Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  When Berndt presented this plan to Göring, the Reichsmarschall, imagining himself at the head of a conquering army, was openly enthusiastic in his support for it. In fact, when Göring and Rommel met with Mussolini on November 30, Göring attempted to present Rommel’s plan as his own. He then went on to imply that Rommel was too sick and exhausted to continue as the senior officer in North Africa—leaving Mussolini to infer that he, Göring, should take Rommel’s place. As Mussolini and Cavallero had to assent to Italian forces in Tripolitania being placed under German command, this all but gave them veto power over the appointment of a German supreme commander in North Africa, hence Göring’s efforts to sway the Italian dictator. But Göring went too far in trying to make his case, and openly accused Rommel of deliberately abandoning the Italian infantry at El Alamein. Rommel didn’t defend himself from Göring’s slander—he didn’t need to: before Rommel could say a word, Mussolini said, “That’s news to me; your retreat was a masterpiece, Marshal Rommel.” At that, any chance Göring may have had of gaining the supreme command in North Africa evaporated.

  There was one bright spot for Rommel in this excursion to Rome: Lucie had come aboard the Reichsmarschall’s train at Munich in order to spend a few days with her husband, who would have neither the time nor the opportunity to visit Herrlingen. All his life, Rommel drew strength and resilience from the bond he shared with his wife, and this time was no exception. Lucie, for her part, gained an even deeper understanding of the fact that not all of the battles fought by her husband were waged against the Allies: she witnessed first-hand Göring’s narcissistic prancing, and the antipathy that existed between him and Rommel. There were long private conversations between Lucie and Erwin, of which no detailed recollections survive, but from a handful of oblique references in their letters in the months ahead, it can be inferred that Erwin was being very frank and open with Lucie about the realities of the war and Germany’s dwindling chances of victory. For both of them this journey was a pivotal experience: Lucie had for the most part been more enthusiastic about Germany’s National Socialist regime—and more vocal in her support of it—than ever was her husband; now she was learning to her dismay that not only was Germany most emphatically not winning the war, the possibility that Germany would lose was growing daily, brought about by Adolf Hitler’s growing detachment from reality. Rommel, who had long admired Hitler while being at best mildly contemptuous of most of the rest of the Nazi hierarchy, now saw Hitler’s rising sense of infallibility, his reliance on his “intuition,” and his belief in his “destiny” as a malign force on the Wehrmacht’s ability to defend not only the Nazi empire, but also the Reich itself. Hitler had broken faith with Rommel when he issued the “stand and die” order at El Alamein; he lost any chance of restoring that bond by his outbursts at Rastenburg.

  As Rommel expected, very little was actually resolved in Rome: the usual empty promises were made. (Rommel later remarked bitterly that had a fraction of the effort now pledged actually been made a few months earlier, the Axis would not have found itself in its current situation.) Kesselring, citing an increasing threat to his newly established airfields in Tunisia, would have none of the planned withdrawal from Mersa el Brega; for his part Rommel’s respect for Kesselring was rapidly diminishing: the Luftwaffe general had yet to fight a ground campaign but regularly delivered himself of oracular pronouncements on how Rommel should conduct his own defense against the Eighth Army. Rommel’s antipathy toward Kesselring only grew further when the airman repeatedly hijacked for the Luftwaffe units in Tunisia the supplies and equipment specifically designated for Panzerarmee Afrika, including thousands of tons of gasoline and several batteries of 88mm Flak guns—only on direct orders from O.K.W. was the purloined materiel turned over to Rommel’s men.

  Rommel was able to secure Mussolini’s permission to pull the nonmotorized Italian infantry out and sent them back to Buerat, roughly halfway between Mersa el Brega and the Mareth Line, while the remaining motorized and mechanized units held firm. This was, everyone knew, the most transparent of subterfuges, for as soon as the Italian infantry arrived in Buerat, the rest of the panzerarmee would begin leapfrogging back to join them, after which the entire army would fall back to Mareth. It was a facesaving gesture, something both men clearly understood, even as Göring gave one final demonstration of how utterly clueless he was as to the true situation in North Africa by demanding that Rommel begin a counterattack against Eighth Army from the Mersa el Brega position. Privately Rommel could only shake his head in mingled dismay and relief that his “Africans” had been spared the leadership of this buffoon.

  It was during this series of conferences that Rommel became aware of an increasingly strong undercurrent running through the Italian command, a barely concealed war-weariness that was distinct from the lack of enthusiasm and air of corruption Rommel had sensed and suspected before. For the first time since coming to power in 1922, Mussolini’s political position was not entirely secure: there were whispers that the loss of Italy’s North African empire might bring about his downfall. The Axis alliance was becoming increasingly unpopular with the Italians as a whole, who resented the spreading perception that Mussolini was little more than Hitler’s poodle; Italy was gaining nothing from this war save for growing casualty lists.

  The problem with the Axis itself—and there was in fact a great deal of truth in what the typical Italian on the Via Appia believed about it—was, once again, the lack of anything resembling a grand strategy. The Axis had been from its inception no more than a marriage of convenience: Germany and Italy, Hitler and Mussolini, had few if any common goals or objectives apart from the aggrandizement of their respective homelands, and while the military and political support of one for the other at various times was useful, even decisive, their refusal to cooperate and coordinate strategies led to them often working at cross-purposes. By contrast, the Allies, along with the Soviet Union, however fractious their relationships and whatever the specific national goals might be, never lost sight of their larger objective: the defeat of Germany and Italy. As a consequence, the Allied war effort was motivated by a sense of purpose, the like of which the Axis never possessed. That an alliance between Hitler and Mussolini should exist was nearly inevitable—so was the nature of that alliance and the burdens it subsequently imposed on both parties; in some ways Germany and Italy became each other’s worst enemy.

  MEANWHILE, BACK IN Tunisia, Walther Nehring, now a general der panzertruppe and recovered from the wounds he incurred at Alam Halfa, had been sent to Tunisia on November 12, four days after the Allied landings in Morocco and Algiers, to take command of the XC Panzerkorps, which at first seemed to exist only on paper. Within days however, the 10th Panzer Division arrived at Tunis (though it was short most of its artillery regiment), along with two regiments of Fallschirmjäger, the armored components of the Herman Göring Division, and the Division von Broich, so named after its commanding officer, Oberst (Colonel) Friedrich Freiherr von Broich. Originally just a divisional headquarters unit, it was gradually fleshed out with various odds and sods of other units, mostly unassigned replacement battalions, in much the same way the Afrika Korps’ 90th Light Division had been created. Also on its way was the Schwere Panzer-Abteilung 501—the 501st Heavy Panzer Detachment: the Allies were about to be introduced to the Panzer VIa—the Tiger tank. This rapid buildup of fresh units, the like of which had never occurred during the whole of the Afrika Korps campaigns in Libya and Egypt, was possible for two reasons: there were two major deep water ports available, Tunis and Bizerte, both located on Tunisia’s northern coast, and they sat close enough to the Italian supply bases on Sicily to allow ships to run in during the night, unload the following day, and return to Sicily under cover of darkness. Tripoli had been the only large deepwater port in Tripolitania, and distant enough from Italy that at least part of the crossing had to be made in daylight, exposing the transports and tankers to attack by the Royal Air Force.

  Opportunities to establi
sh strong defenses existed in Tunisia that the flat, open terrain of Tripolitania denied the Axis. Originally a French colony, now ostensibly governed by Vichy, Tunisia was roughly rectangular, measuring 160 miles across from east to west and 500 miles from north to south. The northern and eastern sides of the rectangle were protected—more or less—by the Mediterranean, although now that the Allies were flexing their amphibious muscles, no shoreline could be considered truly inviolate. To the southwest lay the beginnings of the great sand sea of the Sahara Desert—impossible going for any army. To the southeast, inside the border with Tripolitania, lay the Mareth Line, a series of strong defensive works built by the French between 1936 and 1940. Twelve miles wide and 30 miles deep, it included 40 infantry bunkers similar to those built by the Italians to defend Tobruk, along with eight sites for heavy artillery, 15 communication posts and 28 support positions, which included barracks, messes, and storage for supplies and ammunition. It was difficult if not impossible to outflank, and if properly defended could prove as difficult a nut for the Eighth Army to crack as Tobruk had been for the Afrika Korps.

  Holding the Mareth Line would be essential to any prolonged defense of Tunisia, as Kesselring’s insistence at the Rome conference that Allied air power be kept as distant from possible was not entirely self-serving. At the moment the Allies in Algiers had very few aircraft available, so there was little threat of significant air attacks on the ports of Bizerte and Tunis from the west, but the Desert Air Force had advanced with Eighth Army, and its bombers would present a serious threat to the harbor installations in either port once they were within range. At the moment, the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica enjoyed air superiority over Tunisia, some 128 Axis fighters having flown into the country within a week of the Allied landings in Morocco and Algiers; how long that situation would last, however, was far from certain.

  The taking or the holding of the ports of Bizerte and Tunis then were the keys to any Allied or Axis strategy for Tunisia, and geography would dictate how they were to be attacked—and defended. Both sat on coastal flatlands surrounded by lakes and salt marshes, but it was the Atlas Mountains, which began rising inland from the coast, that would determine the Allies’ routes of attack. A handful of rivers flowed through those mountains, and what roads existed followed the rivers: the valleys and passes through the mountains created natural choke points which could be easily held against greatly superior numbers. This of course was not news to the Allies, who hoped to take Bizerte “on the bounce” after their landing in Algiers, moving swiftly enough to deny the Germans the opportunity to set up their defense in the passes. A British task force of two infantry brigade groups and one armored regimental group moved eastward almost immediately along the Algerian and Tunisian coast, but was brought up short on November 17 at Djebel Abiod by a scratch force of 17 German tanks and 400 German paratroopers—ample evidence of how greatly the terrain, if properly used, favored defenders. In the south, an American airborne battalion captured Gafsa the same day that the British attack on Djebel Abiod stalled. Gafsa was important, as it was one of the two major road hubs in southern Tunisia, the other being the coastal town of Sfax, and it was behind and to the west of the defenses of the Mareth Line. At the moment, however, the Allies, particularly the Americans, hadn’t sufficiently reorganized after the Torch landings to properly exploit the capture of Gafsa, and for the time being it was contained by Nehring’s forces; nevertheless, the Americans’ presence at Gafsa could throw a spanner into the works of Rommel’s planning for the Tunisian campaign.

  Rommel returned to North Africa on December 3, and immediately gave orders to begin pulling the Italian infantry out of Mersa el Brega and packing them off to the Mareth Line the retreat began on December 10. Rommel had left Rome thoroughly discouraged, later writing how he “. . . realized that we were now thrown back entirely on our own resources and that to keep the army from being destroyed as a result of some crazy order or other would need all our skill.” In a letter sent off to Manfred just days later, Rommel gave voice to a grim despondency that he had never before articulated, even to Lucie, as he wrote in the manner of a father speaking to a son whom, for the first time, he fears he may never again see.222

  8 December 1943

  My Dear Manfred

  It’s time that I sent you my congratulations on your 14th birthday. My wishes must not arrive too late. The war is very hard and it looks doubtful whether I shall be permitted to return to you. You know what a difficult struggle we’re having with the British at present, how great their superiority is and how small our supplies. If it goes on like this, we shall be crushed by the enemy’s immense superiority. It is a bitter fate for my soldiers and me to have to go through this at the end of so heroic and victorious a struggle. We will do our very utmost to avoid defeat.

  Now, to you, Manfred, dear boy. . . . You’re going to be 14, and school will soon lie behind you. You must realize the seriousness of the situation and learn as much as you can at school. You are learning for yourself. It is not impossible that you might soon have to stand on your own feet. The times could become very, very hard for all of us. Be guided by your mother, who always has your best interests at heart. . . .223

  Rommel’s blunt statement that he and his officers were now responsible for not only leading the panzerarmee but also keeping it “from being destroyed as a result of some crazy order or other. . .” was a watershed. It was proof of Rommel having realized that his initial reaction to Hitler’s “victory or death” order at El Alamein, along with the conclusions which he had drawn from it, could not be dismissed as angry outbursts born of the stress and confusion of a desperate battle. The conference of November 29 had established once and for all for Rommel that Hitler’s orders could no longer be treated as wholly rational, and hence could no longer be regarded as inviolate. In the past Rommel had defied, evaded, and constructively construed (or misconstrued, as the case may be) orders when he felt that the superior authority issuing them was lacking either sufficient information or imagination. He had never, ever contemplated the idea that he would be given orders by the Führer himself that demonstrated nothing so much as the fact that Hitler had lost touch with military reality. Nevertheless, that was precisely what had happened.

  Realism had always been at the core of the man who called himself Erwin Rommel; it was what made young Lucie Molin once tease her young officer cadet about being “too serious;” it was also what compelled him to his most daring and seemingly outrageously brave acts as a young officer in the First World War; it was what made him an outstanding panzer division and panzer corps commander. He nearly always saw situations and circumstances as they were: he never succumbed to what George S. Patton, Jr. described as an officer’s most besetting sin—he did not “take counsel of his fears”; likewise he very rarely made the mistake of “painting pictures,” Bonaparte’s colorful description of an officer imagining that an enemy was doing exactly what that officer wanted him to do, rather than seeing what was actually being done. That was what made him such an outstanding soldier and combat commander.

  Yet at the same time there existed in him an idealism which fed the profound patriotism that created the soldier he was. Some have characterized Rommel as a born soldier—he was not. One observer said that in civilian clothes Rommel resembled nothing so much as a small-time hoodlum, looking shabby and awkward. Without his uniform and medals, it was claimed, Rommel was not one-tenth the man he was with them. Such depictions are rubbish, for Rommel was a soldier by choice, not destiny. A year hence he would be giving almost daily demonstrations of just how keen was his intelligence, in ways that broadly hinted at awesome non-military gifts and talents, to the point that a general who had spent his entire career as an engineer would exclaim, “[Rommel] was the greatest engineer of the Second World War. There was nothing I could teach him. He was my master.” To say that Rommel was a soldier because he could be nothing else is to admit to no real understanding of the man.224

  Because
his patriotism was sustained by the idealism in Rommel’s character, rather than by mere chauvinistic prejudice, he would not allow it to be compromised by anything. This could—and did—at times fuel the naivety which led him to grave misjudgments, such as his belief that while Adolf Hitler was good for Germany, the Nazis were bad, never grasping how the two were inseparable, how neither one could exist without the other. Still, Rommel’s arrogance, vanity, stubbornness, ambition, even his near hero-worship of Hitler in the early days of the war, were never allowed to supercede his devotion to Germany. Even his decision to decline the sort of cash gifts which Hitler routinely presented to many of his other successful generals was taken because such conduct could be construed as compromising his loyalty to das Vaterland by leaving him morally indebted to Hitler. He could accept the patronage—the promotions, the plum postings—given to him by Hitler in the role of Germany’s head of state, but he would not become Hitler’s vassal at the cost of his duty to the Fatherland. For almost 10 years Rommel had never found cause to make a distinction between service to Hitler and service to Germany. Suddenly, in just a few weeks in November and December 1942, all of that changed—permanently.

  The change was as profound as it was inevitable: Rommel suddenly understood that the war which Hitler had initiated and for so long had successfully led was not a war which would bring greater glory and security for Germany; Hitler’s war was exactly that—Hitler’s war, its purpose nothing more than the aggrandizement of Adolf Hitler. Rommel now began turning away from the Führer—in the months to come he would begin to turn against him—not because Germany was losing the war, or that Hitler was losing it for Germany, but because of how Hitler was causing it to be lost. Hitler would willingly accept no diminution of what he believed he had accomplished, the mere gefreiter who never attended a war academy, never held a commission, and knew nothing of strategy but what he had learned from his own erratic reading and through his intuition. The loss of so much as a square meter of ground once conquered by the Wehrmacht was a personal affront to Hitler himself. When in September Rommel had solemnly intoned for the newsreels that where the German soldier set foot, there the German soldier stayed, he had been speaking for the popular consumption of the German public, not articulating strategy. For Hitler, however, where the German soldier set foot, there he stayed indeed, even if it was in his grave, because, in Hitler’s fantasies, that conquered territory was now the sovereign property of not the German Reich, but the German Führer. Rommel would have willingly sacrificed his army—and himself—if fighting to the last man and last round was required for the defense of Germany; he was not prepared, however, by inclination or temperament, to make such sacrifices merely to serve what he now understood were Hitler’s delusions of grandeur.