The Steel Wave (53 page)

Tedder paused, looked into the coffee cup.

“Monty can be as dismissive of Bradley as he likes, but I believe Bradley’s the best hope we have. Monty keeps insisting that everything is going according to plan, that he’s doing exactly what he planned to do, tying up the enemy’s armor around Caen to take pressure off the American flank. That’s pure bull, and you know it. But it doesn’t matter what Monty says. The fact is, the enemy is more heavily concentrated on our left, and the greater threat from Calais is on our left. If we have any advantage, it’s on the right, and Bradley has to act on that, whether he’s insulted by Monty’s attitude or not.”

Eisenhower felt the plane slowing, on its approach to the base. “Brad knows what he has to do. It’s my job to give him the means to do it. I can’t judge Monty yet. As I said, it’s still his command. One thing I’ve always believed, something I learned at command school: Rigidity defeats itself. Monty isn’t rigid, he’s just…methodical. He hasn’t been defeated, he’s been punched in the nose. I understand British fears, Arthur. I have no intention of digging into another Western Front. Monty should probably bypass Caen altogether and head inland. Better ground, room to maneuver. Bradley’s making good progress in cutting the peninsula, and we’ll have Cherbourg soon, even if the timetables are tossed out the window.”

“Monty won’t bypass Caen. It would be an admission he just can’t make. He’d be telling the world that his plans were wrong, his tactics and strategy didn’t work. Unless you tell him otherwise, he’ll dog it out. He’ll beat on the door to that place until the Germans do something to open it.”

Eisenhower stared out through the window, felt the air in the plane warming, saw small flecks of blue light, the only lights on the ground. There were faces looking back at him, the crew readying for landing, the two gunners standing obediently away. Eisenhower motioned to them, pointed back toward their small seats, the men returning to their place at the machine guns. He looked at Tedder, the man’s head back, eyes closed, stretching his neck. You’re a good man, Arthur, he thought. And everything you say might be dead on. But right now…there’s nothing else we can do. Monty has good people at the controls, and he has the strength, and he’s keeping Rommel busy as hell. I have to keep him going in that direction. Bypassing Caen could open up a whole new set of problems. Monty couldn’t handle that. It’s not…methodical.

He wasn’t sure about Tedder’s pessimism, whether the British were as close to defeat as the air marshal seemed to think. But now, he thought, they have V-1s dropping on them. How would we react to that? What if bombs started falling on New York or Cleveland? Chicago? How much of that could we take? They’ve had a generation of young men swept away by one war, and now it’s happening again. How much more can they give?

Tedder looked at him, pulled his hat firmly on his head, gave a sharp single nod, and faced forward. Eisenhower knew the look. Yep, he thought, he knows it’s on my shoulders. Regardless of what Monty thinks.

The plane settled low, the engines almost silent, drifting, a final drop, hard rattling impact on the runway. Eisenhower let out a breath—he was always tense on landing—and watched the crew surge into motion, the last preparation before they disembarked. He looked again out the window, ground crews moving close, a single flashlight beam, the taxi signal for the pilot.

He leaned back, closed his eyes, thought of Rommel. We’re fighting a legend, for God’s sake. But dammit, you’re not so perfect. We surprised you on the beaches, and then you brought your tanks in piecemeal.
Two
major mistakes. We just need a few more.

32. ROMMEL

JUNE 17, 1944

A
fter weeks of urgent calls to the High Command, calls that forced Rommel to hold his anger to a discreet boil, it seemed that someone might finally be listening. The word had come both to Rommel and to von Rundstedt, a simply worded summons to meet with Hitler. But where the meeting would take place was a surprise. Instead of the usual lengthy journey required to accommodate Hitler in one of his hideaways, Hitler was coming to them.

For days now, Rommel had motored carefully to every crisis point in the front lines, had personally overseen the positioning of troops and armor, had dealt with the loss of two of his key generals, Wilhelm Falley and Erich Marcks, men whose deaths left a gap in leadership that he could not afford. Rommel continued to suffer problems of supply and logistics, and the Allied domination of the air continued to take a horrifying toll on any movement the Germans attempted during daylight hours. Rommel suffered as well from the lack of authority to move the different parts of his army where he needed them to be.

It was the ongoing chess game from afar, Hitler assuming more and more control over individual units in the field, mostly armor and artillery, preventing both Rommel and von Rundstedt from exercising the discretion so essential to confronting the rapid flow of change on various fields of battle. In some cases, Rommel’s hands were completely tied, some of his key subordinates knowing they had to await orders that came from above Rommel’s head. Even von Rundstedt could not override the order that called for every communication to pass from the front lines through Hitler’s own headquarters, six hundred miles away. Rommel had continued to despair that his war was in fact being controlled by men who relied only on maps and exaggerated confidence in the strength of his various combat units, men who were trying to wage war from what Rommel referred to as their
green tables.

But the fight had swayed back and forth, momentum shifting as more troops arrived to bolster Rommel’s lines, some units moving up from southern France, others, amazingly, shifted westward from the Russian front. Despite Hitler’s insistence that von Rundstedt oversee hard-nosed offensive strikes against the invaders, Rommel knew his best chances now lay in the bolstering of a stout defensive position, a position strengthened by the arrival of additional panzer divisions. He also understood that the British in particular were suffering from serious exhaustion in the field. As Rommel predicted, Montgomery was taking his time, regrouping and organizing; true to form, Montgomery’s attacks began to bog down as the Allied troops on the eastern end of the front discovered not only a strengthening in German resistance but their own limitations as well. This had been no surprise to Rommel. His experience in North Africa had been a constant reminder that the terrain of Normandy was far more suited to a defensive fight and that exhaustion and the chaos of battle would affect both sides. The army with the heavier concentration of defense would be the army capable of inflicting greater damage. Though Montgomery would be cautious, he was still the aggressor.

With the British advances seeming to unravel, Rommel’s defenses around Caen were holding steady, despite the additional strength the Allies were still bringing across their beaches. Rommel knew Montgomery would attempt various flank attacks and pincer movements at Caen, a pattern familiar to Rommel from his past confrontations with British forces in North Africa. As had happened in Libya, the British seemed unable to sustain a prolonged massed attack. Since much of their armor was coming forward in smaller packets, the Germans so far had been able to blunt their every thrust. But the British were giving as good as they received, and Rommel knew he could not afford a war of attrition. Montgomery was adding to his strength daily from a seemingly bottomless well of resources. Despite the trickle of reinforcements that slowly made their way into Rommel’s lines, the ongoing pounding from long-range naval artillery and the daily ravaging from Allied fighters and bombers had produced a crisis in the German lines that Rommel could not counter. His divisions were being eaten away.

To the west, the Americans had continued their push inland from their beaches, and Rommel knew he did not have the strength to bolster those lines as stoutly as the defenses anchored in front of the British. It was a decision he had made on his own, a risky move in the face of Hitler’s intransigence. But then, Hitler had seemed to accept that the American intention to drive across the Cotentin Peninsula was an inevitability, one part of an obvious campaign to cut off and then capture the port of Cherbourg. Even Hitler seemed to accept that Rommel’s army was not strong enough to stand tall in both sectors.

The priority for now had to be Caen. As long as the Germans held that city, it provided Rommel with an open door to move the enormous power of his Fifteenth Army down from the Calais sector, where they had remained since the invasion, idly guarding the beaches there against a second invasion, which even Rommel believed was still a possibility. Though the High Command seemed reasonably confident in their shaky conclusion that the Normandy invasion was in fact all the Allies intended, there were still doubts. An invasion at Calais had always made the most sense, the closest point where Allied troops could launch a direct strike into Germany’s industrial heartland, the critical Ruhr Valley.

So, as Rommel’s desperate fights continued in Normandy, two hundred thousand men of the Fifteenth Army posted at Calais watched over silent beaches. Rommel knew that as long as Montgomery was held in check in front of Caen, an opportunity existed. If Hitler could understand that, the order might still come to shift the Fifteenth Army for what could become a massive flank attack on the British left, which might swallow Montgomery up completely. But no one in Hitler’s headquarters seemed willing to consider that as a reasonable strategy. Even von Rundstedt seemed to grasp the possibilities of turning the Fifteenth Army loose at Normandy, but the old man had shown no interest in aggressively challenging Hitler or his armchair generals.

Now, with Hitler agreeing to meet with both of them, Rommel realized this might be his best chance to convince the Führer that there might still be a way to salvage some kind of success. If Hitler would agree to a withdrawal to a stronger defensive line, a war of attrition might begin to favor the Germans. No matter how much strength the Allies could bring across their beaches, a fully entrenched stalemate might convince them to offer some kind of agreement for peace. Rommel knew it was most likely a fantasy, but with so much destruction rolling over both sides, it was a fantasy he had to embrace.

The meeting place was a fortified underground bunker an hour northeast of Paris, which had been constructed to serve as Hitler’s forward command center for his invasion of England. But those plans had dissolved four years earlier, the results of jumbled uncertainty and maddening doubts among the High Command. Now the bunker sat unused, a hulking monument to indecisiveness. Rommel had repeatedly invited Hitler to come directly to his headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, but Rommel would offer no protest about the drive to Soissons. With so much now at stake, he would take whatever crumbs the High Command was offering.

MARGIVAL, NEAR SOISSONS
JUNE 17, 1944

Hitler sat in the center of the room peering over a map table, and Rommel was shocked by the man’s appearance. His face was drawn, pale and sickly, his hands shaking, his shoulders slumped forward in frail weakness. In his hand, Hitler grasped a strange mix of colored pencils, as though prepared to make his marks on the map, but instead, he fingered them with noisy clicks and only stared at the map in front of him.

“You have allowed the enemy to whip you like so many little boys. I have been told that our troops were caught in their underwear, sleeping on the beaches, enjoying an idle holiday when the enemy arrived.”

Rommel looked at von Rundstedt but saw no energy for protest against Hitler’s absurdity. Rommel had heard that report from the BBC as well, nothing more than rabble-rousing propaganda for the benefit of British civilians.

“My Führer, that is not true. It is not true at all. We inflicted costly blows against the enemy landing forces. But we were not equipped to drive him away. Despite all my urgings, we had neither naval nor air support, and we did not have the time to complete the construction that was under way. Nor were sufficient materials provided to my command, the materials I had urgently requested.”

Hitler did not look at him but stared at the map still, seemed to struggle to focus, his eyes blinking rapidly. “You always have excuses.”

Rommel looked toward von Rundstedt and shook his head, a silent request for help.

“Herr Rommel is correct,” the old man said. “The fighting spirit of our troops has never been higher, but we are facing an enemy who brings far more to the fight than we can offer him.”

Rommel waited for more, but von Rundstedt seemed content to offer a small show of support for Rommel’s report and little else. Rommel looked beyond Hitler, at Jodl, but the man’s face showed perfect mimicry of Hitler’s dissatisfaction. Rommel looked around the room: Speidel in one corner, no emotion on his face, others wary; no one offering anything at all. He moved a step closer to the map, trying to see where Hitler’s focus might be, something specific he could address. But Hitler seemed to be staring at nothing at all. The only sound in the room was the pencils clicking together in his hand.

Rommel waded through the silence. He leaned closer to the map, could smell something in Hitler’s breath, sour and medicinal.

“My Führer, the enemy has total dominance of the air and the sea. In those areas…here…where we are still within range of his battleships, our troops are absorbing hellish losses. The armor…The Twenty-first Panzer is down to half strength. Panzer Lehr and the Twelfth SS Panzer have lost a third of their manpower and armor. The Hundred-and-first Panzer have lost half their strength from air attacks alone! If we remain where we are now, the enemy will continue to engage us in a war of attrition. Mutual destruction damages us far more than it damages him. I propose—”

“You will not propose anything right now. We will have lunch and take a fresh look at the maps. I cannot concentrate. There is too much gloom in this place.”

Hitler stood, the others stiffening, and Rommel could only watch as Hitler waved them toward the door.