Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Ironically, it was Hitler who seemed to be more perceptive to the idea that Normandy would be attractive to the Allies. The distance from shore to shore was greater than at the Pas de Calais, but not decisively so, while the terrain behind the beaches, once past the hedgerow country that immediately backed up the shoreline, was ideal for the sort of full-blooded armored thrusts, backed by powerful air support, that had been the Wehr macht’s métier in the glory days of 1940. Isolating first the Cherbourg peninsula, with its premier port, one of France’s finest, and then the whole of Brittany would be fairly straightforward once the Allies broke out of their bridgehead. There were no significant river lines west of the Seine to offer a retreating Wehrmacht the opportunity to make a stand, and the liberation of Paris, while strategically not vital, would have tremendous political and psychological consequences for attackers and defenders alike. Hitler would from time to time in April and May return to his theme of Normandy being the Allies’ likely choice for the invasion, but because he too was influenced by Bodyguard and Fortitude, as well as other cover and deception operations, he never insisted that Rommel make Normandy the priority in his defense preparations.

  Meanwhile Rommel continued to be confident that if and when the Allies came, wherever they chose to arrive, they would be dealt a major, possibly decisive setback. An Allied defeat on the beaches of France would mean a reprieve for the Germans, by perhaps as much as a year, a year in which Speer could complete his reorganization of Germany’s industries; in which German scientists, engineers, and munitions manufacturers could complete the design and testing of new weapons, and finish the defenses of the Western Wall along the German border. The Soviet lunge into Central Europe that everyone was anticipating for the summer of 1944 could be turned into a long, bloody slog against a better-armed and equipped Teutonic foe. And while a defeated invasion might not ensure an ultimate German victory, or even an armistice and a negotiated peace, it would spell death and destruction for millions who were already caught in the grim threshing machines of the Gestapo’s Nacht und Nebel and the macabre Endlösung of the SS. . . .

  Consequently, there were many layers of meaning, some of which Rommel was probably unaware, in a sobering observation he made one blustery February afternoon, standing on bluff overlooking the Pas de Calais. Standing with him was his aide, Captain Helmuth Lang, who was by now a firm friend. Silently looking out over the Channel for some minutes, Rommel abruptly turned to Lang and said, “The first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive . . . the fate of Germany depends on the outcome. For the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.”277

  IN HIS LETTER to Lucie on May 21, Rommel made the most curious comment: “In the afternoon I had a talk with a captured British officer who was quite reasonable.” It was a passing reference to one of the most remarkable incidents of Rommel’s entire life, the day that Rommel met Lieutenant George Lane.278

  Lane himself was rather unremarkable, but the circumstances in which a British lieutenant made the acquaintance of a German field marshal are fascinating, as does what the incident reveals about Rommel. Lane was part of a two-man commando mission sent to the French coast to gain information about a possible new German underwater mine, and was captured when he and his companion were surprised by a German patrol while still on the beach. Imprisoned in the cellars at Cayeux for several days, Lane and his fellow captive, Lieutenant Roy Wooldridge, were blindfolded and driven deeper into France, where Lane was eventually introduced to Rommel at Army Group B’s new headquarters at the Chateau La Roche Guyon, 30 miles northwest of Paris. The two men hit it off almost immediately, and Rommel invited Lane to sit down at a table laid out for tea.

  Using an interpreter, Rommel questioned Lane, who was as evasive as possible in his answers. At one point Rommel commented that Lane was in serious trouble, as there had been problems with gangster commandos in the past, and standing Wehrmacht orders required that captured commandos be shot on sight.

  “You must realize that you are in a very tricky situation. Everyone seems to think that you are a saboteur.”

  “Well, Sir, if you believed that I was a saboteur you would not have done me the honor of inviting me here.”

  “So you think that this is an invitation?” Rommel asked.

  “I do, sir, and I must say I am highly honoured.” Rommel smiled at the flattery, and a long conversation followed. At one point he asked Lane, “How’s Montgomery doing?”

  Lane replied, “Unfortunately I don’t know him, but he’s preparing the invasion and he’ll be here shortly, by the shortest route.”

  “Oh, so there’s actually going to be an invasion?” Rommel said with an obviously feigned innocence.

  “So the Times tells us, and it’s usually pretty reliable about such things.”

  There was one tense moment for Lane, which came when one of the other officers present asked him why, if he was English, he spoke with a foreign accent. By birth Lane was Hungarian Jew (his real name was Gyuri Lányi) but thinking quickly he replied that his accent was Welsh. None of the Germans present, including Rommel, could tell otherwise, so Lane’s fib became part of his permanent record with the Wehrmacht, and probably saved his life in the process. After spending the better part of an hour with Rommel Lane was again blindfolded, and sent to Paris; from there he was incarcerated in an officers’ prisoner-of-war compound, rather than having been sent to a concentration camp, which would have been his fate had his Jewish ancestry been discovered. Until his own death in 2010 at the age of 95, Lane remained convinced Rommel’s intervention saved his life.279

  During his time with Army Group B, Rommel carefully studied the Allied landings in North Africa, at Sicily, and in Italy, in the hope of finding an operational pattern which would give a clue as to the solution of one of the two great questions facing him and his command: when the invasion would take place. The more he studied, the more he learned, the more he pieced together, until at last he realized that he had found it. The Allied invasion plans were always coordinated with weather, the phase of the moon, and the tide: when all three fell within a specific range of time or condition, the Allies saw a window of opportunity for their landings. The weather must be good, wind conditions mild to moderate, so as to not scatter the para troops of any airborne component of the operation too widely. The moon must be full so as to offer maximum visibility to the aircraft carrying the airborne troops to their drop zones, then later to aid those same troops in making their way to their assembly areas. Finally, the tide must be incoming, and at flood when the first wave actually lands on the beach. As May 1944 worked its way toward June, Rommel could look at the calendar with confidence, noting that no such confluence of moon and tide was expected until sometime in August—and even then the weather conditions might prove uncooperative.

  The weather would be the key to any invasion attempt: if the English Channel—notoriously fickle at the best of times—was too rough, the Allied landing craft would be swamped and sunk on their run in to the beaches. The waves could be no higher than 6 feet, therefore relatively calm weather was an absolute requisite. In the first days of June, German meteorologists, anticipating a succession of low-pressure waves moving in from the west, predicted that the current rough weather in the Channel would continue well into the middle of the month, well past the full moon that would occur on June 6. Allied weather teams, however, working with better information than that possessed by their German counterparts, saw a coming break in the weather, one that would last no more than 48 hours, beginning around midnight on June 5: if they chose to take it, the Allies would have a window of opportunity that the Germans never suspected was coming. Ironically, both the German and Allied meteorologists were assuring their respective commanders that weather conditions favored their planned undertakings.

  This was much to Rommel’s liking, as he was hoping to get away from La Roche Guyon and spend a few days back in Herrlingen with Lucie and Manfred at the beginning of June. She would be celebrating
her fiftieth birthday on June 6, and Rommel had made a special trip into Paris to purchase a pair of shoes for her as a birthday present. This had been no small sacrifice on Rommel’s part, as he despised Paris. To someone with his rather puritanical bent, it was a modern Babylon, where the German soldiers were becoming too accustomed to the soft life of an idle garrison and too fond of the city’s bistros, cabarets, and brothels. The thriving black market there, which was officially winked at, even by the Gestapo, was an embarrassment, in his opinion.

  But Lucie was Lucie, the love of his life, so the excursion into Babylon was made, and now, early on the morning of June 4, on what promised to be a dull, blustery day, Rommel, his aide, Captain Lang, his operations officer, Colonel Hans-Georg von Templehof, and his driver Daniel were ready to set out for the eight-hour drive to Germany.

  IT WAS RIGHT on 7:20 A.M.—6:20 A.M. in France—on Tuesday, June 6, when the telephone rang in the foyer of Rommel’s house in Herrlingen. Rommel, always an early riser, was fussing with arranging Lucie’s birthday presents on the drawing room table—the handmade Parisian shoes were, of course, the centerpiece of the display. The rest of the house was already filled with flowers, brought in the previous night after Lucie had retired. When he answered the telephone, Rommel was startled to hear the voice of his Chief of Staff, General Speidel, who informed the field marshal that there had been several widely scattered reports of enemy paratroopers landing around Normandy, particularly in the Cotentin peninsula. When Rommel pressed him for details, Speidel could not say for certain if this was some sort of large-scale commando operation or the prelude to the invasion itself.

  “Well, find out—now!” Rommel barked, then hung up. After changing into his uniform—he had answered the telephone in his dressing gown—he waited impatiently for almost three hours before the phone rang again. At 10:15 A.M., the call from Speidel came through: deliberately, but with an unmistakable note of tension in his voice, Speidel officially confirmed that, in addition to the British and American paratroopers dropped across the base of the Cotentin peninsula during the night, a major Allied landing was underway on the Channel coast: there were five landing sites, all of which were for the time being reasonably well established. At first Rommel seemed unable to grasp what it was that Speidel was telling him, then the reality of what the Chief of Staff had said set in. The Cotentin meant that the Allies had not invaded the Pas de Calais: they were landing in Normandy. Stunned, Rommel informed Speidel that he would set out for La Roche Guyon immediately, then placed the handset back in the cradle. Lucie, roused this time by the telephone’s ringing, came and stood silently by her husband’s side as, shaking his head, Rommel simply muttered over and over again, “Normandy! Normandy. How stupid of me! How stupid of me. . . .”280

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  INVASION AND CONSPIRACY

  Speak Truth to Power

  —QUAKER PAMPHLET

  The Allies called the grand plan Operation Overlord, the actual landings and establishment of the beachheads, Operation Neptune. The day itself, June 6, 1944, has come to be commemorated as “D-Day.” An immense invasion fleet—6,939 ships in all: 1,213 warships, including six battleships, 23 cruisers and 104 destroyers, 4,126 landing craft of various types, 736 support vessels, and 864 merchantmen—departed ports all along the southern coast of England on June 5, bound for an assembly point in the middle of the English Channel, from whence they sailed south, for France. Incredibly, the movement of this armada went completely undetected: it was not until the fog began lifting on the Normandy coastline, when observers in the bunkers and dugouts along the beaches west of Caen were suddenly confronted with the spectacle of a monstrous fleet that stretched from horizon to horizon that the Germans became aware of its existence.

  Equally incredible was that at the exact moment the Allied naval forces off Normandy began their bombardment of the beaches, the entire German command structure was in disarray. Whether by an act of serendipity or the hand of fate, Rommel was, of course, on leave in Germany; his Chief of Staff, Speidel, was completely out of his depth to respond to this emergency: the Knight’s Cross at his throat notwithstanding, he was a career staff officer, not a combat commander, and beyond notifying Rommel of the situation, was completely befuddled. Generaloberst Friederich Dollmann, the commander of Seventh Army, which was responsible for the defense of the Normandy and Brittany coast, was unreachable: he was on his way, along with almost all of his corps and division commanders, to Rennes, where a series of map exercises—including one of the defense of the Normandy beaches—were scheduled for June 6. In contrast, General Erich Marcks, the commanding officer of the LXXXIV Corps, who had not yet departed his headquarters for Rennes, immediately ordered his troops to go on full alert: he had always believed the invasion would take place in Normandy rather than the Pas de Calais, and now the Allies were landing right in the middle of his command area. In Paris, von Rundstedt, who had been informed of the airborne drops as early as 1:30 A.M., dithered for three hours before sending instruction to Panzergruppe West to “reconnoiter in force into 711th Division sector,” well to the east of where any Allied paratroopers had landed.

  The situation only grew worse higher up in the German chain of command. At 4:45 A.M., when von Rundstedt finally called the O.K.W. to secure permission to move Panzer Lehr and the 12th SS Panzer Division toward Normandy, Jodl, the O.K.W. Chief of Operations, told the aging field marshal that the decision was Hitler’s to make, and the Führer had gone to bed less than two hours prior to von Rundstedt’s call: Jodl refused to wake him unless von Rundstedt explicitly ordered him to do so. Von Rundstedt in turn was furious: he wanted a decision made by a proper soldier, not that “Bohemian corporal” whom he openly despised, and angrily ended the call. It would be almost noon before Hitler was given the news that the invasion had begun; meanwhile the tanks of Panzergruppe West remained in place, 100 miles and more back from the coast.

  It was during these critical hours that Rommel’s presence at his headquarters in France was most sorely missed; not for any miraculous maneuver he may have ordered that would have swept the Allies back into the sea, but for his galvanizing—and often polarizing—persona. It is impossible to say what Rommel would have done had he been present, it is undeniable that the acquiescence to inaction displayed by OB West and the O.K.W. would have never been acceptable to him. In North Africa he had become quite the accomplished barrack-room lawyer as he honed his skills at evading inconvenient orders when he was convinced that a particular course of action—which went against those orders—was correct and necessary. He had also developed a particular talent for acting first then seeking permission—or forgiveness, if necessary—later. On the morning of June 6, 1944, his arrogance, rough tongue, and dominating personality could have been expected to mobilize officers who were hesitant or uncertain of what they should be doing—and run roughshod over anyone who barred his way who was not prepared to meet him with equal determination. It is the nature of human beings in a crisis to seek out leadership, to want direction, no matter from whence it comes: Rommel would have provided precisely that missing leadership—never in the whole of his military career is there any record of Rommel passively awaiting orders in a situation which required action. Von Rundstedt declined to request that Jodl awaken the Führer; it is impossible to imagine Rommel not demanding that he do so.

  Rommel was out of the house at Herrlingen, with only the tersest of explanations to Lucie and Manfred, within 15 minutes of taking Speidel’s 10:30 A.M. call: he and his aide, Lang, were on their way back to La Roche Guyon; there was no time to detour and collect Tempelhof.281 They stopped at Nancy long enough for Rommel to get a call through to Speidel to confirm that the 21st Panzer Division, the only armored unit close to the Allied beachheads, had begun its counterattack, as per its standing orders. Speidel assured the field marshal that the division had begun moving less than an hour after the Allied landings began.

  Speidel was correct—after a fashion. The 21st Panzer
, raised again after the original division had surrendered in Tunisia in May 1943, was something of an oddity: essentially cobbled together out of odds and sods, at least half of its tanks and artillery were of obsolete, prewar French design and manufacture, which presented a few tactical problems and was something of a logistical headache. The division commander, Generalmajor Edgar Feuchtinger, was in Paris when the invasion began, but as he had given his regimental and battalion commanders operational guidelines to follow in such an eventuality, this was not the handicap it might have been. By the time Rommel arrived back at La Roche Guyon, 21st Panzer, which had been posted near Caen, one of the Allies’ primary objectives on D-Day, had made its attack: dispersed and outnumbered, it had been able to nonetheless push a column of Panzer IV tanks down to the Channel itself, driving a wedge between the Sword and Juno beachheads. But it was not enough: scores of British and Canadian tanks and antitank guns soon took out the panzers, and the remainder of the division’s battle groups withdrew.

  Materially, the 21st Panzer’s attack accomplished little, although it did have unexpected strategic consequences. Suddenly apprehensive about the presence of hitherto-undetected German armored units, General Montgomery, who had overall command of the D-Day landings and subsequent operations in the beachheads, abruptly abandoned his plan to take Caen on D-Day itself; instead he chose to carry out an overly elaborate envelopment of the city that would require two months to complete. The Allies still had their beachheads, but the division had at least bought the Germans time.