Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (7 page)

Der Führer assigned General Rommel his own Panzer tank division to command shortly after our victory over the Poles. Herr General Rommel has been virtually unstoppable since then. When he led his 7
^th
Panzer Division through the Ardennes Forest and across the Meuse River during the invasion of France in May of 1940, he beat even General Guderian’s Panzers across to the other bank. And I am convinced that if he had not been ordered to halt by the Führer himself, the British would not have had the opportunity to escape as they did at Dunkirk. Nevertheless, it was because of General Rommel’s heroics during this battle that he was awarded yet another medal: the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. He fought at Dieppe and, wise now to the possibility of a sea borne escape, he raced there and took the town of St. Valery where the enemy troops from both France and Britain surrendered. The Canadians were annihilated at Dieppe because of General Rommel. He then blitzkrieged across France and on 17. June, reached the port of Cherbourg on the Cotentin Peninsula, half a country away. As we all know, it was here that the British left France and der Führer accepted the surrender of France on 21.June.1940. France has been in our hands since that date due in no small part to General Rommel. Our Minister of Propaganda, Herr Josepf Goebbels even had a movie made about General Rommel’s heroic exploits and people lined up night after night to see him in
Victory in the West.

As brilliantly as he fought in France in 1940, he fought even more brilliantly in Afrika in 1941 and 1942. Der Führer had made him Commander of the Deutsches Afrika Korps. I know that the foreign press referred to him as “The Desert Fox.” I’m not sure how this moniker made Herr General Rommel feel but I myself am glad that his genius is being recognized by the world. Perhaps they will come to their senses and sue for peace which is what der Führer thought the British would have done before now. In any event, as a tank commander, Herr General Rommel moved his tanks with lightening speed to his objectives. He stopped for nothing and for no one. Enemy soldiers could be found along the way and General Rommel would order them to be ignored for now, as another unit would deal with them later. His greatest skill, in my opinion, is his ability to attack a very surprised enemy - a surprised enemy who wasn’t given the time to prepare or plan. Herr General Rommel won battle after battle following his brilliant instincts.

While his successes in Afrika against the Englishman Montgomery couldn’t be argued with, I have to admit we were not able to hold on to all the gains we made, but I don’t think Afrika was that important to der Führer anymore. By this time, Herr Hitler was transfixed on conquering the sub-human Slavs. What I know and what no one seems to consider is that the Englishman Montgomery prevailed only because Afrika became a battle of attrition. It became abundantly clear that our enemy had far more resources available to him during this fight than we had available to us. I know for a fact that Herr Field Marshal asked, and asked again, for replacement troops and for more equipment and ammunition to be sent to him for his Panzerarmee Afrika but these things were not available since der Führer was all set to conquer Russia and this is where the supplies were sent. So without the necessary men and weapons, it is no wonder Montgomery prevailed. He didn’t prevail easily, though, and Herr Rommel could easily have won if even a fraction of what he needed had been sent to him and if what had been sent to him had not been lost at sea. I can tell you that the reason General Montgomery stood any chance at all was because our Führer had no more soldiers or supplies to give to General Rommel after the losses incurred because of Herr Hitler’s order that no ground be given. I am convinced that if we would have received even a small portion of what we lost in replacement men and materiel, or if General Rommel had been permitted to retreat and regroup, the English General Montgomery would be whistling out of the other side of his face right now. The only thing he would be commanding would be the lilies to grow on his grave.

So General Rommel was called back to Germany and he left Afrika on 9. March.1943, with no word whether he was ever to return to that command. Herr Hitler had the brilliant idea of bringing General von Arnim to Afrika to whip our troops into the shape that apparently der Führer thought General Rommel should have made of them. I’m not sure what transpired or who said what to whom but by the second week in May, just about two months after General von Arnim’s arrival, Hitler must have finally realized that Afrika was lost because General von Arnim finally received orders from der Führer allowing the evacuation that General Rommel had been pressing for since last November. It was only then that all of our remaining German and Italian troops were evacuated by sea but it was much too late to save them or Afrika, though I would never say that out loud to a living soul.

General von Arnim had written a report to der Führer which I saw when I was working for General Rommel earlier in the war. He reported that all our ammunition was gone and all our armaments in Afrika were destroyed. While he did not include this, I saw other reports saying that 100,000 of our German troops were taken prisoner. The Italians claim that they lost nearly 150,000 men who were also taken as prisoners out of Afrika. Had der Führer agreed to allow the regrouping that General Rommel requested, losses would have been curtailed and we’d have had more men and materiel to fight with somewhere else. Nevertheless, with Afrika now in the hands of the enemy and Herr Hitler being the military genius that he is, Field Marshal Rommel, Commander of the Deutsches Afrika Korps was sent back to Germany where he was next ordered to command the German Army in Italy after their cowardly surrender to the enemy in September of 1943. I suppose that after Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, was kidnapped by rebels in Italy, we all knew their eventual surrender was inevitable. Once it happened, someone had to be in charge of keeping Italy in German hands and that task went to General Rommel. He took control of disarming the weak Italians for a while but eventually, command of that theater was transferred. Herr Rommel was recalled yet again to be sent to another battleground. That battleground was France.

After our stunning rout of the British at Dunkirk, where virtually all of the remaining British troops were evacuated from France, the French army surrendered. With their surrender and the evacuation of the British, France was in our hands and it came to serve as an outpost for our German troops. There was now no real need to keep German troops tied down in France and as our glorious Russian campaign needed more and more troops, der Führer took them from France in order to send them to the Eastern Front to help in the defeat of Russia. With the weakening of troop protection of France, der Führer came up with another plan of genius proportions and he ordered an “Atlantik Wall” to be erected to protect “Festung Europa” from enemy invaders from the sea. We already had the impregnable West Wall protecting our western borders. A similar defensive string would allow even more troops to be taken from France and moved to Russia. The engineers and laborers of Organisation Todt therefore began constructing this “Wall” but because it really wasn’t a solid wall per se, only sporadic blocks of defensive emplacements, there were still gaps which could be exploited by the enemy. It actually was more like an empty space with a defensive stronghold every so often than a real wall. So as time went by, more and more defensive structures such as concrete bunkers, gun emplacements and artillery batteries were added by the engineers of Organisation Todt, which fortified the Wall all along the French coastline. This great “Atlantik Wall” would protect and allow us to defend our holdings from Norway, across the French coast all the way to the French-Spanish border some 6,000 kilometers away, minimizing the need for the whole coast to be manned with troops. Hitler is a genius!

Really, though, it was only after the Americans entered the War that Herr Hitler gave any real thought to the need for more ambitiously fortifying the defense to Festung Europa since before that, there was virtually no need. We occupied France and even if the British tried to come over here again, the Wall was plenty strong to repel them. Who else did we have to worry about? But after Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 and our declaration of War on the United States, Der Führer was brilliant in his assessment that sooner or later, the Americans would come to fight. It became clear to der Führer that the big, but stupid, Americans would undoubtedly join up with the British and try at some time to invade Europe. So after we declared war on the Americans, it was clear to everyone that European coastlines, especially in France, had to be fortified. Now that der Führer divined that a cross Channel invasion would be coming sometime in the future, he needed a commander to put more teeth into the Atlantik Wall to ensure it would protect the territories in Europe that were now ours. I heard that he even stopped taking troops from France to send to Russia. In fact, what I heard now, was that he actually took Ost Front troops and moved them into France. Hitler is a genius!

It was in November of 1943, I remember, when Field Marshal Rommel received his new orders and with those orders, he was given a new title. He was now Commander of Army Group B and was responsible for the area in northern France from the Orne River to Antwerp in Belgium, more than 500 kilometers away. Field Marshal Rommel was sent to France with the general directive ordering him to inspect the defensive “Atlantik Wall,” report his findings directly to der Führer and command Army Group B. Was this a slap in old Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s face? After all, General Gerd von Rundstedt had been called out of retirement in March 1942 to command our German defenders in France and the rest of Europe. I wonder why he wasn’t tasked with this responsibility but then I consider how much more aggressive and modern General Rommel is and I see the rationale for der Führer’s partiality. Der Führer’s faith in General Rommel was as obvious as his admiration and gratitude. With this assignment, der Führer also awarded General Rommel the diamonds to his Knight’s Cross. If my understanding is correct, only five other generals have been given this distinction and honor. It was also just about this time when General Rommel’s 14 year old son received his draft notice.

I’m glad der Führer recognized how brilliant a soldier Herr Rommel is when he promoted him to be Commander of the Atlantik Wall. With that promotion, der Führer put him in charge of defending France. Well actually, not “in charge” but he joined with a few others of our outstanding Command staff. Field Marshal von Rudstedt is our Commander in Chief in the West. Field Marshal Rommel who is Commander of Army Group B is just under him and he commands General Friedrich Dollmann who was appointed Generaloberst and commander-in-chief of the Seventh German Army and General Hans von Salmuth who is Commander of the Fifteenth Army. Commanding Panzer Group West is General Geyr von Schweppenburg who earlier commanded armored divisions in Russia. Between these highly decorated and seasoned officers, I was sure we would be ready for anything the enemy could throw at us.

In order to fortify and aggressively protect Festung Europa, Hitler ordered General Rommel to undertake the following prioritized list of tasks:

First: Establish protection of our U-boat pens

Secondly: Provide harbor defense for coastal traffic

Thirdly: Provide harbor defense against enemy landings and

Lastly: Provide for the defense of open beaches.

While General Rommel has seen to all of these tasks, I believe he will be most famous for the last item on Hitler’s list, “providing for the defense of open beaches.”

General Rommel went to France thinking that all he had read about the security and impregnability of the Atlantik Wall was true. While there are bunkers and pillboxes which had been put in place ever since the time we began occupying France in 1940, Herr Rommel inspected sector after sector and found that the linear defense currently in place was nothing but a good start. It is true that there were gun batteries covered and hidden by thick concrete casemates which had massive guns, range finding capabilities, telephone connections to keep all personnel in constant contact, map rooms and even bunk rooms for sleeping. Besides centimeters of thick concrete, they were further protected by machine gun nests, barbed wire, minefields, ditches and many were dug into the sides of hills. I read something that I thought was most ironic. It seems that many of the guns in place in these casemates were taken off old French, British, or Czech tanks. We were going to use the enemies’ own guns against them! But the gun batteries were so spread out and so under-defended that General Rommel knew more had to be done if we stood any hope of repelling an enemy invasion.

If truth be told, after General Rommel inspected the wall and the defenses which had been built over the last three years, he was incensed at their inadequacy. He wanted new and better defenses and many more new gun batteries. So more were built and many were more heavily fortified. He issued orders to make certain that all empty spaces along the disconnected wall were filled with as many deadly obstacles as possible. He ordered camouflage to be added to all the batteries and emplacements to prevent the Allied planes from spotting our defenses from the air. I heard that small holes were made on the tops of these gun emplacements so that grass and flowers could be planted in them to make the disguises even more realistic. General Rommel understood immediately the urgency of defending France and went to work in his classic style.

He ordered everyone to redouble his efforts and arranged for four layers of obstacles to be erected to stop the enemy boats from even reaching the Normandy shores. Being the intelligent general and strategist that he is, General Rommel is certain the invaders have to be thrown back into the sea before they reach the beach heads and that the invasion has to be defeated on the beaches. He is firmly convinced that the sea shore is where our best defenses have to lie in order to keep the attackers floundering in the water where they would be sitting ducks for our guns built into the overlooking bluffs. He had some guns in the batteries laid out to shoot right down on the beaches, some laid out to shoot enfilading fields of fire and some positioned to knock out any approaching ships with huge shells and mortars. But General Rommel still saw that we hadn’t a hope in the world of pushing any invaders back from the beaches if these were the only defenses we had in place.