The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  Rommel’s situation report to the High Command on June 19 reflected his new buoyancy. He crowed that the enemy had achieved no successes either at Caen or at Saint-Lô, and at Caumont they had even lost ground. They had fallen weeks behind their timetable and were having to throw more strength into Normandy than intended. So far they had lost over 500 tanks and 1,000 planes. And—an important point—the whole population in Rommel’s command area sympathized with him, he said, particularly since the enemy bombing had begun; since D day, resistance and sabotage incidents had been negligible.

  Of course, there was still the war of nerves. Rommel was determined that the Fifteenth Army, up the coast from Normandy, should not get caught “with its pants down” like the Seventh. He was actually hoping for the second invasion—for there he would fight his biggest victory. Late on June 16 Luftwaffe radar operators had reported the same kind of electronic jamming and “radar spoofs” as had preceded the Normandy landings, but this time these phenomena were focused on the Channel coast, and here over the next days the tides would be particularly favorable for landings.

  Many times Rommel now journeyed over to the Fifteenth Army sector and wondered exactly where “Patton’s army group” was going to invade.

  Hitler was skeptical. At Soissons he had echoed Meyer-Detring’s argument— his words are in the transcript of the meeting—that “the enemy have already committed all their battle-experienced divisions to Normandy, which suggests they now have their hands full.”

  Rommel disagreed, and June 19 found him once again checking the defenses between the river Somme and Le Havre. He informed the panzer commander Schwerin that day that this was where he expected the new enemy invasion. He ordered Salmuth’s main reserves here moved even closer to the coast. “I’ve learned a lot from Normandy,” he explained. “It’ll be impossible to move them forward once the new invasion begins because of the enemy’s air superiority.”

  On June 22 Rommel and Hellmuth Lang drove forward to visit the Fifteenth Army again. All day long the air above them vibrated to the deep-throated organ note of the pulse-jet powering the V-1 flying bombs as they hurtled toward London. Rommel was thrilled by the spectacle of the stubby little aircraft streaking low across the sky, trailing a jet of flame behind them. “Fantastic,” wrote Lang. The V sites gave the enemy more than enough motive to invade here. “Patton’s army group,” according to new reports from Colonel von Roenne, was evidently as large as Montgomery’s. Rommel was waiting for Patton—waiting, waiting, totally disoriented by Fortitude, so obsessed by a potential threat from a purely theoretical army group that he underestimated the very real and present threat to France in Normandy.

  While Rommel was fussing over the Channel coast, events were moving with dramatic speed in the Cherbourg peninsula. By June 18 the Americans had sliced right across the foot of the peninsula, thus isolating the German troops—and anti-Soviet Russian mercenary troops—to the north. These defenders were to stage a fighting retreat, out to the tip of the peninsula, to fall back into the fortified city of Cherbourg and to deny the enemy access to this vital port as long as possible. The navy confirmed to the High Command that the port was stocked with enough food for at least eight weeks’ siege. By June 22, however, the garrison’s position was desperate. The American commander had pursued the defenders with a vigor that astonished all the German generals with any previous experience of this enemy. This was Major General Lawton “Joe” Collins, handsome, active and hard-hitting—the mirror image of the Erwin Rommel who had battled northward along these same roads in 1940.

  Rommel had virtually written off Cherbourg some days earlier, when he secretly ordered the Seventy-seventh Infantry Division out of the peninsula before it was cut off there by the enemy. The fortress commandant named by Rommel, the aristocratic and haughty Lieutenant General von Schlieben, had only the tattered remnants of three divisions under his command. Hitler had ordered Schlieben to conduct the battle for Cherbourg “just as Gneisenau fought to defend Kolberg” (in the Napoleonic Wars). But now he learned that somebody—defying his own orders—had removed the powerful Seventy-seventh Infantry Division from the peninsula.

  The High Command furiously ordered an inquiry. Rommel kept his own part in weakening the peninsula a guilty secret—severely embarrassing Rundstedt’s staff. “Army Group B’s not telling the whole truth,” Colonel Zimmermann said on the phone to Meyer-Detring. “They have not . . . breathed a word about the breakout of the Seventy-seventh Division. We didn’t give the order for that from here. But somebody must have . . . and when we asked for copies of Rommel’s orders, I was told ‘Rommel only gives orders orally.’ ”

  The uneasiness in Paris was shared by Hitler’s staff. General Schmundt telephoned the château from the Berghof. “I’m worried about Schlieben,” he said. “I don’t get the impression that he’s an iron personality. The honor and reputation of the entire German officer corps rest on how long we hang on to Cherbourg. If there’s the slightest doubt, then you must fly the roughest, toughest man into the fortress instead. The whole world is looking at Cherbourg.” At this Rommel himself phoned Schmundt and assured him that General von Schlieben had his full confidence.

  ROMMEL’S JUNE 23 letter to Lucie indicates that the spell that Hitler had cast on him had begun to wear off. “Militarily, things aren’t at all good,” he wrote, adding, “We must be prepared for grave events.” The major new Russian offensive in Poland, steamrolling toward Berlin, deeply worried him.

  The field marshal spent all the following day in Normandy again. Everywhere, Rommel’s heavy automobile passed blazing supply trucks and destroyed weapons. Because of the danger of air attack, his young driver, Corporal Daniel, had to keep off the fast main highways and use the lesser roads instead, roads that curved more and were bordered by tall trees or hedges. Rommel could not afford to take chances—he had already lost too many valued commanders here since D day: Marcks; Geyr’s entire staff; the seriously injured SS brigadier Ostendorff; General Heinz Hellmich of the 243rd Infantry, killed by a fighter-bomber on June 17; the Seventy-seventh Infantry’s General Stegmann, mortally wounded the next day. Rommel, more cautious than ever before in his life, did not want to be the next. It was eleven P.M. before he got back to the château after a 400-mile drive. Ruge met him and observed that Rommel was shaken by the casualties his infantry was suffering. That night the field marshal wrote to Lucie: “Given a sufficient weight of bombs and heavy shells, the enemy can make any place they want ripe for assault.”

  Upon his return to La Roche-Guyon, Rommel had found an order from the High Command awaiting him. He was to investigate the feasibility of launching a counterattack in the rear of the American forces besieging Cherbourg. Rommel heaped scorn on the proposal. “We’ve barely managed to patch our defensive line together in western Normandy,” he said. “The front is not at all suited for an attack.”

  On June 25 the end was approaching in Cherbourg. Rommel had issued to General von Schlieben the carefully worded decree: “On the Führer’s orders you are to fight to the last bullet.” (Both he and Rundstedt had refused to order any unit to “fight to the last man.”) Rommel stayed at the château all day, depressed and lonely, waiting for the inevitable. Schlieben was urgently appealing for Luftwaffe support, and the air force had prepared a major operation; but Rommel forbade it—Cherbourg was a lost cause—and ordered the sorties elsewhere. “I have reported [the situation] perfectly clearly to the top level,” he said to Ruge. “But up there they refuse to draw the consequences. They refuse to see that their war is coming unstuck.”

  Listening to Rommel, Ruge remembered the two British commandos who had been brought to the château in May. Only yesterday, at a meeting of plotters that Speidel had held at the château in Rommel’s absence, Ruge had said: “One of them wanted dreadfully to know exactly where he was so he could come back here after the war. He said he was going to turn France upside down to find the place. He told the field marshal to his face that he was the man Germany
needed for its postwar reconstruction.” So Rommel was dissatisfied with Germany’s leaders, and even the enemy saw Rommel as Germany’s natural new leader. Gradually all the pieces were clicking into place.

  That afternoon, while Cherbourg went into its death throes, Rommel and Ruge climbed up to the clifftop and sat on the field marshal’s favorite bench. Beneath them was a breathtaking view of the river, along which barges were now at last beginning to carry war supplies toward Normandy. Ruge had had a lot of shrubbery cut away just yesterday to improve the vista. After a silence Rommel began to talk. (Afterward Ruge jotted his words down in his shorthand diary.) “Fancy ordering me to attack Cherbourg!” he said. “I was glad enough to have managed to piece together even a semblance of a defensive front!”

  Again they expressed their exasperation with the High Command, and Ruge spoke of shooting—shooting the people who were running the war, if that was the only way out. Rommel emitted an ironic laugh: “You’re a rough ’un, Ruge!”

  Ruge persisted. “They’ve got to see things as they are,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been missing for years, at the top level.”

  Rommel nodded. “They’re trying to pass the buck on to me,” he said, probably referring to Keitel and Jodl. “The Führer has a kind of magnetic effect on everybody around him—they’re always in a kind of trance. Soon he’ll have to take the consequences, but he always evades the issue. He just keeps ordering: ‘Fight to the last man.’ ” The field marshal sighed. “This is the third time I’ve had to watch a catastrophe approaching,” he said. As they stood up to go back down to the château, Rommel remarked, “I’m curious to see what the next few weeks will bring.”

  Late that evening, the last radio messages were picked up from Schlieben’s headquarters in Cherbourg. A few hours later the High Command ordered a thorough inquiry into the Seventh Army’s affairs—somebody must be to blame for the ignominiously swift collapse of Cherbourg’s resistance. Either General Dollmann or his chief of staff, Max Pemsel—or both—would have to go.

  As if the capture of Cherbourg weren’t bad enough, Rommel now received indications that the second major invasion was imminent. A captured RAF officer was overheard whispering to a cellmate, “We’re going to invade the coast between Le Havre and Dunkirk at the end of July.” Two days later, Speidel’s staff again warned Rommel that huge forces were standing by in southern England: “There are still sixty-seven divisions in Britain, of which at least fifty-seven can be utilized for a major enterprise.” How were Hitler or Rommel to know that the RAF man was a “plant”? And that only twelve enemy divisions were actually left in Britain—and they were destined only for Normandy?

  IN NORMANDY IT was a race against time now for those two old adversaries, Rommel and Montgomery. The Allies had established themselves on the soil of Europe, but had not yet thrust out from their position; the Germans had established new defensive lines. The question was: Which army would attack first?

  Rommel had installed his finest divisions at the Caen end of the front, expecting the real threat to develop there. He had said as much to Pemsel of the Seventh Army on June 15: “The enemy’s push toward Paris is far more dangerous for us than one into Brittany.” Thus he again underestimated the Americans, a vestige of his experiences in Tunisia. He tended to disregard the reports coming from his own interrogation center at Châlons, which described the young West Point-trained American army officers as tougher, tauter and altogether “more Prussian” than their British allies. So far there was little evidence of American strategic intentions; but radio intelligence and Montgomery’s own dispositions indicated that the British intended to capture Caen—the “Poland” in Bannerman’s diary—and then push southeast across the good tank country toward Falaise and Paris, the heart of France. “A major invasion between the Somme and Le Havre may well be coupled with such a thrust,” Rommel said on June 26.

  Rommel’s orders were for the Ninth and Tenth SS Panzer divisions, now arriving from the real Poland, to prepare to slice through the enemy bridgehead toward Bayeux, cutting the coastline near Arromanches. This would wrench the British forces away from their supply lines—they would choke like a deep-sea diver with a severed air pipe.

  Montgomery, however, spoiled this plan and got in his offensive first. Two hours after dawn on June 26, after a day of shelling, bombing and tank and infantry attacks, he threw a heavy attack at Rommel on the western side of Caen, under a lowering sky. This sector was held by Sepp Dietrich’s First SS Panzer Corps. Like a solitary bulwark the Twelfth SS Panzer (Hitler Jugend) Division slowed this attack to a momentary standstill, south of Cheux. It took appalling losses but destroyed sixty of Montgomery’s tanks, often at point-blank range. To General Dollmann it was clear that the enemy were on the point of breaching his Seventh Army and enveloping Caen. Sepp Dietrich begged for infantry and tanks. At nine P.M., as heavy rain began to fall on the day’s battlefield, Dollmann appealed to Rommel: could Rommel use his own panzer forces assembling for the Bayeux attack to help Dietrich defend Caen? Rommel crisply ordered the Seventh Army commander: “Tell SS General Hausser to scrape together everything he can.” Paul Hausser commanded the Second SS Panzer Corps; but so far only the Ninth SS Panzer Division had come this far forward, and the Tenth SS Panzer Division was still way back.

  Dollmann, never a man of action, began to lose his nerve. Bayerlein of Panzer Lehr later commented that the easy life led by Dollmann and Pemsel at their remote and luxurious château headquarters—well back, at Le Mans—had turned them soft. “Dollmann was a zero,” said Bayerlein. According to Ruge’s diary, Pemsel’s nerves were also wearing under the strain. Both men probably knew from the grapevine that their days were numbered. But Rommel, characteristically, supported all his commanders now that they were under criticism from the hated High Command. When the High Command now sarcastically inquired just where Dollmann’s headquarters was, Rommel replied: “That is irrelevant in the present situation,” and “I am not going to criticize them for it.” That Rommel had begun to tolerate the incompetent was a sign of his decline.

  Twice Dollmann picked up the phone and ordered Hausser to send his SS corps to help Dietrich defend Caen, and twice he changed his mind. At first Dietrich actually seemed to have fended off the British attack, but early on June 28 it was resumed and the enemy seized an intact bridge across the Odon—the last river obstacle before the Orne, the main river on which Caen stood. At this Dollmann really panicked and diverted Hausser’s entire Second SS Panzer Corps against this penetration. Hausser requested a tactical delay to enable him to prepare a proper attack, designed to pinch off the slender British finger from both sides.

  At this juncture—8:10 A.M.—the war diary of Dollmann’s Seventh Army headquarters has been tampered with, but he appears to have overridden Hausser’s request and ruled that the attack should begin immediately. Dollmann was past caring about the outcome, anyway. Two hours later he was dead.

  Hitherto it has been believed that Dollmann suffered a heart attack. But his chief of staff, Max Pemsel, related to me one evening, in the Munich apartment of General Jodl’s widow, that Dollmann stepped into Pemsel’s bathroom at the château at ten o’clock that fateful morning and swallowed poison. For two hours Pemsel kept the general’s death a secret, then reported it to La Roche-Guyon as “death from heart failure.”

  A year after first revealing the truth about Dollmann’s death to me, Max Pemsel decided to make it a matter of public record and quietly mentioned the suicide in a military annual. “General Dollmann’s burden of anxiety grew worse and worse. His protests to his superiors were ignored, and he learned that his army would not be getting any outside assistance during its desperate defensive actions.” Pemsel continued, “When Hitler blamed General Dollmann during the night of June 28–29 for the premature loss of Cherbourg, Dollmann was able to disprove it in a telegram in which he referred to faulty intervention by others in his own command affairs. After dispatching this telegram he bade me farewell at 3 a.m., a
nd committed suicide at his command post.”

  No doubt the truth about Dollmann’s death did cross Rommel’s mind. Probably he was glad that Dollmann at least had been spared the High Command’s threatened inquisition. It may be that this was an indication that Erwin Rommel thoroughly approved a general’s preference for suicide with honor to the uncertain outcome of a formal inquiry. He ordered a full-dress military funeral for Dollmann in Paris.

  Half an hour after he had received word of Dollmann’s sudden death, his telephone rang again. It was General Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s chief of staff. Both field marshals, Rundstedt and Rommel, he said gravely, had been ordered to report to the Führer in person the next day.

  A Colonel Calls on Rommel

  JUNE 28,1944, LATE afternoon. In a big Mercedes flying a field marshal’s pennant, Rommel speeds eastward through France toward the German frontier. Hitler has summoned all senior commanders from the west to the Berghof, his mountain villa above Berchtesgaden, for a meeting the next day. Germany’s fortunes have reached a desperate pass.

  On the Russian front, an entire army group has caved in, and onrushing Soviet armored divisions are bearing down on Germany’s own frontier. In Normandy the Anglo-American bridgehead is threatening to burst. Rundstedt, the Commander in Chief West, has asked for “directives for the future fighting.”