Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Part of the Allies’ willingness to use sledgehammers to crack walnuts was due to the overwhelming material superiority possessed by the British and American armies. One of the most frequently overlooked—or worse, glossed over—aspects of the entire Overlord plan was the thoroughness with which the Allied command staff had developed the supply and support systems for the beachheads: it did the Allies no good to have troops ashore who could not be properly supported. Thus in the logistics trains for each of the five beaches were more ammunition, rations, uniforms, vehicles, and equipment than the men ashore could possibly expend, stockpiled and ready according to the wisdom of having and not needing rather than needing and not having. This was a consequence of the grand strategy which the British and Americans had formulated in the opening months of the war, the like of which Germany—or rather Hitler, as all of the Third Reich’s military policies originated with him—had never possessed. From January 1942 until June 6, 1944, the ultimate objective of Allied strategy, planning, production, training, and operations had been those 90 days allocated to Operation Overlord, the 90 days that began on D-Day. The consequences of what Germany might have accomplished had Hitler and the O.K.W. possessed a similar measure of foresight is too terrible to contemplate; the consequences Germany would suffer because the Führer and his flunkies lacked such foresight left Rommel despairing, for there was nothing he could do to avoid ultimate defeat. Three letters written to Lucie in mid-June leave no doubt that Rommel cherished no illusions about how the battle in Normandy would end.

  13 June 1944

  Dearest Lu,

  The telephone line yesterday was really terrible, but it was better than nothing. The battle is not going at all well for us, mainly because of the enemy’s air superiority and heavy naval guns. . . . I reported to the Führer yesterday. Rundstedt is doing the same. It’s time for politics to come into play. We are expecting the next, perhaps even heavier blow to fall elsewhere in a few days. The long-husbanded strength of two world powers is now coming into action. It will all be decided quickly. We are doing what we can. I often think of you at home, with heartfelt wishes and the hope that everything can still be guided to a tolerable end.

  14 June 1944

  Very heavy fighting. The enemy’s great superiority in aircraft, naval artillery, men and materiel is beginning to tell. Whether the gravity of the situation is realized up above, and the proper conclusions drawn, seems to me doubtful. Supplies are getting tight everywhere.

  How are you both? Still no news has arrived.

  15 June 1944

  Was up forward again yesterday, the situation does not improve. We must be prepared for grave events. The troops, SS and Army alike, are fighting with the utmost courage, but the balance of strength tips more heavily against us every day. Our air force is playing a very modest part over the battle area. I’m well so far. I have to keep my head up in spite of it all, even though many hopes are having to be buried. You can no doubt imagine what difficult decisions we will soon be faced with, and will remember our conversation in November 1942.287

  These three letters are startling, not merely for their candor in regard to the battle’s ultimate outcome, but also because they mark the moment when Rommel articulated the necessity of some sort of political settlement to end the war rather than continuing to believe in a military solution which would somehow favor Germany. They mark the penultimate step in a journey of conscience that had begun more than 18 months earlier at El Alamein. The first step had been compelled by Hitler’s breach of faith with his soldiers manifested in the “Victory or death” order; it had progressed during one of the succession of conferences held in Rome with Mussolini and Cavallero—having a chance to spend a couple of days with Lucie during one such, Rommel had confided in her that he had lost his belief in Germany’s ability to win the war through military victory. His journey was accelerated during the withdrawal to Tunisa, when he was encouraged, exhorted, and commanded to hold one indefensible position after another, always for no sound military reason but because of the increasingly delusional state of the man in Berchtesgaden. Precisely where was Rommel’s point of no return is impossible to say: it may have come as early as the moment in December 1942 when Hitler refused to countenance a methodical withdrawal of Rommel’s veteran German and Italian troops—a priceless military asset—from Tunisia. It may not have come until March 1943, when Hitler proposed the patently absurd idea of German operations on Africa’s Atlantic coast. It may well not have come until as late as June 7, 1944, when there was no doubting that the Allies were successfully ashore in France and the Germans’ best opportunity to throwing them back into the sea had been irretrievably lost.

  But whenever that point occurred, what was undeniable was that by mid-June, barely more than a week after the Americans and British came ashore at Normandy, Rommel was convinced that continuing the war could only end in disaster for Germany, and that he had finally lost any remnant of faith in Adolf Hitler as Germany’s leader. In May 1943 the Führer, during a rare moment of candor and self-honesty, had confided to Rommel: “I know it is necessary to make peace with one side or the other, but no one will make peace with me.” Yet Hitler did not—could not—articulate the inevitable conclusion to which his confession led: if peace was necessary, and he was the obstacle to peace, then he must step down or step aside as Germany’s head of state. But if the Allies had been intractable then, now, more than a year later they were implacable. Writing “Whether the gravity of the situation is realized up above, and the proper conclusions drawn, seems to me doubtful” was Rommel’s admission of his own realization that Hitler no longer even recognized the need to make peace, let alone a willingness to bring it about no matter how painful the personal price. The final step on Rommel’s journey of conscience would be the decision that peace was too important to be left up to someone like Adolf Hitler.288

  The “miracle” for which Rommel was so desperately buying time came in the form of the vergeltungswaffen—vengeance weapons—the V-1, V-2, and V-3. The V-1 was a pulsejet-powered flying bomb that carried a ton of explosives, the V-2 a liquid-fueled ballistic missile, and the V-3 an extraordinarily long-range cannon. All three V-weapons were designed and deployed to be used against Britain, although only the V-1 was operational when Rommel was fighting the battle of Normandy. Launch sites were built in the Pas de Calais region beginning in October 1943, and on June 13, 1944, the first V-1 was fired at London. Nearly 10,000 of these flying bombs—“buzz bombs,” Londoners would come to call them, after the distinctive sound made by their motors—would be sent hurtling toward the British capital, killing or wounding almost 23,000 civilians and military personnel while causing almost as much property damage as the “Blitz” of 1940–41, before the last launching site was overrun by the Allies in October 1944. Yet again, though, the V-1 program was one more case of “too little, too late” for Germany: had the flying bomb offensive been unleashed a year earlier—which could have happened had its development not been needlessly delayed—and directed at Britain’s Channel ports where the invasion fleets were assembling, the whole Overlord plan would have been disrupted and delayed, possibly to such a degree that there might have been no cross-Channel invasion in 1944 at all.

  As it was, the V-1 launch sites hamstrung Rommel’s effort to contain the Allied bridgehead. He was able to use two divisions of the Fifteenth Army to bolster the extreme right flank around Caen, but could not bring its full weight to bear in Normandy: thanks to Operation Fortitude, German intelligence services still regarded a second invasion, this one in the Pas de Calais, where most of the V-1 sites were located, as a viable threat. Fifteenth Army was thus compelled to remain in place at the moment when its strength was needed most in Normandy. Fortitude’s fictions would soon become sufficiently threadbare to be seen for what they were, but for five critical weeks they kept an entire German army frozen in place.

  On June 17, 1944, near Soissons, Rommel and von Rundstedt met with Hitler, personally briefing th
e Führer on the situation in Normandy. Rommel gave a vivid, but accurate, description of the conditions under which the German soldiers were fighting—outnumbered, outgunned, with dwindling supplies of ammunition, limited artillery and armored support and no air cover, yet their morale remained high as they were still holding the Allies in check, though for how much longer neither he nor von Runstedt were prepared to guess. Rommel urged Hitler to visit the front to witness first-hand the accuracy of this report, then outlined his plan for more attacks on the Normandy bridgehead: a carefully staged tactical withdrawal from the hedgerow country, far enough to lure the enemy armor into a major attack to break out of the Normandy perimeter. At that point, out of range of the deadly naval guns, a counterattack by a carefully hoarded and assembled panzer corps would strike at the flank of the Allied attack, cutting off the armored spearheads and pushing the supporting infantry back onto the beaches. It could not drive the Allies out of France, but it could deprive them of the units with which they were expecting to overrun France. Later Rommel would confess to Lucie and Manfred that he had never believed the plan had more than a one-in-four chance of success, but it was the best he could have done with what he had; events would intervene, however, which would deny Rommel that one last chance at victory. Hitler meanwhile withheld a final decision on the attack, refusing to contemplate any withdrawal, even to gain tactical or operational advantages, insisting for now that defensive operations continue. Victory, he insisted, would be achieved by “holding fast tenaciously to every square yard of soil.”289

  Meanwhile the British attempted to force a breakout near Caen, at the village of Villers Bocage, on June 12. It was a costly failure, but it kept the bulk of the German armor engaged around Caen, allowing the Americans to strike westward out of the Normandy perimeter and take the Cotentin peninsula, with its vital port of Cherbourg, although a thorough demolition of the port facilities during a surprisingly determined defense led by Generalleutnant Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben prevented the Allies from utilizing Cherbourg before the end of August. More critically for Rommel, the American advance into the Cotentin further broadened the front his already overstretched forces had to cover, compelling him to thin his lines dangerously, with no armored reserve yet assembled to counter against any fresh Allied thrusts out of the Normandy bridgehead. Worse, the divisions holding that frontage were being bled white: replacements, of both men and equipment, were less than a tenth of losses, while supplies of ammunition were, for whatever reasons, not reaching the troops at what the British sardonically called “the pointy end of the stick.” In short, Rommel was being asked to defend more and more with less and less.

  It was with this bitter reality in mind that, on June 29, the same day that Cherbourg fell, Rommel, along with von Rundstedt again met with Hitler, this time at Berchtesgaden. On the way to the Führer’s mountain eyrie, the two field marshals agreed that the time had come to bluntly tell Hitler that there was no hope of saving the military situation in the West: Germany’s only hope was a political solution. Rommel was especially firm in this, declaring that “The war must be ended and I shall tell the Führer so, clearly and unequivocally.” They presented concise but detailed reports about the looming debacle in France, insisting that the army be permitted to withdraw behind the Seine, where it was hoped a new defensive line could be established. Hitler, of course, would have none of it, insisting that “fanatical defense” would save the day. Rommel tried to direct the Führer’s attention to broader strategic questions, suggesting that the time had come for a political solution to bring the war to an end. Hitler would not hear of it: instead he subjected Rommel and von Rundstedt to one of his interminable military monologues, this one outlining how he intended to turn around the situation in the West.

  First, he insisted, the current Allied attacks would be stopped, though how this was to be accomplished he could not say, especially as the two field marshals had just informed him that the means for doing so no longer existed. Next, the Luftwaffe’s new wonder weapons, jet fighters and rocket-propelled bombers, would create chaos over the Allied beachhead—again a statement that bore little to no relationship to reality, as very few of the jet fighters and none of the rocket bombers yet existed at this point. Unconcerned with such details, he then declared that 1,000 new conventional fighters would begin operations in the West, temporarily restoring air superiority for the Luftwaffe and reducing or outright eliminating the threat of the Allied fighter-bombers. Again minor details—where would Germany acquire the pilots to fly these new aircraft and the aviation gasoline to fuel them?—were brushed aside: if Hitler desired something to be so, then in his increasingly fractured reality it simply became so. Aiding in the effort to suppress Allied air power, antiaircraft defenses along the roads between Paris and the front would be greatly strengthened; the guns and guncrews needed to make this happen simply did not exist, of course. Efforts at mining the waters off the Allied invasion beaches were to be stepped up, while a dozen schnelle Boote (the Allies knew them as “E-boats”) and eight submarines would wreak havoc on the support fleet off the Normandy coast—the same fleet protected by nearly 100 Allied destroyers and cruisers.

  At the end of this fantastical recital, Rommel simply stared Hitler out of countenance then abruptly asked the Führer if he truly believed Germany could still win the war. When Hitler did not reply, Rommel went on, saying that his own responsibility to the German people required that the dictator accept the truth about Germany’s strategic situation, military and political. In response Hitler slammed his fist on the conference table and furiously insisted that Rommel confine himself to purely military matters; Rommel countered by insisting that “History demands of me that I should deal first with our overall situation!” Warned again that he was to speak only about military subjects, Rommel tried once more, attempting to, as he put it, “speak for Germany.” At that both Rommel and von Rundstedt were dismissed from the Führer’s presence.290

  Both men left Berchtesgaden convinced that their military careers were over. This turned out to be true in von Rundstedt’s case, at least temporarily: the day after the meeting with Hitler, Geyr von Schweppenburg requested permission to withdraw his panzers out of range of Allied naval guns in order to organize a planned attack on Caen, permission von Rundstedt readily gave. Within 24 hours, Hitler had countermanded those instructions, and von Rundstedt telephoned the O.K.W., furiously demanding that his orders to Geyr be allowed to stand. Field Marshal Keitel refused to approach Hitler, fearing yet another of the Führer’s near-psychotic temper tantrums. Pleading helplessness, Keitel asked von Rundstedt “What shall we do?” Exasperated, von Rundsteadt barked back “Make peace, you fools!” When word of this outburst reached Hitler the following day, von Rundstedt was dismissed from the command of OB West.291

  Surprisingly, Rommel retained his post, but it was becoming an increasingly bleak duty. On July 5, in a forest near St Pierre-sur-Dives, Rommel met Geyr von Schweppenburg, who was barely recovered from the wounds he had suffered a month earlier, to deliver official word of Geyr’s dismissal. “I’ve come to tell you that you have been relieved,” he told von Schweppenburg. “Rundstedt has been too; I’m the next on the list.” Hitler, whose military vocabulary by this time was essentially reduced to “No retreat!” and “Fight to the last round and the last man!” had taken von Schweppenburg’s request to conduct a tactical withdrawal as, all evidence to the contrary not withstanding, a sign of defeatism, and so Geyr had to go. His place was taken by SS Oberst-Gruppenführer Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, a tough, experienced combat veteran, but who lacked Geyr’s operational skills. Dietrich would carry out von Schweppenburg’s planned attack: under near-constant bombardment while the panzers assembled, the attacking force was poorly organized and the attack badly coordinated, exactly as Geyr had feared; it achieved nothing but a lengthening of the German casualty lists. Rommel, meanwhile, found the task of informing Geyr of his relief an unpleasant one: he had come, in spite of himself, to respect the
Prussian aristocrat, and found it increasingly infuriating that the fanatic in Berchtesgaden refused to allow good officers to simply do their jobs. The writing was on the wall for Rommel: Hitler was losing the war and destroying the German Army in the process; before he was finished, he would destroy Germany as well.292

  Events were now heading to an unforeseen climax for both Rommel and Hitler. Taking von Rundstedt’s place as OB West was Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, who had been commanding officer of the Fourth Army in France in 1940 (Rommel had been one of his divisional commanders), and who then led Army Group Center in Russia in 1942 and 1943. Seriously injured in October 1943 when his car overturned on an icy road near Smolensk, he was invalided back to Germany and not pronounced fit to return to duty until mid-July 1944. Even before reaching France, von Kluge had already developed a negative opinion of Rommel, having listened too closely to the gossip flying about the O.K.W. and the Führer’s headquarters: Hitler, Keitel, and Jodl had all characterized Rommel as stubborn, insubordinate, and defeatist. Von Kluge, then, arrived in Paris determined to bring the maverick field marshal to heel. It was not long before the gist of some intemperate remarks made by von Kluge reached Rommel, who, always sensitive to slights, real or perceived, demanded that von Kluge explain himself.