♦ The Great Commanders ♦

The Desert Fox: Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
 

 

Erwin Rommel (on Hitler's left) in Poland, September 1939 (Bundesarchiv)
 

 

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No senior general on the German side in World War II became better known than Erwin Rommel. He was still a colonel on the eve of the war and in 1938 was given command of the Führer-Begleit-Battalion, Hitler’s personal military escort. The Führer knew Rommel by reputation and looked favorably on him because he was a fellow combat veteran of the Great War—a decorated “front fighter” like himself. Hitler had an interest in promoting the careers of such officers as a counterblast against the clique of aristocratic Prussian staff officers who ran the Army, and whom he disliked and deeply distrusted. Rommel himself was a Württemberger of middle-class background who did not wear the silver-embroidered crimson collar insignia and crimson trouser stripes of the General Staff. Despite this, he was promoted to major-general shortly before the invasion of Poland (1 September 1939).

Thus Rommel was well positioned to lobby for command of a panzer division and this he received at Hitler’s instigation after the Army personnel office turned his request down, offering him a mountain infantry division instead. He became commanding general of the 7. Panzer-Division in time for the invasion of France (10 May 1940) and his outstanding leadership of the “Ghost Division,” as it came to be nicknamed, laid the foundation of his later military reputation.

What is remarkable is that at the time of his appointment, Rommel had no particular experience of armored warfare. During the Great War he’d served as an infantry officer in the crack Alpenkorps, a mountain infantry division, primarily on the Italian front. As an infantry company commander he displayed the qualities of leadership that were later to serve him so well in France and North Africa: dash, drive, initiative, an intuitive feel for the battlefield. Rommel was one of the very few junior infantry officers to receive Imperial Germany’s highest military decoration, the coveted Pour le Mérite, known colloquially as the Blue Max. (Another was the writer Ernst Jünger, author of the Great War classic, Storm of Steel.)
 

Lieutenant Rommel and a brother officer in Italy, 1917. By this time he had been awarded the Blue Max (Weapons and Warfare)

After the war Captain Rommel was selected for retention in the Reichsheer, the 100,000-man army allowed to Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1920 he received command of a company of Infanterie-Regiment 13, then stationed in Stuttgart, a post in which he remained for the next nine years. Subsequently he was posted as an instructor to the Infantry School in Dresden (1929-33), being promoted to major in 1932. A year later he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and given command of Jäger-Bataillon 3 of Infanterie-Regiment 17. In 1934 he met Hitler for the first time, when the Führer reviewed the battalion during an inspection tour.

In 1935 Lieutenant-Colonel Rommel was posted as an instructor to the newly reopened War Academy in Berlin, where he remained for the next three years. It was during this time that he wrote Infanterie greift an (Infantry Attacks) a narrative and analysis of his experiences as a Great War infantry officer that became a bestseller. Among its many readers was Hitler. The author had already come to the Führer’s notice as a gifted instructor and on the strength of this he had Rommel appointed to the War Ministry as military liaison officer to the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) organization. The appointment was not a happy one. Rommel, the apolitical soldier, soon came into collision with Baldur von Schirach, the HJ leader, over training issues. Their disagreements proved intractable, and in 1937 Colonel Rommel (as he was by then) was quietly transferred to the Theresian Military Academy in Austria as its commandant.

But the HJ interlude did not diminish Rommel’s standing in Hitler’s eyes. In 1938 the Führer specifically requested his appointment as commander of the new Führer-Begleit-Battalion. During the Polish campaign he accompanied Hitler on his visits to the front, which gave him an opportunity to observe the Panzerwaffe in action. Having been promoted to major-general just before the outbreak of the war, Rommel knew that he would likely be offered a divisional command, and what he had seen in Poland convinced him to request a panzer division.

Yet despite Rommel’s special relationship with Hitler, his attitude toward the National Socialist regime was always equivocal. Without doubt, he welcomed Hitler’s ascent to power: As a German officer he had both patriotic and professional reasons for supporting Hitler’s rearmament program and foreign policy aims. Though he never became a formal member of the Nazi Party Rommel was, until a relatively late stage, a regime loyalist: a man who viewed with approval much of the National Socialist program. But he preferred to steer clear of politics—a preference that became more and more problematical as he advanced in rank.

Unlike many other senior generals Rommel never served on the Eastern Front and had no first-hand knowledge of the worst Nazi crimes. The war in North Africa, though not quite the chivalrous affair of legend, was conducted by both sides with a decent respect for the law of war. Yet Rommel cannot have been unaware of the atrocities committed by German forces elsewhere, nor of Nazism’s genocidal anti-Semitism. Certainly Rommel shared some of the anti-Jewish and racial prejudices common in Germany at the time. But he seems to have been disdainful of Nazi racist ideology and is known to have expressed sharp disapproval of the treatment meted out to German Jews in the years before the war. Even so, the best that can be said of him in this regard is that he preferred to look the other way until force of circumstances compelled him to face the facts.
 

Rommel with officers of the 7. Panzer-Division during the 1940 French campaign (Bundesarchiv)

But in the spring of 1940 all that lay in the future. Commanding 7. Panzer-Division in the invasion of France and the Low Countries, Rommel displayed the same dash and decisiveness that had won him the Blue Max as an infantry officer in the Great War. But his real moment of glory came in February 1941 when he was promoted to lieutenant-general and made commander of the Deutsches Afrikakorps, a small, two-division mechanized corps. The DAK was intended to bolster up the Italian Army in North Africa, which had just been soundly defeated by a much smaller British force. The high command in Berlin enjoined him to adopt a defensive posture, but this direction and his technical subordination to the Italian command in North Africa Rommel blithely disregarded. In March he went over to the offensive with his small force and in short order the British were bundled out of Italian North Africa.

There followed a year and a half of seesaw combat over the Western Desert, in which the British were repeatedly out-generalled by the Desert Fox, as Rommel soon became known. “Rommel, Rommel, Rommel!” Winston Churchill was heard to say during this period. “What else matters but beating him?” But in Berlin the North African campaign was regarded as a sideshow and the Chief of the General Staff, General Franz Halder, looked with disfavor upon Rommel’s performance. The high command’s attention was fixed on the Eastern Front, the DAK was never given the additional forces that might have enabled Rommel to score a decisive victory, and the Desert Fox’s run of luck came to an end at El Alamein.

The final stage of Rommel’s career was melancholy. Though promoted to field marshal and hailed as a national hero, he became depressed as the realization grew on him that Hitler’s direction of the war and the crimes of the regime were driving Germany to destruction. As has already been noted, Rommel was not a political soldier and he preferred to concentrate on his military duties. But as he rose in rank involvement in politics became unavoidable. His disillusionment stemmed from the closing stages of the North African campaign when for the first time he had to deal directly with Hitler's military irrationality, and it was confirmed during the Battle of Normandy in the summer of 1944.

In November 1943, Rommel was appointed as General Inspector of Western Defenses. What he found there appalled him: Hitler’s vaunted Atlantic Wall was little more than a propaganda myth. An Allied invasion of France in the spring of 1944 appeared inevitable, and Rommel argued to Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the Commander-in-Chief West, and to Hitler that a major buildup of forces and defenses was urgently necessary. On Rundstedt’s recommendation, Rommel was appointed to the command of Army Group B, charged with the defense of the most likely invasion sites: Normandy and the Pas de Calais. He tackled the job with characteristic energy but soon found himself embroiled in a debate over basic strategy. Rommel was convinced that the invasion must be defeated on the beaches by immediately throwing in all available forces; his superior Rundstedt argued for the creation of a large operational reserve in readiness to launch a well-prepared counterstroke once the main objective of the Allied attack became apparent. Hitler, who had the last word, could not make up his mind and so split the difference—with fatal results on D-Day and after.
 

Rommel (right) with Field Marshal von Rundstedt at the latter's headquarters in Paris, early 1944 (Bundesarchiv)

Rommel was absent in Germany on the day of the Allied invasion (6 June 1944), and during the subsequent Battle of Normandy he never had an opportunity to repeat his brilliant North African performance. Facing a greatly superior enemy, hamstrung by Hitler’s stand-fast order, he grew increasingly pessimistic. When he and Rundstedt met with Hitler on 17 June, Rommel was blunt: the unequal struggle on the Normandy front would end with the collapse of the German Army and the loss of France. He suggested that the Führer should draw the inevitable political conclusions, implying that Germany must sue for peace. Hitler brusquely dismissed this advice, telling Rommel to mind his own business and concentrate on his military duties.

Like various other generals, then, Rommel turned against his Führer when it became clear that the war was lost, though the extent of his involvement in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime remains unclear. Rommel’s chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Hans Speidel, was an active conspirator, however, and it seems likely that through him the Field Marshal became aware of the plot. Evidence uncovered in 2018 indicates that Rommel was in contact with other conspirators as well, and that after some soul searching he came to the conclusion that Hitler and his inner circle had to be eliminated.

But Germany’s most famous soldier was not fated to play a role in the drama of 20 July 1944. On 17 July the staff car carrying Rommel was strafed by an RAF fighter-bomber. He was seriously wounded and on 20 July lay unconscious in the hospital. Though his doctors expected him to die, Rommel rallied and eventually was discharged to convalesce at home. While he languished there, the Gestapo investigation into the assassination attempt brought his involvement to light. But unlike the other conspirators Rommel was not dragged before the People’s Court to be reviled and denounced by its venomous chief judge, Roland Freisler. Hitler feared the consequences that might flow from the public humiliation and execution of such a national hero, so instead Rommel was offered an honorable exit. He would be permitted to commit suicide, thus avoiding disgrace and protecting his family from retaliation. Rommel agreed to this and on 14 October 1944 he took the poison provided by two officers who'd been sent to convey Hitler's offer. The German people were told that the Desert Fox had died of his wounds; his funeral and burial were conducted with full military pomp.

Thus ended the career of a legendary military figure. In retrospect, however, it must be said that Erwin Rommel’s record as a commander is mixed. He was certainly a valiant soldier and a brilliant tactician but the Desert Fox never had an opportunity to show what he could do at the highest level of command. There is reason, indeed, to think that he lacked the breadth of vision necessary for such a position. Rommel tended to slight the logistical or administrative side of war; it was other people's business to provide the supplies that his troops needed. He was at his best in a fluid, dynamic situation, leading from the front, in direct touch with the battle, which was why desert warfare suited him so well. In Normandy, commanding Army Group B against a greatly superior enemy, he never had an opportunity to repeat that performance.

As a commander of men Rommel certainly possessed a deft touch. Though he was unpretentious, he had presence and his junior officers and troops—both German and Italian—were devoted to him. And though he was critical—sometimes rudely so—of the Italian command, he was generous in his assessment of the ordinary Italian soldiers who, he said, were not responsible for the shortcomings of their leadership. When after a battlefield setback an Italian battalion commander protested to him, “Please believe me, my men are not cowards,” Rommel replied, “Who said anything about cowards? It’s the fault of your leaders for sending you into action with such poor equipment.”
 

Rommel in North Africa with German and Italian officers, 1941 (World War II Database)

Many senior German generals were critical of Rommel, among them his superior in France, Field Marshal von Rundstedt. Perhaps influenced by their dispute over strategy, he opined to the British military historian B.H. Liddell Hart in a postwar interview that the Desert Fox, though undoubtedly a soldier's soldier, was in over his head as an army group commander. Rundstedt added, however, that despite their disagreements Rommel had been a loyal subordinate: When I gave him an order, he carried it out without making any difficulties.”

Perhaps the closest counterpart to Rommel among the senior Allied generals was General George S. Patton, another great fighting soldier who served at a level below the summit of command. Though Rommel displayed none of Patton’s self-conscious flamboyance and showmanship, he took the same cut-and-thrust approach to armored warfare. L'audace, l'audace, tojours l'audace, as Frederick the Great put it. Both Rommel and Patton followed the King's advice.

But let the last word on Erwin Rommel rest with Winston Churchill:

His ardour and daring inflicted grievous disasters upon us, but he deserves the salute which I made him—and not without some reproaches from the public—in the House of Commons in January 1942, when I said of him, We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.” He also deserves our respect because, although a loyal German soldier, he came to hate Hitler and all his works, and took part in the conspiracy of 1944 to rescue Germany by displacing the maniac and tyrant. For this, he paid the forfeit of his life. In the sombre wars of modern democracy chivalry finds no place.

The Second World War Volume III: The Grand Alliance
 

The Desert Fox: Rommel as commander of the Afrikakorps (World War Photos)

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