Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Daniel Allen Butler

  Atlantic Beach, Florida

  October 15, 2014

  PROLOGUE

  A FOX IN THE DESERT

  He stood staring out into the seemingly endless and empty landscape of the North African desert, a short, stocky man in desert-brown tunic and trousers, the usual polished gleam of his jackboots dulled by a dusting of yellow-brown sand. The peaked hat he wore marked him as an officer, the gold-spangled crimson collar tabs and matching shoulder-boards with their elaborate gilt knotting and pips marking him as a generalleutnant (lieutenant general). On his left breast he wore the silver wreath of the Combat Wound Badge, signifying that he had bled in battle on at least two occasions; above that was the stark, distinctive black-and-silver cross patée of the Iron Cross, First Class, an award for valor which he had the curious distinction of having won once in each of two world wars. At his throat were two more decorations, one the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, Nazi Germany’s highest award for gallantry in action. Yet, beside it, incongruously, hung the blue-and-gold-enameled Maltese cruciform of the Pour le Mérite, Imperial Germany’s highest award for valor in combat.

  He stood straight, as befitted a soldier, but without the affected stiffness typical of a German General Staff officer. Hands clasped at the small of his back, his feet spread at shoulder width, it was the stance of man alert yet deep in thought. The face was handsome, with a profile that was all straight lines and angles; the cheekbones were broad and prominent. Above them sat a pair of alert, intelligent eyes that were a cool, measuring gray; the nose was strong and slightly prominent. A thin-lipped mouth, clearly prepared to easily move between compressed concentration and a broad grin, sat above an angular jaw with a hint of a cleft in it. All in all it was a face well suited to projecting the confidence and determination—and ambition—of the man who wore it: it was the face of a leader.

  It was March 23, 1941. Up until this moment, few people outside of Germany would have recognized his name or his face. But as he stood in the Libyan desert just outside the small coastal town of El Agheila, lost in thoughts and plans, he was about to change all of that. Soon his name would be repeated over and over by the prime minister of the British Empire, as part of a ringing declaration that he was the one man the British Army must defeat in order to win the Second World War. Within a matter of weeks almost the entire world would come to know of Erwin Eugen Johannes Rommel, the man his British foes would call “The Desert Fox.”

  No one knows who actually coined the name and first applied it to Erwin Rommel; it simply, somehow, came to be and sprang into common usage among Allied and Axis soldiers—in German it is rendered Wüstenfuchs—and then among their respective newspapers and newsreels, more or less simultaneously. It was a title fairly earned on a dozen battlefields stretching across the wastes of North Africa’s Western Desert from Tunisia, across Libya, almost to the gates of Alexandria. It was the complete summation of the wily though impulsive tactician and shrewd, but not infallible, strategist who, sharply outnumbered and poorly supported, bedeviled British and American armies and ran rings around a succession of Allied generals for almost three years.

  Like his namesake, when on the attack Rommel struck swiftly and sharply, and when on the defensive was never more dangerous than when at bay. Like a fox, he was elusive, swift, and almost always on the move; sitting passive and immobile was not in Rommel’s nature. And like far too many foxes, he would be hunted relentlessly by his enemies until at last he was run to earth by a pack of baying hounds whose collective moral worth vanished into insignificance when measured against his own. He would die, not in battle, but by his own hand, a few miles from his home, as part of a bargain struck with a psychopath in order to protect his wife and teenaged son from homicidal retribution, one last act of courage in a life filled with courageous deeds. And it was an action filled with irony, for Erwin Rommel was a man of unimpeachable integrity, and his suicide had been decreed not as a consequence of an act of treason, as so many would one day be misled to believe, but because he had done the only thing he knew how to do: he told the truth—to Adolf Hitler. In the end, he was compelled to take his own life because he was a patriot.

  His death was a tragedy, not only for Rommel and his family, but for the nation he loved as well. The shadow cast by the monstrous Nazi regime stained the character and reputation of the German people for generations—whether rightly so or not is still the subject of debate. When the Second World War ended in Europe in May 1945, there were far too few men who had held any senior post of leadership in Germany during the years of the Third Reich who had not been tainted by the foulness of that regime. Had he lived, Erwin Rommel would have been one of that rare breed; what he might have become, what role he might have created for himself, in a postwar Germany is impossible to say. Yet it can be assumed without fear of reasonable contradiction that whatever the part he played, it would have been large and profound: Germany—and the Germans—would have been the better for it. Anyone who takes the time to regard the man at length will soon see past the skilled military technician and recognize in Rommel’s moments of insight and introspection the flashes of brilliance that are proof of a truly great mind and character.

  It is a self-serving conceit of the liberal elite of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that military leaders are essentially second- or third-rate intellects, unable to successfully compete with their alleged betters and find a place in the “real” world. It is an ill-informed opinion, for it flies in the face of all contemporary evidence as well as historical experience. No American university, for example, offers a curriculum as mentally and physically demanding as that of any of the United States’ service academies. More to the point, all of history’s Great Captains have been men of extraordinary intelligence and wide-ranging ability. Julius Caesar, who never knew defeat when commanding Roman legions, was equally successful as an author, explorer, businessman and politician. Frederick the Great wrote poetry and philosophy, composed music that is played to this day, and reformed his kingdom’s monetary and legal systems, while at the same time winning a succession of wars that transformed Prussia from a minor central European state into a major Continental power. Goethe considered Bonaparte to possess the most powerful mind in human history; the French emperor’s nemesis, Wellington, who, like Caesar, never lost a battle, closed his public career after serving as Great Britain’s prime minister. In the twentieth century, Douglas MacArthur, after a series of brilliant campaigns in the Pacific, served as proconsul in occupied Japan, during which time he personally drafted a new, democratic constitution for Dai Nippon that is still regarded six decades later as a legal masterpiece. Dwight Eisenhower oversaw the strategy that allowed the Allies to crush the Third Reich, then went on to serve two terms as president of the United States. Rommel was part of this tradition, for while it would have been inappropriate to deem him an “intellectual,” his was a first-class intellect. He disdained the intelligentsia, with their self-important posturings and pretenses; at the same time, he was always articulate, often insightful, and possessed not only the capacity to rationally analyze any given situation but also gifts of intuition that bordered on the uncanny. It was a point of particular pride with Rommel that he was often able to outmaneuver an opposing commander because he was able to outthink him. It was a capacity that he repeatedly demonstrated in two world wars, in the First as a junior officer, in the Second in command of a panzer division, then a panzerarmee, and ultimately an entire heeresgruppe.

  There were no premonitions of greatness, though, no portents when Rommel came into this world that he would one day become the most famous soldier his homeland would ever produce, that his tactics and strategies would be studied and emulated by generations of soldiers to follow, most especially those of his former enemies. No one could have suspected that he would one day rise to the rank of field marshal while leading the most celebrated armored corps of the Second World War, or that his name would one day
be known—even familiar—to millions of people yet unborn when his own life ended 54 years later. He did not spring up the scion of a distinguished family of German officers, the embodiment of Teutonic militarism and obrigkeit. Erwin Rommel was the son of a schoolteacher, deeply rooted in the German middle class, imbued with all of his social strata’s caution where the Junker aristocracy was concerned. All of his life he would hold, and sometimes openly exhibit, even flaunt, a sense of contempt for German aristocrats, particularly for those “professional” officers with a von in their names who seemed to regard martial prowess and skill at arms as a birthright, their especial reserve, and who in turn regarded him as a lucky amateur. For his part, Rommel would gleefully knock all of their strategies into a cocked hat, as for nearly two years in North Africa he won his victories against a revolving door of Allied generals who never seemed to be able to get his measure, all the while doing so while being outmanned, outgunned, and outsupplied. In the end, he was defeated at El Alamein by a foe whose numerical and material superiority was so great as to be overwhelming; even then, he almost won the battle. And it would be in his final battlefield, Normandy, with his hard-won knowledge and understanding of the dreadful material superiority possessed by the British and Americans, that his strategy would prove to be Germany’s only hope of victory, and the plans and theories of the General Staff officers of whom he was so contemptuous would be exposed for the houses of cards that they were.

  But all of that lay in the future. Now, as the sun set on the Mediterranean Sea rippling up to the North African shore, he had readied his Afrika Korps, which at this moment mustered a strength of little more than a single division, to strike the next morning toward a British armored corps which just a few months earlier had routed an entire Italian army nearly a quarter-million strong, driving it from the Egyptian border westward across almost the whole of Libya. Rommel’s coming attack was an act of the sort of pure audacity that had always been his hallmark combat; by doing so—though there was no way he could have known it at the time—he would dramatically, decisively alter the entire strategic picture of the Second World War. And in doing so he would take the first steps down the road that would ultimately lead to his own destruction. . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE BIRTH OF A SOLDIER

  But the Lacedaemonians, who make it their first principle of action to serve their country’s interest, know not any thing to be just or unjust by any measure but that.

  —PLUTARCH, Lives of the Noble Greeks

  Erwin Rommel was a German.

  Deceptively simple and self-evident, this single fact would be found at the core of all that would define him as a man. He would be many things in his lifetime: dutiful son, diligent student, would-be inventor, clandestine lover, determined teacher, loyal husband, devoted father, apt instructor, aspiring aviator, best-selling author, and, above all, dedicated soldier and brilliant field commander. But overarching all these achievements was the defining, essential truth of Rommel’s life—and his death: he was a German.

  Recognizing this as the cornerstone of Erwin Rommel’s character allows everything about the man to be understood with astonishing clarity, including the final decision of his life—the manner in which it would end. From it, every facet of the man proceeds; without it, he would be inexplicable. Emphasizing that Erwin Rommel was a “German” is not to identify him with some vague but convenient Teutonic stereotype; rather it makes a particular point of how Rommel viewed himself and his place in the world. He was born into the first generation of Germans for whom the noun “Germany” no longer defined some vaguely delimited region of Central Europe but now identified a sovereign state—the German Empire. That identity would in turn define his life. And though that life began, naturally, with Rommel’s birth in 1891, it can be fairly said that his story began fully two decades earlier, just outside of Paris, France, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. . . .

  The consequences of the eighteenth day of January 1871 would loom large over, and at times cast a shadow across, the continent of Europe for fully three-quarters of the century that followed. That was the day when, in the Hall of Mirrors, Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Prussia and the architect of German unification, declared the creation of the German Empire. His pronouncement was the culmination of three aggressive wars, coupled with a series of diplomatic alliances, that, under the leadership of the Kingdom of Prussia, subordinated and unified into a single nation a motley collection of petty Teutonic sovereigns, aristocrats and their states: four kingdoms, five grand-duchies, six duchies, seven principalities, three free cities and the imperial domain of Alsace Lorraine, the remnants of medieval feudalism that had bedeviled the German people since the Middle Ages. It marked the end of the centuries-long political morass in north-central Europe, where “Germany,” much like “India” before the Raj, had long been a geographical notion rather than a cohesive nation.

  That the Germans had failed prior to 1871 to produce a unified “Germany” was not the fault of the German people. Germany’s greatest tragedy, at least until 1933, was the series of conflicts in Europe collectively known as the Thirty Years War. Fought between 1618 and 1648 by a handful of royal and noble houses, the war had begun as an armed religious struggle pitting Protestants against Roman Catholics, and ended as an open confrontation between coalescing powers of France, Austria, Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden, that were developing distinct identities as nation-states. What made this series of wars a German calamity was that the Protestants and Catholics, and later the French, Austrians, Danes, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedes, all used the region known from Roman times as “Germania” as their battleground.

  Such was the nature of seventeenth-century warfare that the innocent inhabitants across whose land the opposing armies marched and fought were the war’s true victims, as their monies, livestock, crops, and sometimes children were carried off as plunder to pay for the mostly mercenary forces—very few of them German—actually fighting. Rapine, pillage, and looting were the order of the day, and it was customary for a retreating army to burn a farm, a village, or a town, slaughtering the inhabitants in the process, rather than allow it to fall into the hands of the enemy. The result was to leave the Germans physically, financially, and morally exhausted when an end to the hostilities was finally negotiated via the Peace of Westphalia in 1648—it is estimated that at least half of the population of the region died during the war; in some areas, barely one person in ten survived.

  Starved in both body and spirit, those Germans left alive at the end of the war focused what little energy and few resources they possessed on mere survival. As foreign armies tramped to and fro across the land, there was scant opportunity for the growth of the sort of ethnic cohesion that was taking place in France, Sweden, or England at the time, or to rally around a ruling house in the manner of the lands owned by the Austrian Hapsburgs, making nations out of what had previously been agglomerations of feudal holdings. The result was that “Germany” emerged from the Thirty Years War as the same motley collection of petty domains ruled by minor nobles it had been when the war began.

  One of the larger of these small states, Brandenburg-Prussia, was, in the century that followed the Thirty Years War, fortunate in having a succession of talented, if not particularly likeable, rulers who steadily improved its finances and organization, while at the same time raising an army of moderate size but formidable quality. Simultaneously, through clever diplomacy and shrewd marriage contracts, Brandenburg-Prussia expanded its holdings, until by the year 1740, now known as the Kingdom of Prussia, it was primus inter pares among all the small German states. In that year King Friedrich II, who would be remembered as Frederick the Great, began the succession of wars with the Austrian House of Hapsburg that would culminate in the Seven Years War, fought from 1756 to 1763. The ultimate result of these wars was that Prussia emerged almost doubled in size and population, second only to Hapsburg Austria among the German states, and was now the ackno
wledged leader of those states which were not bound by marriage, formal alliance, or some other treaty, to Austria. A showdown for primacy in Germany between the two seemed inevitable, but it was forestalled by the aggressive wars of Revolutionary France and later the French Empire under Bonaparte.

  Prussia’s role as Britain’s partner in the final defeat of the French emperor at Waterloo caused the kingdom’s political stock to rise sharply in value among the smaller German states, and Prussia’s monarchs began to work toward a unification of these minor states under Prussian leadership, only to be repeatedly thwarted by Prince Klemens von Metternich, Austria’s Machiavellian foreign minister of the day. Von Metternich, architect of the “Concert of Europe” and ardent disciple of the principle of a “balance of power” between the larger European nations, saw Prussia’s aspirations as rightly threatening Austria’s German primacy, and perceived that threat as a danger to his carefully maintained balancing act between the Great Powers of Europe. Inevitably then, he was determined to rein in Prussian ambition, and worked tirelessly to do so.

  There were, as the diplomats of the day saw it, two solutions to the “German Question” of which power would dominate the smaller German polities: the Grossdeutschland, or “Big Germany” solution, and the Kleine-deutschland or “Little Germany” solution. In the former, the northern German states would be unified in a German Empire under the auspices of Prussia, while the latter simply maintained the petty—and pettyfogging—status quo. Naturally, von Metternich vigorously advocated for a Kleine-deutschland, as a united German Empire would threaten Austria’s power and position as the leading “German” state in Europe. For more than thirty years he was able to coerce, cajole, and sometimes outright bribe one or more of the smaller northern German kingdoms—Bavaria, Württemburg, or Saxony—to block Prussia’s exertions toward unification. Even after the upheavals of the revolutions of 1848, which saw von Metternich ousted from public life, German unification remained an apparently chimeral dream.