Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (8 page)

He knew from his experience in Afrika, where the British laid a million mines in two months, what a deterrent those could be and he envisioned mining the coastline of Normandy with more than 10 million mines. Within the five months from when he took over defending these approaches, over a half million obstacles had been laid and more than four million mines had been buried along the entire French coast. Our men had been content to lay about 40,000 mines a month for the time period before General Rommel arrived. True to form, however, he showed the men how to lay mines more efficiently and most effectively and now they are laying up to about 1 million mines per month.

Mining the terrain and building entrenchments were just two aspects of the defenses General Rommel planned. Once his plans were approved, he began fortifying the French beaches and so brilliantly did he pursue this task, that he found that the types of obstacles and impediments we needed weren’t even available so he invented and designed his own. As I’ve said, General Rommel wanted four belts of defenses against the coming invasion. Two were almost completed but they would be virtually useless if the enemy came by boat at low tide. So he strengthened a third belt of defenses and as a result, we would now be able to hold the key positions forever, I believe. He cleverly planned for obstacles to be placed at varying locations so no matter what the tide level was, the enemies’ approach would be thwarted. I thought there had to be at least a million of these obstacles in place, so arduously did he drive his men, but he said it was more like only a half million. Still...those posts and gates and sharpened sticks all topped off with exploding devices along with the barbed wire, the mines and gun emplacements all provided us with deadly protection.

With all of those defenses covering our front, General Rommel also considered our back. Behind the beaches of Normandy lay marshes and fields. True to form, Herr Rommel planned for an attack coming in by air and landing in these fields. He therefore had the dams and locks opened so that these areas behind and beyond our gun batteries would flood. Under the water, he had stakes planted so that any airplane attempting to land would have its belly ripped open. More mines and barbed wire were laid by the mile. No planes could land behind us and if the enemy were so reckless as to send in parachutists, they would drown or explode upon landing if they weren’t shot out of the sky before that. With everything in place, it seemed to me that the enemy would never make it past the sea or air and onto dry land.

When General Rommel was commanding troops in France in 1940, he had taken the Fountainbleau Chateau as his headquarters. But as of March, 1944 when he was sent by der Führer to Normandy, General Rommel took La Roche Guyon, the chateau of a family of French nobility as his headquarters. It is a strong stone castle and besides being able to withstand enemy attacks if they ever dared to make any, General Rommel chose La Roche Guyon to be closer to the beaches where he foresaw the future front would be. This new headquarters is just outside Paris, very close to the gardens of the painter Monet yet close enough to the northern French coastline so he could make daily inspections. Sometimes, as I run from room to room, I find that I keep having to avoid tripping over maps and drawings. The drawings are so interesting! They are the designs of various obstacles that General Rommel is fashioning.

General Rommel drew up defensive plans and wasn’t content to receive reports from those in the field. He wanted to see for himself what conditions were like along the beaches of France. We knew, you see, that the Americans would join with the British, and attempt to land their troops as close to Germany as possible thinking that they wouldn’t have to march so far to reach our borders. What they didn’t know was how impenetrable our defenses were. They could invade and fight all they wanted; they could never get past our West Wall and with all the impediments and obstacles we had in place along the coast of France, it was doubtful that they would even move off the beaches. We had the mightiest tanks and tank commanders and it was clear that no army could stand up against our Panzer divisions. Yes, I know we lost many of the 17 Panzer tank divisions we threw into our Kursk Offensive in Russia last summer, but that was because the generals leading them were cowards and did not measure up to the responsibility der Führer had placed in them. With Field Marshal Rommel, that was an impossibility.

The Atlantik Wall was now virtually impregnable which was a good thing, since most of our army and tank units were fighting in the east, in Russia. I saw a report that said as of June, 1944, there were 70 divisions on the western front and about 200 divisions on the eastern front in Russia. We didn’t have full use of those 70 divisions in the west though, because 23 of them were in Italy. While on paper we had about 50 divisions which were available to us for the defense of the Atlantik Wall, many of these divisions were undermanned. Others were comprised of conscript troops, who were undependable to fight with tenacity and conviction, or were filled with troops who were exhausted from service on the Eastern Front. Hitler considered his genius to be that he knew exactly where to place fighting men and where to place static defenses. To Herr Rommel, however, it was obvious he would need to have all the fighting soldiers of all the divisions in France at the ready when the invasion occurred. He drove his commanders without mercy and though he was still not happy with the defenses in place, by the spring of 1944, he was less unhappy than he was when he first saw the situation. Let them try to come over! They wouldn’t get 1000 meters from where they landed!

After he saw to the state of the Atlantik Wall defenses, General Rommel next took inventory and found that he had just over a half million men available to arm almost 2500 kilometers of French coastline. In an effort to be extra prepared, he thought that defending the coasts through Holland to Norway would not be a waste of energy but he was only ordered to inspect and protect the Atlantik Wall in northern France. If the invasion were to come at any of those other areas, I was praying that someone as methodical and competent as he would have been put in charge. Just given the size of the area that he was to protect made Herr General Rommel calmly nervous, if that makes any sense. He retained his aura of calm, but I could tell he was nervous because of all the unknowns. Where precisely would the attack occur? When exactly would the enemy launch their attack? Would there be more than one attack? Would our defenses be ready for when the attack did come? We knew an attack would come; it was just a matter of time. In fact, we even knew the code words that would be read over the BBC to alert those cowardly resistance fighters. They dashed around under cover of darkness to try to delay the inevitable. Our men found them, of course, and tried to make examples of them but still they thought themselves to be more powerful than we. What a joke they were! Cutting a wire here; using crude bombs there; changing the direction of a road sign or putting a hole in the tire of a German vehicle. They were like flies: an annoyance, nothing more. Our troops were more than a match for them and reprisals took place frequently as a result of their misplaced ideals.

Herr General Rommel did not stop with just erecting obstacles and laying mines. He made sure our troops took full advantage of the terrain of Northern France and ordered tanks, soldiers and Panzerfausts to be hidden among the cover of the hedgerows. The only problem that I could see was that General Rommel didn’t have full autonomy to order all the tanks and soldiers in Northern France to where he wanted them located. As Army Group B Commander, Field Marshal Rommel had more than half a million troops and three Panzer divisions to his name, but only the 21
^st
Panzer Division and the 2
^nd
Panzer Division were in Northern France, the 21
^st
around Caen and the 2
^nd
around Amiens. Further south, General Blaskowitz commanded Army Group G. Because der Führer was the only commander capable of deciding when and where to deploy certain of the other Panzer divisions, he alone controlled them. We were constantly trying to see if we could get at least a couple of the Mobile Reserve divisions released to our command, but so far to no avail. General Rommel was one of the few generals who sometimes had the ear of der Führer, maybe because they had become friends when General Rommel was der Führer’s bodyguard and commanded those troops. I know General von Rundstedt did not have much power of persuasion and I think he resented it. He once said that the only authority he had was to order the guards at his gate to be changed. I also think he resented the fact that in title, he was superior to General Rommel though in fact, it was General Rommel who seemed to be commanding our troops. But as resentful as he may have felt, I would imagine Herr Generaloberst Dollmann was even more put out because even though he was Commander of the Seventh Army, he had no control over any of the Panzer divisions, not even the one in his zone of command.

A couple of months ago, I think it must have been around April of this year, General Rommel had ordered his 21
^st
Afrika Corps Panzer Division to move to protect the critical city of Caen on the chance the invasion might occur in Normandy. He was certain that Caen with its nearby airfield at Carpiquet would be an initial target objective of any invaders in this area and he took the opportunity to arrange for its defense before the enemy actually arrived. General Rommel had ordered it to move from Rennes and to redeploy around Caen. He positioned elements of this Division far and wide, actually over an area of about 500 square kilometers. He was ordered to keep the 116
^th
east of the Seine in case the invasion came around Calais which der Führer foresaw as the likelier Schwerpunkt.

General Rommel had posted men around Caen on both sides of the River Orne, placed artillery units all along the coast and had the Panzers stay more inland. He asked for authority to have the other three Panzer divisions in Panzer Group West to be moved closer to the beach heads throughout Normandy but old Field Marshal Von Rundstedt refused to even ask der Führer for the necessary permission. General von Rundstedt insisted these divisions were needed to fight the invaders once they moved off the beaches wherever they landed and began attacking cities and towns inland.

We all knew there were divergent opinions in the defensive strategies between General von Rundstedt and Herr General Rommel. The disagreement was between whether the beaches would be the most advantageous place to concentrate our defenses or whether concentrating our defenses further inland would make more tactical sense. Clearly, General Rommel held the former view while both Generals von Rundstedt and von Schweppenburg thought the best hope of defeat would come when the invaders were on their way to Paris and were boxed in past the beaches in the hedgerows of France’s bocage country. Herr Rommel argued that the invaders had to be defeated on the beaches because once they arrived inland, their greater resources in men and material would make them unstoppable. Arguments between Herr General Rommel and Herr General von Rundstedt were constant about how and where to best wage our battles with the enemy. The argument between these two Field Marshals was brought to the attention of der Führer who mediated the dispute by allowing General Rommel to have control over three additional Panzer divisions while keeping control over the three remaining Panzer divisions for himself. But this wasn’t satisfactory to General Rommel and he came up with another plan to gain control of the necessary Panzer divisions.

During this spring of 1944, General Rommel thought that if General von Schweppenburg were under his command, he could at least move and station Panzer Group West where he wanted instead of where General von Schweppenburg wanted. During a projected bad spell in the weather, General Rommel planned on going to see der Führer personally. He made arrangements to see Herr Hitler on 4.June.44 so that this reassignment might be made sooner rather than later.

Herr Professor Stöbbe was our chief meteorologist. He told us that since the enemy had not taken advantage of the fine weather that May offered, they were now out of luck and the weather would not allow them another opportunity to attack either by sea or by air for at least another week. He told us that there would be high winds across the Channel. The clouds would be heavy and would bring torrential rain. The bad weather that we now had would promise to get worse and Herr General Rommel thought it impossible that even the Americans would dare to launch any invasion in this kind of weather. He spared not even a second of thought about the British since he knew them to be more timid and averse to taking any kind of unnecessary risk. They would never agree to invade until all elements of weather, moon, tide, cloud, barometric and every other kind of condition were perfect. General Rommel therefore planned on seeing der Führer to try again to get control of Panzer Group West and its Panzer divisions during this period of bad weather. As a side thought, it was also his wife Lucie’s birthday and being so close to Paris, he took advantage to go and have a pair of suede shoes made for her as a birthday gift. General Rommel went home to Germany on 4. June and left General Speidel, his Chief of Staff, in charge. We did not see General Rommel again until late on the night of 6. June. 44.

General Rommel had phoned General Schmundt, der Führer’s chief of staff, to request a meeting with Herr Hitler. I know he was determined to lay out his strategies to der Führer and get all the Panzer divisions he could placed under his and no one else’s control. I was hopeful but still pretty sure der Führer could not possibly decide the issue at this point since he had bigger issues to contemplate, especially with today’s news that Rome has just fallen to our foe. I imagine he is also preoccupied with Russia since we hear the news coming from the Eastern Front has not been very encouraging either. Because of all this bad news, 4. June will be a day that will not soon be forgotten, I think.

Mail was just delivered and I received a letter from my dear mother. I hear of bombing raids being flown over my hometown of Stuttgart and I worry so much about how she is doing and how she is coping now that I’ve been gone these past 5 years. I will write to her soon as I know she is worried about me as well.