by David Irving
The enemy troops that Rommel sees are all young—they average twenty-two or twenty-three. His own infantry divisions often average thirty-five or thirty-seven; only the good panzer divisions like the Hitler Jugend or the Panzer Lehr are as young as these Allied troops. As at El Alamein, the enemy has poured equipment and ammunition into the fighting on a scale that the Nazis cannot match. To beat the flooded terrain, they have amphibious tanks. To thwart the mined Death Zone, they have special tanks with rotating drums in front flailing the ground with chains. Or, more crudely, the enemy just drive herds of “liberated” French cattle through the minefields ahead of them. They have better maps of the defenses than Rommel has himself. Above all, they have warships hurling broadsides far into the bridgehead at the dictate of spotter planes, and they have the weight of many air forces. As Rommel drives out once more to visit General Geyr on June 8, he sees thousands of enemy planes roaming the skies. Nothing bigger than a company dares move by day within sixty miles of the bridgehead. One immediate consequence of the air attack is a complete breakdown of radio communication: General Geyr has lost three quarters of his radio trucks already; Dietrich has only four sets left working out of twenty. Hellmuth Lang writes on the tenth: “So far Rommel has driven forward to one command post or another every day to exert personal control. But driving isn’t the unalloyed pleasure that it used to be.”
The German command structure was anything but simple. Each panzer division commander had to make sense of a mass of conflicting orders emanating from the High Command, from Rundstedt, Rommel, Dollmann (at the Seventh Army), Geyr (at Panzer Group West), and Dietrich (First SS Panzer Corps).
The Panzer Lehr Division had now arrived from Chartres, but it had lost eighty-five armored vehicles, five tanks, and 123 trucks, including eighty gasoline tenders, in air attacks on the 100-mile approach. The division was now licking its wounds near Tilly-sur-Seilles, a village ten miles west of Caen.
With nearly three intact panzer divisions a determined commander could have blasted a big gap in the enemy bridgehead. But when Rommel phoned the Seventh Army at 8:10 A.M., they told him that Dietrich was still hesitating to counterattack until later in the morning. “Bayeux’s already been overrun by the enemy, but Carentan is still in our hands.” Carentan was vital for the defense of the Cherbourg peninsula. Dietrich was planning to strike north to the coast. Rommel snapped: “The First SS Panzer Corps is to move off as soon as possible, with all three divisions, with its main weight on the left.”
That sounded simple, but when Rommel arrived at Dietrich’s command post that afternoon, things weren’t going well. A thousand enemy gliders had landed right in the path of the Twenty-first Panzer’s attack, disgorging thousands of paratroopers who had virtually wiped out Feuchtinger’s infantry support; he had only fifty-five tanks left by dusk. Dietrich told Rommel that the enemy had tanks that could open fire at ranges of over 3,500 yards. Rommel sent a battle group—half of the Twenty-first Panzer and half of the Twelfth SS—northwestward to try to recapture Bayeux, but here they came well within range of the enemy battleships’ big guns. The regrouping for this attack had wasted many hours.
Geyr was critical of the dispersal of the panzer divisions. “Thus the fist was unclenched just as it was ready to strike,” he said later. At 4:40 P.M. Colonel Bodo Zimmermann, back in Paris, put the battlefield position like this to Rundstedt’s intelligence officer, Meyer-Detring: “At present we are stuck. What isn’t very pleasant is that the enemy is making ground. . . . In my view we’ve thrown a whole day away. Our tanks are locked in battles where they ought not to be, and we can only hope that the Panzer Lehr Division manages to slice through at Bayeux fast. Every minute counts. The trouble is, we’re short of truck space. I’m afraid of a race for Saint-Lô. If there is one, things are going to turn very nasty.” Ten minutes later, Zimmermann learned that the big British and American bridgeheads in Normandy were about to link. “Rommel’s absence on the first day is to blame for all this,” said Zimmermann.
By the evening of June 8, both Rommel’s and Rundstedt’s staff’s were wide awake to the strategic danger facing them. Two vital U.S. secret documents had fallen into Nazi hands. The First U.S. Division landing on “Omaha” beach, northwest of Bayeux, had suffered heavily from heavy seas and powerful German defenses—the enemy had evidently known nothing of the extra German infantry division which Rommel had inserted at this point. Many of the American amphibious tanks had foundered, and landing boats had been devastated by German machine gun fire. In one crippled boat that had drifted ashore was found the field order of the entire U.S. Seventh Corps. This scoop was followed by another: A German engineer battalion had recaptured a coastal village, killing a young American officer in a shoot-out; in his briefcase the 100-page operation orders for the U.S. Fifth Corps had been found. Close scrutiny of these American documents would have told the Nazi experts a lot about Eisenhower’s plans: for example, that forces were being committed to this invasion on such a scale that none could possibly remain back in England for any second invasion. But General Max Pemsel, chief of staff of the Seventh Army, perhaps discouraged by his earlier attempts to spread the word, sat on the documents for several days and telephoned only brief and incoherent extracts through to Rommel’s staff. “It’s all very vague,” complained Staubwasser at the château.
What was quite clear, even without captured documents, was Eisenhower’s intention of taking Cherbourg—and that if Cherbourg fell to the Allies it would be disastrous for the Germans. With Cherbourg, the Allies would no longer need to land men and machines on beaches—a slow and tricky business—but could unload them quickly and in great quantity through a major deep-sea port. The Continent would soon be flooded with Allied might. So Hitler issued a string of instructions over the next days to prepare Cherbourg for a long siege.
Meanwhile the High Command was anxious about the lack of decisive action in Normandy. It was high time, they thought, to begin rolling the Fifteenth Army’s surplus strength down into the battle. On the evening of June 8, Colonel Zimmermann in Paris telephoned Speidel. “Rommel,” he said, “has got to decide whether he’s going to get a big success tonight with the forces he already has. Rundstedt does not think he will, he thinks we’re going to have to strip other fronts ruthlessly to provide further strength.” When Speidel relayed this message to Rommel later that evening—just after his arrival back at the château—Rommel was annoyed at this fresh interference from the High Command. He phoned Jodl. “My intention is to split the two big enemy concentrations in two” he said, “with most weight on the left. We can’t attack before tomorrow. The enemy’s trying to breach through toward Cherbourg. . . . We’ve got to prevent their two major bridgeheads from linking up.”
From the Berghof end of the telephone line came sounds of disagreement. Jodl also insisted, “I do not think we have to fear any second invasion in the west.” Rommel was indignant at the general’s naïveté: “May I point out that the enemy has so far committed only one of their two army groups, and this is precisely why we cannot afford to pull any forces out of the Fifteenth Army’s area, and certainly not from Calais.”
Jodl calmly repeated: “There’s not going to be any second invasion.” (The conversation is recorded in the army group’s war diary.)
Rommel hung up on him.
THERE IS SOMETHING tragic about the way Rommel in June 1944 blindly adheres to what his intelligence experts tell him. Rommel, who in the past has burned his fingers on every occasion when he ignored intelligence, has now learned to listen—not realizing that the data the intelligence experts are feeding him are partly faked by members of the German anti-Hitler conspiracy for their own secret purposes and partly concocted by the enemy. As part of the Fortitude deception, the enemy has devised an entire fictitious army group, the “First U.S.,” purportedly under General Patton’s command. On June 2 an agent reports this to Berlin. Data on its strength follows. All along Colonel von Roenne has been overestimating the enemy’s forces,
but now the perplexed Allied chiefs of staff, as they read the Ultra intercepts, can see Roenne inventing British, Canadian and American divisions which even they have not conjured forth! Even more surprising: Speidel’s staff are regularly adding even more divisions onto Roenne’s figures, for good measure. Thus, on June 6—D day evening—Colonel von Roenne issues a secret summary: “Of approximately sixty major formations in southern England, at most only ten or twelve divisions, including airborne troops, are so far involved in this operation.” He concludes that the Allies must be planning further invasions, because so far none of the twenty-five divisions “known” to be in the First U.S. Army Group has appeared.
Such fighting as there is in these days is confused and ill-concerted. In the tangled and obstructive hedgerow country, the tank battles are short, swift and fought at point-blank range. On June 9 Bayerlein’s confident young tank crews, barely older than schoolboys, are sent rolling toward Bayeux beneath the lustrous golden evening skies of Normandy. They are quite fearless and sure of victory. There is the corporal who pauses to run his hands along the white hedgerow flowers, oblivious of the deafening shell bursts, then swings lithely up into the Tiger that is to become his blazing coffin only minutes later. There is the young lieutenant, poking his blond curly head out of his turret, punching an imaginary hole in the air and shouting: “Like that—we can do it”—the gesture only half finished as a shell fragment cleaves his forehead and his tank bursts into flames. The survivors fight on, elbow to elbow in their shirt sleeves and black uniform trousers, with days of stubble on their chins, sweating in the furnace temperatures inside their tanks.
British armor is known to have reached the woods north of the next village, Lingèvres. Bayerlein orders the attack to continue. Engines bellow and caterpillar tracks clatter horrendously as the Panthers and Tigers grind through the narrow village streets, past a wrecked Goliath, a German remote-control tank, and into the wood 300 yards away. The wood is nothing but dense, tangled shrubbery with a few tall trees. “Battle stations!” is called. Then “Hatches shut!” The tank commanders can see only ahead, through a small, fist-sized, armored glass aperture, and all sounds from outside are deadened except the crack of exploding shells. As they burst through into the open again, they are only fifty yards from the nearest enemy tanks. Their earphones are suddenly alive with orders and commands from a dozen Panther commanders. A Churchill is hit and belches smoke. At point-blank range each side hurls armor-piercing shells at the other. Right and left of them, the German crews see still more enemy silhouettes crawling through the gardens, meadows and orchards.
Once a Panther is crippled and calls for help. Another tank roars over to it, and a crewman climbs out into the melee of battle and hooks up towing chains to the Panther; it is dragged back to safety. The British put up a smoke screen and slip out of sight. The battle ebbs. A German gunner stumbles down from a burning armored vehicle, both eyes gouged out by a bullet, murmuring incoherently, and he dies soon after. Phosphor shells hit three Panthers in rapid succession; their crews feel the excruciating heat of the flash and flame; some do not get out but cook in place; others escape, but they are on fire. Crews from nearby vehicles try to beat out the flames or to tear off their burning clothes. But it is impossible to do this fast enough. A naked man staggers past, his body horribly blistered and swollen. “I’m Schmielewski, I’m Schmielewski,” is all he can say. He and the other injured are pulled up onto an army truck. Schmielewski lies on the floor of the truck, with big open eyes. He will make no sound of pain until death relieves him from his agony.
The village of Lingèvres has to be given up.
ROMMEL SPENT the whole afternoon of June 9 at the Seventh Army’s headquarters at Le Mans. He was now a very worried man. Some of the worries were imaginary—for instance, Hitler and the High Command had suddenly warned that Belgium was due to be invaded the next morning (there had been fresh BBC messages). But the imaginary danger had a serious result for Rommel: Hitler ordered the powerful First SS Panzer Division, with no less than 21,000 troops, held back to meet the putative threat to Belgium instead of sending it to help Rommel in Normandy.
Another worry of Rommel’s was very real. The Americans were about to break out of their bridgehead at Sainte-Mère-Église and stream westward across the Cherbourg peninsula. Rommel told Dollmann: “We’ve got to stop the enemy from reaching Cherbourg, whatever happens.”
To meet the threat to the Cherbourg peninsula, Rommel was trying to bring up some elite troops, but this movement was badly delayed by the lack of truck space and fuel and by air attacks. In consequence, he ruled on the afternoon of June 9: “We’ll have to remain on the defensive at first . . . and not counterattack until all our forces are completely ready.” Thus another day had passed without decision.
The next morning, Rommel again drove forward to Normandy. There was still intense enemy air activity—thirty times he had to jump out of his car and dive for cover. He could not reach Sepp Dietrich at all. To discuss the proposed attack that seemed so urgently necessary, Rommel called at Geyr’s Panzer Group headquarters in the afternoon, in an orchard at La Caine, twenty miles south of Caen; at least the ships’ guns could not reach them there. Together they studied the maps spread out on the table in Geyr’s headquarters bus. Sepp Dietrich’s panzers were due to attack northward in the afternoon. But the enemy’s own attacks had been building up steadily all day, said Geyr, and he was being thrown onto the defensive. Geyr told Rommel that he lacked gasoline and ammunition, and he complained that the Nebelwerfer brigade—the rocket launchers—and the antiaircraft corps promised by Göring had still not arrived. The enemy air force was destroying villages, he went on, blasting bridges and strafing roads regardless of the French civilians. There was no sign of the German air force. Geyr’s war diary states the result of their conference thus: “The attack will not take place.”
This same day, June 10, in Berlin, Admiral Dönitz secretly admitted to his staff: “The invasion has succeeded. The Second Front is now a fact.”
That evening, when Rommel arrived back at his château, he phoned Jodl at the Berghof about the disaster looming. “I suggest you send some gentlemen from the OKW to come and have a look for themselves,” he concluded. Afterward he poured his heart out in a letter to Lucie: “The enemy’s air superiority has a grave effect on our movements.” And: “The invasion is quite likely to start at other places too, soon. There’s simply no answer to it.” Thus, just four days after D day, Field Marshal Rommel appeared to have already given up the fight—although in fact he still outnumbered the enemy by nearly four to one in divisions in France and he had not even committed his most powerful panzer divisions to the battle.
IF EVER HE NEEDED a lively and dynamic chief of staff at his side it was now. But he had only Hans Speidel, and Speidel had his own fish to fry. While Rommel was away visiting Geyr that afternoon, Speidel had dropped his mask fractionally and revealed to his staff at the château, as they all sipped tea, that he was plotting against Hitler. Admiral Ruge noncommittally recorded the admission in his secret diary: “He [Speidel] told us of his journey over Pentecost—and hinted it was not just family affairs.” We now know that Speidel had conferred at his Black Forest home in Freudenstadt two weeks earlier with Mayor Karl Strölin and ex-foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath on ways of forcibly replacing Hitler with Rommel.
So far, Speidel had not mentioned this plan to Rommel himself. One of Speidel’s co-plotters, Walter Bargatzky, wrote in 1945: “Speidel proceeded very cautiously, preparing Rommel for the possibility of a revolution and—when he believed he had caught Rommel’s fancy—engineered a visit by Hofacker to Rommel’s headquarters.”
Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, forty-eight, was Stülpnagel’s adjutant in Paris; Rommel had known his father, Lieutenant General Eberhard von Hofacker, commander of a Württemberg infantry division. Another plotter, Speidel’s brother-in-law Max Horst, witnessed their first polite interview during June: Hofacker did not
venture out of his reserve, nor did Rommel. Major Reinhard Brink, Rundstedt’s counterespionage adviser, wrote in 1945: “Rommel kept aloof from these first attempts to communicate with him on this matter.”
Rommel had always adhered religiously to his oath of allegiance to Hitler. And unlike Speidel he had recently signed that manifesto formally reasserting it. But he found himself in a distinct dilemma now. Things were clearly getting out of control. Early on June 11 he knew that Geyr’s attack near Caen had come to nothing. Then a telephone message came saying that an American fighter-bomber had blasted Geyr’s headquarters bus an hour after he and Rommel stepped out of it, killing the entire Panzer Group staff.
Shortly after getting this shocking message, Rommel and Speidel made the hour-and-a-half trip from La Roche-Guyon to Paris to see Field Marshal von Rundstedt at his headquarters. The upshot was a lugubrious telegram from Rundstedt to Hitler, warning that if they could not establish a stable front line soon the situation might “force fundamental decisions.” Rommel also drafted— and the next day dispatched—a vehement telegram to Keitel, chief of the High Command, on the worsening situation. He specifically called Keitel to bring this telegram to Hitler’s attention. One thought kept recurring to him: this is El Alamein happening all over again.
After the meeting with Rundstedt, Speidel stopped by the office of General Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s chief of staff. They talked in whispers about the folly of holding a rigid line in Normandy—as Hitler had ordered—and the need to make some kind of deal with the enemy. Blumentritt was to write confidentially in January 1946, “This was the first time that Speidel told me that a circle of men was forming in the Reich to make representations to the Führer. Speidel named [Field Marshal Erwin] von Witzleben, [General Ludwig] Beck, [Mayor Karl] Goerdeler. He added that if necessary they were going to force Hitler to toe their line. He said nothing about any assassination, there was just going to be a formal approach to Hitler. Speidel also told me that Field Marshal Rommel had sent him on leave to Württemberg for a few days, and that he had talked with the mayor of Stuttgart [Karl Strölin] there.”