Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Rommel’s acerbic dismissal of von Salmuth’s complaint that his men were being overworked was a clear-cut demonstration of two vital aspects of the field marshal’s command of the Atlantic Wall defenses. First was his renewed singularity of purpose: anything which diverted his attention and energy from the completion of the wall was a needless diversion. This proved to be a source of some minor annoyance to his staff, as evidenced by an entry in Colonel Templehoff’s personal journal, where he noted that “On our journeys with the field marshal we always drive straight past the monuments and fine architecture. He’s so wrapped up in his job that he’s totally uninterested in anything else except the military needs of the moment.” The second was the return of the same disregard for personal feelings which had marked his first months in North Africa: he was prepared to run roughshod over any subordinate when and as needed in order to create a command structure on which he could rely to carry out his orders and produce the results he demanded. General Erich Marcks, one of Rommel’s corps commanders and himself no stranger to being short-tempered with subordinates, summed up Rommel to a colleague, saying, “He is a choleric who often explodes and the commanders are terribly scared of him. The first one who has to report to him in the morning receives a chewingout as a matter of principle.”272

  To speed up the work, Rommel encouraged local commanders to hire French civilians as laborers to work alongside the German troops who were digging trenches and pouring concrete—he was not prepared to countenance the Todt Organization’s use of slave labor in his command area. Because he insisted on paying a decent wage, French men and women volunteered by the thousands for this work; to encourage their efforts, he put up notices reminding them that the Allies were least likely to invade a heavily defended area. There was, everyone knew, a trade-off involved, as inevitably there would be members of the French Resistance in the workforce who would happily seize the opportunity to do a bit of sabotage or simply acquire intelligence about the German defensive works which they could pass along to the Allies. For Rommel, however, accelerating the pace of the work was worth whatever minor details about the defenses the enemy might learn in this way: as he had caustically observed earlier, the Allies probably already knew as much about the Atlantic Wall as did the Germans anyway.

  Unlike the previous construction efforts, there was nothing haphazard about the work now being done: Rommel had developed an overall plan which would turn the entire Channel coast, from the water’s edge to a distance inland of 6 miles, into a death zone for Allied soldiers. He had calculated that a defensive line that extensive and deep would encourage the Allies to give up on the idea of invading at all, or if they had the temerity to invade, breaching it would prove so costly in men and materiel that they would be compelled to withdraw.273

  31 March 1944

  Dearest Lu,

  No news of importance. . . . I saw plenty to cheer me here yesterday. Although we’ve still a lot of weaknesses, we’re looking forward full of confidence to what’s coming.

  On April 15, a newcomer to the headquarters at La Roche Guyon reported for duty: Generalleutnant Hans Speidel, who was replacing Alfred Gause as Rommel’s Chief of Staff. Gause and his wife had their home in Berlin destroyed in an Allied air raid in February, and the Rommels had taken them in as houseguests while they found a new home, an increasingly difficult task in the Reich in 1944. As sometimes happens with such guests, they wore out their welcome, irritating Lucie to the point where she not only evicted them, but demanded that Erwin dismiss Gause as his Chief of Staff. Rommel, who rarely stood up to Lucie on anything, chose not to make an issue of the situation and quietly asked for Guase to be reposted, going so far as to write to Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler’s adjutant and still Rommel’s good friend, to see to it that Gause was given command of a panzer division as soon as possible.

  Rommel may have recognized Speidel when the new Chief of Staff reported to him; Speidel was a fellow Swabian, they had first met the in Argonne Forest in 1915, and later briefly served together in the Thirteenth Infantry Regiment of the Reichswehr. Seven years Rommel’s junior, with a doctorate in history, Speidel was bookish and bespectacled—he closely resembled a somewhat distracted owl—well-mannered, erudite, and congenial. Rommel expected to get on well with him; what Rommel did not know was that Speidel brought baggage with him that was not in the valises that were delivered to his quarters: for the past two years he had been part of a growing circle of Wehrmacht officers and influential civilians who were staunch opponents of Adolf Hitler, and whose opposition was beginning to harden into a determination to remove the Führer from power—going so far as to contemplate Hitler’s assassination. This, of course, was unknown to Rommel at the time; Rommel would eventually be told some of it, and learn more of it on his own. The one thing which Rommel never imagined was that he had doomed himself by approving Speidel’s appointment, for Hans Speidel, five months hence, would implicate Rommel in the plot to kill Adolf Hitler in order to save himself from the hangman’s piano-wire noose.

  By the end of April, even some of Rommel’s old arrogance was beginning to reassert itself.

  27 April 1944

  It looks as though the British and Americans are going to do us the favor of keeping away for a bit. This will be of immense value for our coastal defenses, for we are now growing stronger every day at least on the ground, though the same is not true for the air. But even that will change to our advantage again some time. My little dog [Rommel had acquired a dachshund from the owners of the chateau] is touchingly affectionate and loves sweet things. He sleeps in my room now, underneath my luggage stand. He’s going to be inoculated soon against distemper. Went riding again yesterday, but I’m feeling my joints pretty badly today. . . . The affair with Geyr von Schweppenburg with whom I recently had to be very rough because he would not give way to my plans has all been cleared up now by orders from above and decided as I wanted it.274

  The last sentence of this letter hints at a story that would profoundly affect and alter the ability of the German forces defending the Atlantic Wall to successfully repel the coming invasion. Geyr von Schweppenburg, was, of course, the officer commanding Panzer Group West, the “affair” was the culmination of a months-long debate over how to best employ the panzer divisions stationed in France to oppose the Allied landings, and Rommel’s declaration that everything had been “cleared up” and settled to his satisfaction was misleading. The debate was, in fact, far from over, and the failure of Hitler, von Rundstedt, von Schweppenburg and Rommel to settle it would cripple the Wehrmacht when the Allies finally attacked.

  One reason why Army Group B had been assigned the French and Belgian Channel coast as its command area was Hitler’s recognition that of all his senior generals—at least those who were not currently behind barbwire in a POW camp somewhere—only Kesselring, now ensconced in Italy, and Rommel had any real experience fighting the British and Americans. Rommel knew this, and all the work he ordered done on the Atlantic Wall, all of the plans drawn up for Army Group B to counter, contain, and drive back into the sea any Allied landings, were based on the experiences of his last year in North Africa. Only a commander who had tried to fight battles under the umbrella of Allied air power could understand how the all-seeing eyes of the Allies’ observation planes inhibited movement, or how the attrition wrought by Allied fighter-bombers decimated an army’s combat strength. There was nothing comparable to that experience on the Russian front.

  Geyr von Schweppenburg disagreed, vehemently. When he first met Geyr, Rommel instinctively bridled, for the man seemed to be the embodiment of everything he despised about the traditional German offizierkorps. Tall, lean, thoroughly aristocratic, Geyr came from a Prussian military family, and projected an aura of arrogant omniscience. Transferred to France in the early summer of 1943, he had spent two years fighting on the Russian Front, commanding the XXIV Panzer Corps, and believed that in doing so he had learned all that there was to know about armored warfare. To Geyr, not only
did Rommel have nothing to teach him, all of Rommel’s experience facing the British and Americans was essentially irrelevant—it was on the Russian Front that real tank battles were fought.

  Geyr was certain that the only proper way to employ his panzer divisions was to hold them back from the coast by as much as 100 miles, then use them in broad, textbook-like mobile operations to annihilate the Allies when the invasion force attempted to break out of its beachhead. Rommel was appalled by the very idea, for Allied fighters were methodically sweeping the Luftwaffe from the skies above Europe; Allied photo-reconnaissance aircraft already flew more-or-less at will wherever they wished above France and Belgium: once the Allies were ashore, those same reconnaissance planes would be keeping a hawk-like eye on German mobile formations, and the concentration of forces needed for the sort of maneuvers Geyr proposed would never go undetected. He had very carefully articulated this in the formal report he made to Hitler on December 31, 1943, presenting his conclusions on the state of the Atlantic Wall:

  British and American superiority in the air alone has again and again been so effective that all movement of major formations has been rendered completely impossible, both at the front and behind it, by day and by night, and our own air force has only on very rare occasions been able to make any appearance in support of our operations.275

  When the Allied observation planes spotted a target, the Allied bombers would soon follow, and in northern Europe, these would not be the light and medium bombers of the Desert Air Force. The Allies could, any day they chose, bring the heavies of RAF’s Bomber Command and the U.S. Army Air Force’s Eighth Air Force to bear on the battlefield; as Rommel saw it, strategic and operational mobility would no longer be an asset in the ledger for the Germans defending Festung Europa. When he tried to drive this point home to von Schweppenburg, the aristocratic general der panzertruppe replied condescendingly that Rommel had never led in combat any unit larger than a division (completely ignoring Rommel’s two years in Africa), so that he had no true idea of what mobile armored warfare was like; Rommel countered by replying that for all his experience on the Russian Front, Geyr had no idea of what fighting against the British or the Americans was like.

  Rommel’s concept for employing the panzer divisions was to move them much closer to the beaches, to within a few miles of the water’s edge. There, even though it would be impossible to form up large concentrations of armor, battalion- or even company- sized units could prove decisive in the first hours of the invasion. The enemy would be disorganized, their morale (hopefully) shaken, they would be short on ammunition and equipment—especially antitank weapons. The panzer units would retain their tactical mobility and be able to employ it at precisely the moment when it would be most effective—when the Allied forces would be mostly nearimmobile infantry. The German tanks would be able to provide fire support for the German infantry holding the widerstandsnester even as the Allied armor would be too weak in numbers to be able to effectively do the same for the assaulting Allied infantry. Again, this was a point that he had made as forcibly as possible in his December 31 report:

  . . . It will therefore be necessary, in the worst-threatened sectors, to have heavy antitank guns, self-propelled guns and antiaircraft combat troops standing ready in the forward part of the defense zone, whence they can be rushed up to the coast to engage the enemy while he is still disembarking.

  I regard it as urgently necessary to have two reserve divisions held a short distance to the east of the coastal defenses, along the worst threatened stretch of coast between Boulogne and the mouth of the Somme, so that they can intervene in support of the coast-defense divisions, as soon as possible after the main center of the enemy attack has been identified, and thus prevent the creation of any enemy bridgehead. It will be less a question of a formation action than of the piecemeal destruction of the disembarking or disembarked enemy by small combat groups.276

  Now at the end of April 1944, the issue had to be decided, as time was running out. The Germans still had no idea of exactly when the invasion would take place, but the likelihood that it would take place increased with every passing day as summer approached—further debate on the Wehrmacht’s strategy when it actually took place was a luxury the German commanders could no longer afford.

  Unfortunately, the man who was Rommel and Geyr’s immediate superior, and who should have resolved the issue once and for all time, refused to do so. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, at 68 years of age, was Germany’s senior soldier, born, like von Schweppenburg, into a Prussian family with a long military tradition. He joined the German Army as an officer cadet in 1892 and rose to the rank of hauptmann (captain) before the First World War broke out; he would serve as a staff officer for the entire conflict; in point of fact, unlike Geyr or Rommel, von Rundstedt had never experienced combat. After the Armistice, he remained with the Army, a protegé of von Seeckt, and continued to rise in the Reichswehr, ultimately being promoted to generalleutnant in 1932. He was able to easily shift his political loyalty to the new National Socialist regime after January 1933; when he retired in November 1938, he had reached the rank of generaloberst. Von Runstedt’s relationship with Hitler in the years before his retirement were at times rocky, as von Rundstedt saw himself in every way as an officer who must remain aloof from politics. Recalled to active duty when Germany invaded Poland, von Rundstedt protested very vocally when he learned that special SS squads were executing Polish POWs and civilians in the rear areas of his command. He then commanded Army Group B in the campaign in France in 1940, and as a reward for the services rendered by the soldiers under him was one of 12 generals promoted to the rank of field marshal on July 19.

  By the time the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, whatever qualms of conscience von Rundstedt may have had in 1939 regarding the treatment of civilians and prisoners of war had vanished, a process helped along no doubt by the several large bribes given to him by Hitler, who rarely went wrong in counting on the venality of his fellow man. (One of Hitler’s favorite methods of securing his senior officers’ loyalty was the making of large tax-free gifts of cash, little more than thinly disguised bribes, as well as estates seized from their former owners by the advancing Wehrmacht. The list of German officers who willingly accepted these gifts—and often returned to Hitler seeking more—was a surprising number of names from old aristocratic German families. Numbered among the handful of generals and admirals who are known to have refused such offers was Erwin Rommel.) Von Rundstedt was instrumental in the implementation of the infamous Commissar Order and the equally notorious Commando Order. Additionally, no protests about the conduct of the SS Einsatzgruppen (special operations groups—the death squads) ever came out of von Rundstedt’s headquarters.

  By 1944, having already been sacked and recalled by Hitler, von Rundstedt, though respected, even revered, in some circles within the Wehrmacht, was clearly past his best in terms of ability. He had never really mastered the theory, the “philosophy,” of mechanized warfare, and regarded his posting as Commander-in-Chief West to be more of a managerial position than as an active operational command. Comfortably ensconced in Paris’ luxurious Hotel George V, he found his collection of classical music recordings and the contents of his champagne cellar more interesting than the responsibilities of command. When Rommel and Geyr approached him for a resolution to their dispute, he was, to borrow a phrase used in another context by Winston Churchill, “resolved to be irresolute.” Von Rundstedt temporized; the matter would have to be settled by Hitler. Eventually Hitler did just that, but with a typically muddled compromise that satisfied no one and neither strategic nor operational doctrine: half of Panzer Group West’s armored divisions would be assigned to and deployed by the army groups defending the beaches, while the remainder would be retained in reserve under Geyr von Schweppenburg. This arrangement might have worked out in practice, but then Hitler threw a spanner into the works: the reserve divisions could not be deployed without his direct order, nor c
ould one army group’s armor be transferred to another without his permission. It was an unworkable system that would prove fatal for Germany’s efforts to defend against the Allied invasion when it finally came.

  The other great debate that was raging between the various commands in Western Europe was over the question of exactly where the Allies would land. Rommel was sure the enemy would invade in the Pas de Calais area, the defense of which was the responsibility for von Salmuth’s Fifteenth Army, and there were very sound reasons for his conclusion. Paramount among them was that a landing at the Pas de Calais placed the Allied beachhead the shortest distance on the most direct route to the single most valuable and vulnerable strategic target in Germany—the Ruhr, the heart of German heavy industry and arms manufacture. F.U.S.A.G. was poised directly opposite the Pas de Calais, only 19 miles distant; it is a military dictum which any commander ignores at his peril that you must honor a threat, and the threat of an invasion in the Pas de Calais sector was too great for Rommel to discount, because all of the intelligence available gave credence to F.U.S.A.G.’s reality. Unfortunately for the Germans, the concentration of forces in Fifteenth Army came at the expense of other commands, notably its neighbor to the west, Seventh Army, commanded by Generalleutnant Friedrich Dollmann, who repeatedly tried to make Rommel more aware of the vulnerability of the Normandy coast and the relative thinness of the defenses there. Rommel paid heed from time to time, but never made Normandy a priority, focused as he was (and as the planners of Bodyguard and Fortitude intended him to be) on the Fifteenth Army area.