The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  Tempelhoff commented to the admiral, as they watched Kluge take leave of Rommel: “On the main points they now see eye to eye.” And strolling on the cliff above the château the next morning, Rommel said to the admiral in quiet triumph: “The way I snarled at him on his first day here has worked wonders. When he arrived his instructions were very different, but now he has seen for himself that there’s nothing to be done.”

  Rommel went off that day to continue fighting the enemy. Speidel renewed his clandestine contacts with the anti-Hitler plotters. Under cover of a routine visit to Kluge and Blumentritt, he went on to Paris to see Stülpnagel and learned the details of the planned simultaneous coup d’état there. Later he also dropped a hint to General Hans von Salmuth, commanding the Fifteenth Army. Salmuth privately wrote, “I gave my blessing to Speidel’s intentions.” These intentions were, in Speidel’s own words, that the two field marshals should open secret negotiations with the enemy, offering to withdraw German troops from France, Belgium and Holland in return for the immediate cessation of the bombing of German civilians. That a shrewd general like Speidel should seriously expect the British and Americans to abandon their war aims, let alone the doctrine of unconditional surrender, while leaving Hitler’s conquests in the east intact, shows the land of illusions in which the conspirators were living.

  There can be no doubt of Rommel’s personal loyalty toward Hitler at this time, whatever his loathing of Jodl and the High Command. “The tragedy of our position is this,” Ruge recorded him as saying on July 13. “We are obliged to fight on to the very end, but all the time we’re convinced that it’s far more vital to stop the Russians than the Anglo-Americans from breaking into Germany.” He thought the collapse would come in four weeks, so any political decision would have to come very soon. Ruge himself wrote in his diary, “We’ve got to exploit the differences between our enemies. Best of all would be if the Führer himself would take the requisite steps. But to judge from all his utterances, it’s not likely that he will. On the other hand, says Rommel, the Führer is a great man and a man of sound political instinct, so he ought to be able to hit on the right solution by himself.” The next day Rommel again watched the desperate fighting at Saint-Lô. The front line could collapse at any time, he concluded. On Rommel’s return, Speidel drafted a vivid report to Kluge on the crisis for Rommel to sign; it was ready the next day, July 15. Its language was uncompromising: “In the circumstances,” it concluded, “it is to be anticipated that in the near future the enemy will succeed in breaking through our thin front line, particularly in the Seventh Army’s sector, and thrusting on into the wide open spaces of France. . . . Apart from the local reserves which are presently tied down by the fighting in Panzer Group West’s sector”—at Caen—“and which can move only at night owing to the enemy’s air superiority, we have no mobile reserves available to prevent any such breakthrough on the Seventh Army’s sector.”

  Rommel took his pen and added a final paragraph that was blunt and brave: “Everywhere our troops are fighting heroically,” he wrote, “but the unequal struggle is drawing to its close. In my view the political consequences of this have just got to be drawn. As commander in chief of the army group, I feel obliged to make myself quite plain.”

  He stepped out of his study, found Speidel and Tempelhoff waiting for him, and announced: “Here—here’s the signature you wanted!” The others were taken aback at his postscript, and persuaded Rommel to strike out the word “political.” The report was retyped and forwarded to Kluge the next day with a brief covering note: “With reference to our verbal discussion on July 12 I am sending you the enclosed observations as my contribution to a situation assessment. Signed: Rommel.” Thus Rommel had acted. He had put his own name and reputation on the line. He had issued an ultimatum—or so he saw it—for Kluge to send up with his own added authority to the Führer. “I’m curious to see what becomes of it all,” he admitted to Admiral Ruge. “It’s all the same to me whether they give me the boot or the chop—not that I believe they’ll actually do that. But commanders in responsible positions must be permitted to speak their minds.”

  JULY 15, 1944: 3:30 P.M. Rommel set off to inspect the Caen battlefront—slaughterhouse of both Montgomery’s and his own troops. He crossed the Seine in an assault craft, then raced to Normandy in his big open Horch, with young Corporal Daniel at the wheel. It occurred to him that enemy guerrillas had recently ambushed several cars in this area, so he ordered a detour by less active roads. There were hundreds of trucks rolling westward now, thanks to his use of the inland waterways; at last supplies were reaching the battlefield. As he drove the last ten miles to Caen, he could see the depth of the defensive system already constructed by Eberbach and Gause: line upon line of tanks, guns and infantry. He spent some time with the gory survivors of the Sixteenth Luftwaffe Field Division, still holding the main line. The troops had lost all their antitank guns in the murderous RAF bombing raid, but now they were ready and waiting with Panzerfaust bazookas.

  The villages of inland Normandy were idyllic and oblivious of war. “Here a small farm cart,” noted Ruge, “packed with our infantrymen. There our troops strolling with the local girls. Apparently the villagers are all still here.” Rommel had indeed packed these villages with infantry. Montgomery was going to have the battle of his life, if ever he got this far. Rommel moved on to see General Feuchtinger’s Twenty-first Panzer Division—bivouacked in an orchard. A few hundred yards away the French country life continued undistracted. “A father was cutting his young boy’s hair. A real Saturday afternoon atmosphere.”

  On the way back to the château that evening, Rommel took the same road he always took—rather recklessly, Admiral Ruge thought. The field marshal reminisced nostalgically about his school years. Then, jolted back to reality by the blackened skeletons of burned-out trucks, he again talked about the war. “War is so senseless, nobody profits by it. The farmers go on farming, the workers go on working just the same.” To the astounded admiral, the field marshal ventured his own wild dream that one day Germany might be a British dominion, like Canada. “When will there be a decision?” asks Ruge in his diary.

  Rommel waited impatiently for a reply to his “observations.” He was in dead earnest. On July 16—the day he sent the document to Kluge—he again drove up to the Fifteenth Army’s sector, this time to inspect the Seventeenth Luftwaffe Field Division near Le Havre.

  The day was hot and humid; sometimes the sun broke through the clouds. The division’s command post was in a limestone cave in a hill covered with beech trees near Fécamp. After the conference the division’s operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Elmar Warning, escorted the field marshal back to where the cars had been parked under cover against air attack. Colonel Warning had served on Rommel’s staff at El Alamein, and he asked Rommel about the true situation—“because,” he said, “we can count the days off on our tunic buttons before the breakthrough comes.”

  Rommel regarded Warning’s Afrika Korps shirt and replied with startling candor: “I’m going to tell you this much: Field Marshal von Kluge and I have sent the Führer an ultimatum, telling him the war can’t be won militarily and asking him to draw the consequences.”

  “What if the Führer refuses?” asked Warning.

  “Then I’m going to open up the western front,” answered Rommel. “Because there’s only one thing that matters now—the British and Americans must get to Berlin before the Russians do!”

  Kill Rommel!

  CURSING SOFTLY BENEATH his breath, burly Captain Raymond Lee, of the British Special Air Service, gathers up his parachute in the darkness. His men are safe, but some equipment has been broken in the landing and a vital item is missing. All night is spent looking for it.

  At 8:50 a.m. he sends a pigeon fluttering back to England with a message for the War Office: “Landing okay, but fifteen miles southeast of target. Can’t find white box, possibly not dropped. Three leg bags smashed, no radio left. Civilians scared stiff and not hel
pful. Will do our best. Boche plentiful in area, they say, but still hold out.”

  For months the British have been searching for Rommel’s secret headquarters. Back in May it was reported variously as at “Gaillon” and at La Roche-Guyon. On May 26 a British agent stated that Rommel was at the château of the Marquis de Rochefoucauld, sited “at the foot of a rock.”

  Not until July 14 was final confirmation received, from Major William Fraser of the Gordon Highlanders. He had been parachuted into central France, 200 miles away, to establish a guerrilla base codenamed “Houndsworth,” into which a large Special Air Service force would later be dropped to harass the German routes from the Mediterranean to Normandy.

  Fraser’s radio signal to London read: “From Houndsworth 102. Very reliable source states Rommel’s headquarters at Château de la Roche-Guyon. . . . Rommel there May 25, staff permanently there. Rommel arrives left bank Seine, crosses by motor launch. Walks and shoots in Forêt de Moisson. Send maps from this area to area [of] Mantes, also three snipers’ rifles. Would prefer you not to send another party for this job as [I] consider it is my pigeon.”

  At SAS headquarters outside London, the maps were scrutinized: Fraser was too far away to reach the château safely carrying three snipers’ rifles; and he had a specific task already. His commander, Brigadier R. W. McLeod, radioed to him: “Regret must forbid your personal attack on Rommel. Appreciate you consider him your pigeon, but your task [is] to remain in command [of] present area. This pigeon will be attacked by a special party . . .”

  Not easily fobbed off, Fraser signaled back the next day: “Have here Monsieur Defors who owns the estates all around Rommel headquarters. All the keepers, etc., have been in his family service for years. His relations live all around and he has contacts all the way en route.”

  The brigadier’s reply was the same: “Regret decision must stand.”

  After this, Brigadier McLeod acted with accustomed speed. He sent for air photos of the château. Routine cover of the village had been flown on May 13, and now the eight-by-sixes were pulled from the files and subjected to stereoscopic examination by experts. They discovered that the whole area had been surrounded by barbed wire.

  On July 20, the brigadier assigned Operation Instruction Number 32 for the mission: “Intention: to kill, or kidnap and remove to England, Field Marshal Rommel, or any senior members of his staff.”

  It was a death warrant for Rommel, because while snatching him and flying him back to Britain would obviously be a sensational coup, the odds against flying him out safely were probably insuperable: killing him would be easier. McLeod admitted that retaliation would be “inevitable” against the local villagers, just as the Nazis massacred the village of Lidice after the killing of Reinhard Heydrich, and more recently the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane.

  Nevertheless he ordered the dropping of an SAS squad into France near the city of Chartres, with orders to kill Rommel. It is Raymond Lee who leads the five-man team, a professional assassin with half a dozen notches already on his rifle butt. How is he to know, as he leaps out into the darkness over France on July 25, that another fate has already overtaken his chosen victim? Lee will spend his next weeks futilely searching for Rommel, and then ambushing German transport behind the lines.

  Colonel Hans Lattmann, Rommel’s artillery officer, has described an incident that again revealed Rommel’s secret intentions. “We were driving to the Eighty-Sixth Corps,” Lattmann told me. “On the way we had a puncture. We got out, and the field marshal took me on one side and we walked up and down while Daniel the driver and Lang changed the wheel. He asked me, ‘How do you think the war’s going to end, Lattmann?’ I replied, ‘Herr Feldmarschall, it’s pretty obvious we’re not going to win but I hope we’ve got the strength to get a fair settlement.’ And then he said: ‘I’m going to try and use my good name with the enemy to make a deal with the West, against Hitler’s will—but only on condition they agree to fight side by side with us against Russia.’ ”

  Every day now Rommel was covering 250 miles or more in his Horch, meeting his battle commanders. The military records reveal nothing of the agonies of conscience that he was suffering. They only show Rommel methodically and single-mindedly preparing to defeat Montgomery’s coming offensive. Any day now Montgomery would attempt to smash his way out of the frustrating Caen bridgehead toward Falaise and Paris. But postwar documents clearly indicate that each such conference between Rommel and his generals also contained an unrecorded, secret portion in which he hinted at his armistice plans. There is, for example, this off-the-record talk with General Eberbach, the Panzer Group commander. “We can’t go on like this,” Rommel told him.

  Eberbach was noncommittal. “Can you imagine the enemy even starting preliminary talks with us,” he asked, “so long as Adolf Hitler is in power?”

  Rommel shook his head. “I’m relying on your support. We’ve got to cooperate, if only for the sake of the German public who have been so decent throughout all this.”

  Eberbach expressed powerful misgivings that what Rommel was planning would unleash a civil war in Germany, and Rommel knew he was right. He wondered what Hitler’s reply would be to his ultimatum.

  Another such talk took place on July 17, when he visited the First SS Panzer Corps. Sepp Dietrich’s operations officer indicated that Montgomery’s preparations were all but complete. Then Dietrich himself arrived, a stocky peasant type with a weather-beaten face. He had been one of Hitler’s most loyal followers. Rommel tackled him in Hellmuth Lang’s presence with the words: “Would you always execute my orders, even if they contradicted the Führer’s orders?”

  The SS general stuck out his bony hand for Rommel to shake: “You’re the boss, Herr Feldmarschall. I obey only you—whatever it is you’re planning.”

  More private talk followed, which Lang could not hear.

  After that, Rommel climbed into the Horch and told Corporal Daniel to drive back to the château. The late afternoon air was heavy and hot. Rommel was silent, then told Lang: “I’ve won Dietrich over.”

  As usual the long straight roads were strewn with burning trucks and automobiles caught by enemy fighter-bombers. But today the roads were also cluttered with refugees from Normandy: somehow the French had smelled the aroma of approaching death. Their horse- or ox-drawn carts were laden with household goods and decked out with white cloths in the hope of escaping the aircraft cannon fire. As Rommel’s command car roared past, raising clouds of dust, the Frenchmen who recognized him waved and doffed their hats. Lang wrote that day, “We find very little hatred from the French on these trips. They have far less love for the Tommies and Americans.”

  On his knees Rommel had a road map. In the back, next to Lang, was a corporal acting as aircraft lookout. After two hours the number of recently wrecked trucks multiplied—in some there were still dead and injured, so there must still be enemy planes about. Approaching Livarot, the lookout spotted eight enemy planes. Rommel shouted to Daniel to take a covered, leafy lane that ran parallel to the main road, but after some miles the lane converged on the main road again.

  They took Route N179 out of Livarot toward Vimoutiers. Almost at once the lookout saw two more aircraft, diving in toward them. Rommel yelled to pull off into a narrow side road about 300 yards ahead—but before the Horch made it, the first Spitfire was already thundering in at treetop height behind them. At 500 yards’ range it started pumping machine gun and cannon fire out of its wings—Rommel could see the flashes as he looked back, his hand on the door handle.

  Cannon shells exploded in the road behind, then thumped into the left side of the Horch. Hot fragments of metal and glass tore into his face. Daniel’s left shoulder was shattered by a cannon shell. He fought to control the car but it careened down the long hill at high speed and crashed into a tree on the other side of the road, spewing its occupants out across the pavement and then ricocheting empty across the road again into a ditch. Rommel’s head struck something and his skull caved in. B
lackness engulfed him as the second Spitfire swooped in and opened fire.

  The attack had been at about six P.M. Three hours later Speidel found out about the “road accident” and phoned Kluge at once. Kluge traced the hospital. The surgeon in charge phoned him back—Rommel was still in a coma. “He won’t be fit again before 1945,” the surgeon said. To Kluge, it seemed like an act of God. Now he blessed his own prudence—because whatever the reason, he had not yet, in fact, sent Rommel’s grim ultimatum on to Hitler.

  Now he, Kluge, would have complete tactical control in Normandy after all, without interference from a headstrong Rommel. Perhaps his hand would bring victory for the Nazis where Rommel had only been preparing to retreat. He put through a Führungsblitz call to the High Command in East Prussia and announced that until a replacement could be found for Rommel, he had decided to assume control in Normandy himself.

  “I must have a tough man here,” he said. “There’s no question of anything else.” Later he said to Schmundt, Hitler’s chief adjutant, “I need men here who are resolute and tough.” These remarks reveal Kluge’s assessment of Rommel’s command qualities.

  Hitler took the unsubtle hint and placed Kluge himself in formal command of Army Group B, while retaining him as Commander in Chief West. Kluge moved his desk to the château, leaving Blumentritt to mind the store in Paris. Characteristically, he declined to eat with Rommel’s staff: they were banished to the mess below the château, with their juniors.

  Only Speidel was invited to share Kluge’s table. He loftily promised his colleagues to come down and join them on days that Kluge was away. Amid hoots of laughter, one officer replied: “We’ll put that to a vote.” The old camaraderie was evaporating fast, now that Rommel had gone.