Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (32 page)

For the German soldier in the first weeks of the Normandy battle, actions such as that of 2nd Panzer’s
Aufklärungsabteilung
at Caumont were commonplace: a rush to the threatened sector; a fierce and expert defence against clumsy Allied tactics; growing casualties as the enemy’s massed firepower was brought to bear; and at last, a retreat of a few hundred yards to the next line to be equally doggedly held with fewer men, fewer weapons, a slowly dwindling supply of hope. ‘Let’s enjoy the war,’ ran a Wehrmacht catchphrase of the period, ‘because the peace will be terrible.’
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On 6 June, the Allies had inflicted a crushing tactical surprise upon the Germans. In the weeks that followed, they maintained the greatest of all strategic deceptions by the FORTITUDE operation, which imprisoned almost the entire Fifteenth Army in the Pas de Calais until late July. Rommel’s efforts were dedicated to stemming the Allied tide, throwing into the line every new unit as it reached the battlefront. Above all, he was compelled to employ his armoured forces as links of steel in the sagging chain around the perimeter, and was thus unable to concentrate them in the rear for a major counter-attack. The armoured divisions reached Normandy first, because they possessed far greater mobility than the infantry, many of whom travelled the last 50 or 100 miles to the front on foot. Tanks made immensely effective strongpoints, but were almost invariably lost wherever the Allies gained ground. They could not be replaced. If the Allies were restricted in Normandy by their perceived shortage of infantry, the Germans were much more desperately frustrated by theirs. A report by 2nd Panzer in July discussed at length the tactics the division had found it necessary to employ in holding their sector of the line against the British. It concluded bleakly: ‘The fact that a modern panzer division with 2 tank battalions and 2 infantry battalions with armoured half-tracks is not necessary for such fighting is another
matter . . .’
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As Bradley accurately observed, ‘When the tank is employed in lieu of infantry simply to hold a defensive position, it becomes a wasted and uneconomic weapon.’
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If it is arguable that the British wasted precious time in the first days following the invasion, the Germans did no better. Rommel reached his château headquarters after his dash across France at 10.00 p.m. on 6 June, to spend most of the night trying to get a grip on his command, to learn precisely what was happening across the battle area in spite of a tangle of jammed wireless wavelengths and severed telephone links. His order for an immediate counter-attack on the 7th by 21st Panzer and 12th SS Panzer came to nothing, for Sepp Dietrich’s I SS Panzer Corps were quite unable to concentrate the tanks in time. Rommel issued a prompt and formal protest to Hitler’s headquarters about the lack of air and naval support for his battle, and warned Jodl that he was still convinced that the main Allied effort was to come elsewhere. It is interesting that Jodl, often a shrewd judge of strategic situation, never shared this view. But at this stage, both Berlin and Rommel were full of optimism about the prospects of throwing the Allies into the sea. Rommel’s adjutant Hellmuth Lang wrote home: ‘There’s a marvellous tranquillity shown by all concerned, particularly our chief of staff Speidel.’
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The field-marshal himself began to fight his battle with the same remorseless, restless energy that he had displayed in Africa, spending each day in headlong drives from formation to formation, inquiring, urging, demanding, galvanizing, and only returning to his headquarters at night to plan and to issue orders. It was a divisional, at most a corps commander’s, style of direction.

On the afternoon of 8 June, when Rommel arrived at Panzer Group West’s headquarters to find 21st Panzer and 12th SS Panzer’s counter-attack against the British in serious trouble, he at once ordered Geyr von Schweppenburg to divert a powerful battle-group north-west to try to recapture Bayeux, a thrust which was broken up by massive artillery and naval gunfire. At von Rund-stedt’s headquarters in Paris, there was deep dismay that all the
available German armour was now committed to piecemeal action, and not embarked upon a concentrated thrust. These complaints reflected sound tactical theory but ignored the desperate practical need on the battlefield to halt the enemy wherever he was pushing forward. That night, Colonel Bodo Zimmerman of Rundstedt’s staff telephoned Speidel: ‘Rommel has got to decide whether he’s going to get a big success tonight with the forces he already has. Rundstedt does not think he will, he thinks we’re going to have to strip other fronts ruthlessly to provide further strength.’
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Jodl also telephoned, reasserting his conviction that the landings were indeed the sole Allied effort. ‘There’s not going to be any second invasion.’
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Rommel dissented, declared that he was concentrating all his efforts upon preventing the link-up of the British and American beachheads, and declined to demand any weakening of Fifteenth Army in the Pas de Calais.

In the days that followed, some of his most serious losses were among corps and divisional commanders. On 12 June, the formidable old General Marcks of LXXXIV Corps set out to drive for the Carentan front when he heard that the town had fallen, and died in a strafing attack when his wooden leg prevented him from leaping from his car quickly enough to take cover. Fritz Witt of 12th SS Panzer died the same day, to be replaced by Kurt Meyer. The commander of the 243rd Infantry was killed on the 17th, that of the 77th mortally wounded on the 18th.

As Rommel strove to gain a grip of the battle, he could draw some satisfaction from the effectiveness with which the Allied thrusts southwards were being checked and even thrown back. But strategically, this was not enough. If he was frustrating the hopes of Montgomery, his own forces were nowhere within sight of the vital breakthrough to the sea. Even the fanatics of 12th SS Panzer expressed their belief that the Allied line could not be broken after their own attempts to smash through the Canadians had failed on 7 and 8 June. On 11 June, Sepp Dietrich of I SS Panzer Corps asserted that the line could be held for only three weeks. On the 14th, he told Rommel: ‘I am being bled and getting nowhere.’ Told
that he must attack, he demanded: ‘With what? We need another eight or ten divisions in a day or two, or we are finished.’
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Wehrmacht staff officers were astonished to see Dietrich, the hoary veteran Nazi whose relationship with Hitler had alone thrust him into high command, openly derisive about their hopes of victory. ‘He was no soldier, but he was a realist,’ said one.
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Rommel found every counter-attack that he contemplated rendered impossible by local tactical difficulties, fuel shortages or enemy fighter-bomber attacks. Each effort to move troops west to meet the threat to Cherbourg was prevented by more urgent needs closer at hand. A sense of desperation began to overcome him. ‘The invasion is quite likely to start at other places too, soon,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘There’s simply no answer to it. I reported to the Führer yesterday. Rundstedt is doing the same. It’s time for politics to come into play. It will all be over very quickly.’
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Rommel determined on 13 June that any attempt to reinforce the divisions fighting in the Cotentin would fatally weaken the critical front opposite the British Second Army. Despite furious orders from the Berghof to defend every yard of the road to Cherbourg, he successfully extricated useful elements of the 77th Division before the Americans sealed the peninsula. ‘It appears dubious whether the gravity of the situation is realized up above,’ he wrote to Frau Rommel on 14 June, ‘and whether the proper conclusions are being drawn.’
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Hitler’s visit to Soissons on the 17th enabled him to work his customary magnetic spell upon his field-marshal, momentarily arresting the relentless workings of reason. Rommel ‘cannot escape the Führer’s influence,’ wrote Hellmuth Lang.
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The Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B allowed himself to be encouraged by news of the V-I offensive on England, and lifted by the promise of yet more dramatic new weapons to follow. He saw the German front stiffening and holding around Caen and Caumont, the panzer formations inflicting heavy casualties upon the Allies and parrying their attacks. Defeat was still some way off. But Rommel scornfully rejected demands from Berlin for counter-attacks in the Cotentin,
pointing out that he scarcely possessed the forces to hold a line. The fall of Cherbourg made little impact upon him, for he and von Rundstedt had privately written off the port from the moment Carentan was lost. He was dismayed only by the absurd orders continuing to stream forth from Hitler’s headquarters, demanding that Cherbourg should be held ‘to the last round’. The principal achievement of Operation EPSOM on the 26th was to forestall a planned counter-attack by 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions, newly arrived from the east, and to inflict serious losses upon them when they were belatedly thrown into the battle.

On the 28th, at the height of the struggle around the Odon, Rommel once again saw Hitler in Berlin, at the Führer’s behest. Hitler’s intention, plainly, was to strengthen the resolve of his commander. He was enraged when Rommel persistently attempted to bring home to him the terrible reality of the situation in Normandy. At last, Rommel said:
‘Mein Führer
, I must speak bluntly. I cannot leave here without speaking on the subject of Germany.’ Hitler said abruptly: ‘Field-Marshal, be so good as to leave the room. I think it would be better like that.’
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It was their last meeting. Yet once again, the encounter had served to harden Rommel’s faltering determination. He returned to Normandy to find that Geyr von Schweppenburg had persuaded Speidel of the vital importance of withdrawing from the Caen bridgehead, out of range of the Allied naval guns. In the early hours of 1 July, Rommel ordered Geyr to continue to hold his ground instead. Yet von Rundstedt had already received Geyr’s report, arguing the need to pull back, and had forwarded it to Berlin with his own endorsement. Von Rundstedt had never troubled to conceal his own despair: ‘If you doubt what we are doing, get up here and take over this shambles yourself,’ he told Keitel witheringly when the OKW Chief of Staff sought to challenge his judgement by telephone from Germany.
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Before midnight on 1 July, Hitler’s order for Geyr’s dismissal had reached the front. He was succeeded in command of Panzer Group West by General Hans Eberbach. Rundstedt himself resigned his command the following morning,
after a peremptory hint from Berlin that his health was plainly no longer adequate to his task.

Von Rundstedt was succeeded by Field-Marshal von Kluge, a leathery Prussian veteran of the eastern front, who immediately sought to assert his own authority over Rommel and to reestablish his command’s confidence in their own ability to defend Normandy. Yet by the evening of 12 July, von Kluge was telephoning Jodl in Berlin. ‘I want to stress once again,’ he said, ‘that I am no pessimist. But in my view, the situation could not be grimmer.’
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Even after the removal of every open sceptic, the utmost exercise of the Führer’s personal magic and force, and the commitment to battle of some of the most powerful elements of the German army, there was now no senior officer in the entire German high command in France who believed that the battle for Normandy could be won. ‘The tragedy of our position is this,’ Rommel told Admiral Ruge on 13 July: ‘We are obliged to fight on to the very end, but all the time we’re convinced that it’s far more vital to stop the Russians than the Anglo-Americans from breaking into Germany.’
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He judged, with remarkable accuracy, that the German front in Normandy must collapse within a month. At that point, the relentless attrition of men and weapons would have become intolerable. Since D-Day, he had lost 2,360 officers and over 94,000 men, while receiving only 6,000 replacements. He had lost 225 tanks and received 17, in addition to the new formations arriving at the front. The ammunition position remained critical. Yet every Allied tank and aircraft lost was replaced within a few hours. ‘Everywhere our troops are fighting heroically,’ he reported to von Kluge on 15 July, ‘but the unequal struggle is drawing to its close.’
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It was at about this date that, for the first time, Rommel began to put out feelers to his commanders – notably Eberbach and Sepp Dietrich – about the possibility of their support should it prove feasible to open some form of negotiations with the Allies. Hellmuth Lang was witness to one conversation at which Dietrich – Hitler’s old chauffeur and devoted follower in the Munich days of Nazism – shook Rommel’s hand and declared: ‘You’re the boss,
Herr Feldmarschall.
I obey only you – whatever it is you’re planning.’
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Then Rommel and his aide climbed back into the big Horch staff car, a corporal in the back acting as the inevitable ‘looky-looky’ for Allied aircraft, and raced away towards his headquarters. On the N179 short of Vimoutiers, at around 6.00 p.m., a British Typhoon caught them, wounding Rommel’s driver and sending the car careering into a tree, throwing its passengers into the road. Rommel, terribly injured in the head, had ended his career as a battlefield commander, and would be forced to suicide three months later on the evidence of the 20 July conspirators. The field-marshal had never been party to their plans, but the evidence that they had considered him a suitable figurehead to lead negotiations with the Allies was sufficient to ensure his death sentence. Von Kluge succeeded him, remaining Commander-in-Chief West while also assuming command of Army Group B. He merely moved his own desk from Paris to Rommel’s headquarters at La Roche Guyon.

Throughout his tenure of command in Normandy, Rommel directed the defence of the German front to formidable effect, filling the critical gaps and rushing forward units to stem dangerous Allied attacks. But there was no evidence in his handling of the battle of a great commander making brilliant strokes to confound the enemy. ‘In Normandy, there was no particular sign of Rommel’s presence,’ said Montgomery’s intelligence officer Brigadier Williams,
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who had also watched the German general through the desert campaign. In the summer of 1944, Rommel played the part of the firefighter with all the energy at his command. It is difficult to see how any other commander could have achieved more, given the limitations of his resources and orders. His absence from Normandy on D-Day was unfortunate, but it is hard to believe that it was decisive. 21st Panzer might have intervened earlier had Rommel been present, but unsupported it could not have threatened the survival of Second Army’s beach-
head. At no stage in the battle did the division show anything like the determination in action of Panzer Lehr or 12th SS Panzer. It remains just possible that Rommel’s personal influence would have sufficed to get Meyer and his tanks onto the battlefield on the afternoon of 6 June, in which case the British and Canadians would have been in serious trouble. But the balance of probability remains that Second Army could have established itself ashore against any available German defence. By mid-afternoon of D-Day, the excellent British anti-tank guns were already inland and deployed in strength. Just as the Allied commanders on D-Day were at the mercy of their subordinates’ efficiency in executing their plan, so the German Seventh Army could achieve no more than the quality of its forces on the ground and the strength of the Atlantic Wall allowed. With or without Rommel, it lacked the mobility to concentrate for quick counter-attacks. Only the panzer divisions could execute these, and they could arrive no faster than their road speed and the Allied air forces would permit. ‘You know that it was my phrase – “The Longest Day”?’ said Rommel’s adjutant Hellmuth Lang. ‘After that day, after June 6, there was no hope of counter-attacks being decisive.’
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