Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  For Rommel, this unexpected turn of events created a moral dilemma fraught with profound personal and professional consequences. However attractive Walburga might be, and whatever she and young Rommel felt for one another, the stigma of her working-class origins made her socially unacceptable as a potential wife for an ambitious young officer. The offizierkorps had long abandoned any pretense to being composed solely of men of noble birth: by the time Rommel received his commission, the vast majority of German officers were, in fact, of thoroughly middle-class stock. That did not mean snobbery and elitism had been banished from the ranks of the offiziere; on the contrary, such sentiments were, perhaps predictably, even more rampant than they might have been in a wholly aristocratic body. Presuming that working-class men were incapable of conducting themselves with discretion and integrity, the self-appointed middle-class guardians of the offizierkorps’ honor roundly refused to accept such men—or their wives. Working-class origins for either spouse were grounds for ostracism and a sure path to unpopular assignments and glacial advancement—the antithesis of what a young man of the character and temperament of Erwin Rommel wanted from an officer’s life. Marriage to Walburga Stemmer would mean that Erwin Rommel could bid farewell to his military career just as it was beginning.

  At the same time, Rommel could not simply turn his back on Walburga and their daughter: perversely, the same unwritten code of honor that deemed Fraulein Stemmer as unworthy to be an officer’s lady demanded that Rommel acknowledge his responsibility toward her and little Gertrude. Rommel, who would never, in written or spoken word, publicly comment on the affair or its consequences, had little choice but to acquiesce. In the summer of 1913, he returned to Danzig, there to face the music with Lucie Molin. Somehow he explained the entire situation to Lucie in such a way that her response, if she didn’t exactly forgive him, made it clear she understood what had happened. It could well be that Lucie found herself respecting the earnest young officer who was brave enough to face a scorned woman’s wrath; certainly Rommel’s impulsive nature wasn’t unknown to her (and if this situation was not the product of impulsive behavior, it would be difficult to describe one which was!), so some allowance for that might have been made as well.

  And a certain degree of calculation on Lucie’s part cannot be dismissed as impossible. Until the twentieth century was well-nigh to being on its way out, German women were expected to embrace as the compass of their lives the role of the keeper of the three Ks: Kinder, Küche, Kirche—children, kitchen, and church. Dancing may have won her prizes in her teen years, but, as the remainder of her life would demonstrate, Lucie Molin was too much the traditional German woman to ever imagine it as more than a youthful diversion. In Erwin Rommel she had found “her” man, and she was, clearly, determined to keep him. Precisely how it was all explained and settled between remains unknown, all those who had intimate, first-hand knowledge of them having long since taken those secrets to the grave. In any event, Walburga would be regarded as an informal member of Rommel’s family until her death in 1928, while Gertrude would live with her father until his death in 1944.

  With something approximating a settlement between Erwin, Lucie, and Walburga being reached in the summer of 1913—and the “understanding” between Lucie and Erwin, an informal betrothal of sorts, now firmly in place—Rommel was next posted to Ulm, very close to home, where he would spent the next year teaching and training new drafts of soldiers and officer cadets called up to the colors by Germany’s wide-ranging conscription laws. It was a task Rommel enjoyed immensely (he would affirm later in life that nothing gave him as much satisfaction as he instructed young men on how to be soldiers), and he was given the responsibility of training not only new recruits, but also of supervising the refresher courses given to returning reserve officers. What made it all so pleasant, at least for the instructors, was the knowledge that, while the training was being done in deadly earnest, the deterring power and might of the Imperial German Army was such that the possibility of these thousands of young men ever hearing so much as a single shot fired in anger was almost hopelessly remote. None of them could have imagined, in that golden summer of 1914, that in the span of five short weeks, their entire world would start to unravel, or that just over four years later, it would vanish forever.

  It began on June 28, in a street in Sarajevo, Bosnia, when a young man named Gavrillo Princzip shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, along with the archduke’s wife, Sophie. The assassination served as the trigger that released tensions that had been building in Europe for nearly a century, and what should have been a private quarrel between Vienna and Belgrade quickly spiraled out of control into a continent-wide conflagration. A little more than a month after the shootings, a tragedy of errors saw Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and France go to war as a complex and tangled skein of alliances and diplomatic maneuvers quickly and irretrievably unraveled, for, as Winston Churchill’s apocalyptic allusion put it, “The vials of wrath were full.”5

  As unimaginable as Europe’s rush toward self-destruction may seem, what is still all but impossible to truly comprehend more than eighty years later is how enthusiastically the peoples of Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia rushed to war, the ecstatic crowds thronging the Unter den Linden, the Champs-Élysées, the Ringstrasse, or Red Square cheering as their respective governments declared war, or how readily the young men were prepared to march off to the sound of the guns, to the strains of Deutschland uber Alles, le Marseillaise or Bozhe, Tsarya khrani. What should have been an isolated quarrel between Austria-Hungary and Serbia instead became the means to an end for settling old scores, asserting new hegemony or confirming existing preeminence.

  But as all of these interlocking dramas and ambitions were unfolding in the weeks after the assassinations in Sarajevo, Great Britain stood apart from it all. There was no reason for the British to become involved in what essentially was a quarrel in Eastern Europe that posed no threat to Great Britain or her national interests. That was to change, abruptly and irrevocably, however, on August 3, when German troops invaded Belgium, surging forward in a huge mass of feldgrau (field-gray) toward the fortress city of Liège. A five-power treaty formalized in 1839 had guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality—Prussia and Britain had been two of the signatory nations; now a formal protest was sent to Germany over this violation of Belgian neutrality, and an ultimatum issued to Berlin, announcing that if German troops had not begun their withdrawal from Belgium by noon on August 4, a state of war would exist between Great Britain and Imperial Germany. The German chancellor, von Bethmann-Hollweg, however, assured everyone that Britain would never go to war over a 75-year-old treaty that was hardly more than “a scrap of paper.”

  The Germans didn’t even bother to respond. Instead they kept pouring more and more troops into Belgium, along with mammoth cannon, specially designed years before by Krupp and Skoda, to reduce the Belgian forts that ringed Liège and blocked their advance. For the Germans were bound by that strategic dogma that has become enshrined in the lexicon of popular history as the Schlieffen Plan: the rigid and inflexible deployment of Germany’s armies, designed to crush France in six weeks, before the mobilization of Russia’s huge army could be completed, allowing the whole of German might then to be massed in the east to face the expected Russian onslaught, eliminating Germany’s worst nightmare—fighting a two-front war.

  The provisions of the plan necessitated the violation of Belgian neutrality to guarantee the success of the German army, allowing three-fourths of the German forces—a million and a quarter men—to swing behind the French armies positioned along the Franco-German border and descend on them from the north, rolling up the French lines like a bloody carpet. Twelve noon passed on August 4 without word of any intention of a German withdrawal, and so the orders went out to dispatch the British Expeditionary Force, the B.E.F., to Belgium, there to take up positions on the left of the French Seventh Army, and prepare to meet the Germ
an juggernaut.

  The catastrophe that had overtaken Europe was now complete. It was given a name and it would be called the Great War.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE GREAT WAR

  The war was a mirror; it reflected man’s every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.

  —GEORGE GROSZ

  The world had never seen anything like the clash of armies meeting each other in the West and in the East.

  To the German General Staff, the B.E.F. was so small as to be almost not worth consideration, but, German derision notwithstanding, those six divisions were, man for man, the finest troops Europe had ever seen or would ever see again. When they finally met the oncoming waves of Feldgrau on August 22, they handed the advancing Germans setback after bloody setback for the next month, retreating only when their exposed flanks were threatened, their numbers slowly but irrevocably dwindling, as the supporting French armies, bleeding and demoralized, reeled from the shock, surprise, and sheer weight of the German assault.

  While the French armies desperately sidestepped to the west in the hope of forming a line which would finally stop and then throw back the German invaders, the courage and tenacity of the B.E.F. inflicted fatal delays and diversions on the German’s unforgiving schedule for advance. Despite the dire predictions of Schlieffen himself, the plan appeared to be about to hand Germany the crushing victory she was seeking, for the French had been overextended to the east in their thrust into Lorraine. Had the B.E.F. not taken up its position on the extreme French left, the Germans would have swept in behind the French Army, encircling it, exactly as von Schlieffen had hoped it might.

  But when the German Army was within sight of Paris, hastily assembled French forces—not letting the time bought so dearly by the B.E.F. go to waste—launched a devastating counterattack into the German right flank, while the Tommies turned about and lunged at their Feldgrau-clad pursuers. These blows threw the now more-than-weary Germans back some 40 miles, with the exhausted armies all finally coming to a halt on September 22.

  By the end of the year, after a series of sidesteps called the “Race to the Sea” had ended, two thin, snake-like lines of opposing trenches, growing more and more elaborate with each passing week, had been dug from the Swiss border to the Channel, depriving each side of the opportunity to maneuver, as the armies began looking for a way to break the enemy’s lines. Strategically, the Allies were faced with the task of forcibly ejecting the Germans from occupied Belgium and France. Tactically, it was a bloody and almost hopeless undertaking, as time and again the French and British armies surged forward against the waiting German defenses—and each time found some hellish new innovation that cut them down by the thousands.

  Mud, blood, gore, long days or weeks of boredom punctuated by hours of absolute terror, were the frame for the sights, sounds, and smells of men living a nightmare where they and their comrades were shot, torn, gassed, pulverized, immolated and obliterated in ways that human beings had never before suffered and endured. In the First Battle of Ypres, in October 1914, where wave after wave of German infantry, many of them university students advancing arm-in-arm singing patriotic songs, were cut down by deadly accurate British rifle fire, one German division lost over 9,300 men dead out of strength of 12,000—in a single morning. Later, when the Allies were on the offensive, time and again the Tommies and poilus would clamber over the top of their trenches after artillery bombardments that had lasted for hours, sometimes days, or even weeks, attacked across the shell-torn mudscape that stretched between the opposing lines of trenches known as no man’s land. The Germans, having weathered the barrage in the relative safety of their deep dugouts, would emerge to assume their prepared positions and bring down a withering hail of rifle, machine-gun, and artillery fire on the advancing troops. The results were inevitable: more often than not, there would not be enough soldiers left alive among the attackers to take the objective and hold it, or if the Allied troops did reach their goal, the cost was prohibitive—at the Somme, one attack that advanced barely 700 yards took three weeks at a cost of nearly 30,000 lives. Even on days when the public communiqués would read “All quiet on the Western Front” (the German read “In dem West ist nicht neuen”), nearly 5,000 men were becoming casualties, victims of sniper fire and random shelling. It was as if a small town was being methodically wiped off the face of the earth each day. The British, who in some ways were becoming even more methodical than the Germans, referred to such losses as “normal wastage.”

  July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme Offensive, would forever be remembered as the Black Day of the British Army. At 6:00 A.M. 120,000 Tommies went “over the top” to attack the Hindenburg Line. By nightfall, barely more than 12 hours later, half of them had become casualties, 20,000 of them dead. The Somme attack had been launched in order to take pressure off the French Army, which was locked in a death struggle with the German Army around the fortress city of Verdun. In the 10 months of that battle, each army would lose more than 350,000 dead in an area little more than 10 miles square.

  The Somme did not end on the first day; the battle continued with a fury that ebbed and flowed until November, eventually gaining a 7-mile advance, at a cost of 420,000 British soldiers killed, wounded, or missing; the Germans losses totaled nearly a quarter million men. But while the British Army’s hopes for a breakthrough had perished in mud and barbwire, the strategic horizons for the German Army seemed bright with promise. While no one was winning the war on the Western Front, by all appearances Germany and her allies were winning it everywhere else.

  The Central Powers (as Germany and Austria-Hungary now styled themselves) began their string of strategic victories in the autumn of 1915, when Bulgaria joined the alliance and helped the Austrian armies overrun Serbia. Even before the Serbs collapsed, an attempt by the Allies to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war by a coup de main had failed at the Dardanelles: over the next two years the Turks would fight the British Empire to a strategic draw. The Kingdom of Romania, sensing an opportunity to aggrandize itself at the expense of Austria-Hungary, declared war on the Central Powers in August of 1916; by December the Romanians were suing for peace.

  Italy, who had not earned and did not deserve the Great Power status she accorded herself, had ignored her alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the crisis of the summer of 1914. The theme of the Italian prime minister, Antonio Salandra, during those crucial weeks was endless repetitions of “Compensation! Compensation!” letting it be known that Italy was available to the highest bidder; there had been no takers. However, by the spring of 1915 the Italian government perceived an opportunity to exploit the Dual Monarchy’s preoccupation with the Serbs to the south and the Russians to the north, and declared war, hoping to annex Trentino and the Tyrol, and seize the Adriatic port of Trieste. Instead her attacks were stopped cold by the Austro-Hungarian forces, and a bitter stalemate had imposed itself along the Isonzo River, where the Italians attacked and the Austrians repulsed them with bloody regularity.

  To be sure, there were moments of alarm for the Central Powers. When a German U-boat sank the British passenger liner Lusitania in May 1915, the ensuing diplomatic confrontation with Washington DC left Berlin with the realization that sooner or later the United States would be added to the list of Germany’s foes. And the Brusilov Offensive, launched by the Russian Army in the summer of 1916, was perhaps the most skillfully executed operation of the war, and came perilously close to routing the Austro-Hungarian Army. Only swift German reinforcement stiffened the sagging morale of Franz Josef’s troops, and the Dual Monarchy fought on.

  The Allies took the offensive again in 1917, and it would prove to be an annus horribilis. The overture came in April, along a sector of the Western Front known as the Chemin des Dames, where the French, who believed that they had discovered a tactical “formula” which would break the stalemate, opened their great attack. The abortive “Niv
elle Offensive,” named after the French commanding officer who conceived and executed the plan, lasted three weeks, cost 187,000 casualties, and gained less than a mile. Thus the burden fell once more on Great Britain. A carefully developed plan, strategically sound but betrayed by weather, geology, and—worst of all—politicians, resulted in the British Army’s collective Golgotha. Officially known as the Third Battle of Ypres, it would be forever immortalized as Passchendaele, after a village which stood squarely in the center of the British line of advance. Five months of fighting gave a gain of 5 miles and a casualty list 315,000 names long. It had been the Tommies’ supreme effort: they had no more to give. If France was morally and spiritually exhausted, Britain had become physically so: there were, quite literally, no more fit men to replenish the ranks of His Majesty’s regiments. Scraping the bottom of the barrel accomplished nothing, for there was nothing there: it is a matter of record that draft notices were sent to men who were maimed, or mentally ill, or even, in a few instances, already dead.

  On the other side of the trenches, the human cost for Germany in each of these battles was equally horrible as that of the Allies. Ultimately, German losses at Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele exceeded those of France and Great Britain; and for Germany, with a much smaller population relative to the Allies, replacements were harder to muster. Nor were the losses merely numerical: by the end of 1916 whatever qualitative superiority over the Allies’ soldiers the German soldaten once possessed had dissipated, and only the German Army’s technical superiority kept it ascendant. By the end of 1917, even that was being eroded.

  And there was another force, its results less readily visible or immediately obvious, insidiously eroding German and Austrian strength. Neither nation was self-sufficient in food production, and before the war close to a third of Germany’s foodstuffs had been imported from overseas. Now the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany cut off altogether those sources of supply, and by the summer of 1916 shortages became increasingly frequent, while as 1916 turned into 1917, starvation began to loom over the civilian populations of the Central Powers. One way or another, 1918 would be the decisive year of the war.