Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

by Unknown

  On April 6th, at Wadi Akarit, 15th Panzer and 90th Light Division, “fighting,” said General Alexander, “perhaps the best battle of their distinguished careers,” temporarily staved off disaster but could not prevent the junction of First and Eighth Armies. On April 29th they and 21st Panzer Division “continued to show an excellent spirit,” in spite of heavy losses. On April 30th First Army was to be reinforced by the best formations of Eighth Army. General Montgomery selected 7th Armoured Division, 4th Indian Division and 201st Guards Brigade. The two divisions were those which had won the first British victory in Africa under General Wavell. On May 7th the 11th Hussars of 7th Armoured Division, the original and authentic “desert rats,” entered Tunis. On May 12th, after a last battle in the hills above Enfidaville, General Graf von Sponeck surrendered 90th Light Division to his old enemy, General Freyberg and his New Zealanders. The last of the Afrika Korps went into captivity-without its leader. The desert war was over.

  It remained for Field-Marshal Keitel, in a fit of pre-deathbed repentance, to say the last word about it:

  “One of the biggest occasions we passed by was at El Alamein. I would say that, at that climax of the war, we were nearer to victory than at any other time before or after. Very little was needed then to conquer Alexandria and to push forward to Suez and Palestine....”

  General Halder, however, remains unrepentant. In a turgid and ill-written book,Hitler als Feldheer , designed to put all the blame for Germany's defeat on the F�hrer, to exculpate the General Staff and to provide a new version of the “stab in the back,” he still maintains that “to beat England decisively in North Africa was impossible.” Control of the supply lines of the Mediterranean could not be wrested from her. German submarines arrived with a loss of fifty per cent. (In fact, two were lost out of sixty.) England could bring everything she wanted through the Red Sea. (He does not mention that it all had to come round the Cape of Good Hope.) “It was, from the beginning, only a question of time....” Fortunately for the British, the German General Staff has always produced its Halders.

  Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

  CHAPTER 10

  The Atlantic Wall

  In the late summer of 1943 Rommel was where many German generals on the Russian front would have been glad to change places with him-commanding Army Group B in Northern Italy, with headquarters near Lake Garda. On his return from North Africa he had first gone into hospital at Semmering for six or seven weeks and was then posted as a “military adviser” to Hitler's headquarters. A rumour that the Allies, at Mr. Churchill's insistence, were about to stage an invasion of Europe through the Balkans caused Hitler to send him to Greece but he was in Athens only twenty-four hours when, on the news of the fall of Mussolini on July 25th, the F�hrer hurriedly recalled him by telephone. Army Group B was then being formed around Munich, for Hitler already suspected that the Italians were about to surrender or, possibly, to change sides.

  His suspicions were strengthened when Rommel, with General Jodl, went to Badoglio's headquarters to discuss the question of sending more troops to Italy. General Roatta, Badoglio's Chief of Staff, did everything possible to prevent the move, which would, he said, be most unpopular with the Italians. He also objected to Jodl's placing an S.S. guard on his billet. What right had Jodl, he asked, to bring “Political troops” into Italy? What would Jodl have said if he had given him as a guard a company of Jews? Jodl, who had heard a report that he and Rommel were to be poisoned, said nothing but kept his S.S. Rommel decided that the sooner Army Group B moved into Italy the better. They were his Tiger tanks which I watched, on the morning of September 9th, as they moved along the Rivergaro road to occupy Piacenza.

  When the armistice was announced in our prison-camp the evening before, I had hastily bought a well-worn alpaca suit and a large straw hat from the caretaker. Now, out on a “recce” and looking, as I fondly imagined, every inch an Italian peasant, I was leaning over a garden wall, enjoying the sunshine and my first taste of freedom for sixteen months.

  The sight of German tanks in that quiet countryside was unwelcome, as was the appearance of two S.S. men with tommy-guns in the garden a few minutes later. I had to slip away hurriedly into the vines and thence across the fields to the camp to report. I heard afterwards that everyone who saw me-except, fortunately, the S.S. men-recognised me for what I was and wondered what I was doing in Alfredo's second-best suit.

  Even in a prison-camp we had known, what our Intelligence apparently did not know, that the Germans were ready to react vigorously to an Italian surrender. One of our tame guards had reported, at least a fortnight before, that German divisions were streaming over the Brenner. We had not expected that the reaction locally would be quite so quick. Some of us, indeed, hoped to take the train from Piacenza that afternoon, for Rome and the south. Having nearly all been captured in North Africa, we would have been less optimistic had we realised that Rommel was in command. (It was, we still feel, a strange oversight that 50,000 British prisoners-of-war in Italy received no orders or information of any kind at the time of the armistice. The result was that most of them, obeying a six-months-old order to “stay put,” were carried off to Germany. Negotiations with Badoglio went on from the end of July until September: someone might have given us a thought.)

  Apart from making occasional sweeps through the hills, Rommel's troops did not hunt us about unduly. In the desert his order of priority had been (1) petrol and oil, (2) water, (3) food, (4) prisoners. “We can pick them up later,” he used to say. Apparently he still observed it. Once the Germans had a tight hold on Northern Italy, they seemed more interested in looting their former allies of food and machinery and sending the young men off to German labour-camps than in rounding up the odd prisoners who were still at large.

  Rommel, characteristically, was bored with his comfortable appointment. Possibly he did not like serving again under Kesselring: certainly he had hoped for another fighting command. Summering in the Italian lakes was not his idea of war.

  Moreover, immediately after the armistice, he began to have trouble with the S.S. and with Sepp Dietrich, commanding the S.S. Corps. There were reports of widespread looting and of brutal behaviour in Milan and other northern cities. Rommel was indignant, both because of these incidents and because he was not allowed to interfere with the discipline of the S.S. He forwarded a long list of S.S. officers for punishment and, since he was at least free to control the location of his troops, ordered the S.S. units out of Milan. “How are things going now in Milan, Field-Marshal?” he was asked by Himmler, paying a visit of inspection to Italy. “Better, since we moved the S.S. out,” replied Rommel. The S.S. were not, however, so easily defeated. When Rommel complained to an S.S. general about their looting, the general, knowing that Rommel collected stamps, sent him a magnificent (looted) collection.

  It was thus with relief that, at the beginning of November, Rommel learnt that he had been given a special mission by the F�hrer. He was to inspect the coastal defences in the west, from the Skagerrak to the Spanish frontier, and report on their readiness to resist invasion. Some expert advice on the naval side would clearly be needed. Rommel's Chief of Staff, General Gausi, who had been with him in North Africa until he was wounded on May 31st, 1942, knew just the man. This was Vice-Admiral Ruge, then commanding the German naval forces in Italy and previously in charge of minesweepers.

  (After the first war, he was interned for his share in scuttling the German Fleet in Scapa Flow.) Gausi had met and liked Ruge, and Rommel applied for him on Gausi's recommendation. There could have been no better choice. Vice-Admiral Ruge, still living in Cuxhaven and teaching German to British naval officers, is the type of officer we like to think peculiar to the British Navy. In fact, all navies produce it for it is a product of early training, discipline and the sea. Since he was a man of intelligence, energy and integrity, Rommel took to him at once and Ruge became his close friend and confidant. Why was it that Admiral Ruge, for his part, felt himself at ea
se with Rommel from their first meeting, even though the Field-Marshal, returning unexpectedly to his headquarters, caught him in an old bridge coat, with a muffler round his neck? It was his answer to that question which enabled me to place Rommel and will, perhaps, help to explain him to many English readers. “He was a type one meets more often in the Navy than in the other services,” said Admiral Ruge. When, with that in mind, I looked again at Rommel's photograph, covering up the cap, and reflected on all the stories I had heard about him, the odd pieces of his personality seemed to slip into place. Perhaps because my own father was a sailor and I spent much of my early life at sea, I felt that I could now understand this very unusual German general. He had hardly seen salt water until his last assignment. But think of him in the line of Nelson's captains, an unromantic Horn- blower, rough, tough and ruthless but not without chivalry, and he runs true to type.

  The qualities which he showed in the desert and elsewhere are not peculiar to sailors. Soldiers, too, can be bold and determined and tireless and brave. They can have good, orderly minds without much book-learning and with no interest in the arts. They also can be brusque in manner, direct of speech, intolerant of inefficiency and anxious to get on with a job. But when one adds some of Rommel's other characteristics, his manual dexterity and skill in improvising mechanical devices; his extreme simplicity and contempt of “frills”; a mild streak of concealed and subconscious puritanism, so that no one felt inclined to tell a dirty story in his presence; above all, his intense devotion to home and family, then the combination recalls to me my father and his contemporaries as strongly as do the clear blue eyes with the network of fine lines round them. Admiral Sir Walter Cowan, whom he captured in the desert, serving at seventy-two with an Indian cavalry regiment, and with whom I was afterwards in a prison-camp, may not appreciate the comparison but I can picture the two of them barking away at each other, neither prepared to yield an inch, and yet understanding each other perfectly. They were, indeed, very much two of a kind and Admiral Ruge would have made a good, though less prickly, third.

  Reporting for duty on November 10th, Ruge was sent to Berlin to collect all the maps and charts and information he could find. When he had got the papers together they were destroyed in an air-raid. It was not until the beginning of December that he and Rommel were able to start work in Denmark. The inspection of the Danish coast took ten days. Then Rommel moved the headquarters of Army Group B to Fontainebleau and began to study the French coast. (The German Bight of the North Sea was excluded from his task.) He had not been in France since 1940 and what he saw, or failed to see, appalled him. The great “Atlantic Wall,” with which the German propaganda machine had succeeded in impressing its own people as well as the Allies, was a fake, a paper hoop for the Allies to jump through.

  The German Navy had, indeed, erected batteries for the protection of the principal ports. These had been linked up, to some extent, by batteries of the Army Coastal Artillery. But whereas the naval guns were in steel cupolas, the army artillery was merely dug in and had no overhead cover against shells or bombs. (Admiral Ruge explained that the Army Command was unwilling to put its guns under concrete because of the consequent restriction of the field of fire. From 1942 onwards the scarcity of steel made it impossible to obtain the necessary turrets.) As for the string of strong-points, in many cases they had no concrete shelters at all. These were especially lacking along the coast between the Orne and the Vire. Where they existed, the head cover was only 60 cm. thick and useless, therefore, against the preliminary air bombardments which were to be expected.

  Even the elementary precaution of surrounding the strongpoints with minefields had been ignored. In three years, only 1,700,000 mines had been laid. The monthly rate of supply when Rommel arrived was 40,000-a fraction of what we laid in 1941 below the Sollum-Halfaya escarpment. There were no shallow-water mines below low-water level, nor were the minefields to seaward sufficient. Beach obstacles were of the most primitive sort, quite ineffective against tanks and not much use even against infantry. The fact was that no serious and concerted attempt had yet been made to put the French coast into a state of defence against invasion. Nothing was done outside the ports until after the St. Nazaire and Dieppe raids and then the effort was half-hearted.

  Admiral Ruge blames the engineer-general in charge, who was not up to his job. He was bogged down in detail and never thought out a clear over-all plan. “He was not the man to reconcile the differing views of Army and Navy.” The German High Command was equally to blame for not supervising him. In the absence of prodding from above, the local commanders took things easy and decided for themselves how much or how little to do. France had, indeed, become a home of rest for tired generals and tired divisions from Russia. The permanent garrison was composed of “category” troops of very poor quality, under the sort of officers whom such troops attract. The Todt organisation, which had built the Siegfried Line, was busy repairing bomb damage in Germany.

  As may be imagined, Rommel set to with a will to put this right. Beginning just before Christmas, he spent his days making long trips by car with his staff to various sections of the coast and to all the headquarters, down to divisions. By daylight he inspected the defences; when the early darkness of the winter afternoons stopped outdoor work, he held conferences. “He got up early,” says Admiral Ruge, “travelled fast, saw things very quickly and seemed to have an instinct for the places where something was wrong. On one typical winter inspection we arrived at Perpignan late one night. We left at 6 A.M. next morning, without breakfast. Driving through snow and rain, we reached Bayonne at 2 P.M. An hour later, having received the report of the local commanding general, we left, without luncheon, for St. Jean-de-Luz, on the Spanish frontier. There we inspected batteries. We arrived at Bordeaux at 7 P.M. and conferred with General von Blaskowitz. At 8 P.M. we had an hour off for supper, our first meal of the day. We settled down to work again at 9 P.M., but fortunately the engineer-general fell asleep over the table.” To the snug staffs of the coastal sectors Rommel blew in like an icy and unwelcome wind off the North Sea.

  Of his own headquarters, which he had moved to La Roche-Guyon, north-west of Paris, he saw little, except at night. The fact that they were in a fine old castle, full of historical associations, since it had belonged to La Rochefoucauld, Due de Roche-Guyon, aroused no interest in him. Nor could he be persuaded for a long time to visit Mont St. Michel for pleasure. When at last Admiral Ruge succeeded in dragging him there, he remarked that it “would make a good dug-out,” but, said Ruge, enjoyed pottering about in it. On the other hand, he needed no persuasion to go twice to Paris to inspect a revolving gun-turret in concrete which German technicians had constructed.

  Unfortunately for Rommel, he was very far from having a free hand. He could give no direct orders to the troops but could only make suggestions to the Commander-in-Chief West (Field-Marshal von Rundstedt) or to the High Command. Since he was working under personal instructions from Hitler and at the same time was subordinate to von Rundstedt, efficiency was impossible and some friction inevitable. Actually von Rundstedt and Rommel got on better than might have been expected. Von Rundstedt was an aristocratic and dignified German officer of the old school, a very able if orthodox strategist. He might easily have resented the arrival in his area of a jumped-up Field-Marshal with no staff training and no recent experience of European war. The ill-defined set-up had in it all the makings of a bitter quarrel. Happily von Rundstedt was by no means as stiff as he appeared to be and had a sense of humour. Long after Rommel was dead he told Captain Liddell Hart that he had no complaint to make of him. “Whenever I gave him an order he obeyed.... I do not think he was really qualified for high command but he was a very brave man and a very capable commander.”

  That did not alter the fact that the Commander-in-Chief West, who, when he took over early in 1942, had seen as quickly as Rommel the weaknesses of the Atlantic Wall, did not believe that it could be so strengthened as to form a real obstacle
to an invasion. Nothing, he felt, could prevent the Allies landing in force. As a result, he had failed to speed up the work on the defences. It was only at the beginning of 1944 that Rommel sought and obtained an independent command. At the end of January he was made Commander-in-Chief of the German Armies from the Netherlands to the Loire. These included the occupation troops in Holland, the 15th Army, holding from the Dutch frontier to the Seine, and the 7th Army, from the Seine to the Loire. General Blaskowitz's Army Group G controlled the 1st Army, covering the Bay of Biscay and the Pyrenees and the 19th Army, holding the Mediterranean coast. Field-Marshal von Rundstedt remained Supreme Commander over all.

  This was a logical arrangement. According to his staff, it was suggested by von Rundstedt: according to Admiral Ruge, the proposal came from Rommel. Whoever was the author of it, one feels that von Rundstedt's attitude was: “I don't personally see any sense in trying to do anything with the Atlantic Wall but if Rommel feels that he can, better let him get on with it.” The reaction of the staffs on both sides was one of profound relief.

  Get on with it Rommel did and it was a very good thing for the Allies that he was not given six months longer. By then the physical difficulties of the landing would have been immensely greater.

  He was still working under serious handicaps. “He had very little influence with the Navy,” said Admiral Ruge, “and none at all with the Air Force.” It was not until July 1st, more than three weeks after the invasion, that he was able to write to Commander-in-Chief West: “With a view to obtaining unified command of the Wehrmacht and concentration of all forces, I now propose to take over command of the headquarters and units of the other two services employed in the Army Group area or co-operating with it.... Close co-operation between the flying formations and the flak corps and the heavily engaged army can be guaranteed only by the strictest command from one headquarters. Duplication of orders leads to military half-measures....” This was labouring the obvious. But the jealousy between the Services and the system of private armies owing allegiance to Goering, Himmler, etc., was one of the major causes of German defeat.