Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  On November 27, 1916, Oberleutnant Erwin Eugen Johannes Rommel married Lucia Maria “Lucie” Mollin. The young officer Lucie once thought overly serious had become the love of her life, and she the love of his. Exactly when their engagement became formalized remains something of a mystery, as does the reason why they chose this particular time to make their union a reality, but certainly all of the old restrictions and prohibitions concerning junior officers marrying that had been in place before the war began were now so much rubbish. Whatever arrangements had been made regarding Walburga Stemmer and her daughter were evidently acceptable to Lucie: there isn’t the slightest hint of jealousy or insecurity in any of her letters to Erwin, before or after their wedding. Rommel had begun writing her on an almost daily basis back in 1912, and continued to do so throughout the war—indeed, for the remainder of his life, whenever they were separated, he would try dash off at least a few lines to her every day, even when in the middle of a desperate battle.

  The newlyweds had a bare two weeks together before Rommel had to return to the Mountain Battalion, though it wouldn’t be until mid-January 1917 before he again saw any significant action. Bucharest fell to the Germans on December 6, two-thirds of Romania was now in the hands of the Central Powers, and the remnants of the Romanian Army retreated into northeastern and eastern Romania, behind a line of rugged ridges on the west bank of the Siret River, a defensive position of tremendous natural strength. Holding on like a thorn in the Central Powers’ flesh, just to the west of the ridgeline, was a strong Romanian force dug in around and atop Mount Cosna, southeast of the town of Targu Ocna. The ridge behind Mount Cosna was the key to the entire Siret River Line; before the Germans and Austrians could mount any sort of attack on the enemy’s main position, they first had to drive the Romanians off Cosna. To take Cosna, they first had to capture the village of Gagesti (modern-day Paragesti), which sat just below Cosna’s southern slope.

  Rommel, though still only an oberleutnant, was given command of an abteilung (“detachment”) of two rifle companies and a heavy machine-gun platoon, the sort of ad hoc formation which was the precursor to the kampfgruppe (battle group) concept which the German Army would employ with such success a quarter century later, and on January 7, 1917, ordered to take and hold Gagesti.17 A foot of snow lay on the ground, there was a swirling fog that played hob with visibility, and temperatures were below freezing—all in all, precisely the sort of conditions to encourage an enemy’s complaisance. (The effects of the cold cut both ways, however: at a critical moment in the coming action, Rommel’s machine-gun platoon would be using alcohol to clear away ice that had jammed its weapons’ firing mechanisms.) Moving out after sunset, Rommel’s plan was to seize a few outlying buildings around Gagesti which would serve as jumping-off points for a morning attack on the village proper; but as his men moved through the snow and mist, encountering isolated groups of Romanian soldiers who apparently had little stomach to this fight and readily surrendered, Rommel saw an opportunity to take the village by coup de main. After giving his troops a few hours’ rest, he ordered them to charge the village, making as much noise as possible (Rommel recalled that his two companies were “as loud as a battalion”) to create the impression of greater numbers. The Romanian defenders, surprised and demoralized, meekly surrendered—a total of 360 prisoners of war were taken.18

  What happened next was pure Rommel: from somewhere he had acquired a horse he named “Sultan,” and in the gray morning light Rommel and Sultan rode out to reconnoiter the Romanian positions beyond Gagesti, accompanied only by Mess Sergeant Paffle. A half-mile outside the village, the two Germans accidentally rode straight into a Romanian patrol, about 15 men strong. The range was too short for there to be any chance of Rommel or his sergeant dashing off unseen; Rommel being Rommel, he rode forward and in a calm, reasonable, but firm voice, explained to the Romanians that, since Gagesti was lost, they were, in fact, prisoners of war, and should lay down their arms and head into the village to join the other POWs. The already demoralized Romanians, though probably not actually understanding one word in three Rommel said, comprehended his meaning and readily complied. The incident taught Rommel a lesson about the value of a bluff well played against a discouraged opponent that he would never forget.

  What happened after that was a slice of military life the sort of which every soldier and ex-soldier from the Sumerians onward has known all too well. Major Sprösser brought forward the rest of the battalion, formally relieving Rommel’s battle group at midnight. Rommel marched his men back to the Mountain Battalion’s regular billets, 7 miles to the west of Gagesti, where they cleaned their weapons and gear, then settled in for some well-deserved rest. No sooner had they done so than an urgent message from the front arrived: “Enemy has broken through in mountains north of Vidra. Rommel detachment to move to Hill 625 north of Vidra, where it is to join 256th Reserve Infantry.” Rommel and his men wearily trudged back to the front, only to learn upon arrival that the situation was well in hand and their presence was not required. Finding mail from home awaiting them when they returned to their barracks (after yet another 7-mile march) compensated somewhat for the fiasco.19

  The incident outside Gagesti revealed a new facet of Rommel’s maturing persona as a combat leader—the force of his personality. He was becoming a leader, not just by virtue of his rank, but by nature as well; it was as if warfare was the crucible and combat provided the heat which unexpectedly created the alloy of Rommel’s emerging character. His first biographer, Desmond Young, tellingly makes the point that “[Rommel] was a young man of 25, looking even younger than his age, and in rank only an oberleutnant from a not-particularly distinguished line regiment [the 124th Württemberg].” Theodor Werner, who first met Rommel in 1915, recalled him as being “slightly built, almost schoolboyish, inspired by a holy zeal, always eager and anxious to act. . . . Anybody who came under the spell of his personality turned into a real soldier. However tough the strain he seemed inexhaustible. He seemed to know just what the enemy were like and how they would probably react. His plans were often startling, instinctive, spontaneous and not infrequently obscure.” Now, a year and more later, that energy, drive, and imagination combined to imbue Rommel with a confidence and self-assurance that was rapidly approaching arrogance, only made tolerable by the accomplishments behind it.20

  In early February, the Württemburgische Gebirgsbataillon was withdrawn from Romania and sent back to the Western Front, taking up its old position near Hilsen in the Vosges Mountains. As before, the difficult terrain coupled with the lack of any significant strategic objective behind either army’s lines ensured that the same degree of “live-and-let-live” activity prevailed during the five months the Mountain Battalion spent deployed there. It was time well spent on training replacements and developing new tactics: on August 1, 1917, the Mountain Battalion departed the Vosges and was once again deployed to Romania. There, beginning on August 9, Erwin Rommel would lead his abteilung into action in what would be one of the most hard-fought battles of his life, storming Mount Cosna.

  The Germans and Austrians had failed to take and hold the whole of Mount Cosna the previous December, and the Romanian Army, once all but left for dead, experienced something akin to a resurrection in the spring and early summer of 1917. The Russian Army had taken control of the defensive line along the Siret River, behind which the Romanians reequipped, reorganized, and retrained, helped by 150,000 rifles, 2,000 machine guns, 1,300,000 grenades and 355 artillery pieces provided by France and Great Britain. By mid-summer the Romanians had once more manned the Siret River Line, assuring their Russian allies that they could now hold it. It was absolutely vital to the Russians that the Romanians stay in the fight. From the Allies’ perspective, the Romanian government’s decision to go to war had been a colossal blunder: a neutral Romania had protected the southern flank of the Russian Army in its struggles with the Germans and Austrians—now, a Romanian defeat along the Siret would lay that flank bare to the Central P
owers, and the consequences for Russia would be disastrous. For the Germans and Austrians, capturing Mount Cosna would be the key that unlocked the entire Siret River Line: taking it would split the Romanian front in two, and that line was the Allies’ last truly defensible position, for behind it was only open rolling plains, the beginnings of the Ukrainian steppe.

  The Alpenkorps was given the mission of taking Mount Cosna; the Württemburgische Gebirgsbataillon would lead the assault. Although Rommel was still only an oberleutnant, he was one of the battalion’s most experienced combat officers, and Major Sprösser tasked him with planning and leading the initial attack, giving him command of three rifle companies as well as two machine-gun companies. Sprösser knew his man, for Rommel had developed an uncanny sense of terrain, what was once called coup d’oeil in the Great Captains of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Marlborough had it, so did Bonaparte in his early campaigns; General Helmut von Moltke (the Elder) proved at Sadowa and Sedan that he possessed an eye for good ground as well; Wellington was probably history’s absolute master of the art of the tactical use of terrain. Now it was Rommel’s turn, though he would be operating on a much smaller scale.

  The Mount Cosna massif would provide plenty of opportunity for Rommel to display his skill, with steep, heavily wooded slopes and undulating ground. The massif runs almost due north to south in two long, parallel ridges, the western ridge longer and and slightly lower than its eastern counterpart. At the center of the west ridge is a secondary summit connected by a saddle, or cwm, to the peak of Mount Cosna proper. The Romanians set up their defenses at the end of both ridges and on the adjacent heights of Mount Piciorul. Attacking uphill is always an exceedingly dangerous operation, as normally the defenders can observe everything the assaulting force is doing, all the while remaining more or less safely under cover. Rommel exploited the folds and furrows along the slopes of the ridges to minimize this advantage, and when his attack went in, Rommel’s troops, despite being outnumbered and outgunned (something that would become characteristic of his forces in a later war), acting on his instructions, made as much noise as possible, so that

  . . . the enemy . . . was deceived as to our main attack by a lively fire, shouting and hand grenades, and was induced to dispose his reserves incorrectly. The thrust by the 3rd Company against the flank and rear then led to a quick success. In the same way five . . . positions were taken one after another, though the final garrison was two companies strong. The attacks followed each other so quickly that the enemy had no time for regrouping.21

  Rommel continued to push his men forward until they had turned the enemy’s flank on the south end of the western ridgeline, almost a mile behind the Romanians’ main position. When one of the machine-gun companies moved up, Rommel’s troops took up positions for an all-around defense—Rommel likened it to a hedgehog—drove off a counterattack and held their ground, which forced the Romanians to abandon the whole of the ridge during the night.

  Not wanting to give the enemy any respite, the Alpenkorps’ attack continued the next day, August 10, this action bidding fair to be even more difficult than that of the previous day. The Romanian defenses were heavier, and there would be no artillery support for Rommel’s abteilung—the only fire support he would have would be that of the two machine-gun companies. Rising to the challenge, Rommel made textbook use of them, using one company to put concentrated, constant fire on the point of the attack, forcing the Romanian troops to keep their heads down until the German infantry was almost on top of them; the other machine-gun company kept up an interdicting fire that prevented enemy reinforcements from moving up. Careful reconnaissance before the attack allowed Rommel to find the most advantageous rout to the Romanians’ main line of resistance, minimizing the exposure of his troops when moving across open ground.

  As was his wont, Rommel was leading from the front, and for the third time in this war, paid a price for his boldness:

  I was close behind them and was just crossing a small depression when I was forced to hit the dirt by a burst of machine-gun fire coming from the right. The bullets dug small holes in the turf and their source seemed to be a slope some nine hundred yards southeast of Hill 674, nearly thirteen hundred yards away. I had only pitiful cover behind a small mound and I intended to dash on when the machine-gun fire lifted. Suddenly, I received a bullet from behind in the left forearm and the blood spurted. Looking around, I discovered a detachment of Romanians firing on me and a few men of the 1st Company from some bushes about ninety yards behind us. In order to get out of this dangerous field of fire I made a zigzag dash to the knoll in front of us where some elements of the 1st Company had to defend themselves for about ten minutes until the Romanians to the west had been taken care of in hand-to-hand fighting by the men following us. The French officer commanding the Romanian unit kept shouting “Kill the German dogs” until he took a bullet at close range.

  Rommel was lucky: the bullet passed cleanly through his arm, missing both bones completely, though the wound bled profusely; he made do for the time being with a rough-and-ready bandage from the battalion surgeon then went forward again to resume commanding the attack.

  The Romanians fought bravely and they fought hard, and immediately launched a counterattack to drive the Germans off the ridge. Their lack of proper training, despite the best efforts of their French advisors, coupled with their lack of combat experience, led to clumsy, uncoordinated attacks. They might have done well against the armies of 1914, but courage and tenacity were no match for men who already seen three years of war. The Romanians fell back yet again, this time to the slopes of Mount Cosna itself.

  During the night of August 10–11, the Mountain Battalion was moved to the far left of the German position, on the west side of Mount Piciorul. Two abteilungen were formed, one under Rommel, the other under Hauptmann Gossler. Rommel performed a personal reconnaissance of the objective, Hill 674, the secondary summit of Mount Cosna, and, still enjoying the confidence of Major Sprösser, drew up a plan of attack that called for his detachment to move first, sweeping around to the north and attacking the Romanians’ right flank, drawing their attention—and reserves—to Hill 674. Once Captain Gossler judged that the enemy was fully engaged, his detachment would attack the summit of Mount Cosna from the south.

  Rommel deployed some of his infantry and most of his machine guns to directly face the enemy lines, where they would lay down a hot and heavy fire on the Romanians, and hopefully hold them in their trenches. Meanwhile, he led three rifle companies and part of one machine-gun company to the left, ready to take the Romanians in the flank. By noon, everyone was in position and the German troops directly facing the Romanians opened up a furious fusillade, which was the signal for Rommel to begin his attack. The Germans’ lead elements broke through the enemy defenses, but a surprisingly swift response by the Romanians had them quickly pinned down by heavy small-arms fire. Stymied, Rommel was unable to find a way out—at one point he even considered withdrawing—until one of the company commanders, taking his cue from Rommel’s own methods, initiated an attack that began to roll up the Romanian lines, and by mid-afternoon the entire enemy position on Hill 674 was in German hands. Rommel’s abteilung began advancing on Mount Cosna’s northwest slopes while Captain Gossler’s abteilung, having infiltrated around the enemy’s left flank on the southwest slope, pressed its own attack hard. The Romanians dithered, unable to decide which attack to stop first, and were driven off Cosna for their pains.

  The uncharacteristic hesitation Rommel displayed at the top of Hill 674 may well have been a consequence of the extreme pain and loss of blood caused by the wound he had taken in his left forearm the previous day. On the night of August 12 he requested permission to report to the battalion’s field hospital to have the wound properly dressed—he could have, with justification, requested evacuation further to the rear; predictably, he was back with his abteilung within 12 hours.

  Over the next three days the Romanians launched a series of
strong, determined counterattacks, trying to retake the mountain; they fought fiercely and gave the German mountain troops all that they could handle, more than one company coming near to exhausting its ammunition supply in trying to hold back the Romanians. But again, superior training and bitter experience won out over élan and grit; the Romanian attacks were driven off every time. Rommel’s stark accounting of his own physical condition on the morning of August 14 is eloquent testimony to ferocity of the fighting:

  I tried to get some sleep, but it was so cold that I gave up the idea; so I took Lieutenant Werner and inspected the night’s work in the early dawn light. I had not had a chance to remove my shoes for more than five days and, as a result, my feet were badly swollen; also, I had had no opportunity to renew the bandage on my left arm or to change the bloodstained overcoat hung around my shoulders and my likewise bloodstained trousers. I felt very debilitated, but the weight of responsibility was such that I did not consider going back to the hospital.22

  The Romanians continued their attacks on the Germans holding Mount Cosna for the next week, Rommel remaining with his detachment the entire time. There is something admirable about his determination to remain with his men, but there is, at the same time, something disturbing about his unwillingness—or inability—to recognize that he was not indispensible. It’s a far from uncommon quality among good combat officers at almost any level of command, but there is an inherent danger in it, as exhaustion can impair good judgment and lead to poor command decisions, threatening the lives of the very men toward whom the officer feels such loyalty. Fortunately for Rommel, the whole of the Alpenkorps was withdrawn from Mount Cosna on August 25. It was not a moment too soon: