Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  May I close with the kindest regards from all members of the staff, and remain, meine gnädigste Frau,

  Your Obedient Servant,

  Schräpler82

  “Schräpler” was Major Hans-Joachim Schräpler, Rommel’s adjutant since mid-February, when Rommel took command of the 7th Panzer Division. He had already been wounded (in the arm) in this campaign, having returned to duty early after the untimely death of Lieutenant Most; he would remain with Rommel until his own death in North Africa in December 1941, during the retreat from Tobruk. This would not be the last time he would write to Lucie, standing in for her preoccupied husband; this letter, though, is one of his first to her, and is noteworthy as it clearly shows that Rommel had not lost his “touch.” Despite its formality, it leaves no doubt of the high regard in which Schräpler held his commanding officer, a regard shared by the division as a whole. Soldiers, as a rule, always respect rank, if not necessarily the man holding it; in Rommel’s case of the men of the 7th Panzer gave it to both—and soldiers will always fight well for an officer they respect.

  The first of the two incidents of hard fighting remaining for the 7th Panzer began the day after Rommel wrote the second letter to Lucie. His division, now working along a new line of advance, turned north rather than west, headed for the city of Lille. The attack toward Lille began by establishing a bridgehead across the La Bassée Canal, one of the widest and deepest in northwest Europe. When a machine-gun battalion was pinned down by rifle fire from the well dug-in British rearguard, Rommel gave his men a tongue-lashing, standing atop a railway embankment running alongside the canal. As the divisional history told it,

  He complained that we were not doing enough to combat the British riflemen and climbed up on top of the railroad embankment, then, standing up right amid the enemy fire, proceeded to dictate targets to the antitank gun crews of Number Four and Number Seven companies. One by one their leading gunners and commanders were shot dead, clean through the head, but the general himself seemed totally immune to the enemy fire.83

  Once the 7th Panzer was across the canal, General Hoth, Rommel’s corps commander, despairing of the lethargic von Hartlieb-Walsporn, now gave Rommel command of the 5th Panzer Division as well as the 7th Panzer. He would need it, for his mission was to hold Lille’s defenders in place until sufficient German infantry divisions arrived take the town. The 60 encircled Allied divisions Rommel mentioned to Lucie were the B.E.F., the French First and Seventh Armies, and the Belgian Army, which had joined the French and British forces on the Dyle River on May 10: they were all caught in the pocket created by Army Group B’s offensive into Holland and Belgium, and Army Group A’s drive westward from the Meuse. When the extent of the debacle that had developed once the panzers were across the Meuse and Sambre Rivers became clear, the French commander-in-chief, General Gamelin ordered the trapped armies to fall back and fight their way south, where they could join the French forces that would be pushing northward from the Somme River. The remnants of the French Ninth Army, reduced to some 40,000 men, occupied Lille, where they were to anchor the left flank of a defensive line responsible for holding back the Germans as the French retreated—the B.E.F. was already headed for the Channel ports. If they were to have any chance to avoid being completely cut off, that line had to be held. Conversely, taking Lille would allow the Germans to roll up the entire line and trap four enemy armies. The Germans were determined, then, that there be no mistake, committing seven divisions, three panzer and four infantry, to the attack on Lille.

  The battle lasted four days, ending at midnight on May 31, when the French commander, General Jean-Baptiste Molinié, having done all he could, surrendered the town. It almost ended much sooner for Rommel, who, in his desire to be the first German officer to enter Lille (and collect whatever glory and fame would come with that accomplishment) drove straight into the city, only to find the streets swarming with French soldiers who were still willing to fight. A hasty gear-change into reverse and a mad scramble out of the town made good his escape. That same day he had a second close scrape, when the commander of 7th Panzer’s reconnaissance battalion, Major Erdmann, was killed by friendly artillery fire just a few yards from Rommel. The following day General Hoth pulled both the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions out of the attack—taking the city was now a job strictly for infantry. New orders were being drawn up and Rommel was told to ready his division to drive directly to the coast.

  The Belgian army surrendered unconditionally on May 28, and the French First and Seventh Armies disintegrated, but the defense of Lille bought time for the B.E.F. to fight its way to Dunkirk, where between May 27 and June 4, 338,000 Allied troops were rescued from the beaches in what the British called Operation Dynamo. In London, Churchill would declare to the House of Commons and to the British public in general that “Wars are not won by evacuations,” but the success in bringing out most of the troops of the B.E.F.—who nonetheless were forced to leave all of their tanks and artillery behind—allowed the British prime minister to convince his colleagues to fight on, whatever the French might choose to do.

  While Churchill was anxiously waiting out the results of Operation Dynamo, Rommel had been summoned on June 2 to the Führer’s presence at Hitler’s temporary western headquarters near Charleville. He hurriedly drafted a report of the 7th Panzer Division’s exploits thus far in the campaign and personally handed it to Hitler, who, after greeting Rommel with the words “We were very worried about your safety during the attack!” was duly impressed with its contents. Many of Rommel’s colleagues were less so, viewing this as a blatant example of Rommel currying favor with Hitler. Privately, he was prepared to admit to having an ulterior motive, writing to Lucie, “I’ve got to act fast, or the same thing will happen as happened after Matajur.” Having been robbed of glory once was one time too many for Erwin Rommel—it would never happen again if he had anything to say about it.84

  Rommel was invited to attend the private conference which followed, the only divisional commander to do so, where Hitler outlined the O.K.W. plan for overrunning the remainder of France, Fall Rot (Case Red). The French Army’s morale was fragile, its command structure shaky—Maurice Gamelin had been replaced as French commander-in-chief on May 19 by Maxime Weygand, a poor choice, as his dilatory nature had deprived his army of decisive leadership during the most critical days of the German offensive—and its best units had been sent to the First and Seventh Armies. Fall Rot called for two major attacks, the first on June 5 across the Somme River southwest towards Rouen and the Seine, the second four days later over the River Aisne to drive due south into the heart of France, splitting the French Army in two. Rommel returned to his division confident that the French would be compelled to give up in a matter of days, and feeling not a little bit cocky as well.

  4 June 1940

  Dearest Lu,

  We’re off again to-day. The six days’ rest has done lot of good and helped us get our equipment more or less back into shape.

  The new move won’t be so very difficult. The sooner it comes the better fo us. The country here is practically untouched by war. It all went too fast. Would you cut out all the newspaper articles about me, please? I’ve no time to read at the moment, but it will be fun to look at them later.85

  A few hours later, he was writing to Lucie again.

  Today the second phase of the offensive begins. In an hour we shall be crossing the Somme. We’ve had plenty of time and so everything, as far as can be foreseen, is well prepared. I shall be observing the attack from well back in the rear. A fortnight, I hope, will see the war over on the mainland.86

  At 4:00 A.M. on June 5, the 7th Panzer set out for Rouen, the entire division formed up in a huge, rolling armored “box” 2 miles wide and 12 miles long. Called a flaschenmarsch (literally an “area march”) this formation was ideally suited to the open, gently rolling country the division now encountered. With the panzers forward, the flanks and rear protected by lighter armored vehicles, artillery, signals and su
pport vehicles inside the box, every unit in the division could move to support any other unit in minutes. This way Rommel was able maintain a firm grip on the whole unit—there would be no repeats of the fiasco of May 19 outside Le Cateau.

  Thus arrayed, the 7th Panzer Division advanced over 60 miles in two days, avoiding towns and villages which the French might have been employed as defensive strongpoints, reaching Rouen on June 9, only to find the bridges across the Seine, which had been the division’s objectives, blown up at the last moment by a handful of determined defenders. The approach to Rouen had been memorable: the division advanced day and night, stopping only when absolutely necessary and for the briefest amount of time possible, the troops, including Rommel himself, snatching a few hours’ sleep here and there as best they could. Once, having paused briefly near a French farmhouse, Rommel was approached by a woman who lived there, who was clearly under the impression that she and her farm were still far behind the front lines. Seeing the unfamiliar uniforms, she blurted out, “Are you English?” Rommel shook his head. Horrified, the woman shrieked “Oh, the barbarians!” and fled back into her home. Rommel and his companions burst into laughter. Another day saw a British supply column, apparently as oblivious to the real military situation as had been the unfortunate Frenchwoman, captured intact and merrily plundered by the men of the 7th Division, who helped themselves to canned fruit, sweets, and tins of “bully beef” (canned corned beef) which for some reason German soldiers always regarded as a delicacy. At Rouen, Rommel and his men faced French colonial troops for the first time, the 53e régiment d’infanterie colonial mixte sénégalais (53rd Infantry Regiment Mixed Colonial Senegal, 53e RICMS), who ironically fought harder for France than did most Frenchmen. Resisting tenaciously, the Senegalese had to be dug out house by house, sometimes burned out with flamethrowers.

  A dark cloud hangs over what happened next: there is evidence that some of the Senegalese troops who surrendered at Le Quesnoy, just outside of Rouen, were later shot out of hand. The question immediately arises: what did Rommel know of this and if he did, when did he know it? Such an incident was far from impossible, given the presence of dedicated Nazis like Lieutenant Hanke, who hadn’t yet run afoul of Rommel, in the 7th Panzer’s ranks: the Senegalese, who were “colored” troops, were, according to Nazi racial dogma, Untermensch who survived only at the sufferance of their racial superiors. It is not difficult to imagine Hanke or someone of his ilk encouraging soldiers still caught up in the fury and adrenaline surge of combat to kill their enemies outright, no matter how honorably those enemies fought or surrendered—there are after-action reports recounting just such incidents in the archives of every army to fight in the Second World War. The difference here would have been that Hanke’s racial prejudices would have predisposed him to committing such a crime, making it a premeditated atrocity, with the 7th Panzer’s soldiers serving as camouflage for his actions. For the Wehrmacht, the war had not yet assumed the stature of a racial crusade—that would have to wait until the Balkans and Russia—and given Rommel’s attitude toward Nazi racial policies in general, and later his demonstrated treatment in North Africa of prisoners of war who were racially “inferior,” it’s almost impossible to conceive of Rommel authorizing such actions, or countenancing them after the fact. Some accusers have twisted a remark in Rommel’s own account of the action in the village of Le Quesnoy as proof that he at least tacitly condoned the executions—“any enemy troops were either wiped out or forced to withdraw”—but the words themselves as well as the context of the passage hardly support the contention. Given the paucity of information about such executions by men of the 7th Panzer, compared to similar events in other German units at the time that are well-documented and attested, it could well be that, if they did in fact occur, a concerted effort was made to prevent him from gaining any reliable knowledge of such incidents. It is equally likely that the whole incident was a fabrication, an Allied propaganda ploy intended to suitably demonize the enemy. Nevertheless, the accusation was made and it has never been fully refuted, so there it must stand, at once unresolved and disturbing.87

  Meanwhile, in the early hours of June 9, the 7th Panzer reached the valley of the Seine River, strung out along its northern slopes. An intact bridge across the Seine was found at the village of Elbeuf, but the division had become disordered in the darkness, and the battalion given the task of storming the bridge was delayed as it tried to move up to the river. Just as it was prepared to jump off for its assault, the bridge was blown up. Reconnaissance units reported that all of the other Seine bridges had likewise been demolished. The 7th Panzer would not take Rouen.

  That task would fall to the 5th Panzer, as hardly had the dust from the fallen bridges settled than General Hoth had given Rommel and the 7th Panzer a new mission. A handful of relatively intact Allied units, including the British 51st Highland Division, separated from the First and Seventh Armies and the B.E.F., were trying to reach the coastal cities of Le Havre and Cherbourg, from where they hoped to be evacuated to England. Hoth told Rommel to set his sights squarely on the Channel coast and drive as fast as he could in order to cut the Allied line of advance and prevent those enemy units from reaching Le Havre. On the morning of June 10, Rommel was standing atop Colonel Rothenberg’s command tank as Rothenberg ordered his driver to crash through the sea wall along the beach at Dalles, a small resort town halfway between Le Havre and Dieppe, and drive down to the water’s edge. Rommel promptly signaled “Am at coast” to Hoth’s headquarters; the panzers had reached the Channel: despite the naysaying of the likes of Franz Halder and the apprehension of Hitler and most of his senior generals, Sichelschnitt had achieved one of the swiftest, most decisive victories in history.

  That same day, June 10, one of pivotal events in Rommel’s life took place some six hundred miles distant from where he sat atop Oberst Rothenberg’s Panzer IV. In Rome, Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano presented Italy’s declarations of war to the British and French ambassadors. Hitherto, Fascist Italy had stood apart from the German war in Europe, decidedly non-neutral but very much non-belligerent. Now, however, Mussolini, who was even more of a political adventurer than Hitler, while possessing none of Hitler’s calculated cunning, saw an opportunity for Italy’s aggrandizement at France’s expense: his goal was to gain Italy a voice in whatever peace negotiations took place, and with it the acquisition of part of France’s colonial empire in Africa as Italy’s share of the spoils. It was the single most stupid decision Mussolini ever made, for it would, in three years’ time, lead directly to the collapse of Fascist Italy and his own downfall, and a little less than two years after that, his execution at the hands of his countrymen. It would also introduce the world as a whole to Erwin Rommel, who would be sent to North Africa to salvage what he could of Italy’s collapsing colony in Libya from a British invasion, and in so doing so, brilliantly turn the tables on the invaders. But those events were more than eight months in the future, and no one at the time had the slightest inkling that they would so come about.

  For the moment, Rommel had his hands full with the town of Sainte Valery-en-Caux, where the 51st Highland Division and a mixed bag of French units had holed up when the route to Le Havre was cut. For two days the ad hoc garrison held out under incessant artillery fire, the Highlanders fighting with particular tenacity as Rommel edged his panzers forward. When the German guns got within range of the harbor at Sainte Valery, any chance of further evacuation vanished, and the garrison’s commander, General Marcel Ihler, ordered his men to surrender. The 51st Division’s Major General Victor Fortune refused to do so, and continued fighting until his men, lacking tanks and artillery of their own, could no longer hold off the German advance into the town; he capitulated on the afternoon of June 12. In celebration, the 7th Panzer’s divisional band gave a concert that night.

  12 June 1940

  Dearest Lu,

  The battle here is over. Today one corps commander and four divisional commanders presented themsel
ves before me in the market square of St. Valery, having been forced by my division to surrender. Wonderful moments!

  16 June 1949

  Before setting off south this morning (0530 hours) I received your dear letter of the 10th for which my heartfelt thanks. Today we’re crossing the Seine for the second time and will, I hope, get a good step forward on the southern bank. With the fall of Paris and Verdun, and a wide break-through of the Maginot Line near Saarbrücken, the war seems to be gradually becoming a more or less peaceful occupation of all France. The population is peacefully disposed and in some places very friendly.88

  After five days to rest and refit, the 7th Panzer was once again on the move, this time into the Cherbourg peninsula, its objective the port city of Cherbourg. By nightfall, having bluffed his way past a defensive position on the approach road, Rommel had deployed his division to attack. By this time, unconfirmed rumors of an armistice were flying about on both sides, and Rommel, sensing how easily soldiers could get careless—and thus needlessly killed—thinking the fighting was all but over, took considerable pains to make certain that his men did not lapse into such complacency. The attack began before dawn and the German tanks and infantry advanced with caution. At midday Rommel sent French civilians to the commander of the Cherbourg garrison demanding his surrender, and when no reply of any kind was received, Rommel called on Luftwaffe dive-bombers to begin pummeling the town. By 5:00 P.M., the Cherbourg garrison decided it had enough and surrendered.

  It was then that Rommel learned that the rumors were true, an armistice was pending. Paul Renaud had stepped down as prime minister of France on June 16, to be replaced by Marshal Philippe Pétain, France’s national hero of the First World War and a figure of great veneration by the French. Realizing that the military situation was hopeless—the French Army was now outnumbered by more than two-to-one by Wehrmacht, with the Italian Army attacking in the south, morale was crumbling and with it the will to resist—Pétain immediately requested an armistice, which would be concluded on June 22, at Compiègne, on the same spot and in the same railway car in which the representatives of the German Army and the German Republic had signed their armistice with the Allies in November 1918. Rommel’s war in France was over—for now.