Rethinking RommelWhile the German field marshal was undoubtedly a superior tactical commander, his skills didn’t carry over into the strategic realm of operations By David T. Zabecki

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Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, pictured during the 1941 siege

of Tobruk, Libya, rose through the ranks to become an acclaimed

German general. But did he measure up to his reputation?

Every major military commander in history has taken on two personas—the man and the myth. When it comes to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel the gap between reality and legend is wider than most. Among the most readily identifiable German generals of World War II, Rommel has a reputation as one of the greatest his nation

has produced. That said, many noted military historians and senior military officers at least understand, if not wholly agree with, the position of German historian Wolf Heckmann, who concluded Rommel was “possibly the most overrated commander of an army in world history.”

Though Erwin Rommel had distinguished himself in World War I as a highly decorated company commander, receiving the coveted German order Pour le Mérite for his ac-tions in Italy during the 1917 Battle of Caporetto, he owed his spectacular interwar rise within the Wehrmacht to Adolf Hitler’s direct patronage. Shortly after the 1937 publication of his well-received book, Infanterie greift an (Infantry Attacks), Rommel caught Hitler’s attention and soon assumed command of the Führer’s personal security battalion, Führerbegleitbataillon. After the 1939 invasion of Poland, Rommel protested that his tactical talent would be better applied as a field commander than as a personal guard. Superiors slated him to command a mountain division—a logical post given his wartime experi-ence—but Rommel wanted an armored division and bucked the chain of command, appealing directly to Hitler. His blatant violation of military professional protocol got Rommel what he wanted, but it also earned him the enmity and distrust of fellow senior officers. That ill will haunted him for the rest of his life.

As commander of the 7th Panzer Division, Rommel won acclaim for his aggressive, daring tactics during the 1940 invasion of France. His unit, part of Lt. Gen. Hermann Hoth’s XV Corps, crossed the Meuse River near Dinant. The decisive breakthrough of the campaign, however, came when Lt. Gen. Heinz Guderian’s XIX Corps crossed the Meuse some 50 miles to the south at Sedan, breaking the line and hastening the fall of France. Regardless, Rommel—at Hitler’s insistence—was the first divisional commander of the campaign awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, only reinforcing his reputation as Hitler’s fair-haired favorite and cementing the animosity of his peers.

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Top: Attending a June 1940 victory parade in Paris, Maj. Gen. Rommel wears the Pour le Mérite he received after the 1917 Battle of Caporetto. Bottom: Rommel, pictured in 1915 with his pet fox, based his book, Infantry Attacks, on his actions as a company commander during World War I. The book caught Adolf Hitler’s attention and aided Rommel’s rise.

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In a confidential after-action report Hoth recommended Rommel be denied command of a corps until he developed “greater experience and a better sense of judgment.” Hoth and Lt. Gen. Günther von Kluge, commander of Fourth Army, also criticized Rommel for being a glory hog and failing to credit other units for their contributions. When the German High Command produced the 1941 propa-ganda film Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West), Rommel enthusiastically participated in a section of the film that depicted his units crossing the Meuse and even directed French POWs on how to properly surrender.

While there is little doubt Rommel was a gifted tactical commander and an inspiring battlefield leader, he quickly found himself out of his depth when placed above the level of corps command. He had little feel for the opera-

tional level of war or for the realities of logistics, and he had almost no understanding of strategy. Such shortcomings were obvious during his time in North Africa.

In 1941, before Rommel left Germany to take command of the Afrika Korps, Col. Gen. Franz Halder, chief of the German High Command, told him that preparations for Operation Barbarossa made it impossible to divert any more forces or logistical support to North Africa. Thus Rommel’s mission, he was told, was not to defeat the British but to tie down the maximum number of Allied troops as long as possible. The High Command set the Libyan oasis of Maradah as the limit of his eastward advance. In April 1941 Rommel ignored those instructions and tried to capture Tobruk, 350 miles farther east. Halder referred to Rommel as a “soldier gone stark mad.”

Time and again in North Africa Rommel’s tactically bril-liant attacks created logistically unsustainable operational A

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Time and again Rommel’s tactically brilliant attacks created logistically unsustainable operational situations

In 1942 Rommel, commander of Afrika Korps, surveys the terrain near Tobruk. Though better qualified to lead a mountain division, Rommel had appealed directly to Hitler for command of a panzer division.

No one in the German High Command believed Rommel’s plan would succeed, and it didn’t

situations that cumulatively set the stage for strategic defeat. His greatest blunder came after the Battle of Gazala and subsequent capture of Tobruk in June 1942, thought to be Rommel’s most masterful victory. Despite a prior agreement with theater commander Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Rommel went over his superior and straight to Hitler, con-vincing the Führer to approve an assault on Egypt rather than an attack to secure Malta. Kesselring believed it critical to occupy Malta, the Mediterranean island fortress that repre-sented a dagger against the jugular of the German logistics lifeline to North Africa, while Rommel insisted it more important to pursue the withdrawing British and defeat them decisively with what forces he had. No one in the High Command believed Rommel’s plan would succeed, and it didn’t. The British fought him to a standstill at El Alamein in July and again at Alam el Halfa in August. In October 1942 the British counterattacked from El Alamein and drove Rommel all the way back across North Africa.

As Afrika Korps withdrew into Tunisia, Rommel’s battlefield performance grew listless and dispirited, his tendency to blame

others for his failures more pronounced. At Sbiba Gap on Feb. 19, 1943, Rommel ordered Colonel Hans-Georg Hilde- brandt, commander of the 21st Panzer Division, to commit his armor to a frontal assault the Luftwaffe was unable to support due to bad weather. American artillery mauled the German tanks, and Rommel blamed Hildebrandt for the failure. Rom-mel’s performance at Médenine on March 6 was equally lack-luster. Although the basic plan was not Rommel’s, he was present on the battlefield and failed to reverse the disaster.

According to Rommel’s champions, he could have won in North Africa—if only Hitler had given him just a few more tanks and gallons of gas. The reality is Hitler didn’t have the tanks or gas to spare, without pulling the materiel from somewhere else and causing a bigger catastrophe.

Rommel was probably more thoroughly disliked by peers than any other senior general in modern history. Many considered him a reckless if lucky gambler who needlessly sacrificed his troops, as well as a masterful political string-puller, who owed his position to the staunch aegis of Hitler

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German artillerymen race to engage the British at the July 1942 Battle of El Alamein. After a series of brilliant maneuvers in North Africa, Rommel overextended his supply lines and by that October was in full retreat.

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and Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Rommel’s apologists habitually write off negative commentary as profes-sional jealousy, engendered by the fact Rommel was a member of neither the German general staff nor the aristocracy. But that argument doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. One of his harshest critics, Field Marshal Walther Model had been a general staff officer and was every bit the commoner Rommel was. And another detractor, General of Panzer Troops Her-mann Balck, was never a member of the general staff.

As much as Rommel relished deriding the general staff as little more than an elite club for upper-class incompe-tents, he had three of its best men working for him in North Africa, as his chief of staff and his operations and intelligence officers. Siegfried Westphal, Fritz Bayerlein and Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, respectively, were the ultimate dream team for which any commander would have sold his soul. Only von Mellenthin came from the aristocracy, and Bayerlein had been an NCO in World War I. All three were loyal to Rommel while he was their commander, and they served him well, not because they especially liked him, but because it was the professional thing to do. Although only a lieutenant colonel, Westphal often made major battle deci-sions—correct ones—during Rommel’s many absences from headquarters to visit the front.

Writing after the war, von Mellenthin was critical of many of Rommel’s decisions, believing he took too many chances too often, gambling the outcome of battles on split-second decisions made with incomplete information. Rom-mel’s November 1941 counterattack during the Allied relief of Tobruk, in which he again overextended his logistics, was one such instance. Von Mellenthin also noted that Rommel was an extremely difficult commander under which to serve, and that the real field marshal was nowhere near as courte-ous as actor James Mason portrayed him in the 1951 film The Desert Fox. “Rommel’s character defects make him very hard to get along with,” Halder concluded, “but no one cares to come out in open opposition because of his brutality and the backing he has at the top level.”

Much of the debate about Rommel’s later perfor-mance in France in 1944 centers on the conflict between his defensive plan and that of theater commander Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. Rommel advocated a rigid forward defense, designed to keep the Allies from ever establishing a bridgehead. Rundstedt favored a flexible defense in depth,

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Top: Rommel, perched in his command vehicle Greif during his “Desert Fox” years, confers with staff before the capture of Tobruk. Middle: A period cartoon depicts the British Eighth Army’s halt of the German advance into Egypt in 1942. Bottom: After the British counterattack at El Alamein, defeated Germans march into captivity.

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Better ThanRommel?Despite Erwin Rommel’s popular reputation as one of the greatest generals of World War II, few German military historians would rate him their nation’s best.

When comparing the following generals’ war records against Rommel’s—and allowing that each made his share of mistakes during the war—several achieved far better overall results but failed to win even a fraction of the field marshal’s celebrity. Among the most authoritativeobservers of Germany’s wartime senior commanders was Maj. Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, who as a general staff officer worked directly for many of these generals. Von Mellenthin’s two books, Panzer Battles and German Generals of World War II: As I Saw Them,rank among the most important World War II volumes written from the German perspective.

Field Marshal Eric von Manstein

As von Mellenthinnoted, many consideredManstein “Germany’s

greatest strategist during World War II,” both a superb operational staff officer and commander.British military historian Sir BasilLiddell Hart agreed with thatassessment, calling him “theablest of the German gen-erals.” Manstein’s brilliant Sichelschnitt (“Sickle Cut”) modification of the 1940 inva-sion plan for France turned it from a rehash of the old World War I Schlieffen Plan into an innovative, winning strategy. Manstein spent most of the restof the war in Russia, where he repeatedly turned around de-teriorating tactical situations, only to be undermined by Hitler’s inept micromanagement.

General of Panzer Troops Hermann Balck

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Mellenthin wrote, “I think Balck has strongclaims to be regarded

as our finest field commander.”In France in May 1940 Balckcommanded the lead regiment in Heinz Guderian’s breakthrough

at Sedan. Balck commanded the 11th Panzer Division during the December 1942 fight on Russia’s Chir River, widely re-garded as one of the greatest divisional-level battles in all of military history. As commander of the Fourth Panzer Army in August 1944 he stopped the Soviets’ Vistula River offensive cold and received the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds, one of only 27 German soldiers so honored.

Colonel General Heinz Guderian

Guderian, more than anyother officer, was respon-sible for the development

of armored maneuver warfare in the German army. Mellenthin noted that Guderian “created notonly a new combat arm of servicebut simultaneously a new tech-nique of command, in which suc-cess depended on the greatest possible speed and on orders that were brief but clear.” Guderianpioneered the concept of leading from the front using a mobilecommand post linked to head-quarters by radio. During the 1939 campaign in Poland and 1940campaign in France his XIX Corps spearheaded decisive break-throughs, and in 1941 his armored group drove almost all the way to

Moscow. He was chief of staff ofthe German High Command whenHitler fired him in March 1945.

Field MarshalWalther Model

Model often receives ablack eye, many writersinaccurately labeling him

a “fanatic Nazi.” He was never a member of the Nazi Party, buthe was blindly apolitical to a fault, failing to confront the ugly reality of the political masters of hiscountry. Nonetheless, Model was one of the most effective defen-sive tacticians in the history ofwarfare. Hitler repeatedly threwhim into catastrophic crises on the Eastern Front to salvage and even reverse the hopeless situa-tions. The “Führer’s Fireman,” as he was called, was a masterof innovation and improvisationin battle. Between January andAugust 1944 he commandedthree different army groups onthe Eastern Front. Commanding an army group on the WesternFront during the last year of thewar, Model stopped the Allies’Operation Market Garden and then handed the U.S. Army one of the biggest defeats inits history in the Hürtgen Forest. He also received the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. —D.T.Z.

Balck

Manstein

Guderian

Model

Many considered Rommel a political string-puller, who owed his position to the staunch aegis of Hitler

reinforced with a deep-held armored counterattack force. The warfighting experience of the 20th century up to that point clearly demonstrated a rigid forward defense almost always failed, and virtually every major armor commander, including Guderian, agreed with Rundstedt that a forward defense was absolutely impossible in the face of Allied naval and air supremacy. In the end, however, Hitler’s vacilla-tion resulted in a compromise somewhere between the two plans, which of course failed as well.

Like his contemporary General George S. Patton, with whom he is often compared, Rommel was a dynamic, aggressive, inspirational, lead-from-the-front commander. Both generals were brilliant tactical leaders but had serious shortcomings at the higher end of the spectrum of war.

Both also had flamboyant prima donna streaks and cantan-kerous personalities. Their modern-day legends obscure the real soldiers behind those legends, and the blind hero worship that follows only distorts the real lessons to be learned from the study of their careers and battles. MH

David T. Zabecki is HistoryNet’s chief military historian. He served in Vietnam as an infantry rifleman and retired from the U.S. Army as a major general. Zabecki holds a doctorate in military history from Britain’s Royal Mili- tary College of Science, Cranfield University. For addi- tional reading Zabecki recommends Panzer Battles and German Generals of World War II: As I Saw Them, both by Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin.

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Long a favorite of the Führer, Rommel meets with Hitler in France prior to the defense of the Atlantic Wall in 1944.