The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  Throughout April he lobbied to have General Geyr’s panzer divisions moved up toward the coast. The Twelfth SS Panzer Division (“Hitler Jugend”) lay widely dispersed inland and would take at least two days to reach even Caen in the face of heavy air attack, he argued. The Second Panzer Division was over fifty miles from the Somme sector of the coast. In each case, Rommel feared the enemy would set down antitank gun screens by air in the empty space between the panzer divisions and his Atlantic wall. “Things haven’t turned out the way I thought had been agreed on March 20,” he bitterly wrote to Lucie after the Paris meeting, referring to the promise of control over all forces. Rundstedt chuckled over Rommel’s discomfiture and told his chief of staff, Günther Blumentritt: “Rommel’s like an unlicked cub—not a fox at all. He’s too ambitious. In Africa things didn’t turn out too well for him, and now he dearly wants to be somebody here.”

  Rommel continued pushing for his own strategy. “Provided we succeed in bringing our mechanized divisions into action in the very first few hours,” he wrote to Jodl on April 23, “then I’m convinced that the enemy assault on our coast will be completely defeated on the very first day. . . . Contrary to what was agreed on March 20, however, they have still not been put under my control and they’re lying too far back from the coast, widely dispersed.” He added candidly, “I’ve had some hard words with Geyr about all this, and I can only get my own way if he is put under my orders in good time.” Prophetically, Rommel concluded: “If I have to wait for the enemy invasion actually to occur before I’m allowed to submit through routine channels an application for the panzer divisions to come under my orders and move forward, then they’ll probably arrive too late.”

  The Second Panzer Division was a case in point. Rommel wanted it on the Somme, north of Amiens, so that its leading battle group actually stood on the coast at Abbeville. Geyr wanted it far inland. Rundstedt diplomatically thought that somewhere in between might be best. On April 25, Rommel ordered the division pushed forward to touch Abbeville. Returning from the movies the next day, he found that it had not been advanced and he sharply attacked all the “obstructionists.” Ruge quoted him as stating quite bluntly: “The panzer divisions are going to be moved forward, whether they like it or not!”

  The result was an angry visit by General Geyr to the château on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, accompanied this time by General Guderian, Hitler’s own panzer expert, who was on a fact-finding tour of France. Guderian’s staff officer Baron Konrad von Woellwarth later wrote that it was a “decidedly tempestuous conference,” particularly when Geyr and Guderian learned that Rommel now proposed to dig in all the tanks on the coastline: “The very strength of panzer formations,” Woellwarth noted, “lay in their combination of firepower and mobility.” Guderian insisted that all the tanks must be held well out of range of the enemy’s warship artillery—all the landings in Italy had shown that. (He reported to Hitler: “We’ll have to lay down a precise stop line, forward of which no panzer divisions may be moved.”) Rommel was speechless at this lack of comprehension of the coming battle: “If you leave the panzer divisions in the rear, they will never get forward. Once the invasion begins, enemy air power will stop everything from moving.” Geyr insisted that his tanks could roll by night, or even by day if they kept to 150-yard spacings. Rommel educated him about the enemy’s parachute flares, that lit the night sky as bright as day.

  In retrospect, the arguments were evenly balanced. Given the enemy’s overwhelming air power, we can accept that both the Geyr and the Rommel strategies, if adopted wholeheartedly, would have amounted to the same thing. Hitler refused to accept Guderian’s advice favoring Geyr. The upshot was a feeble compromise. By a High Command order dated May 7, three—and only three—panzer divisions were turned over to Rommel: the very good Second Panzer, the reborn Twenty-first Panzer, with a strange complement of captured tanks, and the excellent 116th Panzer. The remaining four panzer divisions were left far inland as a High Command reserve. “The enemy’s intentions are at present so obscure,” General Jodl wrote to Rommel that day, “that some capability for strategic command must be maintained by means of keeping a separate, if modest, reserve. These High Command reserves will be released for operations—without further application by yourself—the moment we can be certain about the enemy’s intentions and focus of attack.” That sounded reasonable enough.

  Roughness of tongue no longer came easily to Rommel. He was mellowing to the timeless allures of France. He was putting on weight—the food was too good, and an afternoon’s hunt sometimes provided four wild boars for the château’s mess table. Once he went horseback riding, for the first time since 1939, on a tiresome and placid gray. He told Ruge that the horse would have been just the thing for a seventy-year-old country parson, and as he dismounted he sighed. “That was so tedious that now I’m itching with impatience all over,” he said. “I can’t stand tedious people either—I expected you’ve noticed that already!”

  Relations with the Rochefoucauld family deepened. The duchess had sent over four bottles of the château’s finest 1900 claret to celebrate the Führer’s birthday. Rommel’s younger staff officers took turns escorting the beautiful Countess Charlotte. In this part of France the upper classes were decidedly pro-German, fearing the consequences of communism for Europe, and the populace largely followed their lead. And of course there was the ancient antagonism, in these parts, to Britain. Rommel traveled freely, without a bodyguard.

  Strolling in the woods with Hellmuth Lang on a glorious spring afternoon, April 23, he ruefully contrasted all this beauty with the ugliness of war. And again he shuddered at the responsibility he had accepted for the survival of the Nazi Reich. “History,” he said, “takes account only of those who know victory. There is no art in being a warlord for a wealthy country, richly endowed with all the materials for war. But I—I have to be satisfied with what little I’ve got, and try to defeat the enemy with only the most modest means. And defeated they must be, if Bolshevism is not to triumph over us. Even then, when we have defeated Britain and the United States, the war with Russia won’t be over because it has enormous resources of men and raw materials. Perhaps,” he predicted, “perhaps then a united Europe will come forward to fight this enemy.” Lang carefully recorded these somber words in the Rommel diary.

  Agents were now reporting that the enemy invasion was slated to begin in the first or third week of May 1944. Again Rommel turned his attention to the Fifteenth Army’s defenses. He wrote to Manfred on his return, “In Britain morale is very low. There’s one strike after another, and the screams of ‘Down with Churchill and the Jews’ and ‘We Want Peace’ are growing louder—bad omens for such a risky offensive.” (He evidently still believed everything that Goebbels told him.) Still his ever restless brain grappled with the tactical problems. Brainstorm after brainstorm issued from the château. He suddenly ordered the erection of powerful floodlights and flares on masts along the beaches, pointing seaward, to dazzle and dismay the invasion craft at the very last moment before they hit the barriers: “Landing against the glare of floodlights will be extraordinarily difficult for the enemy,” he announced. He personally briefed commanders on unorthodox ways of destroying both gliders and paratroops—there were to be booby traps and grenades on the antiglider obstacles strung across the fields. “You’ve got to visualize them fluttering in by moonlight like swarms of locusts!”

  In five heavy Wehrmacht automobiles he and his staff set out on April 29 for another look at the Biscay and Mediterranean defenses. There was little for his posse of war reporters to record, but on the drive through the Pyrenees mountains he did stop beneath a prominent rocky overhang near Perpignan, climb out onto the road and strike a familiar pose for the photographers: “The British are bound to recognize that rock formation,” he explained. “Now they’ll see I’ve been down here too.”

  He arrived back at his château late on May 3, eager to phone Herrlingen. One of his terriers, Elbo, sighted the familia
r leather topcoat and marshal’s baton, yelped with joy and shot out toward him from under the desk—skidding and splaying so comically that Rommel shook with laughter. He was in good form. The call to Lucie was put through. She told him that their puppy Ajax had just been run over outside the villa. Rommel consoled her. Before putting the phone down, he asked, “Can you send me a sketch of your shoe size? I’m going to buy you a pair in Paris for June sixth.” June the sixth—that was Lucie’s fiftieth birthday.

  Hitler had still not fallen for the Allies’ Fortitude deception. He was now more certain than ever that the invasion would come in Normandy, and a phone call went to General Speidel—in Rommel’s absence—late on May 1 to say that the Führer impatiently wanted information on the prospects of Marcks’s corps being able to defend Normandy. At a war conference the next day, without waiting for Speidel’s answer, Hitler decided to inject even stronger forces into the Normandy and Brittany peninsulas—a paratroop corps and airborne troops as well. Interestingly, the war diary of Naval Group West shows that Admiral Theodore Krancke had also deduced—from the pattern of the enemy’s bombing and mine laying efforts, and from such Luftwaffe reconnaissance photos of southern England as there were—that the big ports of Le Havre and Cherbourg were likely to be the enemy’s main invasion objectives. But for months there had been an ugly personal feud between Rommel’s naval aide, Admiral Ruge, and Admiral Krancke, and Krancke’s views either did not reach the château or were disregarded. Rommel’s eyes remained on the Channel coast.

  When General Dollmann proposed, on May 5, shifting the whole of the Seventy-fourth Corps from Brittany to Normandy if there were to be a large-scale invasion there, Rommel rejected the idea. And when Lieutenant General von Schwerin—who was now commanding the 116th Panzer Division—reported to him the same day, Rommel briefed him: “We expect the invasion on either side of the Somme estuary.” He dictated to Hellmuth Lang: “I’m more confident than ever before. If the British give us just two more weeks, then I won’t have any more doubts about it.” And to Lucie on May 6, “I’m looking forward with the utmost confidence to the battle—it may be on May 15, it may not be until the end of the month.” He did curiously telephone the High Command that day to inquire just why they had ordered the reinforcement of Normandy. Jodl replied that the Führer had “certain information” that Cherbourg was the first strategic objective. “Furthermore,” he disclosed, “we have intelligence reports that British experiments at penetrating your types of beach obstacles have been successful.” This evidently jolted Rommel: he telephoned General Marcks to expect a visit from him in Normandy in three days’ time.

  He set out early on May 9 toward Normandy, grumbling with skepticism. The first thing he noticed was that there was much less enemy air activity in the Seventh Army’s sector than in the Fifteenth Army’s, which reinforced that skepticism. But everywhere he could see the results of his efforts. Veritable forests of stakes and fiendish obstacles darkened every beach. Miles of the countryside across the root of the Cherbourg peninsula had been flooded on his orders. Roads were mined and barricaded. There were troops and guns everywhere. He dined with Marcks at Saint-Lô (“We get on well together,” wrote Marcks, “although we’re two very different types”) and finished his two-day tour with a visit to General Edgar Feuchtinger’s Twenty-first Panzer Division at Falaise.

  Feuchtinger was a Nazi Party favorite—he had organized each annual Nuremberg Rally—but he still evidently lacked military discipline, because at eight A.M. there was nobody at the panzer regiment’s headquarters. When the colonel, von Oppeln-Bronikowski, eventually arrived, trailing alcohol fumes, Rommel snorted: “You’re lazy stinkers! What happens if the enemy invasion begins before eight-thirty?” The colonel gasped, “Catastrophe!” and slumped into a chair. Amazingly, the field marshal took no action. Ruge explained in his diary, “Rommel saw at once that he was a good fellow, and he didn’t hold this lapse against him.”

  Most of Feuchtinger’s officers had never had anything to do with tanks before—Feuchtinger had resourcefully mechanized the division with an extraordinary array of captured Czech, French and Russian tanks. If the enemy invaded Normandy, Feuchtinger’s would be the only panzer division on the spot.

  Afterward, Marcks, the corps commander in Normandy, wrote a half-serious letter home: “Opinion at present is that the Tommies have decided to tackle me. . . . I’ve been given a lot of fine new soldiers, and I’ve been busy unpacking them from their cardboard boxes and setting them up. This brings the number [in the Eighty-fourth Corps] up to more than 100,000. It’s highly gratifying to see the number and the quality of divisions that we can still turn out in this, the fifth war year! The latest to arrive here (the Ninety-first Airborne Division) is a real elite: we had nothing remotely like it left by 1918. So I’m looking into the future in good heart, whatever they choose to throw at me. I’ve got this hunch that things won’t start heating up until about my birthday.” Like Lucie Rommel, General Marcks had his birthday on June the sixth.

  HANS SPEIDEL’S arrival brought to the château a casualness that Rommel soon learned to copy. Although the tension was slowly building to a climax, Rommel went on long strolls with his terriers, or hunting with the French landowners, while Speidel stayed behind to take care of things.

  On May 12, they threw a sumptuous banquet for General Eduard Wagner, the army’s powerful quartermaster general. Rommel knew that Wagner took a delight in food and hoped to bribe him in this way to give the Atlantic wall more weapons, like bazookas, that were in short supply. It never occurred to the plain-minded field marshal that Speidel had other aims: that the real motive for Wagner’s visit was to confer with Speidel on Hitler’s overthrow—indeed, his assassination. (Speidel admitted this motive in his earliest postwar manuscripts, then later denied it.) By this time, the Berlin conspirators had given Speidel the go-ahead to try to enlist the field marshal.

  They needed Rommel’s name to make their deeds palatable to the broad mass of the army after Hitler’s assassination. Early in May, the ex-chief of the General Staff, General Ludwig Beck—one of the key conspirators—had sent an intermediary to Paris to urge the military governor, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, to prepare a putsch there to be coordinated with the assassination attempt. The intermediary, code-named “Baron von Teichmann,” then went to Zurich and filed a report on May 17 for the Swiss secret service. “Beck also asked me,” he wrote, “to get Stülpnagel to approach Rommel as soon as possible and inform him that Hitler was to be assassinated.”

  Stülpnagel decided to work through Speidel and had no difficulty approaching him, since Speidel had been his chief of staff in 1940. Moreover, Dr. Max Horst—Speidel’s brother-in-law—was on Stülpnagel’s Paris staff and himself one of the plotters there. Horst briefed Speidel on his mission, at the Hôtel Raphael in Paris. “Speidel promised to proceed with the utmost caution and cunning,” wrote another eyewitness of the meeting. Speidel warned it would not be easy to convert Rommel into the kingpin of a coup d’état.

  Of all these activities Rommel remained happily unaware. He still trusted Speidel. Years later, Meise recalled in a letter, “They were both Swabians. You used to see them talking in Swabian dialect to each other—they understood each other.” But they did not, because Speidel had now started his endeavor.

  New faces began to appear at the château—people invited into the plot by Speidel. They invariably visited him during Rommel’s absence at the front—the diaries establish this. For instance, there was a well-known author, Ernst Jünger, now an army captain on Stülpnagel’s staff; he was drafting a peace manifesto for the plotters. He came late on May 13, just after Rommel had left to inspect the Fifteenth Army. “We ate together,” wrote Jünger in a diary, “strolled in the park and then downed a bottle of wine high up in the oldest portion of the château, under the Norman battlements. . . . It does you good to see that Speidel doesn’t suffer the malady of those other chiefs of staff you see withdrawing late at night to their r
ooms, laden with bulging piles of urgent papers. About him there is the aura of calm that reminds you of the steadiness of the axle of a big wheel, or the eye of a cyclone.” Jünger watched Speidel as he gazed at a flower and remarked on the beauty of the Seine valley unfolding beneath them with its meadows and trees in full blossom. Together they ambled through the village. The wisteria was blooming, the white stars of the clematis, the lilac and laburnum, an intoxicating mixture of color and fragrance. “The war in Europe,” said Speidel after a while, “will be all over by this autumn.”

  That was not Rommel’s view, of course. He was getting ready for a long battle. He had driven off from the château that morning, May 13, for a last look at the Fifteenth Army. “I’m glad it was I who landed this job,” he had dictated to Lang for the diary that same day, “because before it, people were writing me off as a sick man. But the Führer trusts me, and that’s good enough for me.” He was boisterous and cheerful. Seeing the Second Panzer Division still practicing mobile warfare, he yelled, “When they come, don’t start maneuvering—just keep shooting.” Another division complained it lacked machine guns. Rommel retorted, “Then take the guns off the enemy when they drop in on you!”

  General von Salmuth beamed at Rommel’s praise of his fortifications along the Channel coast. After lunch—in the subterranean bowels of an immense V weapon bunker being built near Le Châtel—he delivered a speech of congratulations for Rommel. Division commanders proudly announced their totals: one had emplaced 98,000 stakes, another 96,000. Rommel himself distributed accordions as prizes for the biggest totals. Altogether by this date 517,000 beach obstacles had also been dragged, rammed, pile-driven or water-jetted into position along the coast; over 30,000 were already loaded with Teller mines. Over four million mines had been laid in the Death Zone. Only in Normandy was the result more threadbare; bombing had disrupted rail and road transports of the necessary cement and materials. Here the antiairborne-landing obstacles had only just been begun, and beach obstacles had been completed only along the high-water mark. But now Admiral Krancke was warning loudly that the enemy would probably change their invasion tactics and land at low tide instead—intelligence observation of British invasion trials earlier in May, and decoded signals, had established this.