In the east, battles equally costly in lives but even greater in scope than those of the Western Front would be fought between the Central Powers and Imperial Russia, bearing names like Tannenburg, the Masaurian Lakes, Tagenrog, Gorlice-Tarnow, Lake Naroch, and the Brusilov Offensive; only the immense distances of the Eastern Front prevented these battles from being individually decisive—it would be their cumulative effect which would play into the hands of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries which eventually brought down the Romanov dynasty and then toppled the provisional government. Eight decades of Soviet meddling and “revision” have left the reliability of the records of those years suspect, but at the very least it can be stated with certainty that close to four million soldiers, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German, died in battle on the Eastern Front between August 1914 and November 1917. How many more, mostly Russian, died of disease and malnutrition is impossible to calculate, although the total could easily be double the number of combat deaths.
Yet, if 1918 was to be the decisive year of the war, 1917 was the pivotal one, and during it the hinge of fate turned against the Central Powers. The moral affront of the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the blundering attempt at “diplomacy” which became known as “the Zimmermann telegram” had pushed the forbearance of the American people and their government past the breaking point, and on April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. Almost a year would pass, however, before the weight of American manpower and industry would begin to make itself felt; when it did so, the Allies would be invincible. Germany’s only hope of victory now lay in forcing the French and British to come to terms before the American juggernaut materialized. The collapse of Imperial Russia released 60 German divisions to be redeployed in the West, where for the first time since the opening weeks of the war the Kaiser’s army would enjoy a numerical superiority over the Allies. It was an opportunity that the German General Staff did not intend to waste.
As 1918 dawned, it was clear to the political and military leadership on both sides that the armies of all the warring nations were approaching exhaustion—the question was who would falter first. Germany’s position was, on the whole, the worst, for the British blockade had been slowly starving the German Empire to death for more than three years. Meat and milk were all but non-existent; turnips had replaced potatoes as a dietary staple; flour for making bread often contained as much sawdust and chalk as wheat. With its new-found numerical superiority on the Western Front, the German Army High Command believed that it had the strength for one last great offensive, but after that there would be no hope of victory: Germany was as exhausted as her foes.
The result was a succession of hammer-blows thrown against the Allied lines, collectively known as the “Kaiserschlacht”—the Kaiser’s Battle—beginning in late March 1918, with a new offensive opening with each passing month until July. The first, landing on the British Army, was the most successful, for it had the advantages of superiority in manpower and materiel as well as strategic surprise; yet in the end it failed, for while the British Army fell back, the Tommies held their line, and dreadful losses were inflicted on the attacking German divisions. It would prove to be a decisive development, for each of the four German offensives which followed were launched with diminishing numbers and declining morale, while the Allies were marshaling their strength and regaining a measure of confidence as each following German offensive was contained and then repulsed.
By the end of July the Germans had lost more than 600,000 killed, wounded, and missing—irreplaceable losses—in this succession of offensives with little to show for it: some territory had been gained, but no strategic breakthrough had been achieved, no decisive result attained, and the German Army was finally exhausted. At the same time, the Allies, infused with new strength in manpower, materiel, and morale as the American Army began to arrive in France in significant numbers, went over to the offensive. In August and September, their numerical superiority regained, the Allies attacked the German line relentlessly; moreover, by this time they were also gaining a tactical and technological ascendency as well. One by one, through the month of October and into November, Germany’s allies fell away, and finally, in the first week of November, revolution swept over the Reich, the monarchy was dissolved, and the German government, now a republic, asked the Allies for an armistice. At 11:00 A.M. on November 11, 1918, the fighting ceased.
The Great War would be the defining event of the twentieth century, even more so than the larger war which followed 20 years later. It was what historians deem a “world-historical event”: it fundamentally altered how humanity viewed itself, its societies and institutions, its values and morals. The world which emerged from the war in 1918 was far, far different than that which entered it in 1914; the Great War was (and remains) the greatest cataclysm in Western history since the fall of Rome.
Materially, the cost of the war was staggering: it has been estimated that the monetary expenditure of the war exceeded $186,000,000,000 (at 1918 values). But the human cost was almost beyond measure, for it embraced not only casualty lists, which were almost mind-numbing in their length, but also the toll extracted on Western civilization, one which could never be repaid or replaced. The total dead and missing for uniformed soldiers of all services of all the combatant nations surpassed 10 million; the number of wounded was twice that. Every soldier who fought in the First World War who survived the experience would be marked—and often scarred— by the weeks, months, or years they spent fighting. Each one brought away his own distinct memory and legacy from his experience, though not all had experienced it the same way. For those men who had who made soldiering their career before the war and sought to continue in that profession afterward, many of the scars were intellectual—not in some detached, academic fashion, but rather in the sobering consideration that, for all of the desire that the Great War truly might be “the war to end all wars,” the likelihood of some future conflict on the continent of Europe was all but inevitable. The incidents and events of the war taught lessons and provided insight, both into their vocation and into themselves: they, more than anyone else, had no desire to ever see the Western Front repeated.
Erwin Rommel would prove to be one such. By chance or fortune, he missed the worst horrors of the Western Front, and the mental and emotional scarring it left on the minds and spirits of a generation of French and British officers. These would be the men who, when called upon to lead divisions, corps, and armies in the next war, would often become more focused on avoiding a reprise of Flanders, Verdun, or the Chemin des Dames than they were on winning the battles at hand. That Erwin Rommel would prove to be a very different general than the French or British officers who opposed him would be due in no small part to the simple fact that Erwin Rommel had experienced a different war than did they.
His posting to Ulm in March 1914 put Rommel in command of the half-dozen 77mm field guns of No. 4 Battery, 49th Field Artillery Regiment. A significant portion of his duties was devoted to training conscripts, fresh off the farms and out of the shoppes, who had been assigned to the regimental artillery for the duration of their term of service. Naturally, all throughout July, Rommel, along with all of his fellow officers, paid close attention to the developing crisis in Central Europe which followed the assassinations in Sarajevo, and when French reservists were called to the colors on the last day of July, it was clear to all that the chances for peace were rapidly diminishing: should Berlin decide to mobilize the German Army, war would be unavoidable. Orders for mobilization were posted the following day, August 1; war was declared on France and Russia a day later.
Immediately Rommel asked his commanding officer for permission to return to the 124th Infantry, a request that was readily granted. The regiment was assigned to the 53rd Infantry Brigade, itself part of the 27th (2nd Royal Württemberg) Division, which was sent into the tiny principality of Luxembourg, along with the rest of the Royal Württemberg Army, now the XIII Corps, subordinated to t
he Fifth Army under the command of Crown Prince Wilhelm, the heir apparent to the Imperial throne. The mission assigned to the Fifth Army under the cast-iron dictates of the Schlieffen Plan was to take up a position in the Ardennes Forest, near the spot where the borders of Luxembourg, Belgium, and France converged. There it would act as the pivot-point for the massive wheeling movement of the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Armies marching across Belgium as they sought to outflank the French Army in one grand, sweeping strategic maneuver. The reservists reported to their depots, where they were parceled out to their units; uniforms, weapons, and equipment were issued; troops trains were formed and loaded; and the whole panoply began rolling toward the frontier. Acording to Rommel’s account of the journey to the front, there was an almost festive air about the mobilization:
The trip to the front on August 5, through the beautiful valleys and dells of our native land and amid the cheers of our people, was indescribably beautiful. The troops sang and at every stop were showered with fruit, chocolate, and rolls. Passing through Kornwestheim, I saw my family for a few brief moments.6
Once at the German border, the men left the trains behind and began marching, arriving on August 18. Four days later, Leutnant Erwin Rommel, Jr., in command of a rifle platoon, had his baptism of fire.
It was near a village called Bleid, just inside Belgium, itself intrinsically unimportant to either side. To the south, however, down along the border separating France from the Imperial German territories of Alsatia and Lothringen—Alsace and Lorraine, France’s coveted “lost provinces”—Germany’s 6th and 7th Armies were facing four attacking French armies determined to take back those provinces. It was vital to the German strategy that the attention of France’s Grand Quartier Générale be kept firmly focused on those attacks, and not allowed to wander to the north, where three-quarters of a million soldaten were marching first west, then south, prepared to fall on the rear of the French Army and envelope it in a titanic Cannae. The village of Bleid only mattered insofar as driving out the French would aid in the effort to continue masking the massive movement of the German armies to the north. The events of that day in that place were little more than a skirmish, little different than 100 similar encounters that had already occurred, or thousands more which would take place over the course of the next four years. But because it was Erwin Rommel’s first action, the scrap in and around Bleid deserves a careful look, because of what it would reveal about Rommel as a combat soldier.
The dawn of August 22 was foggy, and the mist made the French soldiers who had taken up positions in and around Bleid nervous. They could hear the unmistakable sound of infantry moving along their front, but exactly how far distant and in what direction was impossible to tell. A few ragged, ineffective volleys of rifle fire reached out in the direction of the Germans as Leutnant Rommel lead his platoon forward. The whole of II Battalion was advancing, its four companies deployed in line abreast. Two days earlier, Rommel had led his men in clearing the village of Conses, “with fixed bayonets, fingers on triggers, and all eyes studying doorways and windows for telltale evidence of an ambush,” but all they encountered was an old woman who assured them that the French soldiers had already left. This time, there was no mistaking where the French were.7
Bleid was the centermost of three villages, with Gevimont to the north and Senieux to the south. The French pickets had been methodically withdrawing in good order as the Germans approached the outskirts of the village, and Rommel halted his platoon in the cover of a hedgerow that surrounded a cluster of farm buildings, sending out small detachments to his left and right to make certain that in the fog the platoon had not become separated from the rest of the company.
Taking a sergeant and two privates with him, Rommel, who had wisely exchanged his pistol for a rifle before going into action, moved forward to scout out the farm itself, which proved to be deserted. Peering around the corner of a building which opened on the main road running past the farm, he saw 15 or more French soldiers, chattering over their breakfast, oblivious to the fact that German soldiers were less than 50 feet distant from them. Counting on the element of surprise, Rommel decided that he and his three men would be sufficient to handle this situation, and at a nod from the young leutnant, the four of them opened fire on the startled Frenchmen.
Some of the enemy soldiers went down, never to rise, before they could get off a shot in return; others scuttled behind cover and began shooting back. Estimating that there were around 10 French soldiers left alive, Rommel and his trio of myrmidons charged them, only to be greeted by a fusillade of rifle fire coming from windows and doors in buildings on either side of the road. The four Germans beat a hasty retreat whence they came, and once back with the rest of his platoon in the shelter of the hedgerow, the youthful lieutenant did a quick assessment of the situation. What happened next was a decisive moment in the life and career of Erwin Rommel.
Should I wait until other forces came up or storm the entrance of Bleid with my platoon? The latter course of action seemed proper. . . . The strongest enemy force was in the building on the far side of the road. Therefore we had to take this building first. My attack plan was to open fire on the enemy on the ground floor and garret of the building with the 2nd Section and go around the building to the right with the 1st Section and take it by assault.8
Rommel’s platoon then began to clear the village house by house. The rest of II Battalion rushed up in support, and the French were driven out of Bleid in an hour. Casualties were heavy, though: nearly a quarter of the battalion’s officers and one in every seven men were killed, wounded, or missing. At the end of the fight, Rommel passed out, a reaction brought on by the stress of his first combat, exhaustion from the long journey to the front, and an unspecified stomach ailment. (This latter problem would plague him for the next several months, and Rommel would continue to have intermittent problems with his health throughout his career.)
The action at Bleid, while all but inconsequential to the overall course of the war, looms large in the life of Erwin Rommel, beyond it being his introduction to combat. Courage, decisiveness, an understanding of the power of tactical surprise as a force multiplier—a skill that would receive the necessary honing in the years to come—and boldness. (Some might say “impulsiveness,” yet what is boldness but impulse leavened by calculation?) Also prominent was Rommel’s acute awareness that war, while it might be a grand adventure, was not one without cost or suffering. “Bleid presented a terrible sight,” he would later write. “Among the smoking ruins lay dead soldiers, civilians, and animals. The troops were told that the opponents of the German Fifth Army had been defeated all along the line and were in retreat; yet in achieving our first victory, our success was considerably tempered by grief over the loss of our comrades.” Rommel would prove in two world wars that he possessed a rare talent for warfare, but he would never grow fond of it.9
Over the course of the next month, Rommel fought in a half-dozen similar small actions as the Fifth Army began advancing, pressing hard on the French, who were reeling back under the immense weight of the right wing of the German Army which had swept across Belgium. Only a combination of tenacious defensive stands by the B.E.F.—coupled with timely, though not always orderly, withdrawals—prevented the whole of the French Army from being enveloped and then destroyed in detail. Even when the German advance toward Paris was stopped at the Marne River, the minor attacks continued, as the rest of the German Army continued to bear down on the French: the Schlieffen Plan had failed but victory still seemed possible, as the Germans believed that there was yet a chance that the morale of the French armies would break.
In yet another such attack, this one on September 24, near Varennesen-Argonne, a small town about halfway between Rheims and Metz, Rommel had his second major personal encounter with the enemy, though this time it would not be as fortuitous as that at Bleid. Leading his platoon in an assault against French infantry holding a line along the old Roman road leading southwest of Varennes
, he was suddenly confronted by five French soldiers. Snapping off two quick shots from his rifle, Rommel dropped a pair of them, but when he squeezed the trigger a third time, he was rewarded with only a dry “click”: the magazine was empty. Again, not waiting to give his enemies time to gather their wits, he rushed forward, bayonet in hand (wiry and strong for his size, Rommel prided himself on the skills in hand-to-hand fighting he’d acquired in peacetime), only to be knocked off his feet when a rifle bullet hit his left thigh, blowing out a fist-sized chunk of flesh. Seeing their officer go down, the men of Rommel’s platoon pressed home their attack, and soon he was safely behind German lines and on his way to a field hospital. Transferred to a corps hospital two days later, he underwent surgery to repair some of the damage to his leg—none of which was, fortunately for him, permanent—which was followed by three months of recovery and limited duty. The wound also earned Rommel his first combat decoration, the Iron Cross, Second Class. Years later, when he was writing of the tactical lessons to be learned from this encounter, he would comment wryly that “In a man-to-man fight, the winner is he who has one more round in his magazine.”10
It would be the middle of January 1915 before Rommel was sufficiently fit to return to his old unit, II Battalion of the 124th Infantry Regiment. Upon arrival, he was given command of the 9th Company, at once recognition of his experience and leadership, and an unspoken acknowledgment of the casualties already suffered within the ranks of the German Army’s junior officers. It was also the occasion of his introduction to trench warfare, for by this time both the Allies and Germans had begun digging in along the positions which they would hold—more or less—for almost four more years. Already certain patterns of operation were taking shape: the German General Staff chose to concentrate the bulk of Germany’s manpower and resources in the east, against the Russians, where the sheer scale of the front made impossible the sort of unit density which stifled any kind of maneuver or strategic movement on the Western Front. Offensive action in the West would be limited to raids on enemy positions and small-scale attacks designed to disrupt Allied plans and preparations for offensives of their own.
Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel Page 5