Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the ridge, after several hours of hard, confused fighting, the Bavarians had finally pushed the Italians off Hill 1114. It was captured by a company under the command of Leutnant Ferdinand Schörner, who reported—erroneously—that he had captured the summit of Monte Matajur, when in fact he had done no such thing. Through neither man knew it at the time, this particular feat of arms, not a small accomplishment in its own right, in view of the determination shown by the Italians in defending the hill, would ignite a long-running, often bitter, sometimes petty, rivalry between Schörner and Rommel. Feldmarschall Karl von Bülow, commander of the Fourteenth Army, had promised the Pour le Mérite, the “Blue Max,” Germany’s highest (and naturally most coveted) award for gallantry in combat, to the officer commanding the unit which captured the summit of Matajur—Rommel had been determined to be that officer, but it would be Schörner who would be receiving the medal.28

  It was just as well that Rommel had no idea what was transpiring up on the ridge above him, as it was not long before a column of Italian soldiers, Bersaglieri to be precise—Italy’s elite light infantry—came marching through Luico, utterly confident that all of the German and Austrian troops were on the other side of the ridge. They were understandably startled when they stumbled upon Rommel’s small detachment; Rommel tried to bluff them into surrendering without a fight but an exchange of rifle and machine-gun fire began, which lasted for about 10 minutes. Finally the shooting from the Italians began to taper off, then ceased altogether, and the Bersaglieri commander signalled his willingness to surrender. Evidently believing that the presence of Rommel’s “advance party” signaled the collapse of the ridgeline defenses and that the bulk of the Fourteenth Army was about to descend on them, the Italians chose the better part of valor and laid down their arms—50 officers and 2,000 men of the 4th Bersaglieri Brigade meekly marched into captivity. By now the rest of Rommel’s abteilung was beginning to catch up with him, while Major Sprösser was bringing the rest of the Mountain Battalion over the ridge and moving into Luico from the opposite direction; Monte Kuk was now in German hands.

  Two peaks along the ridgeline were still in Italian hands, Monte Cragonza and the actual summit of Matajur, and as long as they remained so, the Alpenkorps’ hold on the rest of the ridge couldn’t be considered secure. The Italians would be able to observe every move the Alpenkorps made, bring down machine-gun fire on units that strayed into range, and call in fire missions for Italian artillery batteries sited to support the defenders. As the afternoon faded into evening, Rommel allowed his men to rest while he studied the ridgeline through a pair of binoculars. He then went to Major Sprösser and expressed his confidence that with the proper artillery support and maximum surprise he could take Cragonza (also known as Hill 1096). Doing so would cut the road by which the Italian positions atop Matajur were supplied, as well as being the only route of retreat available to the defenders.

  As the moon rose in the small hours of October 26, Rommel’s heavily reinforced abteilung of three rifle and three machine-gun companies began working their way back up the ridge, making for the summit of Monte Cragonza. It was still dark when the village of Jevszek, which sat on the shoulder of Cragonza, was taken without a fight, another 1,600 Italian POWs, including 37 officers, being gathered in later that morning. The position atop Cragonza was not to be taken so easily: for once Rommel could see no tactical alternative to a frontal assault, and so he went forward fast and hard with his three rifle companies and stormed the peak.

  Flanking machine-gun fire from the north struck amongst us. We rushed on. . . . For a while on the Matajur road I myself provided a target for an Italian machine gunner. There was no cover against his fire. I escaped the well-laid cone of fire by running upslope around a bend of the road about seventy yards away.

  The losses only increased the fury of the mountain troops. Trench after trench was taken and nest after nest of machine guns was wiped out. The hard job was completed about 0715. The valiant 2nd Company . . . had captured the peak of Monte Cragonza.29

  Now all that lay between Rommel’s abteilung and the Alpenkorps’ ultimate objective was the Mrzli, the secondary summit of Monte Matajur, connected to the peak itself by a saddle which was thick with Italian infantry.

  . . . Already during our attack we had observed hundreds of Italian soldiers in an extensive bivouac area in the saddle of Mrzli between its two highest prominences. They were standing about, seemingly irresolute and inactive, and watched our advance as if petrified. They had not expected the Germans from a southerly direction—that is, from the rear. . . .

  . . . The number of enemy in the saddle on Mrzli was continually increasing until the Italians must have had two or three battalions there. Since they did not come out fighting, I moved near along the road, waving a handkerchief, with my detachment echeloned in great depth. The three days of the offensive had indicated how we should deal with the new enemy. We approached to within eleven hundred yards and nothing happened. Had he no intention of fighting? Certainly his situation was far from hopeless! In fact, had he committed all his forces, he would have crushed my weak detachment and regained Monte Cragonza. Or he could have retired to the Matajur massif almost unseen under the fire support of a few machine guns. Nothing like that happened. In a dense human mass the hostile formation stood there as though petrified and did not budge. Our waving with handkerchiefs went unanswered . . .30

  What happened next was akin to a scene out of a Dürrenmatt play: as Rommel approached to within 150 yards of the Italians, they suddenly broke and ran in all directions, scores of them rushing forward to greet him, hoisting him on their shoulders amid shouts of “Enviva Germania!” An entire regiment—1,500 men—of the Salerno Brigade threw down their weapons and surrendered to the handful of riflemen who had kept pace with Rommel. The road to the Matajur summit—the true summit—lay wide open, with only a single regiment of enemy infantry defending it.

  What followed was almost equally strange: a message from Major Sprösser arrived, directing Rommel’s abteilung to withdraw from the ridge and return to Luico. The major, seeing the enormous number of prisoners coming down from the slopes of Monte Cragonza and the Mrzli—more than 3,000 Italian officers and other ranks—assumed that Monte Matajur itself had fallen, and wanted the Mountain Battalion reassembled so that it could rest and refit before renewing the offensive—there was no purpose to occupying the Kolovrat ridge now that the Italian defenses had been breached or taken. The whole of Rommel’s abteilung, save for the under-strength rifle company and the machine company that were with him at the moment, were already moving down toward Luico. Rommel, of course, did not know the reasons for Sprösser’s order, but he did know it was a mistake.

  Should I break off the engagement and return to Mount Cragonza?

  No! The battalion order was given without knowledge of the situation on the south slopes of Matajur. Unfinished business remained. To be sure, I did not figure on further reinforcements in the near future. But the terrain favored the plan of attack greatly and every Württemberg mountain trooper was in my opinion the equal of twenty Italians. We ventured to attack in spite of our ridiculously small numbers.

  We kept attacking. The heavy machine guns were moved up in echelon. From Hill 1467 a hostile battalion tried to move off to the southwest by way of Scrilo. But the fire of one of our machine guns, delivered at sixty yards from the head of the column, forced the battalion to halt. A few minutes later, waving handkerchiefs, we approached the rocky hill six hundred yards south of Hill 1467. The enemy had ceased firing. Two heavy machine guns in our rear covered our advance. An unnatural silence prevailed. Now and then we saw an Italian slipping down through the rocks. The road itself wound among the rocks and restricted our view of the terrain to a few yards. As we swung around a sharp bend, the view to the left opened up again. Before us—scarcely three hundred yards away—stood the 2nd Regiment of the Salerno Brigade. It was assembling and laying down its arms. Deeply
moved, the regimental commander sat at the roadside, surrounded by his officers, and wept with rage and shame over the insubordination of the soldiers of his once-proud regiment. Quickly, before the Italians saw my small numbers, I separated the 35 officers from the 1,200 men so far assembled, and I sent the latter down the Matajur road at the double, toward Luico. The captured colonel fumed with rage when he saw that we were only a handful of German soldiers.31

  At last it was the turn of the Matajur summit itself, 400 yards ahead and 300 feet higher up. While his six heavy machine guns directed suppressive fire on the summit, Rommel carefully led his riflemen across the open ground, as always using every wrinkle, fold, and undulation to best advantage for cover and concealment. Just as he got his men in position to storm the garrison on the pinnacle of Monte Matajur, the enemy commander surrendered. Either the man had not realized just how small was Rommel’s band of attacking infantry, or else, seeing that the rest of the Kolovrat ridge had fallen and that the only road by which reinforcements could have reached him or he and his men could have withdrawn was in enemy hands, concluded that the Matajur summit would fall no matter what he did. Whichever it was, he evidently decided that getting his men (and quite possibly himself) killed for no purpose was the height of folly, so he gave it up as a bad job. At 11:40 A.M., October 26, 1917, Rommel’s signals section fired the prearranged pattern of flares that announced that the Alpenkorps’ objective was secured.

  In 52 hours of near-continuous operations, Rommel and his men had covered a horizontal distance of almost 18 miles (and the vertical equivalent of another 2), much of the time under enemy fire, broke through the center of the Italian defenses along the Isonzo River Line, took in rapid succession one enemy village and four summit positions, and captured almost nine thousand enemy soldiers. Though Rommel would remember by name every man killed or who had suffered a severe wound, the human cost of these achievements had been astonishingly small—six dead and 30 wounded. Though he was denied the Pour le Mérite, Rommel and his accomplishments were singled out for mention in the Alpenkorps’ Order of the Day on October 27, a measure of professional recognition which was no small salve to the ego of an ambitious and rather vain young infantry officer.

  With the line of the Isonzo River defenses split wide open, the Italians had no choice but to retreat. The Alpenkorps was shifted to the Fourteenth Army’s right flank, where its mountain-fighting skills could be put to best use as the Army’s advance trailed its right wing along the foothills of the Dolomite Mountains. A string of short, sharp delaying actions marked the Württembergers’ progress westward, and it was in one such engagement on November 7 that Rommel’s abteilung, once again at its usual strength of three rifle companies and a machine-gun company, was given the task of clearing an Italian blocking force from the Klautana Pass, approximately 12 miles east of the town of Longarone.

  For the first time since the early days of the war, Rommel’s attack failed. Throughout the war, he had been careful to examine every action in which he’d been engaged, in order to root out and absorb whatever tactical lessons could be drawn from them. For all of his undeniable arrogance and vanity, Rommel could be remarkably self-honest when necessity demanded: the knowledge that, while death and injury were inevitable consequences of warfare, men’s lives would be wasted through carelessness or over-confidence repeatedly drove home that necessity. In this case, Rommel readily acknowledged that over-confidence had played a part in the failure of his attack, coupled with a degree of over-complication in the planning and execution.

  Though they had driven off their German attackers, the Italian troops holding Klautana Pass were spooked by the attack, and decamped a few hours later. The road to Longarone was wide open. While not a large town by any definition, Longarone had a tremendous strategic importance: the single rail line which was the sole supply route for the Italian Fourth Army and 12th Corps ran through the town, while the Piave River valley was the only practical route by which the 12th Corps, already in danger of being isolated and cut off by the Fourteenth Army’s advance, could withdraw from its positions to the north, in the Carnic Alps. At noon on November 9 the Germans reached Longarone.

  The Piave valley lay before us in the brilliant light of the midday sun. Five hundred feet below us the bright green mountain stream rushed over its broad, multi-branched, stony bed. On the far side was Longarone, a long and narrow town; behind it lofty 6,000-foot crags soared up to the heavens. The automobile of the Italian demolition crew was crossing the Piave bridge. An endlessly long hostile column of all arms was marching on the main valley road on the west bank. It was coming from the Dolomites of the north [12th Corps] and was heading south through Longarone. Longarone and its railway station, as well as Rivalta, were jammed with troops and stalled columns.32

  Here was an opportunity that a solider of Erwin Rommel’s caliber could not resist. Rommel’s abteilung was the advance guard for the Mountain Battalion, which in turn was the lead element of the whole of the Alpenkorps. Knowing this, Rommel found that the tactical situation offered him three choices as to what action he would take. The first was to simply wait for the rest of the Mountain Battalion to catch up before engaging the Italians; by now, anyone who knew anything about Erwin Rommel would understand that this was about as likely as having the sun rise in the west. The second, which would create considerable destruction and confusion among the Italian forces in Longarone, would be to remain on the east bank of the Piave, and have all four of his companies—the machine-gun company in particular—open fire on the long columns of Italian soldiers until such time as the remainder of the battalion arrived. The third alternative was to find a way across the Piave and attack Longarone. It would be a bold, almost foolhardy move; Rommel himself would later hold it as a maxim that “A risk is a chance you take; if it fails you can recover. A gamble is a chance taken; if it fails, recovery is impossible.” Attacking Longarone would clearly fall in the category of a gamble; nevertheless, it would be a calculated gamble. His experience in France and Romania had taught him that, much like Sir Isaac Newton’s notional body in his First Law, an army in a state of retreat tends to remain in a state of retreat unless something compels it to do otherwise. While interdicting the withdrawal of the 12th Corps from the east bank of the Piave would certainly have been costly to the Italians, actually blocking their line of retreat would create chaos that could produce potentially decisive results. Gamble or no, for Rommel there was no other choice to make.33

  A mile down-river from Longarone was the village of Dogna, and there the Piave was fordable to infantry on foot. The machine-gun company remained on the east bank directly across from Longarone and set up its half-dozen heavy machine guns, while Rommel took the two rifle companies down to Dogna and crossed the river, then moved north. It was dusk before all of his riflemen were across and he was able to bring them up to the outskirts of Longarone. The Italians were surprised but responded with alacrity, and returned such a heavy volume of fire that Rommel was forced to retreat, his men taking whatever cover they could find inside buildings and behind stone walls and fences. Meanwhile Major Sprösser had brought up the rest of the battalion and sent a company across the Piave at Dogna with orders to cover Rommel’s rear by taking up positions to block any Italians coming up the road from the south.

  When darkness fell a column of Italian infantry that Rommel later estimated to be at least a thousand strong surged down the road out of Longarone, overrunning isolated German soldiers and nearly capturing Rommel himself. Running as hard as he could, Rommel reached the blocking force by Dogna and was able to turn them around before the Italians arrived. The Germans then put up such a heavy fire that the Italian attack was halted in its tracks; Sprösser continued to send reinforcements, and sometime around 2:00 A.M. the Italians gave up and withdrew back into Longarone. At dawn, with his abteilung back to its full strength, Rommel began a cautious advance north toward Longarone; a hundred yards outside the town he was met by one of his own men, Leutnant S
choffel, who had been captured in the attack out of Longarone the previous evening. Schoffel handed Rommel a handwritten letter from the commanding officer of the Longarone garrison.

  Headquarters, Fortress Longarone

  To the commander of the Austrian and German forces:

  The forces in Longarone are not in any condition to offer further resistance. This Headquarters places itself at your disposal and awaits your decision as to the disposition of our troops.

  Major Lay34

  Momentarily stunned, Rommel quickly had the men of his detachment fall in and they marched into Longarone, where Rommel formally accepted the surrender of the town and the garrison: the entire 1st Italian Infantry Division, 10,000 strong; 200 machine guns; 18 pieces of mountain artillery; 600 draft animals; 250 wagons; 10 trucks and two ambulances. Leutnant Schoffel, it turned out, had convinced his captors that Rommel’s small force was considerably larger than in truth it was; unexpected “confirmation” of his story came from an Italian soldier, who had been taken prisoner early the previous day, told by Major Sprösser that an entire German division had surrounded the town, and later allowed to elude his captors and return to Longarone. Rommel had been right all along—a retreating army tends to cling to an attitude of defeat. Rommel’s losses since the capture of Monte Matajur were six men killed in action, two severely wounded, 19 slightly wounded, and one missing.

  The victory at Longarone would be the high-water mark of the Battle of Caporetto: despite their best efforts, the Germans and Austrians were unable to maintain their momentum, while French and British divisions, rushed up to northern Italy from Salonika, began shoring up the once-crumbling Italian army. Rommel and Sprösser would each be awarded the Pour le Mérite for their respective parts in the capture of Longarone, which would be remembered as one of the Italian Army’s greatest humiliations. For Rommel it was unexpected but very welcome compensation for the “Blue Max” he was denied at Monte Matajur. Awarded by Kaiser Wilhelm personally, the citation accompanying the medal specified that it was given for breaching the Kolovrat line, storming Monte Matajur and capturing Longarone. In the years to come, Rommel would only acknowledge that it was for the Monte Matajur action alone—unless he found himself in Italian company, at which time he would find an opportunity to mention that it had been given to him for Longarone. It also, to his dismay, marked the end of his service with the Württembergische Gebirgsbataillon: sent on a well-earned leave in the first week of the new year, when he returned to duty he was promoted to hauptmann (captain) and posted to the headquarters staff of the XLIV Army Corps, the new designation for the Army of the Kingdom of Württemberg. He would remain a staff officer for the remainder of the war, until Germany signed an armistice with the Allies on November 11, 1918 and the hostilities of the Great War ceased. He would return home to Ulm, there to be reunited with Lucie just before Christmas 1918, in time for what promised to be a bleak Yuletide throughout the Fatherland. Almost 22 years would pass before he would once again lead men into battle.