The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  THIS, THEN, WAS the situation at one A.M. Speidel and most of his staff had gone to bed. The Fifteenth Army was at maximum alert, the Seventh Army was not; its guard was down. And Rommel was 500 miles away, at Herrlingen. At about this time the first six soldiers of the invasion parachuted onto the base of the Cherbourg peninsula; around them descended hundreds of shadowy shapes— straw dummies, designed to convince the Nazis that this was only a spoof invasion, while the “real” one would be far away. The six men concealed themselves well, then let fly with flare pistols and loudly played phonograph records of small arms fire and soldiers’ oaths. It was a further twist of Fortitude, designed to perplex and confuse.

  After that the real airborne landings, by parachute and glider, began in the Normandy area. The 716th Infantry Division sounded the alert at 1:10 A.M. Marcks alerted his corps one minute later. The Seventh Army finally went on alert at 1:35. As it did, its chief of staff, General Max Pemsel, telephoned Rommel’s château. Speidel was awakened, spoke to Pemsel, and then called Rundstedt’s staff in Paris. But at 1:40 A.M. Speidel got reports of other airborne landings well up the coast, in the Fifteenth Army’s sector, and soon he learned that straw dummies had been found in Normandy. These revelations made it possible for him to assert that the big action was elsewhere. For the rest of the night he was to hesitate. Repeatedly he told the Seventh Army, which was in the path of the gigantic assault, that the enemy must be staging only a “local attack” in Normandy. He reassured Rundstedt’s staff at three A.M. that he was taking it all “very calmly.” “It’s possible,” he said, “that people are taking bailed-out air crews for paratroops!”

  Again Max Pemsel, from the Seventh Army, phoned the château to try to correct Speidel’s blithe attitude. “It is a major operation,” he insisted vehemently. Speidel, however, was transfixed by new reports from the Fifteenth Army’s area, miles away. Two prisoners from the British First Airborne Division (whose plane had in fact lost its way and landed them there in error) had revealed under interrogation that still more landings were to follow. Speidel took this to mean the landings would come in that same area. Reluctant to commit his panzer divisions wrongly, Speidel refused to commit them at all.

  As the hours wore on, the reports multiplied. Heavy bombers had been heard passing over the Channel Islands, flying slowly—obviously towing gliders. By three-thirty there were hundreds of gliders landing around Caen, to the rear of Rommel’s Death Zone. Naval radar detected massed ships approaching the coast of Normandy. At 3:42 A.M. Pemsel phoned the château and screamed that the depth of the airborne landings proved that this was obviously a huge operation.

  At 3:50 A.M. General Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s chief of staff back in Paris, also shifted to Pemsel’s view. “The width of the sector under attack shows this is no operation of purely local significance,” he said.

  At 4:30 A.M. Pemsel reported that his artillery was already shelling warships. At 5:15 A.M. a map of Caen was found in one of the crashed gliders—certainly a clear indication of the extensiveness of the invaders’ intentions; getting to Caen would be no small effort. Again the nervous Seventh Army chief of staff insisted to Speidel’s headquarters that all the facts pointed to “a major enemy assault.” Still Speidel kept his nerve.

  Outside the château, Speidel could see the gray of dawn in the eastern sky. In other Allied invasions, the enemy had always landed before dawn. At 5:40 A.M., twenty minutes after dawn, he telephoned Pemsel. “Have any troops actually landed from the sea?” he asked. Pemsel had to admit that they had not. Only the day before, in fact, the German naval staff had suggested that the landings might come after dawn; decoded enemy radio signals had revealed that the Allies’ big invasion rehearsal of May 4 had begun two hours after low tide, and in broad daylight.

  At 6:15 A.M. Pemsel’s anxious voice again came on the telephone from Normandy. At 5:30 A.M., he said, a naval saturation bombardment of Rommel’s Death Zone and beach obstacles had begun.

  Speidel once again resisted Pemsel’s inference. Indeed, he put his own arguments to Pemsel with such persuasiveness that Pemsel, worn down, wrote into the Seventh Army diary a new assessment completely reversing his earlier alarmist view. “The purpose of this naval bombardment,” wrote Pemsel, “is not yet apparent. All in all, these appear to be just diversionary operations mounted in connection with later assaults planned for elsewhere.”

  AFTER THIS, beginning at 6:40 A.M., there is a two-and-a-half-hour gap in the war diary kept by Speidel’s operations staff. We know that Speidel did telephone Tempelhoff instructions to begin the long drive back from Germany, but why the gap from 6:40 A.M. until 9:05 A.M.?

  There is one clue in the Fifteenth Army’s war diary. It says that at 6:45 A.M. the Fifteenth got a phone call from Max Pemsel, reporting the latest news. “A naval bombardment has begun from offshore, but there has been no invasion attempt so far. We at Seventh Army expect to be able to cope with the situation with our own means.”

  That was splendid news. On hearing it, General von Salmuth commented to his own chief of staff, “So—the enemy invasion has failed already,” and went to bed. This was clearly the belief at Château La Roche-Guyon too.

  Speidel later admitted, faced with the evidence of these war diaries, “Yes, it is quite possible that we all went back to bed as well.”

  Normandy

  AT HERRLINGEN, ROMMEL usually gets up early enough to catch the seven o’clock news. Then he bathes, shaves, dresses and breakfasts at nine or ten on a clear soup prepared by Lucie. Then he goes out for a stroll. But today, June 6, 1944, is different. It is Lucie’s birthday. The villa is full of flowers—the finest bouquet is from the field marshal himself—and there are the presents to be arranged on the drawing room table. In his red striped dressing gown and slippers, Rommel contentedly busies himself with the gifts, helped by one of Lucie’s houseguests— Hildegard Kirchheim. (She is the wife of General Hein-rich Kirchheim, who was one of Erwin’s earliest officers in Africa.) The Paris shoes take pride of place.

  There is a knock at the door, and the housemaid, Karolina, comes in. “Herr Feldmarschall Rommel is wanted on the telephone!” Rommel assumes it is General Schmundt, Hitler’s adjutant, calling from Berchtesgaden—he had telephoned yesterday to say that the Führer would probably find time to see Rommel today. Rommel walks through the sliding door into the smoking room and picks up the phone. It is Speidel, calling from La Roche-Guyon: the enemy invasion has begun.

  The blood drains from Rommel’s face. For a moment he says nothing, then: “I’ll return at once!” His hand crashes down on the telephone hook. He jerks it up and down until the operator replies. “A Führungsblitz call to the Führer’s headquarters, at once!” he barks. The girl hesitates to clear the lines for him. “Dammit, girl,” snaps the field marshal, “this is Rommel speaking. Give me a line at once!” When the call goes through, he tersely reports the situation and his intention to return to France, then hangs up and vanishes upstairs to change into his uniform. “Get my Daniel up here with the car at once,” he shouts at his manservant, Private Rudolf Loistl. “And get Lang to meet me at Freudenstadt.”

  We cannot state with certainty what time this was. Speidel’s version is that he called Rommel at 6.00 a.m., which indeed would have been tardy enough. But the only such call to Rommel is fixed in the war diary of Army Group B more than four hours later, at 10.15 a.m. According to the diary kept by Hellmuth Lang’s mother, Lang left at ten-thirty to rendezvous with Rommel. Rommel certainly left Herrlingen no earlier than that. Hildegard Kirchheim recalls, “I waited about thirty minutes after the call came, until Lucie came into the room and told me in great agitation that Erwin had already left for France.” She also remembers that Lucie then tried on the shoes; they did not fit.

  If Rommel had been tuned to the Allied radio stations, he would have heard the formal enemy proclamation of the momentous news, an hour sooner. “Under the command of General Eisenhower,” said the broadcast, “Allied naval forces supported by s
trong air forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the coast of France.” After El Alamein, this was the second time that Rommel would arrive back at his headquarters too late to save a battle.

  What had jolted Speidel’s staff out of their slumber? Probably it was the alarmed telephone call that General Pemsel of the Seventh Army suddenly put through to the château soon after nine A.M., reporting that enemy troops and even tanks were swarming ashore in Normandy.

  “The enemy ships lay hove to, offshore, for a long time,” Pemsel explained. “They only began the invasion after the tide turned.” Rommel’s beach obstacles had been demolished at the first light by enemy commandos and sappers who had slipped in with small craft. Within five minutes of the infantry hitting the beaches, the first tanks were rolling up the shallow slopes. Shock troops had attacked the surviving bunkers with flamethrowers and explosives. Where there were cliffs, they were scaled by rope ladders projected by rockets from the approaching landing craft.

  The violent air and naval bombardment had torn great gaps in Rommel’s minefields and Death Zone. As Rundstedt observed with more than a trace of malicious pleasure in 1949, the enemy had foiled all Rommel’s gadgets: “The invasion began at low tide, not high tide as our navy had presupposed; their tanks merely drove through the flooded terrain, and the stakes did not prevent the airborne landings.”

  No counterattack had begun. Three panzer divisions were within striking distance, but none was moving to the invasion beaches. The Twenty-first Panzer— still minus General Feuchtinger, who was off in Paris—could have moved up from Caen in less than two hours; it had begun to stir restlessly at four A.M., but Speidel had refused to commit it despite Marcks’s frantic pleas. Thus hours were lost.

  Nor were Rundstedt or the High Command’s General Jodl in any position to intervene. Nobody—least of all Speidel’s staff—was prepared to swear that this was the only invasion, and not a feint. Colonel von Roenne, of Rundstedt’s Foreign Armies West, still spreading misinformation, several times telephoned Speidel’s intelligence officer. “This is not the main invasion yet—that’s going to hit the Fifteenth Army later,” he said on one occasion, and much the same on the others.

  Jodl accordingly vetoed any release of the High Command’s panzer reserves toward Normandy: the fanatical Twelfth SS Panzer (“Hitler Jugend”) and the hard-hitting Panzer Lehr Division were the closest. For the Germans this was the tragedy, that Rommel was not there; he would have used his famous tongue and temperament to cut through the Gordian knots restricting the panzer reserves. “If people had listened to me,” he wrote to Lucie afterward, “we would have counterattacked with three panzer divisions on the first evening and we would probably have defeated the attack.”

  At midday he picked up his aide’s car at Freudenstadt—to meet him Lang had driven through Stuttgart at sixty miles an hour with his horn blaring—and they raced on into France. Rommel was sick with anxiety and halted briefly at Rheims at 4:55 P.M. to telephone the château for the latest news.

  As Speidel replied, it sounded hopeless. The enemy had torn a twenty-mile breach in the Atlantic wall and had already poured seven divisions into the bridgehead; they had set down two British airborne divisions around Caen and two U.S. airborne divisions onto the Cherbourg peninsula. After a ten-hour delay, the High Command had at last lifted its veto on the Twelfth SS and Panzer Lehr divisions for a counterattack; but the Hitler Jugend would not arrive until the next morning and the Panzer Lehr not until June 8.

  “It’s a major operation here,” reported Speidel. “But it still doesn’t rule out the possibility of a further major enemy invasion somewhere else!”

  Rommel impatiently inquired: “How far has our own counterattack progressed?” Speidel informed him that the Twenty-first Panzer was awaiting further reinforcements. Rommel rasped: “Get the division moving into the attack right now! Don’t await further reinforcements—attack at once!”

  From northwest of Caen, General Marcks himself soon led the Twenty-first Panzer’s striking force into battle, standing up in his own open BMW car. Six tanks punched a narrow corridor through the invading British forces and reached the coast at Luc-sur-Mer: a two-mile stretch of Rommel’s Death Zone was still intact and fighting. But the tank force lacked cohesion, and when hundreds of enemy aircraft flew low overhead at 7:20 P.M., releasing thousands of parachutes in the rear of the panzer division, Feuchtinger—by now back from his jaunt to Paris—lost his nerve and abruptly called off the attack. In fact, the parachutes were only a supply drop that had gone off course.

  Colonel Zimmermann of Rundstedt’s staff, asked confidentially by Meyer-Detring the next morning what countermeasures had been begun, replied graphically, “So far, a load of shit. Feuchtinger took to his heels.”

  AT TEN P.M. on D day, June 6, Rommel’s car finally screeched to a halt at the château’s main steps. His artillery chief, Colonel Hans Lattmann, wrote: “This evening Rommel got back from his wife’s birthday: that was a short trip. He didn’t even make it as far as the Chief,” meaning Hitler. “He’s very calm and collected. Grim-faced, as is to be expected.”

  By this hour, Eisenhower had put 155,000 troops ashore in a chain of Normandy beachheads totaling eighty square miles. Rommel’s troops had inflicted over 10,000 casualties on them, but, as Marcks told his staff—and even by the field marshal’s own earlier definition—the invasion had obviously succeeded. Moreover, Rommel was now told: “A further major invasion operation is to be expected on the Channel coast, as Dover is now completely hidden behind a smoke screen.

  This waiting for the “second enemy invasion” was to befuddle Rommel’s strategy for the next five weeks.

  Rommel spent most of that night, June 6–7, trying to find out what was happening in Normandy. The Allies were jamming the Germans’ radio and many telephone lines were down, but once Rommel managed to get through on the phone to the Seventh Army, and he barked at General Max Pemsel: “You’ve got to stop the enemy from getting a foothold, whatever happens!” He also managed to order the Twenty-first Panzer Division and the Hitler Jugend to stage a counterattack the first thing next morning starting at about eight o’clock. Sepp Dietrich’s First SS Panzer Corps would take overall command of the attack. But Feuchtinger of the Twenty-first had only about seventy tanks still running, and it was 9:30 A.M. before the Hitler Jugend began to arrive, having suffered heavily from enemy air attack on the way. Dietrich fumbled, kept postponing the counterattack—despite a visit from Rommel during the day—and then halted operations for the night.

  Shortly before noon that day, June 7, Rommel telephoned General Jodl—now at the Berghof with Hitler—and formally complained about the total lack of German air force and navy intervention. Significantly, he warned Jodl: “My general impression is that we must assume that the enemy is going to make another invasion focal point elsewhere.” Despite this, Hitler’s staff were optimistic. General Geyr von Schweppenburg—commander of Panzer Group West—had now assumed overall direction of the five panzer divisions in or approaching Normandy, and Hitler believed they would launch their decisive counterattack the next day. That evening a naval officer reported from Hitler’s war conference at the Berghof: “Like Field Marshal Rommel, the Führer sees the situation as wholly favorable, and is in confident anticipation of the success of our countermeasures.”

  The entire German public was hypnotized by the news from France. Gestapo reports on morale in Breslau, Berlin, Kiel and Koblenz showed that everybody trusted Rommel’s ability implicitly. Now people recalled Hitler’s confident prophecy on June 5, explaining why he had abandoned Rome that day without a fight: “The invasion this year is going to result in an annihilating defeat for the enemy at the one place where it really counts.” Now too the public understood why their Führer had economized everywhere else—so as to concentrate everything on victory in the west. Voices in Kiel, Stettin and Hamburg were heard by Gestapo agents greeting the enemy invasion with enthusiasm: “At last we know what’s what!” �
�This is the moment of decision.” “Now we know that it all hasn’t been in vain, and we’re not finished yet.” The Gestapo summary concluded: “With one stroke the mood has completely changed.”

  Initially, this complacency was also reflected by Speidel’s staff (though not by Rommel). Hellmuth Lang wrote home, “There’s a marvelous tranquillity shown by all concerned, particularly our chief of staff Speidel.”

  At night they now all slept in the air raid shelters tunneled into the cliff, in paneled rooms with central heating, air conditioning and, above them, 100 feet of rock. They took things very calmly. As soon as Rommel left for the battlefield each morning, his staff retired to the table tennis room, Speidel and Ruge taking on artillery chief Lattmann and the Luftwaffe colonel Queissner or, less strenuously, the beginner General Meise, their engineer chief. Sometimes Speidel was called to the telephone, but otherwise they could forget the invasion battle.

  Not Rommel. There is in him the same restless urge as in Africa, which drives him out to the battlefield again and again “to keep an eye on things,” to keep his finger on his army’s pulse, to find out how much more each grenadier in his foxhole can take, where artillery support is needed, where to rush the reinforcements and supplies.

  One war correspondent, watching him confer with his battle commanders, writes afterward: “Where knowledge and ability have their own human limitations and intuition begins—that extrasensory instinct, a child born of inspiration and perception—that is where the true leadership qualities of a warlord are to be seen. Rommel has them.”

  There are photographs showing him in these days, confidently striding the battlefields—walking past the wreckage of a crashed Flying Fortress B-17 bomber, inspecting the enemy troop-carrying gliders that have crashed into the tall earth dikes topped with tangled, thorny hedges some ten or fifteen feet high that characterize the tight little fields and apple orchards of Normandy. And here he is with the Panzer Group commander Geyr, and with SS General Sepp Dietrich—a former sergeant major in the Bavarian cavalry who played a murky role in the Nazi misdeeds after Hitler’s rise to power.