Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  by his qualities as a soldier: otherwise we

  should have no civilization.

  —ERWIN ROMMEL

  Seven decades have passed since Erwin Rommel took his own life, and yet he remains perhaps the most compelling personality of the Second World War. Handsome, dashing, intelligent, charismatic, a brilliant commander and a born leader of men in combat, he came close to being the heroic ideal of the romantic warrior. He was no such thing, of course, and he would have snorted derisively at anyone who suggested that he was. In his own eyes, Erwin Rommel, Field Marshal Rommel, was a soldier; that was all to which he aspired, and for himself he could conceive no higher calling.

  What he could not have denied, and would have made no effort to do so, was that if the man was not extraordinary, the life he lived, by any standard, was precisely that. Few men ever fought on so many battlefields, or displayed not only courage, but also intelligence, initiative, and leadership, all to a remarkable degree. His military career spanned four decades and two world wars; in both wars he was awarded his nation’s highest decorations for valor; in both wars he was severely wounded. At the height of his career he was the most famous and popular general in the Fatherland, and “Rommel” was a household name around the world. For two years he was the nemesis of the British Empire, and such was his fame and stature that even when his wounds removed him from the battlefield, his name was still used to intimidate the enemy. Yet he was more than just a soldier, the man was not made by the uniform: he was also a loving and devoted husband and father, and a firm and loyal friend; and if pressed would have acknowledged that he was as proud of those accomplishments as he was any of his medals, stars, or ribbons. Such was his life that, as the functionary from the Propaganda Ministry said to him, “Wenn es auch nicht stimme, wäre es doch gut, wenn es stimmen würde” (“Even if it is not true, it ought to be!”).

  As a tactician, Rommel’s reputation is secure: he was a born virtuoso, a master of the battlefield—he was only ever restricted by the limitations of circumstances, of logistics or superior orders, never by a lack of imagination. Few generals in history have ever displayed a greater talent for improvisation and invention: Rommel was especially fortunate that his was the imagination of a skilled—even gifted—technocrat. Though his First World War experiences in France, and especially at Monte Matajur and Longarone in Italy, profoundly shaped his concept of operations, the wellspring of Rommel’s genius precedes those battles. It can be found in the love of machinery and things mechanical, along with the accompanying ingenuity, which he displayed in his youth. Years later it stirred his adult imagination so that he was able to marry his understanding of machines with the German Army’s tactical doctrine of infiltration, and then envision what his mechanized units, with their panzers, armored cars, and half-tracks, and the Luftwaffe in support, could do if unleashed. This set him apart from many of his fellow officers in the Wehrmacht, particularly those of the General Staff, for whom Rommel had only disdain, who never could never quite fully comprehend the capabilities or the limitations of the formations of steel behemoths which they commanded, and who would then ask either too much or too little of them. The reverse of this facet of Rommel’s character was that while understanding the limits of machines, he was prone at times to forget the limits of what men could endure or achieve, and sometimes asked too much of them.

  But what the panzers could do was not always the same as what they should do, and it was here that Rommel’s lack of a higher military education became something of a liability. For all that he despised the General Staff and the arrogant, opinionated officers it produced, he lacked that fundamental understanding of war that transcended combat which was the core of Generalstab teaching and doctrine. It can be rightly said that Rommel understood how to fight a war—but why that war was being fought would probably have eluded him. The upper reaches of strategy, where military operations and political considerations begin to blur together, were always beyond him. Likewise, he could understand the strategic premise behind a particular campaign, but not necessarily see the broader, and longer implications and consequences of that campaign; had he been able to do so, he would have taken the opportunity in 1941, when he was Hitler’s favorite, to impose on the Führer and press his case for additional forces in North Africa, where their presence would have exerted a strategic influence on the whole of the war entirely out of proportion to their numbers. It would be precise—and fair—then to say that Rommel lacked an understanding of the “philosophy” of war.

  Certainly he was no scholar of military conflict. In the spring of 1944 Lieutenant General George Patton began studying the preparations William the Conqueror undertook in 1066 for the invasion of England, in the hope of discovering what old Roman roads William’s soldiers took through Normandy on their way to the coast. Patton believed that, if those same roads still existed, after nine centuries of use they could be counted on to be routes for an army advancing out of Normandy. It is impossible to imagine Rommel doing the same thing in an effort to anticipate the axis of the Allied thrust out of the bocage country. It simply never would have occurred to him. War to Rommel was a trade, rather than a profession. He was like the builder who could construct an imposing edifice, rather than the architect who could design it.

  Yet that did not mean he could not be a craftsman, and at his given trade, Erwin Rommel was very much so. The proof of that assertion lies not in any one of his battles, but rather in the regard in which the men under his command held him. Rommel inspired confidence in his soldiers—some middle and senior officers may have quibbled with his tactics but for the most part the average soldaten—the “ground-pounders”—respected and admired him, and because they knew that he rarely threw away their lives foolishly or for no purpose, their trust and confidence in him impelled them to fight harder, take risks, act and think imaginatively and aggressively. To their dying days, thousands of his “Africans” would proudly declare, “I fought for Rommel!” It was a devotion that was more than merely lip service; it paid real dividends in battle. History is replete with commanders, some who have been beloved by their soldiers (Bonaparte, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Lee), others greatly respected (Hannibal, Wellington, Grant, Patton), for whom the ordinary soldier was willing to “try harder.” Such soldiers turn their commander into a consistent winner, or at the very least a very tough fighter whom no one wants to cross without having overwhelming strength.

  The reverse is true as well: commanders who lack for their soldiers’ confidence will tend to be losers unless they have massive numerical superiority (such were most of the British generals in North Africa, for example, including Montgomery, or any of the Italian generals in Libya). Soldiers who do not trust their commanding officers are hesitant soldiers, and soldiers who hesitate at best lose battles, at worst are dead. The bond of trust between Rommel and his soldiers was an essential ingredient to Rommel’s success as a military commander.

  But if Rommel lacked the academic credentials of a formally trained strategist, this is not to say that Rommel’s understanding of strategy did not grow in depth as well as breadth as his career progressed. Quite the contrary: his grasp grew to the point where he could sometimes perceive and comprehend strategic opportunities as well as realities that others missed completely. In France in the summer of 1940, he was the impulsive, thrusting division commander whose eagerness to advance at times imperiled his own command or upset the plans and calculations of his superiors; by the time he took command of the Afrika Korps, he was still as aggressive as ever, but his grasp of the fundamental differences between war on the Continent and war in the Western Desert—where his opponent’s army became the primary objective and the mere holding of territory was often irrelevant—was so immediate as to be almost instinctive, and was never matched by any of the British generals who opposed him. He has been taken to task for lacking the strategic foresight to coordinate his operations in Libya in the summer of 1941 with the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the Soviet Union, bu
t that was hardly Rommel’s fault, as he had been kept ignorant of the existence of Operation Barbarossa until it actually began.

  Facing defeat at El Alamein, Rommel’s strategic horizons expanded even farther, as he immediately understood that once Panzerarmee Afrika no longer presented a threat to Cairo and the Suez Canal its further presence in Egypt—or even in Libya—made it a liability to the overall Axis strategy in the Mediterranean. He kept his under-equipped, overachieving army intact through a retreat of 1,100 miles, disregarding time and again directives, even commands, to stand firm at some intrinsically indefensible position that a self-proclaimed military genius a thousand miles distant decreed be defended to the last man. He halted only when he reached a point where the Panzerarmee Afrika would once again be relevant, where the enemy could not simply pass it by but would be compelled to confront it. Of all the generals, marshals, and national leaders bruiting about their competing strategies for the Axis forces in Tunisia, Rommel’s offering was at once the most promising and realistic. He alone seemed to understand that the tens of thousands of veteran German and Italian soldiers under his command would be a priceless military asset in defending Italy against the inevitable Allied invasion—and that squandering such an asset in trying to maintain a meaningless bridgehead in Tunisia was military folly at its most egregious. Meanwhile, fighting a determined delaying action in Tunisia as those troops were gradually withdrawn to Sicily and Italy could have severely disrupted the Allies’ strategic timetable for operations on the Continent. It would then be the Axis’ sheer good fortune that none of the Allied generals possessed the same degree of imagination as Rommel when the time came to invade the Italian peninsula: they refused to take the sort of risks which Rommel would have regarded as prerequisites to success. The Allied leaders’ lack of Rommel’s calculated audacity did not automatically invalidate his strategic thinking.”

  It would be in France, in 1944, that Rommel’s true vindication as a strategist would come about, not via brilliant preparation for the cross-Channel invasion, or in dazzling maneuvers against the Allied forces once they were ashore, but rather in how precise and correct he was in anticipating the impossibility of a German victory once the Allies had established their bridgehead. It was Rommel alone who foresaw how Allied command of the air would cripple the operations of the Wehrmacht’s mobile forces, or how inexorably the British and American way of war, systematic, methodical, utterly practical and coldly impersonal, would overwhelm the German defenders, no matter how good their individual weapons or how how courageous their individual efforts. It was Erwin Rommel, perhaps the most pragmatic of all of Germany’s generals in the Second World War, who alone recognized how the Allies’ utterly pragmatic approach to war would ensure Germany’s defeat.

  Legend has cast Rommel in the role of an overarching genius, which he certainly was not. He was not, for example, invincible, even if his defeats came about more through his enemy’s materiel superiority than via brilliant planning. Claude Auchinleck twice proved, during Crusader and then at First Alamein, that Rommel could be outmaneuvered and outfought. He can be seen—honestly—as ambitious, somewhat grasping, eager—even anxious—for professional recognition and popular acclaim, even if achieved through the work of others, and sometimes at their expense. While he never took counsel of his own fears, he easily fell into melancholy when events went against him; and he was not above blaming other people for problems that were at least in part of his own making. Yet, even if Rommel cannot be fairly described as “une chevalier, sans peur et sans reproche,” what can never be denied is the integrity of Erwin Rommel’s moral stature as a man. By turns and sometimes in combination brilliant, generous, petty, jealous, shrewd, headstrong, arrogant, shortsighted, visionary, loving, and dispassionate, he was, at his core, a decent human being. That is no mean verdict, no small epitaph, no damnation by faint praise, for in the moral black hole that was the Third Reich, Rommel alone among the ranks of the Wehrmacht’s field marshals never compromised his honor, never chose to conveniently look away, never fell victim to the rationale of “just obeying orders” which ensnared, shamed, and ultimately damned so many of his colleagues, when he confronted the horror and immorality of the Nazi regime and the man who led it.

  Which leads directly to the great conundrum of Erwin Rommel’s life. Whether bidden or not, the question will eventually rear its ugly head: why did Erwin Rommel serve such an evil master—and serve him so well?

  There are those who would condemn Erwin Rommel out of hand simply for the cause he served, the banner he followed. But to paint him with the brush of Nazism is to misunderstand him, along with millions of other Germans like him, who first mistook the swastika as a symbol of hope and change, only to then watch its metamorphosis into a representation of malignant evil. In Hitler’s case the devil did indeed assume a pleasing shape, and Rommel took that shape at face value, not only at first, but for years to follow. And this is where any accounting of the life and legacy of Erwin Rommel encounters rocks and shoals, because the very legitimate question arises here as to whether or not through his tacit approval of Hitler Rommel became complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich.

  The difficulty in arriving at a meaningful answer to the question lies in maintaining a genuine sense of perspective, never losing sight of the fact that none of the German people, ardent Party members or passionate foes of the Nazi regime or some shading in between, whether soldiers or civilians, were prescient. Thus it is an immense challenge for anyone with a knowledge of the events of 1933 to 1945 but who is two generations removed from them to steer away from exercising flawless hindsight. The Wannsee Conference, the Endlösung, the Nacht und Nebel decrees, the Sonderkommando and Einsatzgruppen, the death camps, medical experiments, slave labor—all seem inevitable in retrospect, as innumerable decisions and actions, large and small, whether by Hitler, his henchmen, or petty, anonymous Party hacks and bureaucrats, conspired and converged to produce such a monstrous construct. But “inevitability” is a gross oversimplification, a convenient—even lazy—expedient in accounting for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. However much the evil of the Nazi regime may appear as given after the fact, the stark truth is that none of it was inevitable before: they were the consequences of the actions of human beings, not outcomes dictated by the laws of nature.

  Perhaps the most insidious is the belief, sometimes expressed, other times implied, that the Germans should have recognized the potential for the abuse of power inherent in as authoritative a regime as the Third Reich, should have anticipated that it would happen. But to ask them to have done so is to ask of them powers of foresight such as have never been given to any people, anywhere, at any time in history: any regime in any government, no matter what that government’s form, structure, or delimited powers, can be abusive of its power if it is determined to be so. Undeniably the Nazis were an authoritarian regime, and thus potentially more prone to such abuses, but the Germans as a people were comfortable with, even embracing of, living under an authoritarian government as they had never known anything else—aside from the brief experiment of the Weimar Republic, the essence of German government had only ever changed in degree, never in fundamental nature. The Germans followed—obeyed—Hitler and the Nazis because it was their nature as a people to obey: they never had any example, any experience, to follow to do otherwise. Recognizing the truth of the German people’s experience does not exonerate them, for the Nazi regime was history’s greatest exercise in immorality, and morality is—and must be—based on more than experience; but it does explain them, and so makes them understandable, if not comprehensible.

  In the end, it becomes clear that while Erwin Rommel was guilty of a kolossal blunder in judging the nature and character of the man who led the Third Reich, in doing so he was simply one of millions of Germans who were deceived by the greatest lie ever told by history’s greatest practitioner of the Big Lie. And in the end, Rommel paid a far, far greater price than did the millions of those Germans who h
ad been, if not Hitler’s willing executioners, then at least his willing accomplices. And it was a far, far greater price than that paid by many of his colleagues who were accomplices, or at least accessories, to some of the worst excesses of the Nazi regime. It is impossible to imagine Erwin Rommel emulating his one-time rival, Ferdinand Schöner, for example, in ordering the summary execution of German soldiers for mere suspicion of cowardice or desertion, or turning a blind eye, in the manner of von Rundstedt or von Manstein, to the atrocities of the SS that were aided and abetted by men under their command.

  From the perspective of Hitler and the Nazis, Rommel’s besetting—and ultimately damning—sin was his integrity. Too many of the toadies and sycophants surrounding the Führer were attempting to sugarcoat the bitter strategic realities that came with each new day. They strove to cast the latest defeat, the most recent disaster, as a minor tactical set-back or a strategic move necessitated by the need to buy a little more time in which to allow the much-anticipated wonder weapons to reach the front, where, under the guidance of what was sure to be Hitler’s inevitable stroke of strategic genius, the Allies—east and west—would be routed in a triumph Germaniae. Ultimately the reason why Erwin Rommel was forced to take his own life was not because he had countenanced tyrannicide—he hadn’t—but rather because he chose to commit what was an even greater crime in Nazi Germany in the summer of 1944: he spoke Truth to Power. Erwin Rommel had to die because he chose to tell the truth to Adolf Hitler.

  Dulce et decorum est pro Patria mori. So wrote Horace; Conington translated it thus: “What joy, for fatherland to die.” And for Erwin Rommel, that is a far more suitable rendering than the traditional interpretation. “Joy” is most often translated into German as “freude,” but it can also be rendered “sich freuen”—“glad.” No sane man gladly takes his own life—and Erwin Rommel was one of the sanest men ever to walk the earth—but when confronted with the ultimate choice given him by Adolf Hitler, Rommel must have known a certain gladness, for if he was to die, he would be doing so for the Fatherland which he had served his entire life, at the same time that he was fulfilling the best tradition of ritter, chevalier, knight, warrior: defending at the last those he loved best—Lucie and Manfred.