Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  It was the Allies’ good fortune that the 21st Panzer’s attack struck where it did, for if it had gone in just a few miles to the west, their entire plan for the invasion would have come unraveled. The British and American operational concepts for the actual landings differed widely: the Americans favored a brute force approach, expecting to overwhelm the enemy defenses with firepower and numbers. Anticipating that the sheer weight and ferocity of the pre-landing naval and aerial bombardment would leave the German defenders stunned and incapable of effective resistance, the United States Army did not make armored support a priority for the first wave of troops landing on Utah and Omaha Beaches. On Omaha, the two infantry divisions given the task of taking and holding the beach were assigned a total of two battalions of armor—a total of 60 tanks. The British, on the other hand, driven by their own dwindling reserves of manpower, chose finesse over fury: specialized tanks, designed expressly to counter, destroy, or otherwise overcome German defenses and obstacles, were included in the first wave of the landing force from the beginning of the planning phase, along with conventional armor. The whole of the 27th Armoured Brigade was committed to the landing force, with a strength three times that of the American armor committed to Omaha Beach.

  The fight for Omaha Beach was the critical battle of D-Day: had the Americans not gained a foothold there, the entire Overlord plan would have become unworkable. Essential to the Allies’ plan to liberate Western Europe was that the Normandy invasion not merely gain a bridgehead on the Continent, but that it be large enough to allow the buildup of forces in sufficient strength to launch the liberating attacks across France and the Low countries. (This was the actual Operation Overlord—the first 90 days of operations against the Germans on the Continent; the name is usually applied—erroneously—to just the D-Day landings.) The Allies had already determined the size and composition of the armies that would be required to break out of the bridgehead: too small a bridgehead would literally mean there would be no place to put all of those units. The initial plan for D-Day called for three beachheads, all to the immediate west of Caen—they would become Sword, Juno, and Gold Beaches in the final plan—but General Montgomery immediately recognized that three beaches were far too small to contain the sort of buildup the Allies anticipated, and demanded that the landing area be enlarged. (While Montgomery was uncomfortable with fluid operations and battles of maneuver, he was the unquestioned master of the set piece.) Thus Omaha and Utah Beaches were added to the invasion plan: once consolidated the resulting bridgehead would meet the Allies’ operational requirements for the buildup. Omaha was the lynchpin: if the landing there was unsuccessful, Utah Beach would be isolated, too distant from the British and Canadian beaches to be effectively supported, meaning that the landing force at Utah would have to be withdrawn. The Allies would then be left with the original, inadequate beachhead proposed in the initial Overlord planning, leaving them with no viable option but to withdraw from the coast of France entirely—sustaining the existing beachhead while simultaneously trying to plan, organize, and carry out a second landing which would expand the initial foothold would have exceeded the limits of the Allies’ resources.

  Even as it was, the Germans came closer than they knew to defeating the invasion. The destruction they wrought on the Allies was frightening. Ernie Pyle, arguably the most gifted war correspondent ever to write about human conflict, unforgettably described the carnage he saw on June 7, as he walked along the Normandy beaches:

  The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of the outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy in those first few hours.

  For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that were not visible, for they were at the bottom of the water—swamped by overloading or hit by shells or sunk by mines.

  There were trucks tipped half over and swamped, partly sunken barges, and the angled up corners of jeeps, and small landing craft half-submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.

  On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There were half-tracks carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single shell hit, their interiors still holding the useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files.

  There were LCTs (Landing Craft, Tank) turned completely upside down, and lying on their backs, and how they got that way I don’t know. There were boats stacked atop each other, their sides caved in, their suspension doors knocked off.

  In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved.

  In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes and mysterious oranges.

  On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.

  On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. . . .282

  ROMMEL REACHED LA Roche Guyon at 9:00 P.M., by which time the 21st Panzer’s attack was over and its lack of success in driving the Allies back into the sea was confirmed. While he obviously could not have known the details of Allied planning for Overlord, and thus the true extent of the opportunity missed, he and his staff understood that the actions of 21st Panzer were proof of what could have been accomplished had Rommel been permitted to position the panzer divisions closer to beaches before the Allies landed, and then given command authority to commit them as needed once the invasion began. The presence of one more panzer division in Normandy in the first 48 hours of the invasion would have been decisive, and the knowledge must have been galling, especially when events simply added the exclamation point to his assertion in the report he had submitted in April to Jodl and the O.K.W.:

  If I am to wait until the enemy landing has actually taken place, before I can demand, through normal channels, the command and dispatch of the mobile forces, delays will be inevitable. This will mean that they will probably arrive too late to intervene successfully in the battle for the coast and prevent the enemy landing.283

  Rommel would be compelled to fight the Battle of Normandy halfblind, with one hand tied behind his back. While the Allies had an almost embarrassingly detailed knowledge of German troop strength and unit dispositions, Rommel knew next to nothing about the forces confronting him. Allied photo-reconnaissance aircraft flew over the Normandy battlefields with near impunity; so complete was Allied air supremacy over Britain that such German reconnaissance flights as were allowed to successfully penetrate British airspace were carefully shepherded by intercepting fighters so that they would see only what the Allies wanted them to see. The Fortitude deceptions continued, which both misled Rommel as to actual Allied strength, but also compelled him to keep the Fifteenth Army in the Pas de Calais to honor what everyone in the German high command continued to believe was a genuine threat of a second invasion. This was arguably Fortitude’s greatest contribution to the success of Overlord, as it prevented Rommel from reinforcing the Seventh Army while the Allies were building up their forces to break out of the Normandy bridgehead. Rommel was forced to fight the Battle of Normandy with only the troops he had to hand, plus a trickle of reinforcements.

  Initially, Geyr von Schweppenburg and von Rundstedt had high hopes for what might be accomplished by the 12th SS Panzer and Panzer Lehr Divisions. Both were large, well-equipped units—SS divisions tended to maintain something much closer to their specified manpower and equipment levels than did normal army units, while Panzer Lehr was organized to teach advanced armor tactics to ne
wly promoted company and battalion commanders, hence its personnel were all combat veterans. Had they arrived at the front intact and on time, they would have wreaked havoc among the invading Allied armies, especially the Americans, for in the first 48 hours of the invasion the landing forces were still somewhat disorganized and understrength.

  Alas for the Germans, it was not to be: both were forced to engage the British and Canadians piecemeal, arriving at Caen late, disordered, and having suffered significant losses, the consequence of constant harrassment by Allied “jabos”—jagdbomber, fighter-bombers. Von Schweppenburg and von Rundstedt were appalled to discover that Rommel’s dire predictions about the effectiveness of Allied air power were all too accurate, as the British and American tactical air forces crippled the ability of the two panzer divisions to advance in daylight. Von Schweppenburg had ordered Panzer Lehr to begin moving into Normandy on June 7, and told the division commander, Fritz Bayerlein, Rommel’s one-time Chief of Staff in North Africa, to move the division up in daylight. Bayerlein protested, Geyr insisted, and the movement from Chartres to Normandy, which normally would have been accomplished in a matter of hours, required two days. Bayerlein would remember the roads as “a fighter-bomber race course,” and in the near-constant bombing and strafing Panzer Lehr lost five tanks along with a score of half-tracks and armored cars; just as bad was the loss of 150 trucks and fuel tankers. When it tried to move into Caen the 12th SS Panzer fared no better.

  Even more problematic for the German defenders was the havoc played on their supply lines by the Allied bombers and fighter-bombers: squadrons of American P-47 Thunderbolts and British Hawker Typhoons ranged over Normandy’s roads, seeking out German truck convoys—the destruction they brought to such convoys was crippling on multiple levels: not only were vital supplies being lost, but priceless trucks were destroyed (the Wehrmacht was losing motor vehicles faster than German factories could replace them), and the pool of drivers and logistics personnel was dwindling. Trucks could only move at night; the Luftwaffe was helpless to stop the depredations of the jabos, as stocks of aviation fuel were being hoarded for fighters defending the Reich from the Allied bomber armadas: the British and American air forces were flying as many as 10,000 sorties a day, while the Luftwaffe could muster less than a tenth of that number. Compounding the problem was the methodical campaign being carried out by the medium bombers of the US Ninth Air Force against bridges and viaducts in both Normandy and the Pas de Calais (the latter to maintain the fiction of the threat of a second invasion). There were almost no intact rail or road bridges within 100 miles of the French coast, which forced the Germans into tortuous and expensive detours in order to bring up whatever supplies they could by truck or train. After a few weeks, Rommel would be forced to resort to floating barges laden with fuel and ammunition down the rivers flowing into Normandy in order to get even a trickle of supplies to his troops.

  Rommel had been right: Geyr and von Rundstedt had never imagined such overwhelming airpower: not even in its finest hour, in France in 1940, had the Luftwaffe been able to so thoroughly dominate a battlefield. Apart from Bayerlein, none of Rommel’s subordinates or superiors had yet faced the Americans and the British: only now, too late, were they beginning to comprehend how thoroughly the Allied air forces could interdict the movements of German troops, tanks, and supplies; only now did they understand the truth of Rommel’s assertion that Allied air power would deny the mobility on which men like Geyr and von Rundstedt had predicated all of their plans for the German panzer divisions. They had refused to listen when Rommel had warned them:

  Our friends from the East cannot imagine what they are in for here. It’s not a matter of fanatical hordes to be driven forward in masses against our line, with no regard for casualties and little recourse to tactical craft; here we are facing an enemy who applies all his native intelligence to the use of his many technical resources, who spares no expenditure of materiel and whose every operation goes its course as though it had been the subject of repeated rehearsal. Dash and doggedness alone no longer make a soldier; he must have sufficient intelligence to enable him to get the most out of his fighting machine. And that’s something these people can do, we found that out in Africa.284

  Geyr would have the lesson driven home very personally and painfully: on June 10, while he was organizing a counterattack on Caen, Geyr’s newly established headquarters at La Caine was bombed and strafed by Royal Air Force Typhoons, its location revealed through radio intercepts and Ultra decrypts. Von Schweppenburg’s disregard for Allied air power led him to set up his headquarters in an open field: Geyr was wounded while most of his staff was killed in the attack.

  Denied the chance to stop the Allied invasion at the water’s edge, Rommel now faced the challenge of containing the enemy beachheads, and confining the Allies for as long as possible in Normandy’s bocage country, ideal terrain for an army weak in armor and limited in mobility defending against a highly mobile enemy whose numbers were steadily growing, and who possessed near-absolute command of the air. The bocage—the word means “little forest,” a perfect description of the innumerable hedgerows which criss-crossed the most of Normandy and the Cotentin peninsula—would allow him to exploit to the fullest the Germans’ superior tactical skills, forcing the Allies to fight for every yard of ground gained.

  By June 10 Rommel had correctly divined the Allies’ intentions, essential to developing a strategy for containing the beachheads and, should Montgomery or one of his subordinates blunder and present such an opportunity, pushing the Allies back into the Channel. He summed up his conclusions about Allied objectives in a strategic appreciation he submitted to OB West and the O.K.W.:

  The course of the battle in Normandy to date gives a clear indication of the enemy’s intentions:

  (a) to gain a deep bridgehead between the Orne and Vire, as a springboard for a powerful attack later into the interior of France, probably towards Paris;

  (b) to cut off the Cotentin peninsula and gain possession of Cherbourg as soon as possible, in order to provide himself with a major port of large landing capacity. (There seems also to be a possibility, as things are developing, that the enemy will dispense with the Cotentin peninsula if the battle is too fierce, and make an early thrust with all his available means, into the interior of France.)285

  Rommel saw that the tenacity of the German defenders was disrupting the Allies’ carefully worked-out timetables for their campaign in Normandy, which offered opportunities to strike back at the Allies with local counterattacks. But lest they start “painting pictures” in Berchtesgaden and Berlin, he pointedly reminded the Führer and the O.K.W. that whatever success the Wehrmacht was able to eke out against the Allies, they would be limited at best as the Allies brought their increasingly superior numbers to bear.

  As a result of the stubborn defense of the coast defense troops and the immediate counterattacks launched by the available major reserves, the enemy attack, despite the strength of his effort, has gone considerably more slowly than he had hoped. The enemy also seems to be committing more forces than he had originally planned. Under cover of his very strong air force, the enemy is visibly reinforcing himself on land, and neither our air force nor our navy is in a position, especially by day, to offer him any hindrance. Consequently, the enemy forces in the bridgehead are growing at a considerably faster rate than reserves are flowing to our front.286

  Rommel’s first priority at this moment was to establish an unbroken front around the Allied beachhead in order to contain it. New units were being thrown into the line piecemeal as they arrived in Normandy, regardless of type or quality, to plug gaps and reduce unit frontages—they could be sorted out later. Admittedly most of the panzers were being sent to the eastern end of the German perimeter, as Montgomery was building up his armored strength for his pending envelopment of Caen, but that did not significantly affect the troops defending the hedgerows: in the bocage, tanks were as much a liability as an asset, a lesson the Americans wer
e being taught rather pointedly.

  Once again Rommel was in his element, the quintessential combat commander, leading from the front. This time, however, there was none of the exhilaration that had been so evident in the 7th Panzer Division’s mad rush across France in 1940, the heady days of the first advance from El Agheila, or the triumph of the Battle of Gazala and its aftermath. This was not a desperate battle, it was a battle of desperation. As at El Alamein, he was engaged in a materialschlact, a battle of attrition, one he knew Germany could never win. From the first day of the invasion, when he learned that the Allies had been able to successfully establish their beachheads, Rommel had no real confidence that the patchwork of German infantry, artillery, and armor holding the front in Normandy would prevent the Allies from eventually breaking out of their bridgehead—it was not a question of if but rather when it would happen. For the Allies to be stopped, or even compelled to withdraw from Normandy entirely, would require a miracle.

  Rommel was doing his best, trying to extricate armor from the lines to form a mobile reserve that he could keep posted a few miles behind the front for either making local attacks when possible, or for a counterattack should the Allies unexpectedly break through the hedgerows into the open country beyond. Enemy air power was making this difficult, however, as was a factor which Rommel had never considered, having never before encountered it—naval gunfire. The British and American battleships, cruisers, and destroyers posted off the Normandy beaches carried awesome amounts of firepower that were on-call for the Allied soldiers struggling through the hedgerows—the big 15-inch guns of the battleships could range as far as 16 miles inshore, while even the 5-inch guns on the destroyers could strike targets 5 miles inland. The American artillery, shore- and sea-based, was especially dangerous: the most sophisticated fire-control network in the world allowed a single forward observer to request a fire mission that could, if the situation required, bring down the fire of hundreds of artillery pieces, from company mortars all the way through battalion and regimental guns and howitzers, to divisional and corps heavy artillery—and even the offshore guns of the warships—onto a single target within minutes. The Germans’ improvised hedgerow defenses were formidable, and often could withstand fire from most Allied field guns, but Rommel’s men lacked the time and materials to build dugouts strong enough to withstand heavy naval guns. Thus when the Tommies or GIs had to crack a particularly tough nut, they would whistle up a heavy cruiser or battleship and settle the matter with 8-inch, 14-inch, or 15-inch shells.