by Unknown
Moreover, the knowledge that von Rundstedt's disbelief in fixed defences was shared by the Army Command, always inclined to discount anything done by Rommel, did not fail to percolate down to subordinate commanders. As late as April 22nd Rommel was writing:
My inspection tour of the coastal sectors... shows that unusual progress has been made.... However, here and there I noticed units that do not seem to have recognized the graveness of the hour and some who do not even follow instructions. There are reports of cases in which my orders that all minefields on the beach should be alive at all times have not been obeyed. A commander of a lower unit gave an order to the contrary. In other cases my orders have been postponed to later dates or even changed. Reports from some sectors say that they intend to try to put one of my orders into effect and that they would start doing so the following day. Some units knew my orders but did not make any preparations to execute them.I give orders only when they are necessary. I expect them to be executed at once and to the letter and that no unit under my command shall make changes, still less give orders to the contrary or delay execution through unnecessary red tape.
Rommel must have missed the ready obedience of the Afrika Korps. In the desert he had not had to give orders twice. Lack of backing from above and of enthusiasm below were no help in a race against time. Rommel was accustomed to the first. As for the second, no one was better than he at rousing the spirit of tired and apathetic troops. Like a mate of a sailing-ship, he could “put a jump into a wooden dog.” “He had a knack of handling men and of talking to them,” said Admiral Ruge. “Like many of us who had been young officers in 1918, he had done some deep thinking after the revolution about the relations between officers and men. That is one of the reasons, I think, why our Army and Navy kept their discipline so long under such very difficult circumstances. Wherever we went at this time in France he spoke freely to all ranks. He explained his ideas to them clearly and patiently and told them exactly what he wanted them to do. Naturally, they listened for, apart from his reputation, he had great common sense, a gift of quiet humour and an instinct for the human side of a situation often lacking in trained staff officers. A new spirit was very soon evident in the troops and the work of preparing to resist the invasion began to go ahead.”
On the other side of the Channel, General Montgomery was speaking in just the same simple, direct and effective fashion to the troops who were to carry it out and to the factory workers who were to keep them supplied.
In neither case were these “pep-talks” greatly appreciated by higher authority. Both commanders were suspected of aiming at a personal “build-up.” The British newspapers, says Moorehead, were encouraged to “go slow” on Montgomery.
As far back as the summer of 1941, the Army Propaganda Department had been instructed, apparently by General Halder, not to make too much of Rommel. Baron von Esebeck had been refused permission to rejoin him in North Africa. Rommel's enemies in high places were now in a quandary. They had to make the most of the Atlantic Wall, if only to intimidate the Allies. They could not publicise it and the work being done on it without at the same time publicising the man in charge. They contented themselves, therefore, with describing him in private as a mountebank and a seeker after notoriety. They added that he had never been the same since his illness in North Africa. Rommel, meanwhile, like Montgomery, realised that propaganda and the exploitation of his own personality were merely another weapon. “You can do what you like with me,” he said to his chief cameraman, “if it means the postponing of the invasion by even a week.” In private, says Admiral Ruge, he remained modest and unassuming. “He was not a vain man and he had no wish to push himself forward.”
Personal jealousies Rommel could ignore: scarcity of material was an obstacle that could not be overcome. At this period enormous quantities of steel and concrete were being used for submarine shelters and for the launching-sites of V1's and V2's. The new submarines and the secret weapons were Hitler's latest prescription for winning the war. Had they not been spotted in time, they might well have enabled him, if not to win it, at least to prolong it indefinitely. Perhaps rightly, they were still given priority over fixed defences. Rommel had, therefore, to make do with what he could lay his hands on.
Hitler might agree, as he did, that all coastal defence batteries should be put into concrete emplacements, with at least six feet of concrete overhead. But even armed with this order Rommel could not get the concrete, simply because there was not enough to go round. When the invasion came, many batteries had no overhead cover at all and were quickly blotted out from the air.
Rommel nevertheless managed to get a prodigious amount of work done and, in this new field, showed his innate talent for improvisation. In a few months, though hampered by supply and transport difficulties and, towards the end, by continual air attacks, he succeeded in having four million mines laid, as against less than two million in the previous three years. Given time, he proposed to lay fifty to a hundred million and, after surrounding all strongholds with deep minefields, to fill up the country between them with mines, wherever it was “tankable.” What would the answer have been if he had thus converted whole areas of France into vast mine swamps? The point was not raised at Field-Marshal Montgomery's post-war conference at Camberley in May, 1946, though it had occurred to one distinguished commander and student of war, Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Tuker. General Patton might have been puzzled.
Because mines, like everything else, were in short supply, they were not at all of conventional construction. Rommel raided depots and arsenals, where he discovered stocks of hundreds of thousands of old shells. These he made into mines, as did the Japanese, more primitively, in Burma. (Under the Japanese system, an unfortunate individual sat with his shell in a hole in the road and was supposed to touch it off when a tank ran over him.) Nor were the minefields laid in conventional pattern. Rommel's idea was to employ mines in as many different ways as possible. “Here he had to fight many a battle against the engineers,” said Admiral Ruge. “They wanted to lay their mines by the book while he was always for variety.” Rommel and Ruge were, in fact, still making a comparative study of mining tactics ashore and at sea when the invasion overtook them.
Rommel's open mind greatly impressed his naval adviser. “He was an unconventional soldier and, unlike many of the General Staff, he was very much interested hi technical things. He saw the point of any new device of a technical kind very quickly. If one gave him an idea in the evening he would often telephone in the morning and suggest an improvement. He had a strong mechanical bent and his suggestions were always sound.” In the many “gadgets” that were improvised to make a landing difficult, one can see the traces of the young officer who took his new motor-bicycle to pieces and put it together again, just as one can see, in the deceptions and ruses employed, the artful enemy we knew in North Africa.
Amongst the “gadgets” were, for example, the beams driven into the beaches below low-water mark, some with mines on the top, some with steel cutters to act as “tin-openers.” There were homemade “nutcracker” mines in blocks of concrete. There were mined logs with a seaward slope. There were the obsolete tank obstacles, made out of three iron bars at right-angles, which were now useless against tanks but, as Rommel pointed out, could still impede infantry if set below high-water mark. There were naval mines sunk in shallow water with floating lines attached to the horns. Ashore there were poles driven in on open fields and wired together with mines on top to impede glider landings. Many of these and other such devices were, however, not ready by June 6th because of difficulties of supply, of transport and of labour. Amongst the deceptions were, naturally, dummy minefields, though Rommel had to complain that they would hardly be convincing to air reconnaissance if cattle were allowed to graze over them. There were dummy batteries which, in fact, were later heavily bombed. There was the usual camouflage, though here again Rommel had to point out that it was not much use camouflaging a battery position in a green field
with black nets. There were arrangements for make-shift smoke from straw and leaves, real smoke apparatus being in short supply. Infantry and artillery commanders were ordered to be ready to light fires on dummy batteries and on dummy emplacements and entrenchments behind the line, to distract enemy gunfire from the beaches. But, on April 22nd, “there are no reports from any place that these preparations have been made.”
As a preliminary measure, when the invasion was nent, Rommel was anxious that V1's should be used against the British concentration areas in the South of England. He was refused, though many of the installations were ready, because there were not yet enough V1's to allow of a continuous fire being kept up. It was, perhaps, too late. But it is interesting to note that General Eisenhower says that, had the Germans succeeded in perfecting these weapons six months earlier and had they been used principally against the Portsmouth-Southampton area, “the invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult and perhaps impossible.”
Similarly, Rommel wanted the Navy to mine the navigation channels and the Luftwaffe to drop the new pressure-box mines all round the Isle of Wight. The Navy objected to laying mines too close to the shore and the Fiihrer would not allow the pressure-box mine to be used because there was no known method of sweeping it and the Allies might lay similar mines and “block our harbours completely.” (He was, presumably, still thinking of his new submarines.)
The real conflict of opinion was, however, on the whole broad question of how the invasion could best be resisted. Rommel apparently had no doubts.“We must stop the enemy in the water,” he said, “and destroy his equipment while it is still afloat.” The first twenty-four hours, in his view, would be decisive. Once the Allies secured a bridgehead it would be impossible to drive them back into the sea or to prevent them breaking out. He based his belief entirely on the factor of air superiority. “He had never forgotten how the R.A.F. had kept him and his army of 80,000 men nailed to the ground for two or three days in North Africa.” The air force that would accompany the invasion would be incomparably more powerful. As for the Luftwaffe, it would be shot out of the skies and the reinforcements promised by Goering, like the supplies for North Africa, would never appear. Road and rail traffic would be completely disrupted and movement in the back areas would become impossible. It was no use, therefore, thinking of conventional large-scale counter-offensives: the troops would never get up to make them or would arrive in disorder and too late. If this reasoning were correct, then the main line of resistance must be the beach. Every man in the forward divisions must be ready to fight at once if a landing were attempted on his part of the coast. Reserves, headquarters and ancillary services must be right up behind the fighting troops. The armour must be in close support, so that the guns of the tanks could actually bear on the beaches. If this strong belt of resistance were eventually broken, at least it would hold up the invaders for some time and their breakout would be local.
The Army Command, the Commander-in-Chief West, his staff and the majority of the army, corps and divisional commanders took the more orthodox view. With 3,000 miles of coast line to defend; with only 59 divisions, most of them second-class and only ten of them armoured, with which to defend it; with no certainty where the main landing would be made, it was useless to think of preventing the Allies setting foot above high-water mark. The only correct course was to keep the reserves, including the armour, well in rear, to wait until the main effort was identified beyond doubt and then to launch a large-scale counter-offensive at the right moment. That might be when the invaders were ashore and still building-up. It might be when they had moved out of their bridgehead but were temporarily “off balance.” Von Rundstedt justifiably considered himself a good enough general to select it according to circumstances.
For Rommel it may be said that his appreciation of the effects of Allied air power was proved accurate. It was only with the utmost difficulty that troops could move behind the front and then across country, by night and in small formations. One division from the south of France took twenty-two days to cover the four hundred miles to Normandy and had to do most of it on foot. General Bayerlein, now commanding the crack Panzer Lehr Division, ninety miles south of Caen, took more than three days to get up and lost five tanks, 130 trucks and many self-propelled guns before he came into action, though he was well provided with “flak” and had trained his division in the use of cover and camouflage. In the Falaise gap, roads, highways and fields were so choked with destroyed equipment and with dead men and animals, says General Eisenhower, “that it was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.”
On the other hand, Rommel can be accused of grossly overestimating the chances of holding the Atlantic Wall. It was no good saying, at the end of April, that “we must, in the short time left, bring all defences up to such a standard that they will be proof against the strongest attack.” For that he should have been in charge two years before, with unlimited material and the men to put it into place. Even so, there is no such thing as a defensive belt “proof against the strongest attack.” That was a lesson that he and his “Ghost Division” had helped to teach in 1940. As it was, his defences were not even a quarter complete. Nor could he have had any confidence in the men who manned them. Dug-outs, convalescents from the Eastern Front, boys without battle experience, with a residue of renegade Poles, Rumanians, Jugoslavs and Russians, they were not likely to stand up to the sort of sea and air bombardment he had himself foretold. His reputation as a strategist would rank higher if he had backed von Rundstedt's proposal for evacuating, before the invasion, the whole of southern France up to the Loire. Had that been done, he might have fought his last battles in the moving warfare of which he was a master. But such a plan, as he knew, was foredoomed. Selling ideas of retreat to the F�hrer was a task more hopeless than that of defending the Atlantic Wall. However, as will be seen in the next chapter, he is not to be judged entirely on what he said and seemed to believe at this period. General Montgomery had no doubt what Rommel would do. His analysis of his old opponent's plans and personality was a masterpiece. “Last February,” he said, in May, "Rommel took command from Holland to the Loire.... It is now clear that his intention is to defeat us on the beaches.... He is an energetic and determined commander; he has made a world of difference since he took over. He is best at the spoiling attack; his forte is disruption; he is too impulsive for a set-piece battle. He will do his level best to 'Dunkirk' us-not to fight the armoured battle on ground of his choosing but to avoid it altogether and prevent our tanks landing by using his own tanks well forward. On D-day he will try (a) to force us from the beaches; (b) to secure Caen, Bayeux, Carentan. Thereafter he will continue his counter-attacks.... We must blast our way on shore and get a good lodgment before he can bring up sufficient reserves to turn us out. Armoured columns must penetrate deep inland and quickly.... We must gain space rapidly and peg out claims well inland....
While we are engaged in doing this, the air must hold the ring and must make very difficult the movement of enemy reserves by rain or road towards the lodgment areas. The land battle will be a terrific party and we shall require the support of the air all the time-and laid on quickly."
It came about as both men predicted. Rommel did try to “Dunkirk” us. The air did hold the ring. The first twenty-four hours were decisive. Once the Allies secured their bridgeheads, only by some gross mistake on their part could they have been thrown back into the sea. Would von Rundstedt have had a better chance of defeating them in open warfare when they debouched from it? With the troops at his disposal and in face of Allied air supremacy, it seems unlikely. Nor was General Montgomery the man to give him the opportunity of catching him “off balance.” Progress might have been slower but one feels that it would have been just as sure.
In fact, neither of the plans for resisting the invasion was put to the test for neither von Rundstedt nor Rommel was I free to do as he wished. Because Hitler, i
f he did not inspire it, backed Rommel in his belief that the beaches must be the main line of resistance, von Rundstedt was unable to form his army of manoeuvre. Because von Rundstedt, against Hitler's intuition and Rommel's judgment, took the orthodox staff view that the main landing would come in the Pas de Calais, the nearest point to England and the direct road to the Ruhr, Rommel was not able to concentrate a strong armoured force immediately behind the Normandy beaches, where he and Hitler expected it. Three weak armoured divisions only were placed at his disposal for the whole front from the Scheldt to the Loire. The rest were in reserve, nominally under the orders of Commander-in-Chief West. Even he could not move them without the permission of Keitel, Jodl and Hitler which, as usual, came too late. In the forward area in Normandy, Rommel had only his old 21st Panzer Division, now reformed, with very few of the old personnel. According to von Esebeck, it was removed from his command while he was away seeing Hitler the day before the invasion and transferred to von Rundstedt's Panzer Group West. He retrieved it and used it to advantage, for it was this division which prevented the capture of Caen the first day. But, rightly or wrongly, Rommel did not feel that its commander, Major-General Feuchtinger, handled it with the boldness of von Ravenstein in the desert. When he reached the front he found it, says von Esebeck, held up by airborne troops. “How many gliders were there,” asked Rommel. “Hundreds and hundreds,” replied Feuchtinger. “How many did you shoot down?” “Three or four.” “You have lost your chance,” said Rommel. Feuchtinger, for his part, complained that, until Rommel's return, he could get no orders from any one and that he had been forbidden to move without them.