Erwin Rommel

German military leader

• Born: November 15, 1891
• Birthplace: Heidenheim an der Brentz, Württemberg, Germany
• Died: October 14, 1944
• Place of death: Herrlingen, near Ulm, Germany

A legendary commander of World War II, Rommel, known as “the Desert Fox” for his cunning, achieved distinction for his actions in France and North Africa. His successes on the battlefield resulted from his courage and determination, his aggressive leadership, and his mastery of military tactics.

Early Life

Erwin Rommel (RAWM-mehl) was the second son of a schoolmaster and mathematician. He was an indifferent student, and a susceptibility to childhood illnesses prompted him to increase his stamina through athletic training. When he expressed an interest in a military career, his father attempted to dissuade him from a course so unpromising but later agreed to assist him. Once he had chosen a career, he sought to reach the top of his profession. He joined the Württemberg Sixth Infantry Regiment as a cadet on July 19, 1910; in the following year he entered officer training at the War Academy in Danzig. There he met Lucie Maria Mollin, the one woman in his life; they were married in 1916 while he was on military leave.

Rommel was commissioned a second lieutenant in time to enter World War I as a platoon leader. He became known for his bravery under fire and his aggressive leadership, fighting at Bleid, at Verdun, and in the Argonne, where he was awarded the Iron Cross. After recovery from a leg wound, he joined a mountain infantry division stationed in the Alps along the Romanian and Italian fronts. In a daring attack at the head of his men, who never numbered more than six hundred, he broke the Italian line, captured the strategically important Mount Matajur, and took nine thousand prisoners and quantities of matériel. For this feat he was awarded the Pour le Mérite (the Blue Max), Germany’s highest military honor.

During the interval between wars, Rommel served as a commander of troops who put down insurrections and as a military instructor first at the Infantry School at Dresden and later at the War College, Pottsdam. His lectures were the basis of his Infanterie greift an (1937; Attacks, 1979), a book read with attention by Adolf Hitler.

Life’s Work

Rommel’s career, like those of other German officers, began to advance with the rise of National Socialism and the rearming of the nation. Along with the rest of the army, Rommel took his oath of loyalty to Hitler in July, 1934. In 1935 he escorted Hitler in a review of troops at Goslar and attracted the attention of other Nazis by refusing to permit Schutzstaffel (SS) troops to take precedence over regular officers. During Hitler’s trip to Czechoslovakia in 1938, he was in charge of troops providing security. When war erupted in Poland, he accompanied Hitler to the front as a staff officer. There he observed the successes of German armored (panzer) units and, when Hitler offered him his choice of commands, he selected a panzer division over infantry. He was appointed commander of the Seventh Panzer Division stationed on the Rhine River.

In the Blitzkrieg on France of May, 1940, Rommel’s division crossed the Meuse and Sambre rivers, knifing through Belgium in a sweeping arc bypassing the Maginot line. Near Arras, he encountered a sharp British counterattack that slowed the advance, but his forces prevailed over superior numbers. After a successful conclusion of the sweep, he moved south against Cherbourg, where he captured, among others, four French admirals.

Having triumphed in France, Hitler reluctantly posted two divisions to North Africa to reinforce his Italian allies who had suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of British general Sir Archibald Wavell. Rommel, a lieutenant general, was named commander of the divisions that formed the nucleus of the Afrika Korps. Although nominally under the command of an Italian general and later under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring in a rather loose command structure, he usually had freedom of decision and independence.

The terrain of the 1941-1943 conflict in North Africa consisted largely of coastal desert stretching two thousand miles from Morocco to Egypt and up to two hundred miles inland. For Rommel it offered a vast theater in which to adapt the principles of Blitzkrieg against a British army whose leaders were trained in conventional defense and conservative attack strategy. Rommel conceived a grand objective that transcended his original purpose of assisting Italian allies. Driving eastward from Tunisia, he would capture British strongholds along the Mediterranean, until he reached Cairo. From there he would take the Suez Canal and then sweep around the east side of the Mediterranean until he reached the oil fields of Persia and Arabia.

Numerous adverse factors intervened to deny Rommel’s dream of conquest. The German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) on June 22, 1941, meant that the first priority for men and matériel became the eastern front. Rommel’s British opponents, with a well-equipped and sound army, learned how to counter his tactics and almost always outnumbered him. Further, British naval and air power in the Mediterranean, based at Malta, took a heavy toll on supplies sent to Rommel, while the British could bring their supplies around the Cape and through Suez, a longer but more reliable route.

Once in Tunisia, Rommel quickly went on the attack, driving Wavell’s Eighth Army, now reduced because many units had been sent to Greece, eastward toward the Gazala line and Tobruk, the British port and stronghold. Breaking through the line, Rommel besieged Tobruk; he met a crushing counterattack in the British Operation Crusader. Both sides lost heavily, but Rommel ran short of supplies and fuel and was forced to lift the siege and withdraw to Al-Agheila in December, 1941.

In May, 1942, after resupply and reinforcements, Rommel renewed the attack on Tobruk, flanking the Gazala line to the south with his main panzer units. To shorten his supply lines, he then breached the line from behind and brought through the Italian Ariete Division, placing it in a fortified defense position to the east. When British units moved up to attack and repair the break, the Ariete held while Rommel’s Fifteenth and Twenty-first Panzer Divisions encircled them. In the Battle of the Cauldron, Rommel’s forces inflicted losses so punishing that the British were forced to withdraw, leaving Tobruk to fall on June 20, 1942. Its cache of fuel, provisions, and vehicles resupplied Rommel’s army, and the victory brought him the rank of field marshal.

Hardly pausing for rest, Rommel pressed his weary men after the retreating British and toward the next objective, Al-Alamein in western Egypt, where the British had established a strong defense line, bounded on the north by the sea and on the south by the impassable Qattara Depression. Behind extensive mine fields and obstacles, British general Sir Claude Auchinleck positioned his divisions and brigades across the desert in checkerboard fashion.

Rommel opened the attack against the southern portion of the line and made progress in swinging it back, but the British defenders did not crack. He fought doggedly on, with both sides incurring heavy losses, yet for Rommel, with his precarious resupply situation, the losses grew unsustainable. He withdrew to approximately the original points of attack and waited for supplies and reinforcements, constructing heavy defenses mine fields and obstacles. During a three-month lull, British supply operations proved more successful, and General Bernard Law Montgomery, newly appointed commander of the Eighth Army, built an approximate two-to-one superiority in tanks, field guns, and troops.

On October 23, 1942, Montgomery opened the second Battle of Al-Alamein with a cannonade from a thousand guns massed along a five-mile stretch. In Germany for medical treatment, Rommel rushed to the front, arriving late on October 25 to find that all reserves had been committed. With his units being overpowered in all sectors, he sought permission to withdraw; in response, Hitler forbade him to retreat a yard. On the following day, November 3, with the concurrence of Field Marshal Kesselring, he ordered a fourteen-hundred-mile withdrawal toward Tunisia with only twelve tanks still operational. The retreat enabled him to save most of his army only because Montgomery was slow in pursuit.

Toward Tunisia, American forces were advancing from the west following their landings in Morocco and Algeria in Operation Torch. Realizing that the Axis faced a hopeless situation, Rommel urged Hitler to withdraw the Afrika Korps for the defense of Europe. Instead, Hitler, who had reluctantly entered Africa, now determined to hold a position there at all costs. He poured in men and matériel, including the new Mark V (Panther) and Mark VI (Tiger) tanks. Although Rommel was in command at the Battle of Kasserine Pass, where his forces mauled inexperienced American troops, his influence was waning, and he was withdrawn before the surrender of all remaining forces in May, 1943. Hitler’s refusal to withdraw the Afrika Korps remained a bitter disappointment to their commander.

After minor assignments in Italy and the Balkans, Rommel was appointed deputy commander of the western front, in charge of coastal defenses, under the aging field marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. After carefully surveying coastal installations, Rommel began an extensive construction of gun emplacements, tank traps, mines, and other obstacles, and made frequent personal visits to his troops to build their morale. Realizing that Allied air supremacy would hamper any movement of forces, he believed it essential that an invasion be stopped on the beaches. His preparations were far from complete when the Normandy Invasion occurred on June 6, 1944.

Unable to contain the invasion, Rommel and Rundstedt met Hitler near the front to request reinforcements and permission to withdraw to better defensive positions; both requests were denied. By this time Rommel had reached the conclusion that only a separate peace with the Western Allies could save Germany; he further believed it necessary to replace Hitler.

Though he was drawn into the plot against Hitler, he never sanctioned assassination. When the bomb planted by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg exploded at Hitler’s headquarters on July 20, Rommel lay in a Paris hospital recovering from wounds sustained when his staff car was strafed by a British Spitfire on July 17. During the interrogations that followed, Rommel was implicated by General Heinrich von Stülpnagel, among others, and a list of offices to be filled after the demise of Hitler, which fell into the hands of the SS, showed Rommel as reich president.

As his recovery continued at his home in Herrlingen, he was visited by two SS generals, who bore a brief charging him with treason. He was offered the choice of the People’s Court or suicide by poison. Since Hitler gave assurances that his family and staff would be protected if he elected to take a cyanide capsule, he accepted this course. The official explanation was that he died of a brain hemorrhage resulting from his wounds. He received a hero’s funeral at Ulm, where Rundstedt read the eulogy.

Significance

During World War II, Rommel was Germany’s most celebrated commander. To his enemies and to Germany he was a legend, and at times he seemed invincible. A popular leader with his men, he insisted on commanding from the front, oblivious to personal danger and hardship. He practiced the principle he taught his cadets: to be to the men an example in both their personal and professional lives. Among the British who opposed him, he had a reputation for chivalry and for correct, even considerate, treatment of prisoners. In North Africa, he employed an astonishing variety of military tactics that worked in his favor so long as he was not overpowered by superior numbers.

Though a model soldier, Rommel was not without flaws. As a commander who insisted on being at the front, he sometimes lost contact with his headquarters. He neglected logistical problems and often attacked when his forces were poorly supplied. He demanded that his officers and men be as aggressive and efficient as he was, and he had a reputation for being tactless and somewhat abrasive with senior officers. Strong-willed and single-minded, he was politically naïve, allowing himself to be used by Nazi propaganda.

Bold and aggressive by nature, Rommel emphasized attack over defense, insisted that officers should lead attacks, and saw that success required that firepower be concentrated in the spearhead, not behind it. He grasped the concept of fluidity in military attack the view that one does not assault fixed positions and then stop and the importance of carefully coordinated attacking units. He developed ingenious tactics and achieved important victories over superior numbers in North Africa. Successes came to his opponents after they mastered his own art of desert warfare. In the end, Rommel lost because the opposing forces won the contest for supplies and reinforcements.

Bibliography

Irving, David. The Trail of the Fox. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. Carefully researched and written in vivid detail. Highly readable, it is the most comprehensive and accurate biography.

Jörgensen, Christer. Rommel’s Panzers: Rommel and the Panzer Forces of the Blitzkrieg, 1940-1942. Staplehurst, England: Spellmount, 2003. Describes how and why Rommel and the panzers were able to attain many major victories for the German army in World War II. Analyzes the force’s doctrines, tactics, personnel, and hardware.

Lewin, Ronald. The Life and Death of the Afrika Korps. Reprint. New York: Quadrangle Books, 1977. A straightforward and detailed narration of the North African campaign.

Mitcham, Samuel W., Jr. Rommel’s Desert War. New York: Stein & Day, 1982. Chronicles the North African campaign from December, 1941, until the surrender of the Afrika Korps.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Triumphant Fox: Erwin Rommel and the Rise of the Afrika Korps. New York: Stein & Day, 1984. Beginning with a biographical account, the book chronicles Rommel’s early successes in North Africa.

Reuth, Ralf Georg. Rommel: The End of a Legend. Translated by Debra S. Marmor and Herbert A. Danner. London: Haus Boosk, 2005. Reuth downplays Rommel’s military accomplishments, claiming he owed his fame to Nazi propaganda and not to actual achievement on the battlefield.

Rommel, Erwin. The Rommel Papers. Edited by B. H. Liddell Hart. Translated by Paul Findlay. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953. A collection of Rommel’s memoirs, letters, and personal documents giving his own account of his campaigns.

Showalter, Dennis. Patton and Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century. New York: Berkley Caliber, 2005. Showalter, a distinguished historian of World War II, provides a thoroughly researched and well-written dual biography of Rommel and George S. Patton.

Young, Desmond. Rommel: The Desert Fox. New York: Harper and Bros., 1950. A sympathetic and comprehensive biography by an English officer who fought against Rommel in Africa.