Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel
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Rommel found himself leading his company in one such attack on January 29, on a stretch of front in the Argonne Forest just east of Verdun. Using the sparse undergrowth to conceal his men as best he could, Rommel deployed them in open order and the company began crawling toward a French line of entrenchments sited on the opposite side of a small, shallow valley, hoping to reach a small hollow which would offer a “dead zone” immune from enemy small-arms fire. Before his men were halfway there, the French opened up with rifles and machine guns, and though they could hide in the near-barren bushes, Rommel’s men had no cover. Seeing no alternative but to rush the French, he ordered his bugler to sound the charge: 9th Company leaped up, cheering, and dashed forward toward the French, who promptly decamped from their position. In short order 9th Company had advanced close to a thousand yards from their own entrenchments, and a reserve company moved up to help consolidate the position. Rommel now led his company westward, to the edge of the forest, where he and his men encountered a barbwire entanglement denser and more extensive than any of them had ever before seen.
Ahead, beyond the wire, lay a small hill which if occupied would offer a commanding position of the open ground to the south. There was heavy enemy small-arms fire to the left and right, but 9th Company was presently sheltered from it in yet another hollow. The only way forward was through the wire barricade and into open, exposed ground. Rommel didn’t hesitate:
I ordered the company to follow me in single file, but the commander of my leading platoon lost his nerve and did nothing, and the rest of the company imitated him and lay down behind the wire. Shouting and waving at them proved useless. I found another passage through the obstacle and crept back to the company where I informed my first platoon leader that he could either obey my orders or be shot on the spot. He elected the former, and in spite of intense small-arms fire from the left we all crept through the obstacle and reached the hostile position.11
A message was sent to battalion headquarters—“9th Company has occupied some strong French earthworks located one mile south of our line of departure. We hold a section running through the forest. Request immediate support and a resupply in machine-gun ammunition and hand grenades.”—but the new position proved untenable: the earthworks ran parallel to any line of attack from the east, and the ground was so frozen that Rommel and his men were unable to dig defensive positions of their own. When a strong French counterattack materialized from that direction, Rommel began looking for a more defensible position. Two hundred yards to his right a quartet of French blockhouses sat unoccupied, and he immediately ordered his men to move to them. For almost two hours Rommel and his fifty-odd men held out against increasingly fierce French attacks, but ammunition began to run low and the perimeter around the blockhouses was shrinking, with the possibility that 9th Company would be cut off increasing with every passing minute. Finally word from headquarters arrived: “Battalion is in position half a mile to the north and is digging in. Rommel’s company to withdraw, support not possible.” What would happen next was up to Rommel.
Now for a decision! Should we break off the engagement and run back through the narrow passage in the wire entanglement under a heavy cross fire? Such a maneuver would, at a minimum, cost fifty percent in casualties. The alternative was to fire the rest of our ammunition and then surrender. The last resort was out. I had one other line of action: namely, to attack the enemy, disorganize him, and then withdraw. Therein lay our only possible salvation.12
Amazingly, the brash tactic worked, and the startled French attackers were thrown back in confusion long enough to allow Rommel to extricate his men through the barbwire entanglement and back to the German lines, losing only five men along the way. For this action, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, and was the first leutnant in the 124th Regiment to be so honored. II Battalion’s 9th Company was now known as “Rommel’s Company,” a singular, if informal, honor, as it was rare in the Imperial German Army for a unit to be identified, even casually, by its commander’s name. For his part, Rommel found company command exhilarating:
For a 23-year-old officer there was no finer job than that of company commander. Winning the men’s confidence requires much of a commander. He must exercise care and caution, look after his men, live under the same hardships, and—above all—apply self-discipline. But once he has their confidence, his men will follow him through hell and high water.13
Rommel spent the next six months in the Argonne, most of the time occupied with the same sort of low-level bickering with the French. In mid-May command of the 9th Company was taken away from him and given to a lieutenant with more seniority who had yet to lead a company in battle, the same sort of supersession still familiar to modern combat commanders when a chair-warmer is in need of having his “ticket punched.” Rommel, having no desire to leave his men, remained as the company’s second-in-command. A second German attack on the position Rommel had captured and briefly held in January went in on June 29, and in that action Rommel suffered his second wound when he was struck on the shin by a piece of shrapnel; this time around the injury was sufficiently minor that hospitalization wasn’t necessary. For the time being he remained with 9th Company, though he would be given temporary command of 2nd then later 4th Company when their commanding officers were ill or absent on leave.
In any event, his remaining time with the 124th Infantry was short, as promotion to oberleutnant at the beginning of September was followed a month later by a posting to the newly formed Württembergische Gebirgs-bataillon (Württemberg Mountain Battalion). The French Chasseurs Alpins, highly trained light infantry skilled in mountain fighting, had offered up some serious headaches for the German Army in the opening battles in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace and Lorraine in August and September 1914. The German response was the formation of dedicated mountain units of their own, something the German Army had never previously possessed. The first move in that direction was made by the Bavarian Army, which created Schneeschuhbataillon I & II (the 1st and 2nd Snowshoe Battalions) on November 21, 1914, with a third formed in April 1915, followed by a fourth in May. That same month all four were brought together into a single regiment, while two more such regiments were created out of independent Prussian and Bavarian Jäger battalions. Originally organized during the Napoleonic Wars to serve as scouts and provide screens of skirmishers for the regular infantry regiments, by the time the Great War began, they had lost most of their distinctive tactical functions, though their uniforms and higher standards of discipline continued to distinguish them from ordinary infantry battalions. Now, the Jäger were to once again become specialized units and soldiers.
The Württembergische Gebirgsbataillon was the Army of Württemberg’s contribution to the projekt. Soldiers from almost every one of the kingdom’s regiments were transferred to the new unit, those who before the war were avid skiers or had experience climbing mountains being the first selected. In addition to such skills, officers considered for posting to the Mountain Battalion had to be proven leaders in combat. Rommel was, of course, a natural for selection, and given command of 2nd Company. He initially regarded his new commanding officer, tough, ambitious Major Theodor Sprösser, as something of a martinet, an opinion that would gradually change once the major led the battalion in combat. Training was rigorous but not harsh, and when, at the beginning of December 1915, the battalion moved to western Austria for ski training, it became something of a holiday for men like Rommel who had been skiers since childhood or adolescence.
The Mountain Battalion spent almost a month billeted at the St. Christoph’s Hospice near the Aarlberg Pass, but just before New Year’s Day, officers and men boarded troop trains which took them, not south to the Tyrol and the Italian front as they had hoped, but west to the Vosges Mountains. There they took up a position on the South Hilsen Ridge, 25 miles north of the Swiss border. In stark contrast to the Argonne or Flanders, where units were packed together like sardines in a tin, the front was sparsely held: the Mountain B
attalion was assigned to hold a 5-mile-long line of strongpoints, a frontage that along the Somme, for example, would have been covered by at least two divisions. The terrain so grossly favored the defense while complicating supply problems that not even the French, still hopelessly enamored with the offensive, were foolish enough to attempt a major attack in this sector. Various strongpoints and local terrain features were assigned picturesque names—the Little Southern, the Whip, the Picklehead, the Little Meadow, and so on, and much of the time there was spent in training, particularly for newly commissioned officers. There were periodic raids on French positions, but hardly on the scale or with the frequency that occurred in the trenches.
Such masterful inactivity couldn’t last forever, and at the end of October, the Mountain Battalion was withdrawn and sent east, to do battle with the Romanian Army. On August 27, 1916, in what can only be described as an act of monumental stupidity, Romania had declared war on Austria-Hungary, and within five days the other Central Powers responded in kind. Romania was essentially surrounded by her enemies—Germany to the north, Austria-Hungary to the west and southwest, Bulgaria to the south; Russia, to the east, would do its best to provide whatever assistance it could, but Russia’s successful Brusilov Offensive, which had been the impetus behind Romania’s rash decision, was beginning to lose momentum and the Russian Army had problems of its own. With its army outnumbered, ill-equipped, and poorly trained, Romania’s strategic position was hopeless.
Within hours of the declaration of war against the Austrians, a half-million Romanian soldiers rushed through the frontier passes and threatened the region the Germans called “Siebenbiirgen”—“Seven Fortresses”—after seven castles built there centuries earlier by the Saxons, but that the rest of the world knew as Transylvania. Despite some initial successes, within a matter of two weeks, the Romanian forces were stopped in their tracks. The rugged Transylvanian Alps and Carpathian Mountains were precisely the sort of country in which the Württemburgische Gebirgsbataillon—along with the newly formed Alpenkorps, a German division specially organized from Jäger battalions taken from the Prussian and Bavarian armies—had been created to fight. On September 18 the Germans and Austrians began their counterattack, and over the next 10 days, the Romanians were tumbled pell-mell out of whatever gains they had made and back into Romania itself. By the middle of October, however, they were able to stop the Germans at the passes of Vulcan and Szurduk.
The Alpenkorps, to which the Mountain Battalion was now attached, was initially deployed to force these passes. Though the Romanian mountains were far removed in every sense from the mire and carnage of the Western Front, the march forward from the railhead near Petroceni left no doubt that mountain fighting possessed its own catalogue of hardship and peril.
We climbed over a narrow footpath and our packs with their four days’ uncooked rations weighed heavily on our shoulders. We had neither pack animals nor winter mountain equipment, and all officers carried their own packs. We climbed the steep slopes for hours.
It began to rain as we started to climb without benefit of a guide. The rain grew heavier as night began to fall and it was soon pitch black. The cold rain turned into a cloudburst and soaked us to the skin. Further progress on the steep and rocky slope was impossible, and we bivouacked on either side of the mule path at an altitude of about 4,950 feet. In our soaked condition it was impossible to lie down and as it was still raining, all attempts to kindle a fire of dwarf pine failed. We crouched close together, wrapped in blankets and shelter halves and shivered from the cold. . . . After midnight the rain ceased, but in its stead an icy wind made it impossible for us to relax in our wet clothes.
When we reached the summit, our clothes and packs were frozen to our backs. It was below freezing and an icy wind was sweeping the snow-covered summit. Our positions were not to be found. Shortly after our arrival a blizzard enveloped the elevated region and reduced visibility to a few yards. . . . [T]he surgeon also warned that a continued stay in the snowstorm in wet clothes, without shelter, without fire, and without warm food, would result in many sick and much frostbite within the next few hours. We were threatened with court-martial proceedings if we yielded one foot of ground.
Numerous cases of high fever and vomiting were reported, but renewed representations to sector were without effect. . . . When day broke the doctor had to evacuate forty men to the hospital. Captain Gossler had decided to move off with the remainder of the companies, come what may; ninety percent were under medical treatment because of frostbite and cold.14
Bickering among army and corps headquarters prevented the attack on the passes from going forward; instead the Mountain Battalion was moved northward, where it staged a near-textbook attack on the Romanian positions atop the Lesului massif on November 11. A set-piece frontal assault, the attack on Lesului should have been a bloodbath, but here the Germans demonstrated what the hard-won tactical lessons taught them in the trench-raiding and local attacks of the Western Front could accomplish in open warfare. Skillful use of terrain for concealment along with coordinated fire-and-movement by infantry sections, coupled with effective, concentrated covering fire to keep the Romanians’ heads down, resulted in the capture of Mount Lesului with astonishingly light casualties; in Rommel’s company, which had been part of the decisive flanking movement forcing the Romanians off the mountaintop, the only casualty was a single wounded soldat.
Rommel was allowed to show his own mastery of these lessons the next evening, on the approach to the village of Kurpenul, on the far side of Mount Lesului. In a dense fog, 2nd Company began descending toward the village, Rommel having posted scouting detachments on both flanks as well as sending an advance guard forward. Romanian troops could be seen in the village, and somewhere in the fog an artillery battery was shelling the German positions down in the Vulcan Pass. Having only the vaguest idea of the Romanian positions and not wanting to risk having his company cut off from the rest of the battalion, Rommel halted in place, set up a screen of sentries, and waited for the rest of the battalion to catch up with 2nd Company. By that time the last Romanian soldiers had left the village and the Mountain Battalion moved in.
First light brought more fog, and with it a Romanian counterattack. Visibility was down to a few score yards, and the enemy’s advance was somewhat tentative, as both sides were equally vague as to the other’s deployment. Rommel, for whom the tendency to move to wherever the action was the hottest was becoming instinctual, moved forward.
I went with the advance guard, consisting of one squad, and the remainder of the company followed 160 yards to the rear. The fog swirled hither and yon and the visibility varied between a hundred and three hundred feet. Shortly before the head of the column reached the south end of the village, it ran into a closed column of advancing Romanians. In a few seconds we were engaged in a violent fight at fifty yards range. Our opening volley was delivered from a standing position and then we hit the dirt and looked for cover from the heavy enemy fire. The Romanians outnumbered us at least ten to one. Rapid fire pinned them down, but a new enemy loomed on both flanks. He was creeping up behind bushes and hedges and firing as he approached. The advance guard was getting into a dangerous situation. It was holding a farmhouse to the right of the road, while the remainder of the company appeared to have taken cover in the farms some five hundred feet to the rear. The fog prevented it from supporting the advance guard. Should the company move forward, or should the advance guard retire? Since it was a question of asserting ourselves against a powerful superiority, the latter appeared to be the best thing to do, especially in view of the extremely limited visibility.
I ordered the advance guard to hold the farmhouse for an additional five minutes, and then to retire on the right side of the road through the farms and reach the company, which would furnish fire support from its position a hundred yards to the rear. I ran back down the road to the company; dense fog soon concealed me from aimed fire by the Romanians. I quickly ordered a platoon of the
company and a heavy machine gun to open fire on the area to the left and the advance guard began to drop back under this fire protection.15
The Romanians, now firmly in contact with the Württembergers, pressed their attack hard; Rommel estimated that his company was outnumbered ten-to-one, and there is little reason to doubt the accuracy of his assessment. At one point, 2nd Company’s 1st Platoon had driven back the Romanians facing them, and impulsively edged forward, leaving its place in the line. Now that platoon was in danger of being cut off, and Rommel was faced with a commanding officer’s most feared dilemma.
I was none too elated with this course of events. Why did the platoon fail to stay in its place as ordered? Should I commit my last reserves, as requested by the platoon leader? Under these conditions all of us might have been surrounded and crushed by superior numbers. Would such a loss have crippled the left flank of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion? No, as little as I liked it, I could not help the 1st Platoon.
I ordered the 1st Platoon to disengage immediately and fall back along the village road. The remainder of the company was disposed to cover the retirement of the platoon.16
Rommel cooly adjusted his positions and continued to hold off the Romanians until Major Sprösser could bring up reinforcements, after which the Romanians gave up on their attack and withdrew, although exchanges of rifle fire continued throughout the morning. Another Romanian attack materialized in mid-morning, but by this time the fog had burned off, and the Romanian advance was halted in its tracks well short of the German lines. With the Vulcan and Skurduk passes now in the hands of the Germans and Austrians, the overall strategic situation in Romania stabilized somewhat, for the moment at least, as both the Central Powers and the Romanians paused to catch their breath. This was the perfect opportunity for Erwin Rommel to slip away on leave for a brief visit to his home in Ulm, but first he had a much more important appointment to keep in Danzig.