmuth was prepared to humor him.

  Rommel’s notes made it obvious that he had formed a clear—and, as it turned out, dramatically accu
rate—image of the enemy’s likely invasion tactics. First there would be violent bombing raids; then a seaborne landing on a broad front by hundreds of assault craft and armored landing craft, with fire cover provided by offshore warships and fighter-bombers; there would be simultaneous airborne landings a short distance inland, to prize open the Atlantic wall from the rear and help establish a quick bridgehead.

  There is a record of his first talk with Salmuth in the Fifteenth Army files too. It is clear from it that he had already begun to crystallize a defensive strategy. “Field Marshal Rommel’s view is that our defense forces must be concentrated much closer to the coast. Our reserves are to be brought up forward and thrown into an immediate counterattack. If the British once get a foothold on dry land, they can’t be thrown out again.” Rommel told him of his startling plan for a mine belt all along the coast. There were still 600,000 mines waiting to be laid; but even dummy minefields would help obstruct the enemy, as Africa had shown. Salmuth now warmed to the theme: “We’ll need above all to have powerful fighter defenses, and fast, once the invasion begins.” Rommel reassured him: “I’ve been promised a thousand fighter planes.” Salmuth exclaimed, “With a thousand fighters we can repulse any invasion attempt!”

  Rommel and Salmuth toured the Fifteenth Army’s sector—the heavily fortified ports, the existing puny minefields only twenty to fifty yards in depth, the pillboxes, the bombproof bunkers for motor torpedo boats at Dunkirk and the much-photographed twelve-inch gun battery on Cap Gris Nez, just twenty miles from the English coast.

  On Christmas Eve, he was also shown something really secret—the launching sites being built for Hitler’s wonder weapons. There were long-range rockets and pilotless flying bombs that would rain down on London when Hitler gave the word. Rommel was astounded to learn that the Nazis did have secret weapons ready after all—here was the evidence of it.

  At Wizernes was an awesome underground rocket-launching complex, forerunner of the missile silos of today. At nearby Mimoyecques, German engineers and slave laborers were building a subterranean gun battery with 400-foot barrels, permanently aligned on London 100 miles away. These missile sites were reason enough, in Rommel’s view, for the enemy to have to invade Europe right here.

  Over Christmas he stayed at his desk at Fontainebleau, writing up what he had seen. He was angered by the contrast between the bomb-gutted towns of Germany and the peacefulness of the French and Belgian towns and villages, he wrote Lucie. The hand of war had rested only briefly on them. “Day and night,” he went on, “I’m racking my brains on my new job. I’ve got high hopes that we’re going to pull this one off.” In fifty letters between now and June 1944, this was the message he kept repeating. It was as though he had consulted a psychiatrist about the bouts of pessimism to which he was prone, and the doctor had advised him to repeat two words over and over again to himself: Think Victory!

  When he had last spoken by phone to Lucie, she told him that their son had enlisted for antiaircraft defense—he was just fifteen. “Dear Manfred,” he wrote him. “In fourteen days you’ll be leaving your parental home and enlisting as a Luftwaffe auxiliary. So life begins in earnest for you. I hope you’ll bring us as much joy in uniform as you have up to now. A new way of life is starting for you. You’ll have to learn to obey the orders of your superiors without answering back. Often there’ll be orders that don’t suit you, or that you don’t get the point of. Obey without question. A superior can’t go into a long palaver with his subordinates. There just isn’t the time to give reasons for every order. Remember your moral upbringing and don’t fall into bad company. I’ve talked with you often enough about that. You know the importance I attach particularly to this question of conduct.” It brought a lump to the field marshal’s throat. It seemed only yesterday that Manfred’s rabbits had formed the center of his young life. And yet he hardly knew the boy.

  At his hilltop villa just outside Stuttgart—the city of which he is now mayor—I several times met and talked with Manfred Rommel. He is not much like his father, and in some ways finds the family name something of an encumbrance in his career: he has the talent and evident ability to get to the top without it, and he resents any hint to the contrary. He has a thick Swabian lisp and, as did the field marshal, inclines to a certain paunchiness; Manfred was successfully fighting this tendency over the two years that I saw him, and at the end of this period his suits were beginning to hang loosely on his formerly ample frame.

  “Late in 1943,” he told me, “I informed my father that I wanted to volunteer for the Waffen SS. At the time they were the elite, they had the best officers and most modern weapons and their uniform was smartest, too. ‘Out of the question!’ snapped my father. ‘You’ll join the same service as I did, thirty years ago.’

  “When I argued, my father admitted that the Waffen SS had fine fighting qualities but he did not want me under the command of SS chief Heinrich Himmler. ‘I have reason to believe that Himmler has been carrying out mass killings,’ my father explained. ‘I have heard that people like him are trying to burn the bridges of the German people behind them by actions like these.’ ”

  Rommel outlined his defense ideas to Field Marshal von Rundstedt over tea on December 27. Like Salmuth, Rundstedt also supported Rommel’s basic plan to defeat the enemy invasion actually on the beaches. But he differed with Rommel on one detail that was to prove important: he would not allow the panzer divisions to be moved right up to the coast, because, he said, if the enemy invasion then came somewhere else—“And for me too there is no doubt whatever that the main invasion will most probably come either side of the Somme”—the tanks could not be moved rapidly across from the sector that Rommel had committed them to.

  The new year, the momentous year of 1944, began. From January 2 to 5 Rommel inspected the next sector on his map—the coastlines of Holland and Belgium. He did not really expect the enemy to risk landing here, because the countryside was broken up by countless waterways and could be easily swamped as well. Again anger surged within him as he saw how little the tidy Belgian and Dutch towns and villages had suffered. “Everywhere the deepest peace,” he reflected on January 3, after a 300-mile drive. “They are well paid, they don’t have the crippling taxation that we do, and they just can’t wait to be liberated from us. Their towns are beautiful and are spared by the enemy. It makes you sick, when you think how hard our people are having to fight to defend our existence against all comers.”

  A related problem was that this “milk and honey” existence in the west had rubbed off onto the Nazi occupation troops. On paper, Rommel already had 1,300,000 troops here; but many of the coastal divisions were only units that had been sent here to be rehabilitated after fighting on the Russian front. Other divisions had little motor transport, few weapons and hardly any training. In most of the divisions the average age was thirty-seven. Seemingly unimportant gaps were being plugged with assortments of Russian troops who had volunteered to fight Stalin—only to find themselves now about to fight Americans, Canadians, Poles and British on French soil.

  To Rommel, Paris seemed like a Babel. He had not abandoned his own Puritan lifestyle—he still did not smoke and rarely touched alcohol. On New Year’s Eve his staff had seen him raise only two small glasses of claret to his lips. (Tempelhoff later recalled: “I once had to escort Montgomery in the fifties, and in this respect he reminded me very much of Rommel.”) In the Paris of January 1944 there was a thriving black market, and the restaurants, theaters, brothels and cabarets were heavily patronized by the troops. Rommel saw more soldiers in the streets with briefcases and parcels than with weapons and ammunition.

  When Hitler sent his trusted and proficient general Alfred Jodl to France early in January, he formed the same distasteful impressions. Jodl’s humiliating inspection report to Hitler was widely circulated and Rommel got a copy: “The C in C West,” wrote Jodl of Rundstedt, would do well to exchange his Hôtel George V for a command post where he can see the blue sky, where the sun sh
ines and which smells fresher.” Jodl added: “Lower headquarters and officers’ accommodations are a danger not only to security but also to inner attitudes and alertness. The bloom of war is completely missing. Deep armchairs and carpets lead to royal household allures. As of March 1, all staffs are to move into their command posts. Unfortunately,” Jodl sneered, “these too have largely been built next door to fine châteaux.”

  Rommel was equally shocked by the waywardness of the defense planning. His visit to the Luftwaffe commander in France—the 300-pound, sixty-five-year-old, heavy-jowled Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle—was another eye-opener. Sperrle stuck his monocle in his eye, propped up his vast bulk over a map of his airfields and nonchalantly explained that on the first day of the enemy’s invasion there would be virtually no Luftwaffe opposition at all. The ground organization had been readied for the squadrons, but these—including pilot-instructors and pupils—would not actually begin arriving from the Reich until some days after the invasion began. Rommel wrote, “The prospects here aren’t good at all. From all I had heard previously I’ve been expecting a lot more from this service.”

  A few days later he had a visit from his old friend from the Potsdam academy, Colonel Kurt Hesse, now a local field commandant based near Paris. Rommel confided to Hesse that he was going to ask for several changes in the lower commanders that he had so far met. They had done virtually nothing for the defense of France. He fixed Hesse with a serious look. “If we don’t succeed in driving the enemy back into the sea by the fourth day at the latest,” declared Rommel, “then their invasion will have succeeded.”

  Death Zone

  ON JANUARY 15,1944, Erwin Rommel dictates into his diary these words: “I have instructed that the troops are to ram stakes into the beaches as a barrier against landing craft.”