by David Irving
As of this day, Rommel has been given tactical command of all the troops on the coast confronting England. Moreover, Rundstedt has gone on five weeks’ leave, leaving Rommel effectively free of supervision. To Rommel, it is a fine feeling to dictate the destinies of men again.
On the tenth, General Warlimont of the High Command has telephoned Hitler’s approval of Rommel’s basic intention of defeating the enemy on the beaches.
Rommel has been given dictatorial powers to this end. He can flood the countryside by damming rivers or, more ruthlessly, letting in the sea. He can uproot and evacuate the French and Belgians living in the six-mile Death Zone he has marked along the coast. He can rip down buildings if they obstruct his artillery’s field of fire, and he can cut down entire forests to find the wood he needs.
Thus he transforms the coastline of western Europe.
An expert on coastal defense has arrived to help Rommel. He is Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, a jovial, cocky Swabian. Ruge had organized the coastal defense forces of France, then become chief naval officer in Italy. Now he is Rommel’s naval aide.
I called on Friedrich Ruge many times at his home in the ancient university town of Tübingen. We would talk for hours over sherry and plates of genteel cakes. My father had fought against him in the great sea battles of the First World War, and it turned out that as an exercise he had translated into German a volume of doggerel, Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes, that I had learned to recite as a child. We got on well, and the admiral handed over to me transcripts of his unpublished diaries to explore. He had written them in shorthand, so he had felt it safe to include many of the indiscretions that Rommel uttered over the next climactic months of his life.
From General Meise, Rommel learned that there were enough captured explosives in France to manufacture about eleven million antipersonnel mines. On January 13, Rommel indicated to the visiting General Jodl that he wanted two million mines per month. But even this figure grew. Ruge records a luncheon on January 26 with a visiting general who, discussing mine laying, happened to say: “The fact that there are one million square meters in a square kilometer doesn’t occur to most people.”
That caught Rommel’s attention, and he asked Meise: “How many mines can we lay in a square kilometer, then? I make it sixty-five thousand.” This gave him, by mid-March, a new target figure. By the time he had mined a one-kilometer strip on the seaward side of the Death Zone, and the strip on the landward side—against airborne landings—and filled in the gap between them, his troops would have laid two hundred million mines in France. He did not doubt the feasibility.
His energy appalled his staff and the field commanders. He always left his headquarters before eight A.M. And after the slack months in Italy, he began to jerk his body back into shape.
He began hunting and shooting again, to take exercise. He stomped across the muddy fields around Fontainebleau until his limbs ached, gunning down the rabbits, hares and wild boars that were foolish enough to cross his path. It was only the return of his old lumbago trouble that stopped Rommel from indulging his hunting urge still more.
On January 16 he again visited Salmuth’s Fifteenth Army on the Channel coast. The superior echelon here was the Eighty-first Corps.
The corps had already laid 253,000 mines, mostly on either side of Cayeux-sur-Mer. The general explained that Salmuth was requiring each sapper to lay ten mines a day. “Make that twenty,” snapped Rommel.
In private, Salmuth objected to the stiff demands being made by Rommel on his troops. They were getting so exhausted after a day with the pick and shovel that they had no time for real weapons training. “When the battle begins,” protested Salmuth, “I want fresh, well-trained soldiers—not physical wrecks.”
Rommel decided to show who was now in command. “Evidently you don’t intend to carry out my orders,” he said in challenge.
Salmuth resorted to Rommel’s own tactics—he just scoffed at the field marshal and then patronizingly advised: “Stick around a bit, and you’ll soon see that you can’t do everything at once. Your program is going to take at least a year to put into effect. If anybody tells you different, then he’s either just trying to flatter you or he’s a pig idiot.”
Rommel waited until his staff had rejoined their cars, then let fly at Salmuth until he was hoarse. Then both lapsed into silence. Very red in the face, Salmuth escorted him to his car. As it started back to Fontainebleau, Rommel cocked a thumb at Salmuth’s receding figure and beamed at Ruge: “He’s quite a roughneck, that one. That’s the only language he understands.”
To Lucie the next day the field marshal wrote, “I think we’re going to win the battle for the defense of the west for certain—provided we get enough time to set things up.” Think Victory!
He had circulated all his requirements to his commanders. The document began with the simple statement: “The main battle line is to be the beach itself.” Before any enemy landing craft could even reach that beach, he insisted, it must brave mines and murderous arrays of underwater stakes and obstacles. Behind the beaches would be the heavily mined Death Zone, with its infantry and artillery strongpoints; every man capable of pointing a rifle was to be in them, even the bakery companies. Behind the zone would wait—if Rommel got his way—the precious panzer divisions, with their tanks and artillery dug in and waiting to pound the beaches with shellfire.
He had still not gotten his way over the panzer divisions, however. Fighting desperate battles in Russia and southern Italy, Hitler’s military reserves were overextended. Moreover, on January 22 the U.S. Fifth Army landed a corps at Anzio, only a bit south of Rome—just as Rommel had predicted. The High Command’s only panzer reserves now were those in France, so there was no possibility of letting Rommel embed them permanently in his coastal defense system. Besides, there were long seasons when a major invasion of France was an impossibility. Rundstedt’s chief tank expert, General Baron Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, was schooling the available panzer divisions for sweeping cross-country operations to annihilate the enemy after they had landed.
Rommel met him on January 8, and saw him at once as the typical red-trousered, blinkered General Staff officer. He discounted Geyr’s vast battlefield experience in Russia as irrelevant to the coming campaign. Geyr, for his part, was horrified at what Rommel proposed to do with the panzer divisions—pushing them into the store window, so to speak, as fixed artillery behind a fixed Death Zone. Neither man budged in his views. Both were Swabian, both with a personal pride bordering—as the American interrogators later said of Geyr—“upon the ridiculous,” and both obstinate to the point of pigheadedness. From this point on, the files and diaries fulminate with the increasingly explosive controversy.
Eleven weeks after getting the job from Hitler, Rommel went for the first time to look at the more distant coastline, the Brittany peninsula. It was held by the Seventh Army. He started on January 22, and at Le Mans, the Seventh’s headquarters, he discussed the possible enemy invasion areas with General Friedrich Dollmann. General Dollmann was sixty-two, unusually tall, imposing—the product not of a long line of soldiers but of a civil service family. He had commanded the Seventh Army for more than four years. Rommel was sure the enemy would invade not Dollmann’s area but Salmuth’s Fifteenth Army, Dollmann’s neighbor on the right. “His main argument,” recalled Dollmann’s chief of staff, General Max Pemsel, “was the shorter distance the enemy would have to go to reach Germany’s vitals, the Ruhr region.” Dollmann found the new arrangement which subordinated him to Rommel—a former junior—most distasteful. As the diaries of both Rommel and Army Group B establish, he tried to draw Rommel’s attention to the advantage to the enemy of invading Normandy. The countryside of small fields and giant hedgerows positively invited airborne operations, as did the Cherbourg peninsula with the big seaport at its tip. The whole army sector was only weakly fortified. His troops had between them ninety-two different types of guns, 252 different types of shells and only 170 of the excellent seventy-five-millimeter an
titank guns and sixty-eight eighty-eights. In Brittany, one division was required to defend a 150-mile front, while another was holding even more, a 180-mile sector.
On January 29 Rommel again set off, this time for Normandy itself. He was crippled by lumbago but carried on for three days, touring the blustery beaches and driving through unsuspecting towns and hamlets with names like Caen and Falaise, Cherbourg and Sainte-Mère-Église. At Caen, he called on the 716th Infantry Division, in the green meadow landscapes and the fertile plains of the bocage country. Did he pause for a glimpse at Caen itself—its fine old patrician houses rich with wood carvings, its 900-year-old Abbaye aux Dames and the twin Abbaye aux Hommes which contained the remains of William the Conqueror? What would become of these buildings if the fourteen-inch guns of the British battle fleet opened fire and the enemy’s strategic bomber forces arrived overhead?
Then to Saint-Lô, to meet the general commanding the corps defending the Normandy sector, the Eighty-fourth. General Erich Marcks was a tough soldier. A master of military strategy, he had devised the General Staffs original plan for the attack on the USSR—and had paid the price by losing a leg in that campaign. Now he was in Normandy with a wooden leg, grimly determined to wreak revenge on the British for killing half his family in a night air raid. Death on the battlefield was the highest honor to generals like Marcks—and it was an honor the enemy would bestow on him just six days after the battle began. He spoke optimistically but Rommel rebuked him for not packing everything he had into the main battle line. Rommel noted in his diary with some disappointment: “Generally speaking, the troops are not working hard enough on the construction of defenses. They just don’t realize how urgent it is. Everywhere there’s a tendency to squirrel away reserves, and this will lead to the weakening of the coastal front.”
Rommel had made an unforgettable impression on Marcks. The corps commander wrote to his surviving son: “Rommel’s the same age as me but looks older—perhaps because Africa and its many trials have left their mark on him. He’s very frank and earnest. He’s not just a flash in the pan, he’s a real warlord. It’s a good thing that A[dolf] H [itler] thinks a lot of him, for all his bluntness, and gives him these important jobs.” Rommel’s own judgment on the troops in Normandy was harsh: “There’s still a lot to do, because many a man here has been living a soft life and hasn’t thought enough about the battles that are coming.” So he wrote to Lucie. And to Manfred: “In times of peace men grow lazy and self-content.”
Like an ugly rash, Rommel’s beach obstacles began springing up all along the coast of northwestern Europe. There were concrete and steel tetrahedrons, concrete dragon’s teeth, jagged steel “Czech hedgehogs” welded from girders at right angles, and other nameless and indescribable devices, all of them made to rip or pierce the bottoms of Allied landing craft. Rommel lived only for his mission now. No amount of persuasion would get him to stay behind to inspect the fabled Mont-Saint-Michel on his first visit to the broad, sandy bay. He was far more concerned about the huge expanse of sand—ideal for airborne landings. “It needs two flak batteries up on top,” he announced, pointing to the abbey’s fairy-tale spires. He was not joking. Colonel von Tempelhoff, his new operations officer, wrote in annoyance on January 26, “On our journeys with the field marshal we always drive straight past the monuments and fine architecture. He’s so completely wrapped up in his job that he’s totally uninterested in anything else except the military needs of the moment. We notice this particularly during the communal meals with him each day.” (In Italy it had been the same: they had driven straight through Pisa, despite protests from his staff. “How long has the tower been leaning already?” barked Rommel. “Then drive on, it will still be leaning when the war is over.”)
Once at Saint-Malo, lunching in the villa that had belonged to the British industrialist Alfred Mond, Gause showed him lovingly a vase he had just found: it had been produced by the famous porcelain works at Sèvres. Rommel’s face lit up. “Porcelain! Meise, why don’t we use china for our land mine casings?”
With great ingenuity, he devised new defense techniques. He suggested they try injecting the heavy timber stakes into the beach with the jet of fire hoses. Sure enough, the idea worked: the posts could be embedded to their full depth in the sand in three minutes, compared with the forty-five minutes using conventional pile drivers. Rommel then ordered the troops to clamp mines to the obstacles as well, and to arm the other obstacles with “thorns”—savage iron spikes and jagged steel plates designed to tear open the hulls of landing craft like can openers. To overcome the shortage of mines, Rommel devised ways of using the 1,200,000 obsolete shells at his disposal.
The lethal “nutcracker” mine was a shell embedded in a concrete block, with a plank of makeshift trigger to detonate it whichever way a ship brushed past it. He also sketched the tackle and techniques for emplacing these unwieldy artifacts far down the beaches—using floating cranes, or boats, or teams of plow horses. The drawings were printed and distributed to commanders throughout his territory. To overcome other shortages, he established factories for concrete and tetrahedrons, he built power stations, he reopened coal mines. Above all, Rommel’s activity created something intangible, here in the west: soldier morale. Gradually the feeling spread that there was a chance of victory after all.
His stocky figure, clad in the new leather topcoat he had bought in Paris, was seen everywhere, advertising his formidable presence. He told the war photographers who accompanied him: “Do what you like with me, if it results in even a one-week postponement of the enemy’s invasion.” From February 7 to 11 he drove 1,400 miles, inspecting the First and Nineteenth armies on the Biscay and Mediterranean coasts. But this journey was only to deceive the enemy into believing that he was everywhere.
Back at Fontainebleau after that, mounds of paper work awaited him. He still found time to write to Lucie, about his work, his concern about the Russian front—now under heavy Red Army attack in the north and south—and Italy. However, he was convinced that Hitler would master these crises, too.
Twenty years later, General Meise recalled that to the very end his chief used language of qualified admiration for the Führer—but not for the other Nazis around him. Once the general tried talking politics with Rommel, but only once. Rommel interrupted, “Meise—you and I can only talk politics if we’re in an open field with nobody else in sight for two hundred yards all around.” Rommel described Hitler as a fantast, a visionary: “If you see him entirely alone, you can talk quite reasonably with him. But then Martin Bormann and Company come in, and he reverts to his old form.”
Old Rundstedt returned from leave on February 21. The next day Rommel left for ten days’ well-earned leave himself. He flew home in his Heinkel—although such private flights were now explicitly forbidden because of Germany’s urgent gasoline shortage. But he was exhausted.
Over the past week he had again inspected the Fifteenth and Seventh army sectors and had observed a major war game organized by panzer expert Geyr in Paris on the seventeenth. Big differences of opinion had been expressed by the army, navy and air force generals. General Marcks had hobbled over to a map, thumped the Normandy coastline and insisted that the invasion would come there, coupled probably with one in Brittany—both aiming at the capture of the big port at Cherbourg. Rommel had replied equally firmly that his naval experts ruled out any invasion operation of Normandy, because of submerged reefs lying across the sea approaches. Geyr had lectured them on his plans for his Panzer Group West to wait in reserve, to fight the landed enemy days later on a killing ground of his own choice. German air power had been virtually nonexistent, in this war game version at least. Salmuth later wrote, “I was deeply shocked by it all.”
Lucie had by now moved their household into the big new villa at Herrlingen. When Rommel drove up the short, curving drive, he had a surprise for her—a year-old terrier called Ajax, given him by the Todt Organization. It barked loudly at strangers, so it would make a good watchdog, he
told her.
Lucie had something of a surprise for him, too—a visitor: the mayor of Stuttgart, Dr. Karl Strölin, who had won that office because of his early membership in the Nazi Party. He had served briefly in the same unit as Rommel in the First World War. He was a solid and worthy figure, big and upright. Unbeknown to Rommel, he was a member of the anti-Hitler conspiracy. Rommel noticed that he was nervously chain-smoking. From Lucie’s letters, it is clear that Strölin had in fact been putting out definite feelers toward Rommel for several months. When General Gause had flown on leave to Herrlingen earlier in February—where Lucie had kindly offered accommodation for his bombed-out wife—the mayor had come to the villa then and involved Gause and Lucie in long political discussions. Gause, ill and depressed after losing everything in that Berlin air raid, had listened readily. Strölin had then flattered Lucie, for all her shrewdness, with theater tickets, free accommodation at a luxury Stuttgart hotel, official cars, wonderful bouquets of flowers—and by the time the field marshal stepped across the threshold of the villa there was also a large painting, donated by Strölin, in which Rommel himself was the central figure.
Rommel had not come to talk politics with strangers. He wanted to be with Lucie and Manfred; he wanted to housebreak Ajax and stroll through the Swabian countryside. Politics interested him as little as Sèvres porcelain. But he politely agreed to see Strölin. The man took some papers out of his case and—in front of Lucie, Manfred and the adjutant Aldinger—launched into a dramatic speech about the criminality of the Hitler regime and the need for Rommel to step in, in person, to “save the Reich.” It was a powerful line. One of the papers was a memorandum prepared for the Ministry of the Interior. Others documented actual crimes committed by the Nazis. He spoke of massacres of Jews and others in the east, and concluded: “If Hitler does not die, then we are all lost!” At this Rommel rose to his feet and boomed: “Herr Strölin, I would be grateful if you would refrain from speaking such opinions in the presence of my young son!”