Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

by Unknown

  School at Aalen did not agree with young Rommel after the freedom of Heidenheim. Finding himself behind the others of his age, he became even paler in the attempt to catch up, lost his appetite and could not sleep. Then he grew lazy and inattentive and made no effort. He was so careless that he became the butt of his class. “If Rommel ever shows up a dictation without a mistake,” said the schoolmaster, “we will hire a band and go off for a day in the country.” Rommel sat up and promptly turned in a dictation without even a comma out of place. When the promised excursion did not come off, he relapsed into his usual indifference. For several years he remained a dreamy little boy, taking no interest in books or games and showing no sign of that intense physical energy which he afterwards developed.

  Then, when he was in his teens, he suddenly woke up. Mentally, he began to give evidence of having inherited the mathematical talent of his father and grandfather. Physically, he started to spend every spare moment in summer on his bicycle and in winter on skis. He passed his examinations with credit. He lost his dreamy abstracted air and reverted to the type of W�rttemberg, “the home of common sense in Germany.” He became hard-headed and practical - and very careful of his money, another W�rttemberger characteris- tic. With his great friend Keitel (no relation of the Field-Marshal who subsequently became one of his bitterest enemies), he applied himself to the study of aircraft. Together the two boys built model aeroplanes and then a full-scale glider in which they made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to leave the ground. They began to think about their future careers. Keitel had already made up his mind to become an engineer and find employment at the Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen. He did so and Rommel would probably have gone with him had his father agreed.

  His father opposed the idea and it was then that Rommel decided to join the army. The family had no military tradition, except that Rommel senior had served for a time as a lieutenant in the artillery, before retiring to become a schoolmaster. Nor had the Rommels any influential friends in military circles: they were a respectable Swabian family of mod- erate means, far removed in education and environment from the Prussian officer class. Rommel was afterwards to have serving under him in Africa generals of aristocratic family, large fortune and military connections which destined them to life in a good regiment from birth and, given ordinary ability, almost assured them of accelerated promotion. Such career as he might have in the army would have to be carved out by himself and there seemed no reason to suppose that he would end up as more than an elderly major, living in retirement on a modest pension in some small town like Heidenheim itself.

  On July 19th, 1910, he joined the 124th Infantry Regiment (Koenig Wilhelm I, 6th W�rttemberg), at Weingarten as an “aspirant” or, approximately, officer cadet, which meant that he had first to serve in the ranks before going to aKriegsschule or War Academy. He was promoted corporal in October and sergeant at the end of December. In March, 1911, he was posted to theKriegsschule at Danzig.

  Rommel's time at Danzig was important to him in more ways than one. It was there that he met, thrbugh a friend in the War Academy who had a cousin in the same boarding school, the girl whom he was afterwards to marry and who was the only woman in his life. Lucie Maria Mollin was the daughter of a landowner in West Prussia where the family, Italian in origin, had been settled since the thirteenth century. Her father died when she was a child and she was now in Danzig, studying to be a teacher of languages. Rommel fell in love with her at once and she with him and although they did not become formally engaged for another four years there was never any doubt in either of their minds. According to his widow, Rommel at this time was already a serious-minded young man, intensely preoccupied with doing well in his profession. Examinations still did not come as easily to him as the practical side of soldiering and he had to work hard at his books. However, Danzig was a pleasant city in which to be young and in love and, as they both enjoyed outdoor life and dancing, they spent a happy summer whenever, chaperoned by the cousin, they could escape from school.

  Rommel duly passed his examinations, if not with great distinction at any rate with marks above the average, and, at the end of January, 1912, received his commission as a 2nd Lieutenant and returned to his regiment. He and Fr„ulein Mollin wrote to each other every day.

  In Weingarten, where the regimental barracks were in the massive old monastery, Rommel was turned on for two years to the training of recruits. He was good at drill and good with men and, like the young Montgomery when he first joined a battalion, was observed to be unusually interested in the minutiae of military organisation. Otherwise there was nothing to suggest that he was anything out of the ordinary. Physically he was still undersized, though wiry and strong; mentally he was in no way distinguished. Unlike Montgomery, he was not argumentative and preferred to listen rather than to talk, as he did throughout his life. Since he neither smoked nor drank and was already, in his own eyes, engaged, the after-dark amusements of a small garrison town did not appeal to him. The other subalterns found him quiet and too serious for his age but good-tempered and agreeable, always ready to exchange duties to allow the more social to get off, though not prepared to be put upon. One or two of them recognised that he had an independent mind, a strong will and a sense of humour and the N.C.O.s quickly discovered that he would not tolerate anything slipshod. He was thus cut out to be a good regimental officer and, in due course, a good hard-driving adjutant. As an adjutant he would, very properly, be unpopular with the inefficient but it was already clear that he cared less than most young men about popularity. On the whole he seemed a fairly typical Wurttemberger, shrewd, business-like, careful, with a hard streak in him.

  At the beginning of March, 1914, he was attached to a Field Artillery regiment in Ulm and remained with it, enjoying the riding and taking pride in the smart turnout of his battery, until, on the afternoon of July 31st, he returned to barracks to find horses being brought into the barrack-square and orders awaiting him to rejoin his own regiment at once. Next day his company was fitting field equipment. In the evening the colonel inspected the regiment in field-grey, made a stirring speech and, before dismissing them, announced the order for mobilisation. “A jubilant shout of German warrior youth echoes through the ancient grey walls of the monastery,” saysInfanterie Greifi An , Rommel's book on tactics, but this and other such comments sound less like Rommel than a gloss by a Nazi propagandist, preparing the 1937 edition for popular comsumption. Had the “warrior youth” been able to foresee the memorial panels to the tens of thousands of officers and men of the W�rttemberg regiments which still hang in Ulm Cathedral, they might have been less jubilant. Next day the 124th went off to war.

  In all armies there is a small minority of professional soldiers (and a few amateurs) who find in war the one occupation to which they are perfectly adapted. Year by year, in theIn Memoriam column ofThe Times , my eye catches the name of Brigadier-General “Boy” Bradford, V.C., D.S.O., M.C., killed in the Cambrai battle in 1917 at the age of 24, and I remember riding over, unduly conspicuous, I felt, on a white horse, to his brigade headquarters in front of Bourlon Wood and thinking, as I talked to him, that here was someone at last who knew his trade and was equal to any demands that war might make. I remember, too, A. N. S. Jackson, the Olympic runner, my contemporary at Oxford and in the regiment, whom I saw married in 1918 on Paris leave, wearing one ribbon only, the D.S.O. with three bars. There were others like them but not many.

  Of this small company of exceptional young men was Rommel, on the wrong side. From the moment that he first came under fire he stood out as a perfect fighting animal, cold, cunning, ruthless, untiring, quick of decision, incredibly brave. At 5 A.M. on the morning of August 22nd, 1914, he went into action against the French in the village of Bleid, near Longwy.

  He had been patrolling for twenty-four hours, was suffering from food poisoning and was so tired that he could hardly sit in the saddle when he was sent forward to reconnoitre, in thick fog. Having located the village
he brought up his platoon. When they were fired upon, he halted them and went on with an N.C.O. and two men. Out of the fog loomed up a high hedge, surrounding a farmhouse. A footpath led past it to another farm. Rommel followed it. As he came round the corner, he saw fifteen or twenty of the enemy standing about in the road. Should he go back and bring up the platoon?

  That first decision in war is not an easy one to make. Much of a man's future conduct hangs on it. Rommel did what he was to do again and again. Counting on the value of surprise, he collected his three men and attacked, firing from the standing position. The enemy broke and the survivors took cover and opened fire. Rommel found his platoon moving up. Half he armed with bundles of straw, the other half he posted to give covering fire. Then he advanced again. Doors were beaten in and lighted bundles of straw thrown into the houses and barns. House by house the village was cleared. It was a minor action and of no importance except that it was his first and a pattern of the boldness and independence which he showed throughout his service.

  Despite his illness and the colossal exertions of the moving warfare of that period, he carried on, sometimes fainting but never reporting sick, until on September 24th he was wounded in the thigh when attacking three Frenchmen in a wood near Varennes, alone and with an empty rifle. By this time his battalion commander had come to rely on him for any particularly tough job and he already had been recommended for the Iron Cross, Class II. Three months later, as soon as his wound was healed, he rejoined the battalion. He came up with it in the middle of January in the Argonne. On January 29th, 1915, he won his Iron Cross, Class I, by crawling with his platoon through a gap in a belt of wire nearly a hundred yards deep, into the main French position, capturing four blockhouses, beating off an enemy attack in battalion strength, retaking one of the blockhouses from which he had been driven out and then withdrawing to his own lines with the loss of less than a dozen men, before a new attack could be launched.

  This, again, was only a minor action but it showed Rommel's readiness to exploit a situation to the limit, regardless of the risk involved. It led him time and again into positions of fantastic danger and yet enabled him to win every ounce of advantage, especially against an irresolute enemy.

  It was doubtless this willingness to take risks and capacity for individual action which led to his posting, after promotion toOberleutnant (1st Lieutenant) and a second wound in the leg, to a newly-formed mountain battalion,, theW�rttembergische Gebirgsbataillon (W.G.B.). This was a unit larger than the normal battalion, consisting of six rifle companies and six mountain machine-gun platoons. It never fought as a unit but rather as a formation, splitting up into two or more Battle Groups (Abteilungen) whose constitution varied according to the job in hand. Each battle group was given its task and fought under its own commander, who was allowed wide freedom of action and had merely to report back once a day to the battalion commander. When, after intensive training in mountain warfare in Austria and a peaceful period of nearly a year in a quiet sector in the Vosges, the battalion joined the famousAlpenkorps on the Rumanian front, Rommel was quickly entrusted with the command of one of these battle groups which varied in size for different actions from one company to the whole battalion. Meanwhile he had slipped off on leave to Danzig and there, on November 27th, 1916, married Lucie Maria Mollin. Her photograph, taken at this time, shows her to have been a handsome girl, markedly Italian in type, with beautiful modelled features. What it does not show, since the expression is serious, is that she had a great sense of fun, as she still has. Studiousness, courage and strength of character are obvious. She was a good wife for a soldier.

  Some of Rommel's subsequent feats in Rumania and Italy would be almost incredible had it not been possible to check them by the statements of others who witnessed and took part in them. In brief, his method was to infiltrate through the enemy lines with a few men, usually laying a telephone line as he went. In mountainous country, where the peaks and the valleys were likely to be held, he worked round the upper slopes, often as steep as the roof of a house and practicable only to skilled mountaineers. Whether in icy fog and deep snow or in the blazing heat of summer he would keep moving at speed by day or night. He had a remarkable eye for country and was proof against heat, cold, fatigue and lack of food and sleep. Once behind the enemy lines he never hesitated to attack, however small his force, for he rightly assumed that the sudden appearance of his men in the rear of their positions and the first devastating burst of machine-gun fire from the back areas would shake all but the best of troops, which the Rumanians and Italians were not. When he took the strongly-fortified Rumanian position of Mount Cosna in August, 1917, he led four companies in single file through the woods between two enemy posts, 150 yards apart, without being detected, and laid a telephone wire at the same time. By the time he reached the summit he had been virtually without sleep for nearly a week and had also been severely wounded in the arm several days before by a bullet fired from far in his rear.

  When he took the village of Gagesti in January of the same year, he lay out until ten o'clock at night within the Rumanian outpost line in a temperature ten degrees below freezing. Then, when he judged, correctly, that the Rumanians would be asleep in their billets, he opened up on the village with his machine-guns and half his rifles and led the rest of his troops, cheering, to the attack. As the enemy tumbled sleepily out of the houses he collected them and soon had four hundred of them locked up in the church. His own casualties were negligible.

  If he were compelled to make a frontal attack, his practice was to open intense machine-gun fire over the whole sector, with the heaviest concentration at the point where the attack was to be made. Then came an assault with strong forces on a very small front. The attacking troops carried machine-guns, which, as soon as a breach was made, were sited for enfilade fire to the flanks. The remainder of the assault force pressed on, regardless of what was happening in their rear. In other words, he adopted precisely the tactics of penetration in depth which were employed by the German panzer divisions in 1939.

  All this time, it was to be remembered, while Rommel was commanding anything up to a battalion, conducting independent operations against the enemy, having his advice sought and taken by senior officers on direction and methods of attack, he was a young man of twenty-five, looking even younger than his age, and in rank only anOberleutnant from a not particularly distinguished line regiment. This in the German army, where seniority counted for more than in our own, where young men were not normally encouraged to air their opinions and where the standard of training was high. That he established an almost unique reputation and was known throughout his division, even before he went to the mountain battalion, is on record. Yet he was not one of those queer personalities who crop up in wars and make an impression by being unusual. He merely had the qualities of courage, boldness, determination and initiative in so exceptional a degree - that they could not fail to attract attention. He was a Freyberg rather than an Orde Wingate.

  The climax of his career in World War I was reaehed with the capture of Monte Matajur, south-west of Caporetto, on October 26th, 1917. The Austrians had suffered a series of set-backs at the hands of the Italians and had appealed for German help. In spite of their commitments elsewhere, the German High Command sent the 14th Army, consisting of seven veteran divisions, to take part in an offensive against the Italian positions in the Isonzo valley. The W�rttemberg Mountain Battalion was again assigned to the Alpenkorps, which was due to attack in the centre, towards Matajur. On the first day the battalion had the task of protecting the right flank of a Bavarian regiment which was to lead the attack. Thereafter it was to follow on after the Bavarians.

  To summarise a long and complicated operation, Rommel was not interested in following the Bavarians and persuaded his battalion commander, one Major Spr”sser, to allow him to move off to the right of them and attack the Italian positions independently. While the Bavarians were held up, he led two companies before dawn across the Italian front
without being detected, and an advance party succeeded in penetrating the Italian front line at first light and capturing an Italian battery position with the bayonet, without a shot being fired at them. Rommel left one company to hold and widen the gap and pushed on with another into the Italian hinterland. He had to return to the help of his first company, which was attacked by an entire Italian battalion. When he took the Italians in the rear they quickly surrendered. He sent back a message to his battalion commander and with it more than a thousand Italian prisoners. On this Major Spr”sser came up with four more companies. With six companies under command, Rommel was permitted to proceed with his break-through into the back areas. Finding a road masked from view, he led his whole force along it in single file for nearly two miles while the Italians were still preoccupied with the main battle and bombardment in progress on their front. In open country behind the enemy lines, he sat on the main road leading towards Monte Matajur and captured a ration column, a staff car, 50 officers and 2,000 men of the 4th Bersaglieri Brigade which was moving up.

  Taking the staff car, he did a preliminary “recce” and decided to cut straight across country to Monte Matajur, the key to the enemy position. Throughout the rest of that day and the whole of the night he drove on his now exhausted troops. At dawn he came upon a camp of the Salerno Brigade. With two other officers and a few riflemen he walked straight into a mass of armed men and ordered them to surrender. After a moment's hesitation, 43 officers and 1500 men laid down their arms, mainly, it would appear, from sheer surprise and the power of the human eye.

  When Rommel eventually scaled Monte Matajur from the rear and fired his success rockets from the summit, he bad been continuously on the move for fifty hours, had covered twelve miles as the crow flies m mountainous country, had climbed up to 7,000 feet and with never more than six companics under command, had captured 150 officers, 9000 men and 81 guns. He himself found the lack of fighting spirit in the Italians quite incomprehensible. In the 1937 edition ofInfanterie Greift An he is made to say that “to-day the Italian Army is one of the best in the world” but here again one suspects a little sub-editing by the army propaganda department.