The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  As far as the Fifteenth Army’s sector was concerned, however, Rommel was 100 percent confident. As newsreel cameras whirred, he spoke to batteries of microphones and troops of the Wehrmacht and Todt Organization assembled in front of the big guns of Strongpoint Atlantic, south of Le Touquet on the Channel coast. He talked of his confidence—“the confidence I have with regard to the coming historic battle here in the west.” Throughout Germany, Rommel’s presence in France had inspired a wave of optimism. The secret Gestapo morale reports disclosed the remarkable fact that nearly everybody was looking forward to the invasion: “People see it as our last chance to turn the tide. There is virtually no fear of the invasion discernible.”

  “Mid-May already,” wrote the field marshal in mild puzzlement to Lucie on the fifteenth. “And still nothing doing. . . . I think it’s going to be a few more weeks yet.” That afternoon he drove to a country house outside Paris for the christening of a colonel’s daughter. Normally he detested christenings, but Speidel had begged him to make an exception. (In fact, Speidel wanted the excuse to meet Stülpnagel.) Rommel was photographed briefly with the infant, and with Stülpnagel and Bayerlein, the other godfathers, under the flowering chestnut trees, then returned to his château.

  Bayerlein was now commander of the crack Panzer Lehr Division, which had been specially established, down to the last armored personnel carrier, for anti-invasion operations. Rommel knew him, of course, from Africa and confided to him, “I’m afraid that things may go here as they did in North Africa—I’m afraid of our supply routes being bombed to pieces until finally nothing more is even crossing the Rhine, just as in Africa nothing was getting to me across the Mediterranean.”

  Because he could not get away, Rommel telephoned Hitler at noon the next day, May 16, to report progress. He described the multiple rocket launchers developed by General Feuchtinger: “I can well imagine that these could be fired from bunkers in broadsides of forty-eight at a time. They travel five thousand yards. Feuchtinger tells me he’s quite capable of procuring the rocket ammunition.” Hitler approved the idea. Rommel proudly added, “The morale here of commanders and troops alike is magnificent. One corps has already planted 900,000 stakes against airborne landings, and it’s gotten hold of a million grenades to arm them with explosives over the next weeks.” It was the first time in his life that he had phoned Hitler. Afterward, he wrote home: “He was in the best of spirits and didn’t spare his congratulations on our work here in the west. I hope to make faster progress than ever now.” Ruge, who had listened in on an earpiece, was fascinated by Hitler’s remarks. Speidel—who had also listened in—was less pleased: the prospects of enlisting the field marshal for his anti-Hitler conspiracy must have seemed more distant than ever.

  After that, Rommel drove briefly back to Normandy to check that General Marcks was bringing all his reserves into the front line, as Rommel had dictated. “I can’t venture too far afield right now,” he explained to Lucie. “One never knows when the balloon will go up.” Later that day, May 17, he drove on into Brittany. The sun shone, the country was dazzling with apple blossoms. At Le Val-André, where mile upon mile of empty beaches had stretched before him on his last visit, there was now an impenetrable thicket of Rommel obstacles— barbed wire, tetrahedrons, concrete dragon’s teeth, Czech hedgehogs and timber stakes topped with Teller mines or steel “can openers.” He dined with the local commanders and reminisced nostalgically about the booty of Tobruk two years before—the pineapples, English beer, crabs’ legs and other delicacies—and he told them about the captured New Zealander, Brigadier G. H. Clifton, who four times escaped and was four times recaptured in the desert. Long after dark, Rommel was drawn back to the beach again, and he strolled with Admiral Ruge deep into his manmade forest of deadly obstacles. “Let the enemy invade us now,” he told a division commander the next day, “but with trembling knees.”

  He drove back to La Roche-Guyon, content. He himself would have liked to go to Herrlingen, but he wrote to Lucie there could be no thought of that. However, when General Speidel asked if he might take a few days of home leave again over Pentecost, Rommel indulgently agreed. Speidel left on May 24. In fact, he was going to consult with other anti-Hitler conspirators in Württemberg.

  It was on the twentieth that the two British commandos, sent as part of the Fortitude deception, were driven to Rommel’s headquarters for interrogation. Their capture near the Somme estuary seemed another indication as to where the invasion was likely to come, although Lieutenant Lane said he thought the Somme–Dieppe coastline was too heavily fortified to be invaded. He was asked, “Are such commando spy missions really necessary, if the invasion is imminent?” Lane answered: “The invasion is not imminent at all—you overestimate our enterprising spirit!”

  There was nothing more that Rommel could do but wait. He went on rabbit hunts or strolled with Ruge and Meise in the woods. The terriers went with them—young Treff bouncing excitedly about the fields like a rubber ball. When the rabbits went to ground, Rommel borrowed ferrets from the French farmers to fetch them out. From Germany there were alarming reports of new air raids, including some on Stuttgart, capital of Swabia. He wondered how Manfred’s antiaircraft battery had made out. Once he was forced into the tunnels of the château as enemy bomber squadrons glittered past thousands of feet overhead. “The French are suffering badly,” he informed Lucie on May 29. “Three thousand dead among their population in the last forty-eight hours alone.” It was the preinvasion bombardment beginning.

  ON WHIT SUNDAY, the twenty-eighth, he drove to the forest of Choisy. He chatted with Lang about Göring and the Luftwaffe: “While the others were building up their air power, we were fast asleep. Now we’re paying the penalty. My impression is that the people around the Führer often didn’t tell him their real opinions about the situation.” At the edge of the forest, they climbed back into their car and drove over to see the Marquis de Choisy, whose friendship Rommel had made in 1940. The marquis was an imposing person, though rather frail now. His son had been fighting for three years with the Wehrmacht in Russia. The mother was pert and lively, without a kind word for the British. Rommel already knew their daughter, a fresh-faced young girl who had often visited her relatives, the Rochefoucaulds, at the château. “These people,” wrote Lang that day, “are staking everything on Germany and this is what the Chief wants. Because then, when the invasion comes, they’ll have to side with us because they’ve already compromised themselves too far. The Chief’s view is that Germans and French—and all Europe—must stand united if our crusade against Bolshevism is to be won.” (The marquis was hanged later by De Gaulle.)

  Back at La Roche-Guyon, Rommel and Lang sat up late with the Rochefoucaulds. Rommel thought the duke rather a lifeless old gentleman, but his heart was evidently in the right place because when they left for their own quarters he raised his family to their feet to drink a toast: “To Germany’s victory.” A few days later, Rommel could not help noticing that the four beautiful tapestries that had hung for centuries in his vast study had quietly been removed and put in storage—so evidently the family believed the invasion was about to begin.

  There is no contemporary evidence that Rommel’s views on the target and prospects of the invasion had changed. All the evidence still pointed to the Fifteenth Army’s sector, closest to the English coast: it was attracting two enemy reconnaissance flights for every one over the Seventh Army. In this last week there were 246 enemy air raids on targets north of the Seine, and only thirty-three south of the river. (Rommel’s weekly reports spoke of the mounting French public anger at the enemy over these raids.) Provided the enemy invaded here, Rommel knew he could defeat them. He appealed to Jodl in a letter on May 23 for Hitler to begin his missile attack on London as soon as possible, to throw another wrench in the enemy’s works and provide them with another urgent reason to capture the Fifteenth Army’s sector—the secret missile-launching sites. Unexpected confirmation was brought from England by none other than
Hans Cramer, the last commander of the Afrika Korps, somewhat improbably repatriated to Nazi Germany because of his bad asthma! He called on Rommel, and tipped him off that the enemy invasion would be on either side of the Somme.

  Rommel checked the moon and tide tables: there were no good invasion tides until after June 20. He spent June 2 hunting with his marquis, and went to Paris the next day to see Rundstedt and pick up the shoes for Lucie. Rundstedt’s written appreciation was, “There is still no sign that the invasion is imminent.” That day, however, Rommel did send out a significant instruction to his commanders, without fully realizing what he was saying: “The enemy has conducted repeated invasion maneuvers at low tide, which means we may have to take such an invasion seriously into account.” All Rommel’s beach obstacles had, of course, been built on the assumption of a high-tide invasion. A rush program would have to begin now to push the obstacles down to the low-tide line as well. “You are to try to complete this by June 20,” his order concluded.

  The next morning, June 4, Rommel drove to Germany on leave. He took Colonel von Tempelhoff, his operations officer, with him, and left Speidel at the château to mind the store. Lucie would get her shoes.

  At Hitler’s headquarters, a less sanguine mood prevailed. Jodl’s High Command staff—correctly expecting the invasion target to be the Cherbourg peninsula—checked their tide tables and warned Hitler on June 2, “Favorable invasion dates occur between June 5 and 13.”

  In France, such warnings went unheeded. Some people there even began to doubt there would be an enemy invasion, such was the triumph of Fortitude. That was certainly the view of Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle’s Luftwaffe superiors. It was the view of General Blumentritt (“I’m beginning to think it’s all been one big British hoax”). And in the diary of Luftwaffe major Werner Beumelberg on July 23 is the startlingly similar remark that Cramer said he had heard from Rommel before his departure: “There’s not going to be an invasion. And if there is, then they won’t even get off the beaches!”

  Only the one-legged General Erich Marcks was still uneasy, as he surveyed the two divisions in the Calvados area of the Normandy coastline, the 716th and 352nd: each had a thirty-mile sector to defend. “It’s the weakest sector of my whole corps,” he had conceded to Salmuth on May 30, when Rommel brought all his senior commanders to Caen for a weapons display. A couple of days later Marcks again stood there, on a hill at Arromanches-les-Bains, gazing out to sea as though he expected to see warships come up over the horizon. He told an army captain at his side, “If I know the British, they’ll go to church next Sunday for one last time, and sail Monday [June 5]. Army Group B says they’re not going to come yet, and that when they do come it’ll be at Calais. So I think we’ll be welcoming them on Monday, right here.”

  With Their Pants Down

  NEAR A RUINED CITY in France, Rommel stands with a tattered little notebook in his hands, curiously turning the pages and examining the smudged ink inscriptions. It is not his notebook—General Feuchtinger has just handed it to him. Feuchtinger’s Twenty-first Panzer Division has captured it during the battle still raging between the Germans and the Allied invaders around this city in June 1944. It turns out to be the private diary of an English officer, a Captain Alistair Bannerman, and it is written in the form of a long letter to Elizabeth, the young wife he left in a Dorset farmhouse when he went off to lead an antitank platoon against the Germans. From it Rommel, with the help of an interpreter, learns something of the souls of the men he is fighting, and of their last days in England as they prepared for the biggest invasion in history.

  The diary begins on Sunday, May 28, 1944—the day that Rommel spent with the Marquis de Choisy. At the unnamed army camp in Sussex, in southeastern England, total security has just been imposed and all movements in and out are strictly controlled.

  For the first time Captain Bannerman feels trapped.

  He realizes he may never see his young family again, and the diary begins to meander between the idyllic past, the tedious present and the horrible events to come. “We don’t feel majestic at all at the moment,” he writes. “There are too many little pinpricks in this life. The eternal drill, the being pushed around, hobnailed boots and sweaty socks, and now the caged existence too—these are all petty irritations that erect something of a wall between us and life as the journalists and politicians care to portray it from their exalted viewpoints. I have tried explaining to my own platoon that we’re about to make history and that one day their children will read of our deeds in the history books, but all I get are faint smiles. . . .”

  And so the diary goes on—one moment reflecting that tank landing craft are more comfortable vessels than the infantry assault boats in which the soldiers were vomiting all over each other during a rehearsal for invasion, the next moment indulging in nostalgia for boat trips in May in Dorset, picnics, his wife’s soft dress and tender moments with her in spring.

  “Then I think of you, my family, in October when the apples are already in the storehouses and the autumn flowers are running riot through the gardens with their copper red and blue colors. The mornings are cool and moist with dew, making the lawn shimmer with jewels, but it’s still warm enough to lie full length in the open air as I did last October, watching Andrew learn to walk. . . .”

  Thus Bannerman prepares for the coming battle. “We’re perspiring in clumsy boots and disinfected uniforms,” he writes, “kitting out and loading our iron monsters, to destroy Nature on the other side of the Channel.”

  He has commanded this antitank platoon for eighteen months and had only a few weeks’ leave with Elizabeth. “I know which of my men are happily married, and which have kids and I know some of their names. I know the shirkers and the know-it-alls.”

  At times he is annoyed with the jaunty proclamations by Churchill, Montgomery and Eisenhower. “It’s monstrous to speak of this coming blood sacrifice of men as though it were a day at the races or a game. It is not. War is an evil business, it impinges on human liberty, dignity and peace with a kind of dullness, greed and apathy and turns all men into crawling animals lusting to get at each other’s throats, to destroy each other’s noble and beautiful cities and values that have taken 2,000 years to create. . . . To soldiers sitting in Nissen huts Churchill’s radio rhetoric sounds a bit embarrassing. They have no great faith in the new world, they have no belief in any great liberating mission. They know it’s going to be a charnel house. All they want is to put an end to it all, and get back to civvy street, to their homes, their private lives, their wives and loved ones.”

  The diary returns to Sunday, May 28:

  We’ve just eaten and then listened to a speech by our commander. He repeated some of the things that Montgomery’s just said to the battalion commanders. . . . He says the first four days are going to be vital, and we’re going to have to take risks. We’ve got to go hell for leather to gain ground. Our commander says that the time for our own big risk will be the first six hours, when we have to thrust inland with as much force as possible to reach our main objective—a city they’ve code-named “Poland.” I don’t know what that is. It’s a well-kept secret; thank God our security seems to be up to scratch in this respect. What a moment that’s going to be, when we open our maps on board ship and find out the real name of the place we’re going to attack. . . .

  The commander says the patch of ground we’re going to invade was recently inspected by Rommel, and it’s been reinforced even more, as have the rest of the coastal defenses. They’ve planted some most unpleasant stakes and spikes in the water and no doubt they’ve laid on a lot more surprises for us. But Monty says we can’t overcome their surprises just by sitting back and waiting. They say the Xth Panzer Division has already moved closer to our area. It’s got about twenty Tigers, ninety Panthers and over 100 Panzer IVs, so it’s clear that my six little guns are going to have their work cut out if they attack our battalion.

  NOW IT IS May 31. In France, Rommel is checking the tide tables and deci
ding he can safely leave soon for Germany. In Sussex, the invasion troops are getting their last letters from home. “Now it is only war,” Bannerman writes in his diary:

  I long for you so much, for your understanding, your quiet love and your tenderness, and today I want so much to smother your mouth with a flood of wild and reckless kisses, to lie by your side and feel the unbearable sweetness of your naked body in a cool room, with the summer breeze like a zephyr on your skin. Oh the torture of it all, to feel this summer desire in my blood, this rightful longing for you, you darling and desirable woman. And yet to know that duty and barbed wire, destiny and human folly are putting thousands of miles between us! . . . What a gigantic effort each man now has to make, to face up to something like this. Men who may have had only little of life, men with little education and little knowledge and with no philosophical supports, men with ailing, estranged or poor or needy families, men who have never been loved, men who had never had high ambitions or wanted a new world order. Yet we’re all here, we’re all going, as ordered, willingly into battle. I hope the country recognizes these men for what they now have to do. . . .

  Bannerman’s mind keeps going back to Dorset’s warm and gentle landscape, to country walks, to love and laughter: