The solution came from an unexpected quarter: Colonel General Alfred Jodl, the O.K.W.’s Chief of Operations. On October 30 the Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, submitted a report to the Führerhauptquartier which presented an unvarnished—and unpleasant—view of the “Atlantic Wall,” the vast and allegedly impregnable system of fortifications which protected Europe’s Atlantic coast from Allied invasion. It was the Atlantic Wall—Atlantikwall in German—which was to give substance to Hitler’s proclamation of a “Festung Europa,” a “Fortress Europe,” within which no Allied boot would ever be set. Von Rundstedt’s report minced no words in declaring the Atlantic Wall to be little better than a hoax, for aside from a few massive fortifications built mainly for propaganda purposes, in the autumn of 1943 the defensive works along the Atlantic coast were limited, and nothing in place was sufficient to stop a cross-Channel landing. Given that the Allies had now demonstrated three times their ability to conduct successful seaborne invasions, the near-pathetic state of the Atlantic Wall could no longer be ignored: everyone, Axis and Allies alike, knew that the decisive battle of the war would be fought on the Atlantic coast.
Jodl saw this as an opportunity to put Rommel to work in a way that got him out of Italy and would be perceived by both Rommel and the German people as useful employment of a general of his talent and skill: assign Army Group B as an inspectorate responsible for expanding, strengthening, and completing the Atlantic Wall defenses. Rommel would be nominally subordinate to von Rundstedt, who was oberbefehlshaber West, or OB West—the supreme commander, West—but his own command brief would run along the coast from the northern tip of Denmark south to the Franco-Spanish border. The task was perfect for Rommel, Rommel perfect for the task.
THE ATLANTIC WALL, concept and reality, grew out of a Führerbefehl, a Führer directive, this one being Number 40, which was issued by Adolf Hitler on March 23, 1942. Unusually long and detailed compared to the usual Führer directive, which typically consisted of no more than two or three paragraphs, Directive 40 was five pages of closely spaced text which created a uniform defensive doctrine and a rationalized command structure for Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine units stationed along occupied Europe’s long and vulnerable Atlantic coast. The British commandos, along with the S.O.E., the same organization which oversaw the British desert irregulars—the S.A.S., S.B.S., and Long Range Desert Group—which had proven to be a thorn in Rommel’s flesh in North Africa, had transformed that coastline into a special operations playground. Not a week went by without a raid of some sort being staged along the coast of Denmark, the Low Countries, or France, ranging from mere “nuisance raids,” where isolated sentries were knifed or garroted to increase the anxiety of German guardposts, to full-scale air and sea operations that spirited away entire radar installations; Churchill’s directive to the British special forces had been to “set Europe ablaze”: this they were doing, and in the process proved that the Third Reich’s Atlantic defenses resembled nothing so much as a sieve.
The initial work done in accordance with the instructions laid down in Directive 40 was the construction of fortifications around ports, naval installations, and radar sites, the latter being especially critical as they were vital to the Luftwaffe’s defense against the raids of over a thousand bombers which the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command was now routinely sending to Germany.
Most of this work was done by the Todt Organization (Organization Todt, or OT), the civil and military engineering arm of the Third Reich. The organization’s labor pool had originally been almost exclusively German, but by the middle of 1943 it had been almost completely replaced by conscripted foreign workers, POWs, and, as time went on, increasing numbers of concentration-camp inmates drafted as slave labor, as the Wehrmacht’s demands on manpower drew away all of the OT’s able-bodied Germans. In February 1942 the Todt Organization became a department of the newly created Ministry of Armaments and Munitions (Reichsministerium für Rüstung und Kriegsproduktion), under Reichsminister Albert Speer. Speer was one of the few high-level Nazis who understood how poorly organized was the German economy for the sort of total war which Hitler had brought about, and once he was confirmed in office set about reorganizing German industry to improve efficiency and productivity. He also reinvigorated the Todt Organization at the same time, though the Atlantic Wall, Führer Directive No. 40 notwithstanding, was still a fairly low-priority project.
It was Hitler himself who gave the Atlantic Wall its first good, hard push toward completion: in August 1942, he informed Speer that he wanted not only the ports, harbors, and fixed military installations on the Atlantic coast protected by defensive works, he wanted the entire coastline converted into a defensive barrier. He mandated the construction of a belt of 15,000 permanent defensive positions constructed on the Dutch, Belgian, and French coastlines. These positions, known as widerstandsnester (“resistance nests”) would be complex arrangements of trenches, bunkers, dugouts, mortar pits and machine-gun posts. They would be built so that they could offer all-round resistance, placed so that they had interlocking fields of fire and were within mutually supporting distance of each other, and sited so that they could enfilade specific stretches of shoreline. Hitler was confident that a density of 30 such defensive posts per mile, properly manned, would be sufficient to stop any seaborne landing; the total manpower requirement would be roughly a half-million troops. He demanded that the entire construction project be completed by the spring of 1943.
It was an impossible order, and the Todt Organization engineers knew it, but they did their best—one indicator of just how hard they began working their men is that in the wake of Hitler’s order, the volume of concrete being poured in Western Europe for defensive works tripled, from 100,000 cubic yards per month to 300,000. Nonetheless, by the time Hitler’s deadline arrived the work was only half-finished; the Führer though, by this time, was distracted by the unfolding debacle in Tunisia and then the imminent Allied landings in Sicily. This was hardly unusual: Hitler tended to fixate on one subject at a time, almost to the point of obsession, then when that task was accomplished, move on to whatever next caught his attention. This, of course, was the underlying reason why the Germans as a whole never developed a grand strategy for the Second World War. In any case, prior to the summer of 1943, the question of an Allied invasion of Europe across the English Channel had been problematic at worst: despite the multitude of small-scale raids which the British were carrying out, the Allies lacked the manpower and the seaborne capability to launch and sustain the sort of full-scale, multi-division invasion necessary to establish a permanent bridgehead on the Continent.
That perception changed drastically after Operation Husky, the Allied landings on Sicily, in July 1943, which were followed with a swiftness the Germans never expected by the landings at Salerno, Italy—Operation Avalanche—at the beginning of September. Now the Allies without question possessed the technical ability along with increasing numbers of landing craft and support ships to stage an operation as ambitious as a cross-Channel invasion; just as important, if not more so, the experience gained in the landings in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy gave them a priceless body of practical knowledge to bring to bear on the challenge of landing on the Continent.
The single most significant factor that would distinguish amphibious operations in the Mediterranean from any potential operation against the Channel coast was the weather: the highly unpredictable, widely—and often wildly—variable, and sometimes violent nature of the weather in the English Channel severely curtailed the “window of opportunity” in which the Allies could land on the Channel coast. The relative lateness in the year of Operation Avalanche meant that there would be no cross-Channel invasion before the late spring of 1944—prior to that the weather would be too volatile for the landing to be sustained, even if it were made.
Suddenly the degree to which the Atlantic Wall was ready to confront an Allied invasion acquired a priority and matching urgency that it
had never before been accorded. Hitler and the O.K.W. assumed—reasonably and rightly—that the Allies would not attempt a cross-Channel invasion until they had built up their strength in manpower, equipment, aircraft, and ships, including landing craft, as well as the necessary reserves, to a level they believed could not only land successfully and establish a beachhead, but secure one large enough to allow for powerful attacks to be staged out of it when the Allies chose to begin driving on the Reich. The sum of all the strategic issues facing both Allies and Germans could be summed up in a single equation: could the long-neglected Atlantic Wall defenses be shored up and completed before the Allies accrued enough strength to guarantee that their invasion succeeded? When Hitler gave Rommel his new assignment on November 5, 1943, he was explicit in stating just how critical was the success of Rommel’s mission: “When the enemy invades in the west it will be the moment of decision in this war,” he said, “and the moment must turn to our advantage.” This was the challenge that now faced Erwin Rommel; as he had been so many times before, he was once again in a race against time.260
FOR ROMMEL TO accomplish his mission, he first had to discover the truth about what defenses, such as they were and what there were of them, had already been constructed, and where. After he had that knowledge, he could go about expanding and improving them. He already had certain ideas about which he would become dogmatic in the months ahead, the first being that any seaborne invasion must be met—and stopped—at the water’s edge. In the considered opinion of Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the OB West, and General der Panzertruppe Leo Geyr von Schewppenburg, the commander of Panzergruppe West, the Wehrmacht’s armored reserve in Western Europe, allowing the Allies to establish a lodgement ashore and expecting to defeat them in a battle of maneuver when they attempted to breakout of their beachhead was the preferred strategy. In Rommel’s opinion, this was the height of folly: neither man had fought a battle or directed a campaign where they had been compelled to fight an enemy who had absolute air supremacy, as Rommel had been forced to do in Tunisia. All of their presumptions and preconceptions of mobile warfare had grown out of the battles in France in 1940 or in the first two years of the Russian campaign, where the Wehrmacht had either enjoyed air superiority or control of the air over the battlefield was at least contested. Neither man had the slightest conception of the destructiveness of Allied air power, or how severely it curtailed movement. As far as Rommel was concerned, whenever and wherever the invasion took place, the battle would have to be fought—and won—by the soldiers already in place, using whatever equipment they had to hand.
Rommel’s second premise was that if Allied air power would deny mobility to his forces, then some countervailing measure should be employed to deny mobility to the Allies. For that, Rommel once again looked to North Africa, specifically to the two battles of El Alamein and the Battle of Alam Halfa. He vividly remembered how the vast minefields sown by the Afrika Korps and Eighth Army alike had inhibited the movements of both armored and infantry divisions, and worked to localize and channel attacks. There was no reason the same principles could not be applied to the defense of the Atlantic coastline; mines were to become one of the cornerstones of his overall defensive concept for the Atlantic Wall. Rommel would be, in private, the object of considerable derision among many of his fellow senior officers for his repeated reliance on his experiences in North Africa in guiding his operational and strategic thinking in Western Europe. Their combat experience had been gained on the Russian Front, where fighting was done under far different conditions than those which obtained in the west. They completely missed the fact that North Africa had been, in essence, the laboratory where much of the Allies’ operational and tactical doctrines were worked out. They would come to rue their contempt as, after June 1944, Rommel was repeatedly proven right in his conclusions and they were shown to be fatally wrong.
Rommel’s “grand tour” of his new command responsibilities began on November 30 in Denmark. With him went Gause, his Chief of Staff, along with Generalleutnant Wilhelm Meise, a career engineer officer upon whom Rommel would come to heavily depend in the months ahead, and Vice-Admiral Friedrich Ruge, his naval advisor who would also become a close friend. The rest of the staff of Army Group B was establishing its headquarters at Fontainebleu, preparing for formal activation on January 15, when it would assume command responsibility for the Netherlands, Belgium, and northern France, including the whole of the Channel coast. The inspection in Denmark was predictable, but the shopping was apparently quite good. Militarily Rommel found what he expected to find—fortifications concentrated around harbors and ports, with little in the way of defensive works constructed elsewhere. Rommel was unconcerned by this, this part of the inspection itself being more-or-less pro forma, as Denmark would never be the site of the Allied invasion of the Continent. The country’s geography and location dictated against it: the Danish peninsula was too distant from the British Isles, could be too easily sealed off, any army within it too easily contained, for it to serve as the base for any decisive Allied attack on Germany itself. The stores in Denmark, especially in the capital, Copenhagen, were a marvel, however: luxury goods and foods which had been unavailable in Germany since the beginning of the war were plentiful; of course, Rommel and his fellow officers cheerfully yielded to temptation.
8 December 1943
Dearest Lu,
We’re off again today up to the northernmost point. The round trip will be over in a couple of days and then the paperwork will begin. Hard fighting still in the east and south. I need not tell you with what feelings I look on from a distance.
I hear that the call-up is going to be extended to the 14-yearolds. The lads will be sent to labor service or defense according to their size and physique.
11 December 1943
We’re now back from Copenhagen. A few days’ written work and then the job will continue. You can still buy everything you want here in Denmark. Of course the Danes will only sell to their own compatriots. I’ve bought a few things for Christmas, so far as the money went. [By regulation, German officers (generals included) were allowed to exchange only limited amounts of Reichsmarks for Danish kroner.]261
Rommel’s reference to 14-year-old boys being called up for national service highlights the manpower shortage that the German armed forces were beginning to experience. Manfred was now eligible for conscription, and a father-and-son talk on the subject that took place a few days after this letter was written, when Rommel was briefly back in Herrlingen, revealed that the once politically naive Rommel was becoming uncomfortably familiar with the realities of the Third Reich. Manfred and his father were discussing which branch of service would be best suited for the young man. Manfred had decided—based on the fact that they were better equipped and had the smarter-looking uniforms—that the SS was for him. Rommel stomped down hard on that idea.
“Absolutely out of the question,” he said. “You’ll join the same branch in which I’ve served for thirty years!”
Manfred was startled at the vehemence of his father’s response, and Rommel went on to explain: he acknowledged that the SS were good troops, but he did not want his son under the command of a man who, to Rommel’s certain knowledge, was guilty of ordering mass executions.
“Himmler?” Manfred asked, his father’s revelation taking him by surprise.
“Yes.” Then, according to Manfred’s recollection of the conversation, “he instructed me to maintain absolute silence about the whole affair. The war was not going at all well and he had heard that people like Himmler were trying, by actions of this kind, to burn the bridges of the German people behind them. I think he was not at all certain at that time whether Hitler knew anything about what was going on, for no mention of the mass executions had ever been made at the Führer’s H.Q.” Hitler could still inspire momentary bursts of enthusiasm, even something passing for the old loyalty—after being given the Atlantic Wall assignment, Rommel excitedly blurted out to a friend, “What power he ra
diates! And what faith and confidence he inspires in his people!”—but once away from the Führer’s charisma, reality almost instantly replaced adulation. The exchange with Manfred had revealed in just a handful of words what was at the heart of Rommel’s determination to go on fighting; being who he was, he could do no other, but now he was fighting for Germany alone.262
WHATEVER REMAINING VESTIGES of confidence Rommel might have had in Hitler finally evaporated after he spent six weeks touring the Atlantic coast and inspecting the German defenses, such as they were. Even at this late date, still barely half of the original construction ordered by Hitler was complete, and large tracts of the defensive positions which had been built were already falling into disrepair. Had the Allies invaded, the result would have been much like how the Marhathas recollected the capture of Ahmednagar in 1803: “They came here in the morning, looked at the wall, walked over it, killed the garrison, and returned to breakfast!” Rommel regarded it as a farce, and felt as though he had been duped by Hitler’s description of the wall and its state of readiness, blurting out to his staff that it was little more than “a figment of Hitler’s ‘Wolkenkuckkucksheim’—‘cuckoo land in the clouds’—‘an enormous bluff . . . more for the German people than for the enemy . . . and the enemy, through his agents, knows more about it than we do.’” Rommel could, and would, change all of that.263
Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel Page 56