Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Aboard the train placed at Rommel’s disposal to expedite his inspection, he further developed his ideas about how to turn the wall into a reality, and best defend the Channel coastline, especially in light of what was certain to be Allied air superiority, if not actual air supremacy. “When the invasion begins,” he told his small entourage, “our own supply lines won’t be able to bring forward any aircraft, gasoline, rockets, tanks, guns or shells because of the enemy air attacks. That alone will rule out any sweeping land battles. Our only possible defense will be at the beaches—that’s where the enemy is always weakest.” Rommel understood that if the Germans made it too costly for the Allies to get ashore in sufficient strength to establish a beachhead, the entire invasion effort would collapse, and it would be a long, long time before they attempted another.264

  The Allies, then, must begin taking casualties even before the first British or American soldiers set foot on the beaches. Rommel was under no illusion that the Allies would be so cooperative as to choose to land at one of the heavily fortified sections of the coast, where heavy guns and huge concrete bunkers dominated—such installations were imposing, but the sort of weaponry which could defeat or even destroy them swiftly and economically had yet to be invented, so the Americans and British were sure to pass them by. The Allies would land elsewhere, in a more lightly held sector of shoreline, somewhere they could be confident, even certain, that they could bring to bear overwhelming firepower to reduce to impotence whatever German defenses were present. The question then was how to inflict unacceptable losses on the Allied landing forces even in the absence of German heavy artillery, tanks, and deep concrete emplacements. The answer was mines. As Rommel’s chief engineering officer, General Meise would be required to translate Rommel’s concepts into reality, and he sat enthralled as Rommel described in detail what he wanted to achieve and how he meant to accomplish it. Mines would be the key to Rommel’s defense of Festung Europa.

  Rommel’s inventiveness extended beyond the usual antipersonnel and anti-vehicular mines. He wanted mines that could sink ships and landing craft, mines that would be effective against enemy paratroopers, mines that could be detonated at will by remote control, or set off by trip-wires or electric eyes. Recalling the mine-detection equipment the British had used at El Alamein, he wanted to have mines made of non-ferrous components, virtually undetectable to the British devices. “I want antipersonnel mines, antitank mines, anti-paratroop mines. I want mines to sink ships and mines to sink landing craft,” Rommel told Meise. “I want some minefields designed so that our own infantry can cross them, but not the enemy tanks. I want mines that detonate when a wire is tripped; mines that explode when a wire is cut; mines that can be remotely detonated. Some of them must be encased in nonferrous metals, so that the enemy’s mine detectors won’t register them. . . .” The keen mind of the teenaged would-be engineer who built his own glider and who tore down and rebuilt his own motorcycle engines was reinvigorated once again. Always handy with a pencil and sketchpad, Rommel frequently drew illustrations and diagrams of the work he wanted done.265

  Nor did his ingenuity end with mines. Rommel conceived of an entire array of underwater obstacles that would be sited between the high- and low-tide lines which would destroy incoming landing craft: concrete tetrahedrons that had steel blades or antitank mines at their apexes; jagged steel hedgehogs that resembled Brobdingnagian jacks, constructed from girders or steel rails welded at right angles; wooden stakes set in a concrete base that contained a heavy shell—the impact of a landing-craft striking the stake would set off the explosives. His final plan called for four belts of such obstacles, the first placed in 6 feet of water at mean high tide, the second at the 6-foot mark at half-tide, the third in 6 feet of water at low tide, and the last at 12 feet of water at low tide. General Meise, who had been an engineer all his life, could only stand and watch in utter admiration: “Quite apart from Rommel’s greatness as a soldier, in my view he was the greatest engineer of the Second World War. There was nothing I could teach him. He was my master.”266

  Rommel’s near-obsession with mines, and their impersonal, implacable ability to create casualties and chaos, to intimidate, deflect, and channelize an attacking force, such as he had witnessed at El Alamein, sprang from yet another shortage with which he was confronted: manpower. He lacked sufficient infantry to man the Atlantic Wall in the strength that he believed would be required to stop an Allied invasion. Germany was running out of soldiers fit for combat—in fact, Germany had already run out of them. Hitler still refused to allow German women to join the labor force, so that by the end of 1943, there were at least 5,000,000 fit, able-bodied men working in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in German factories, men whose Allied counterparts were already in uniform and fighting. (It was this same refusal by Hitler which led directly to one of the most horrible passages in the entire reprehensible history of the Third Reich: the drafting of slave labor—Jews, Slavs, Russian prisoners of war, French, Belgian, and Italian civilians conscripted at random—by the hundreds of thousands, most of whom would be worked to death.) So great was Germany’s need for manpower that the Wehrmacht was compelled to accept foreign volunteers—ethnic Germans, Belgians, Czechs, Dutch, Finns, Hungarians, Poles, and Balts, along with Russian prisoners of war—to create new infantry units. They were organized into battalions, which were then integrated into existing infantry divsions; the value of these units can be surmised from the fact that on January 1, 1944, 427,000 Russians and Ukrainians alone were serving in Wehrmacht uniforms: their Ostbataillone (Eastern battalions) were the numerical equivalent of 30 divisions.

  Nor did the Wehrmacht’s ruthless ingenuity stop there. There were thousands of wounded German soldiers whose injuries barred them from the rigors of front-line service in Russia or Italy, but who could still be useful in rear echelon services, as well as in manning fortifications. Organized into what were nicknamed magen divisionen (“Stomach Divisions,” as chronic stomach problems were the most prevalent ailment), they were ideal for garrison duties. Yet even with such clever expedients, the O.K.W. was convinced that the Allies not only had the Wehrmacht outnumbered—which was true—but had it overwhelmingly outnumbered. And thereby hangs a tale, for Hitler, the O.K.W., and Rommel himself were being systematically deceived by a Allied combined-service intelligence operation known as Fortitude.

  Operation Fortitude was part of a larger operation, Bodyguard, which was a vast and complex cover and deception plan created to deceive the Germans as to where, when and in what strength the actual invasion of Europe would take place. Bodyguard was actually an umbrella operation, coordinating several smaller—though still significant in size and scope—operations drawn up to accomplish specific missions which built up the whole fabric of Bodyguard’s overall deception. Fortitude was one of these subordinate operations, its purpose being to supply the German intelligence services with enough seemingly reliable information to cause them to conclude that there existed two, or even three, Allied army groups in Great Britain poised to invade Europe. Fortitude was divided into two sections, North and South. Fortitude North was to mislead the Germans into believing that an invasion of Norway was in the offing, which would, it was hoped, divert reinforcements that would otherwise have gone to France or the Low Countries. Based in Scotland, the deception relied primarily on false radio traffic to create the impression that a fictitious British Fourth Army was being built up for the Norwegian invasion. It was a limited success at best.

  Fortitude South was an entirely different story. It was developed around the existence of two Allied army groups, 21st Army Group under Montgomery, and 1st U.S. Army Group, or F.U.S.A.G., under the command of Lieutenant General Patton. F.U.S.A.G., which aside from a few hundred men with special duties, was wholly fictional. It was supposedly deployed in southeastern England, directly opposite the Pas de Calais, which Rommel considered the most likely place a cross-Channel invasion would take place. Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, which was indeed real
and would carry out the actual invasion of the continent, was posted in southern England, opposite Normandy and the Cherbourg peninsula.

  A meticulously orchestrated radio deception plan of the sort that the Germans tellingly called a funkspiel—a radio game—was carried out to dovetail precisely with the apparent movement of units around southeastern England, where dummy encampments, tanks, vehicles, aircraft, and landing craft were positioned. The Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Force, which by this time together owned the skies above Great Britain, would deliberately allow the occasional German high-altitude reconnaissance flight to penetrate the areas where F.U.S.A.G. was supposedly concentrating: the photos those aircraft collected, when cross-referenced with an analysis of the F.U.S.A.G.’s simulated radio traffic, convinced Rommel, OB West, O.K.W., and Hitler that F.U.S.A.G. was real. The cinching argument for many of the high-ranking German officers was the presence of Patton, the one Allied commander whom they had so far come to respect.

  Montgomery fully appreciated the value of Fortitude South, for he knew that 21st Army Group would field a maximum of 37Allied divisions, armor and infantry, for the invasion, consolidating the beachhead then expanding it, and breaking out of whatever foothold his forces could create. Rommel would have upward of 60 divisions available, although these would initially be spread out all along the Channel coast. Not that the raw numbers were a true indicator of the balance of strength, as most of the German divisions in France and the Low Countries were significantly understrength, usually underequipped, and some of them were of openly dubious value. Nonethe less, in any attack the advantage always lies with the defender, never more so than in an amphibious invasion: for once Montgomery’s slavish devotion to massive superiority in men and materiel would not be misplaced, as he would need a minimum of three-to-one odds simply to be confident that the invasion force could get ashore. By inflating the apparent size of the Allied forces arrayed against the German defenders, as well as creating deep uncertainty as to where the actual invasion would take place, it was hoped to entice the maximum possible number of German divisions to “stay home” as it were when the actual invasion hit the Normandy beaches, denying the defenders there the reinforcements they would desperately need.

  In this endeavor, the Allies were unwittingly aided by one of the most important German intelligence services, Fremde Heere West (Foreign Armies West), the branch of the Abwehr dedicated to developing an upto-date order of battle of the British and American forces stationed in Great Britain which would be used in the invasion. So detailed and credible was the evidence, especially the Allied funkspiel, which pointed to an unexpectedly massive buildup of American and British forces, that the commanding officer of Foreign Armies West, Oberst Alexander von Rönne, became convinced that the 35 fictitious divisions assigned to F.U.S.A.G. were actually real, and that the British and Americans had or were forming a reserve army of at least another 30 divisions. Thus the intelligence evaluations of Fremde Heere West presented to OB West and Army Group B stated as fact that the combined Allied strength exceeded 100 divisions, when in truth it was less than half that.

  Despite this, Rommel’s confidence in the ability of the Atlantic Wall—once he was past his initial outrage at its condition and Hitler’s duplicity in regard to it—to hold back the coming invasion would grow with each passing month. Something akin to his old optimism, if not cheerfulness, began to assert itself almost as soon as he arrived at his permanent billet in France, a large country house in Fontainebleau.

  15 December 1943

  Dearest Lu,

  Arrived safely yesterday. I’ve found myself a lovely billet in a chateau which once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. But I won’t be here long. I’m already off on a trip tomorrow as today’s news announced. It seems that they can’t tell the British and Americans soon enough that I’m here. I lunched with von Rundstedt today. He seems very pleased and I think it’s all going well, but I must first get a picture of the situation and see how things are. The old chateau is a lovely place. The French built very generously and spaciously for their upper classes two centuries ago. We’re absolutely provincial in comparison.267

  On Christmas Eve he was able to get a telephone call through to Herrlingen—not always an easy feat, as Allied bombers were targeting communications centers in France—and talk with both Lucie and Manfred. He wrote Lucie the next day, of course.

  It was grand that the telephone call worked so well last night and that I now know that things are all right with you both. The big news was Manfred’s call-up for the 6th January. He is sure to be pleased, but for us, and above all, for you, it’s painful to see the youngster leave home, and it will take us a long time to get used to the idea. I wish you both a happy Christmas. Enjoy the time you still have together. . . . I spent yesterday evening with the officers of my staff and afterwards with the men, though it’s difficult to be really cheerful at the moment.268

  Rommel’s lack of cheer was understandable, as by this point he had developed a good picture of the Atlantic Wall’s shortcomings and the amount of work which would be needed to overcome them. Still, Rommel was the sort of officer—the sort of person—who became bored and disinterested if a task were too easy; the challenge of completing the wall required someone of Rommel’s temperament: his penchant for leading from the front in combat, when applied to this task, meant that he wanted to be everywhere, seeing everything, ensuring that the work was actually being done. And he thrived on it.

  19 January 1944

  Dearest Lu,

  Returned today from my long trip. I saw a lot and was very satisfied with the progress that has been made. I think for certain that we’ll win the defensive battle in the West, provided only that a little more time remains for preparation. Günther’s going off tomorrow with a suitcase [Lance-Corporal Herbert Günther, Rommel’s batman]. He’s to bring back my brown civilian suit and lightweight coat with hat, etc. I want to be able to go out without a Marshal’s baton for once. . . .

  Situation in the East: apparently stabilised. . . .

  In the South: severe fighting and more heavy attacks to be met. . . . In the West: I believe we’ll be able to beat off the assault.269

  As he scurried to and fro across northern France and Belgium, Rommel began to feel the need to get himself back in shape as well. It would not have done for any of his old Goslar jägers to see how their former officer commanding, who had been such a stickler for physical fitness, had let himself grow soft during his time in Italy. Always an avid—and skilled—hunter, Rommel stalked the deer, wild boars, and rabbits which made the countryside around the chateau their home. He was not an indiscriminate slaughterer of animals: whatever game Rommel took found its way into the officers’ mess Army Group B headquarters.270

  Back in Herrlingen, Manfred’s call-up date came in mid-January; as per his father’s stern instructions, volunteering for the SS was right out, but rather than joining the Army, as the elder Rommel had wished, Manfred found himself conscripted into the Luftwaffe, where he would be expected to serve when needed as a “gun bunny” delivering ammunition to an antiaircraft battery. Rommel’s letters to his son were now taking on a more man-to-man tone, as the father realized his son was no longer a mere boy—the war was causing everyone to grow up a little faster than they would have otherwise. On the last day of January, Rommel wrote Manfred, saying,

  I was particularly pleased with your first letter as a Luftwaffe auxiliary, because you have settled in so well to your new conditions. It is not easy for an “only child” to leave home. Perhaps you’ll be getting a few days’ leave in February and then you must give us a full report. There’s still an endless amount of work here before I’ll be able to say that we’re properly prepared for battle. People get lazy and self-satisfied when things are quiet. But the contrast between quiet times and battle will be tough and I feel it essential to prepare for hard times here. I’m out on the move a lot and raising plenty of dust wherever I go.

  All the best to yo
u and warmest greetings,

  Your Father271

  Rommel’s confidence continued to grow as the work on the Atlantic Wall fortifications progressed, but he never allowed confidence to create slackness: he continued to work his officers and men as hard as ever. Mine-laying was the priority, and no matter how quickly it progressed it was never fast enough to satisfy him. In March Generaloberst Hans von Salmuth who commanded the Fifteenth Army, which was responsible for the defense of the Pas de Calais, where Rommel expected the invasion to take place, was pleased to report to Rommel that his men were each laying 10 land mines a day. Rommel’s reply was a terse, “Make it twenty a day.” Another time, when von Salmuth complained that the working pace Rommel demanded was leaving the Seventh Army’s soldiers exhausted, Rommel responded by asking, “Tell me, Herr General, which would your men rather be, tired or dead?” By the time the Allies actually landed in France, the Germans had laid almost six million mines—Rommel’s final plan called for a total of twenty million. Existing minefields were extended, with particular attention given to those covering roads or tracks leading from the beaches: the beaches themselves were devil’s dens of mines, obstacles, booby traps, barbwire, bunkers, and redoubts. Inland, Rommels spargel—“Rommel’s asparagus”—began sprouting up in open fields that seemed likely landing spots for airborne troops: these were heavy wooden stakes, with sharpened tops, driven vertically into the ground; barbwire was strung between them. Similar obstacles were to be driven into the sand along the beaches, using fire hoses to excavate the holes hydraulically, as obstacles to Allied landing craft. Not long afterward, some unsung genius in the Seventh Army suggested strapping Teller mines to the top of these stakes: if the stake failed to rip out the bottom of the landing craft, the mine would blow the unfortunate vessel to bits. Rommel immediately endorsed the idea and ordered such obstacles to be emplaced all along the French coast.