Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

by Unknown

  At any rate, though Rommel could hardly have tried such tricks with success against Lord Cavan's British divisions, it was a remarkably bold operation. For it he was awarded the Pour le Merite, a decoration usually reserved for senior generals and, when awarded to junior officers, corresponding to the Victoria Cross. He was also promotedHauptmann or Captain. Shortly afterwards, having swum the icy waters of the Piave at night with six men roped together, he attacked, seven strong, the village of Longarone and captured it, with the whole of its considerable garrison, by firing upon it from different points in the darkness and, at dawn walking in alone, informing the Italians that they were surrounded and ordering them to surrender. He was then sent on leave and, to his disgust given a staff appointment This he held until the end of the war.

  Leadership in war is not, perhaps, amongst the highest forms of human activity. Yet, whereas a champion of the prize-ring, even a world champion need be no more than an exceptionally aggressive animal with adequate physique and superlative technical skill, a man to whom other men will un hesitatingly confide their lives in battle must have more to him than that. Thus, soon after I started out on the trail of Rommel, I naturally began to ask myself and others what sort of a person he was, apart from his exploits in action.

  From the beginning I ran up against a fundamental difference between the German attitude towards war and our own. For this I was not altogether unprepared. Soon after the first war, I happened to read in translation a book calledStorm of Steel by one Ernst J�nger and an incident in it had always stuck in my memory, partly because the scene of it was familiar to me. Just after the battle of Cambrai and the successful German counter-attack which followed it, the battalion to which Ernst J�nger belonged was holding the line near Moeuvres, in the neighbourhood of the Hermes Canal. It was a fine, sunny, Sunday afternoon and the officers of his company, having lunched well, were smoking their cigars and drinking their brandy in a dug-out in the front line. “Why not let's go over and raid the English?” someone suggested. It was not a suggestion which one can imagine being made in a British company mess in those days. We were ready enough, if not anxious, to take part in a full-dress attack or an organised raid if we were ordered to do so. A good battalion prided itself on aggressive patroffing and on being in command of No Man's Land at night. But, apart from that, most people were disposed to live and let live and to appreciate a quiet afternoon, with only the odd shell droning over to burst in the back areas, as a Heaven-sent opportunity to read a book or write a letter. Had any one proposed an impromptu raid, “officers only,” in such circumstances, he would have been suspected of punishing the brandy too freely and advised to lie down.

  In this case the raid was carried out across the fifty or sixty yards which separated the two front lines. Because there was no warning in the way of artillery preparation and because the early afternoon was not the recognized time for raids, it was successful and the company officers returned ten minutes later in triumph, bringing with them two or three prisoners and leaving behind them two or three dead.

  The sequel is even more surprising. When the battalion was next out of the line, the officers who took part in the raid presented to the company commander, who had led it, a large silver cup, inscribed “To the victor of Moeuvres.”

  The German professional soldier has always taken war with a seriousness with which-only sport is treated by the British. It is just possible to imagine, though with difficulty, the rest of the side presenting a silver cup to someone who has won the University Rugby match in the last minute by a run from his own 25-yard line. But the cup for “the victor of Moeuvres,” solemnly produced with appropriate speeches and filled for a toast to the hero himself - if any one can see that ceremony occurring in a British battalion he must have soldiered in strange company.

  This story kept running through my head while I talked in Heidenheim to Hauptmann Hartmann, the first person I met who had served with Rommel in World War I. The Hartmann factory, which makes bandages by the million, had the rather bleak air of extreme impersonal efficiency and almost sterilised cleanliness that only German and Swiss factories seem to attain. Captain Hartmann's office was the typical office of theHerr Direktor , gloomy, with its dark panelling, its heavy fur- niture and its large photographs of former Hartmanns round the walls, not a room in which a file would dare to go adrift or a paper escape from its appropriate tray. Captain Hartmann was, however, by no means so sombre as his surroundings. A dark, good-looking, slightly-built German, he seemed much too young to be Rommel's contemporary (and mine). As he got up from his desk and came across the room to greet me, I saw that he had lost one leg at the hip. Was that in the first war? No, in this, in a glider accident, when he was attached to theLuftwaffe. Gliding had been and still was his passion; the first day he came out of hospital after losing his leg he had gone up again. When he spoke of gliding, his face lit up. He was an attractive and sympathetic person with an easy manner.

  Then we got on to Rommel. Yes, they had been great friends ever since the first war and until Rommel's death. They served together in the same battalion. He had been with him when he won his Pour le Merite. He described how Rommel swam the Piave on that December night with his six men and took Longarone. What a soldier! “Where Rommel is, the front is,” they used to say in the division. He was always attempting and bringing off things that no one else would have thought of trying. He seemed to haveFingerspitzengef�hl. a sort of sixth sense, an intuition in his fingers. (It was a word which I was to hear from every soldier I met who had known Rommel.) Hard, yes, though he never asked any one to do more than he would do himself, or as much, and he was always trying to minimise losses by tactics. He was a tactical genius. Perhaps officers did not like him as much as the men because he always expected more of them and there were very few who could go his pace. But he was “the best of comrades.”

  “Best of comrades” sounded more promising. After all, they had been young men together and battalions do not spend all their time in the line. Presumably even in Rumania they had their local Amiens to make for when they came out to rest, some equivalent to Godbert or the Cathedrale, where they could settle down in a corner to dine well and forget the war. Such evenings, when one had ridden in along thepave and booked a room and bathed, with bath-salts, and shopped and had a drink with other people from the division, are part of everybody's first war memories, the memories that make one reflect: “Oh, it wasn't too bad after all.” (Was it not in the Cathedrale that “Kid” Kennedy, my Brigadier, eyeing the attractive young person who served us, paid her a compliment in terms which I had never heard before, have never heard since and have never forgotten? “By God, Desmond, isn't that lovely?” he said. “You could eat a poached egg off her stomach.”)

  But when I tried tactfully to switch the conversation from the front line to relaxation and rest and to get some idea of Rommel as a human being as well as a soldier, I came up against a blank wall. Interests? No, Captain Hartmann did not think he had any other interests. When he was not putting his genius for minor tactics into practice, he was working out new plans for embarrassing the enemy. Certainly he never wanted to “beat it up” in the back areas, nor, apparently, to visit them. Was there any change in him, I asked, when he returned to the battalion in 1916 after being married? No, he was just the same, just as tough, just as regardless of danger, just as preoccupied with winning the war on his particular sector. “He was one hundred per cent soldier,” said Captain Hartmann, a slightly rapt expression coming over his handsome face, “he was body and soul in the war.”

  A few days later I tried again, with Hauptmann Aldinger, who had not only served in the same battalion with Hartmann and Rommel during the first war but was Rommel'sOrdonnanzoffizier , a combination of personal assistant, camp commandant, A.D.C. and private secretary, in France in 1940, in North Africa, and in Normandy in 1944, and was almost the last person to see him alive. Captain Aldinger is a precise little man who might very well be the chief accountan
t of some large business like Hartmann's bandage factory, in which case the auditors would have an easy job. But in private life be is a designer of gardens, with a considerable reputation in Stuttgart and an architect of obvious good taste. Perhaps he would see what I was trying to get at and give me a line on Rommel. Here again I made no progress.Fingerspitzengef�hl came up once more and all the military virtues. A hard man, too hard for many people, particularly officers. “But if Rommel was on your flank you knew you had nothing to worry about on one side at any rate.... In those days he believed that every order must be exactly carried out.... He had more trust in the Higher Command and in the Staff in the first war than he had in the second....” Other interests? Well, he liked a day's shooting or fishing when he could get it. Reading? Military works mostly. Music or the theatre? No. Food and wine? They meant nothing to him. Was he then entirely serious? Oh, no, he liked to joke with the troops and to talk in the Swabian dialect to people from his part of the country.

  It seemed that I was on the trail of that rare and rather colourless creature, the specialist with the single-track mind. The young Montgomery, as he appears in Alan Moorehead's biography, was the nearest parallel to this regular officer with no interests outside his profession. But at least Montgomery had been a notable athlete at St. Paul's, the best-known boy in the school. At Sandhurst he had so annoyed his instructors that he had been told that he was quite useless and would get nowhere in the Army. Rommel had not even that negative distinction.

  Life in any army is narrow and limited and nowhere more so than in the old German army, with its class-consciousness and rigid traditions. Thus the outsider, or the man coming into it temporarily from a different world, is inclined to think that the professional who, even in war-time, thinks of nothing but soldiering, must necessarily be narrow and limited also. When General Speidel, Rommel's extremely acute and intelligent Chief of Staff in Normandy, remarked to me that he did not suppose that Rommel had ever read a book in his life that had not to do with war, it was in this mood that I asked whether he was not, then,“un peu bete.” General Speidel stared at me in astonishment. “Stupid? Good God, no!” he said. “That's the last thing he was.”

  Eventually I sorted out Rommel to my own satisfaction and related him to my previous experience. But I propose to let the reader form his own impressions and leave mine until later.

  Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox

  CHAPTER 3

  Between Two Wars

  The taste of defeat is always bitter. But the collapse of Germany in 1918 surprised and shook the German professional soldier much more than the capitulation of May, 1945, which all but the fanatics of the S.S. had long seen to be inevitable. Ludendorff, indeed, knew that the great offensive of March was his final throw. But when the tide of success was checked and began to turn the other way in the summer, the old type of German regimental officer as yet had no thought of surrender. The German armies still stood on foreign soil; since the Russian advances in 1914 no enemy had yet set foot in Germany except as a prisoner. The line might have to be shortened, as after the battles of the Somme. The whole of Northern France and Belgium might have to be given up; a compromise peace might have to be made which would leave Germany no better off in the West than she was on August 4, 1914. But, outside the General Staff and the Army Commanders, few realised until the last fortnight that there was now no choice between capitulation and complete disaster. Even the Allies were preparing to face another winter of trench warfare and planning their ultimate offensive for the spring of 1919.

  In fact, the German armies were squarely beaten in the field and the blockade had broken the will-to-resist of the German people at home. Defeat might have been delayed; it could not have been averted.

  Nevertheless, since we all like to attribute our failures to anything except our own shortcomings, it was natural enough that the legend of the “stab in the back” should have been seized upon and swallowed by the returned soldiers. The Allies, with a strangely faulty appreciation of German psychology, helped to promote and perpetuate it by permitting them to march back armed across the Rhine bridges, their bands and colour-parties leading.

  They then proceeded to give the Germans a solid, permanent and perfectly legitimate grievance by completely ignoring the conditions under which the armistice had been arranged. These, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out at the time, were plain and unequivocal. The Allies had declared their willingness to make peace with Germany on the basis of President Wilson's Fourteen Points, as amplified in his addresses to Congress, and the object of the Peace Conference was to “discuss the details of their application.” In fact, they were never discussed and the peace was dictated without the Germans being heard. Moreover, of the Fourteen Points, Four principles and Five Particulars “only four,” says Mr. Harold Nicolson inPeacemaking , “can with any accuracy be said to have been incorporated in the treaties of peace.” The result was that, although the Treaty of Versailles was certainly not as severe as the sort of peace which the Germans themselves would have devised, no German felt himself bound by it. In particular, no German was prepared to accept the cession of a large slice of West Prussia to Poland, the loss of the city of Danzig and the subjection of some two million Germans permanently to Polish rule. It is against this background that the subsequent behavior of every German officer has to be regarded. The officer class considered that it had been tricked into surrender and it was of no use to argue that, had it continued to fight into 1919, it would have had to accept any terms, however outrageous, which the Allies might have decided to impose.

  In 1945 we saw the Germans pulverised and disintegrated like the rubble of their ruined cities, too apathetic for the moment, in their sullen misery, even to hate. In 1918 they still had the spirit to turn upon each other, since the day for turning upon their conquerors was as yet far distant. (That it would dawn, they had no doubt. “Clear out of here and we will hunt the French home with sticks,” said a German industrialist to me in D�sseldorf in 1919 - and that was four years before the French occupation of the Ruhr.) At the time we were too busy licking our wounds, celebrating our victory, spending our war gratuities and enjoying the beginnings of the short-lived post-war boom to know or care much about what was happening in Germany. Yet the sight of returning officers being seized in the streets or dragged from trains, stripped of their rank badges and, often, butchered was one of the spectacles which impressed the Germans and did much to assure Hitler a welcome in due course. It did much to explain the rise of the Free Corps, its brutalities and the emergence of the Goering, Roehm, Sepp Dietrich type. It also explained why the Socialist Minister of Defence, the ex-basket-maker, Herr Noske, who was also an ex-N.C.O., turned to the officer class as the only Germans now capable of respecting and restoring the “order” which the German is always trying to impose upon his own people as well as upon others.

  There was, however, another side to all this. Through, the clouds of economic chaos and confusion of spirit arismg from defeat, occupation and civil war, it is hard for any one who was not in Germany at the time to picture German middle-class families living their normal lives, the husbands going down to their bleakly efficient factories and offices, the wives superintending the unceasing scrubbing and polishing, hunting their unfortunate maidservants and preoccupied mainly with the price of food and the difficulties of procuring it. It is harder still to think of a German regular officer relapsing at once into peace-time soldiering, as though he had merely been away on some abnormally lengthy manoeuvres.

  Yet that, or almost that, is what happened to Captain Erwin Rommel. On December 2 1st, 1918, he was re-posted to his original regiment, the 124th Infantry at Weingarten, which he had joined in 1910 when he joined the army. On the whole he saw very little of the “troubles.” He had to travel through revolutionary Germany in the same month to retrieve his wife from Danzig, where she was seriously ill in her grandmother's house. He was questioned, mildly insulted, since he travelled in uniform, and once
nearly arrested, but he brought her safely back to his mother's lodging in Weingarten. (The two women were always the best of friends.) In the summer of 1919 he went for a time to command an internal security company in Friedrichshafen, where he had his first experience of handling Germans who were not prepared to obey orders.

  He was given a draft of “red” Naval ratings to lick into shape as soldiers. They were a little wild at first, booed Rommel because he wore his Pour le M,rite, demanded to be allowed to appoint a commissar, refused to do the goose-step and held a revolutionary meeting. Rommel attended it, stood on a desk and announced that he proposed to command soldiers, not criminals. Next day he marched them behind a band to the parade-ground. When they refused to drill, he got on his horse and left them. They followed him back to barracks meekly enough and in a few days were so tame that Inspector Hahn, the head of the police at Stuttgart, asked Rommel to select some of them for enlistment in the police, for which they would be paid a special bonus on joining. He also invited Rommel to join with them, which perhaps explains the legend that he was once a policeman. Rommel said that he was going back to his regiment. Most of the men were ready to sacrifice their bonus and go with him. Except when they had to provide a guard over a black-marketSchnaps factory, perhaps an unfair test of their new-found discipline, he had no further trouble with them. Later he took his company to the Ruhr for internal security duties but had no very exciting experiences there. By January 1st, 1921, after a tour of duty. at Schwabisch-Gemund, he was in Stuttgart, commanding a company in the 13th Infantry Regiment, the 124th having disappeared in the reduction - or renumbering - of the German Army. There he was to remain as a captain for nearly nine years.