The Trail of the Fox Page 3

  The 124th Infantry was garrisoned in the ancient monastery at Weingarten, near Stuttgart. For the next two years Rommel drilled recruits. He had little in common with the other lieutenants. Virtually a nondrinker and a nonsmoker, he was serious beyond his age, dedicating himself with monastic devotion to his career. Nor did Rommel and the local women of Weingarten have time for each other.

  Later, in the years of his fame, he received many inviting letters from women, and he then said jokingly to Lucie, “If only I had got all these offers when I was a young lieutenant!”

  On March 1, 1914, Rommel was attached to the Forty-ninth Field Artillery Regiment at Ulm, not far from his hometown, and he was commanding a battery in this unit as the darkness of the First World War enveloped his fatherland. The original manuscript of his memoirs, later published as a book, vividly describes what he saw and felt at the time:

  Ulm, July 31, 1914.—Uneasy lies the German countryside beneath the sinister threat of war. Grave and troubled faces are everywhere. Fantastic rumors are running wild and spreading with lightning speed. Since dawn the kiosks have been besieged by people, as one extra follows another.

  About seven A.M. the Fourth Battery of the Forty-ninth Field Artillery clatters across the city’s ancient cobblestones, with the regimental band in front. The strains of “The Watch on the Rhine” echo through the narrow streets. Every window is flung open; old and young join in the lusty singing.

  I am riding as platoon leader of the neat horse-drawn battery I have been attached to since March 1. We trot out into the morning sun, exercise as we have done on other days and then ride back to barracks again accompanied by thousands of cheering people.

  For me this is the last exercise with the artillery. . . . As things are now growing very serious indeed, I must get back to my own parent regiment, the 124th Infantry, at all costs. I must get back to the riflemen of Number Seven Company, whose last two years’ recruits I have trained.

  Helped by my orderly, Hanle, I hastily pack my worldly possessions. After I reach Ravensburg late in the evening, I walk to our garrison town—Weingarten—with my pal Lieutenant Bayer who has come to meet me. We talk about the grave times ahead of us in war, particularly for us young infantry officers.

  In August 1914 the regimental barracks in the massive monastery at Weingarten is a beehive of activity. Outfitting in field gray! I report back from my posting and greet the men of Seven Company whom I’ll probably be leading into battle. How all their young faces glow with joy, anticipation and fervor—surely there can be nothing finer than to lead such soldiers against an enemy!

  At six P.M. the whole regiment is on parade. After Colonel Haas has inspected his riflemen in field gray for the first time, he delivers a fiery speech. As we fall out, the mobilization order itself arrives. So this is it! An exultant shout of militant German youth echoes around the time-honored walls of the monastery. Our Supreme Commander is calling us to arms! What we have only just promised to our regimental commander we can and shall now prove by our deeds as well: Faithful—unto death.

  As darkness fell next evening, Rommel watched his regiment leave Ravensburg station for the western frontier, with bands playing and crowds cheering. He himself followed three days later. The journey through Swabia’s pretty valleys and meadows was unforgettable. The troops sang, and at each station they were welcomed with fruit, chocolates and bread.

  “At Kornwestheim,” wrote Rommel, “I see my mother and two brothers and sister for a few moments, then the locomotive whistles that it is time for farewells. One last look, a clasp of hands! We cross the Rhine at night, as searchlights finger the skies for enemy fliers and airships. The singing dies away. The riflemen fall asleep on seats and floors. I myself am standing on the loco’s footplate, staring into the open firebox or out into the rustling and whispering of the oppressive summer night. Will I ever see my mother and family again? We arrive late on the afternoon of August 6, and we are happy to get out of the cramped transport train. We march through Diedenhofen to Ruxweiler. Diedenhofen itself is not a pretty place. The streets and houses are dirty, the people hostile. It is all so different from our Swabian homeland. We march briskly onward. As night falls, it begins to pour. Soon we are soaked to the skin. Our packs weigh us down. A fine start this is. We can hear sporadic shooting from the French frontier a few miles away.”

  The captured Rommel personnel files exhaustively document his subsequent campaigns and battles. For more than two years he stayed on the slaughterhouse battlefields of France. In September at Varennes he was wounded by a ricocheting rifle bullet in his left thigh—characteristically for him, he was confronting three French soldiers alone and with an empty rifle. He was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. When he returned to the 124th Infantry from the hospital on January 13, 1915, it was fighting in grueling trench warfare in the Argonnes forest. Two weeks later he crawled with his riflemen through 100 yards of barbed wire into the main French positions, captured four bunkers, held them against a counterattack by a French battalion and then withdrew before a new attack could develop, having lost less than a dozen men. This bravery won Rommel the Iron Cross, First Class—the first for a lieutenant in the entire regiment. In July he was again injured, this time by shrapnel in one shin. He hoped to be sent to the new Turkish war theater, and even began learning Turkish. But in October he was posted, as a company commander, to the new Württemberg Mountain Battalion. After a year of training, the battalion’s six rifle companies and six mountain machine gun platoons were transferred to Rumania, where the Germans were fighting the Russians.

  Even this early there was something that marked Rommel out from the rest. Theodor Werner, one of his platoon leaders, recalled: “When I first saw him [in 1915] he was slightly built, almost schoolboyish, inspired by a holy zeal, always eager and anxious to act. In some curious way his spirit permeated the entire regiment right from the start, at first barely perceptibly to most but then increasingly dramatically until everybody was inspired by his initiative, his courage, his dazzling acts of gallantry.”

  Later, Werner became Rommel’s aide. “Anybody who once came under the spell of his personality,” Werner wrote, “turned into a real soldier. However tough the strain he seemed inexhaustible. He seemed to know just what the enemy were like and how they would probably react. His plans were often startling, instinctive, spontaneous and not infrequently obscure. He had an exceptional imagination, and it enabled him to hit on the most unexpected solutions to tough situations. When there was danger, he was always out in front calling on us to follow. He seemed to know no fear whatever. His men idolized him and had boundless faith in him.”

  January 1917 found Rommel commanding an Abteilung—an ad hoc detachment varying in strength from three to seven mountain companies. Until July the battalion was again stationed in France, then it returned to the Rumanian front. On August 10, only two days after his arrival there, Rommel was again wounded. A bullet fired from far in the rear passed through his left arm, but despite this injury Rommel fought on for two weeks. On September 26 his battalion was transferred to a far more demanding theater—northern Italy.

  Since entering the war in 1915, the Italians had been fighting Austria with the hope of winning back the Adriatic port of Trieste. By the time Rommel arrived, eleven battles had already been fought on the frontier river, the Isonzo.

  A year later the Italians staged their twelfth attempt: fifty infantry divisions supported by thousands of guns had crossed the middle reaches of the river. Heavily outnumbered, the Austrians appealed for help. In response, the German supreme command created a Fourteenth Army, under General Otto von Below, to go to the Isonzo front. This was why in October 1917 Rommel again found himself marching toward the sound of gunfire.

  The battlefield here was very different from France—it was a breathtaking backdrop of towering mountains, bottomless ravines, treacherous precipices, swirling mists and rushing rivers. Every enemy shell burst threatened to bury General von Below’s troops
under avalanches of rocks; every shot filled the air with razor-sharp rock splinters that killed or maimed any man they hit. It rained heavily, which helped conceal Below’s coming offensive from the Italian defenders. But the rain had turned mountain streams into raging torrents that swept officers, men and pack animals to their deaths.

  General von Below’s aim was to penetrate the main defense line south of the Isonzo River. The high points of the line were the towering Monte Mataiur, Monte Kuk, Kolovrat Ridge and Hill 1114. Tens of thousands of Italian troops and well-constructed gun sites commanded each of these high points, and the German unit commanders scrambled to take them, knowing that honors would be the reward. The rivalry among these young officers—leading proud units from the German provinces of Bavaria, Silesia and Rommel’s Swabia—was ferocious.

  Lieutenant Ferdinand Schoerner, a Bavarian commander, set the pace, driving his coughing, staggering volunteers so ruthlessly forward—despite their heavy loads of machine guns and ammunition—that one of his men dropped dead from exhaustion before the unit reached the objective: Hill 1114, key to the whole Kolovrat Ridge. For taking Hill 1114, Schoerner was awarded Prussia’s highest medal, the Pour le Mérite. That outraged Rommel. He considered that the credit was due him.

  Rommel’s part in breaching the Kolovrat position was indeed great. As night fell on that first day of the offensive, Schoerner’s promising position had seemed thwarted by Italian fortifications. Rommel’s superior, Major Theodor Sproesser, commander of the Swabians, wrote a battle report, a faded copy of which still survives, which describes the emplacements. “Like fortresses,” he wrote, “the strongly built concrete gun positions . . . look out over us. They are manned by hard-bitten machine gunners, and bar our further advance to south and west.” During the night Rommel reconnoitered the enemy defenses and found a gap, and shortly after dawn his Abteilung penetrated the Italian lines. Three hours later he stormed Monte Kuk itself. Finding Rommel in their rear, the Italians panicked, their line began to crumble and German infantry poured through the breach.

  But Schoerner, the Bavarian, got the Pour le Mérite! Rommel was stung by this injustice, and after the war he asked the official army historian to make petty corrections to the record; he even arranged for future editions to read “Leutnant,” not “Oberleutnant,” in referring to Schoerner, and he persuaded the Reich government to print a fourteen-page supplement which in part set out his own role in more vivid detail—describing how forty Italian officers and 1,500 men had surrendered to Oberleutnant Rommel, how he had pressed on ahead of his unit with only two officers and a few riflemen, how the Italians had surrounded and embraced him and chaired him on their shoulders and rejoiced that the war was over for them.

  This sort of prideful revisionism would become part of the Rommel style.

  But Rommel still had a chance for a Pour le Mérite. General von Below had specifically promised one to the first officer to stand atop the loftiest Italian high point, the 5,400-foot Monte Mataiur. Rommel intended to be that officer. His own fourteen-page supplement to the official army history tells the story: “Before the prisoners from the Hill 1114 engagement were removed, some German-speaking Italians betrayed to Lieutenant Rommel that there was another regiment of the Salerno brigade on Monte Mataiur that definitely would put up a fight. . . . Heavy machine gun fire did indeed open up as the [Swabians] reached the western slopes.” By nightfall, after hours of hard fighting, Rommel was at the base of the last rise of Mataiur. He and his men were dog-tired, but he drove them on. The report of his superior, Major Sproesser, takes up the account: “There is an Italian with a machine gun sitting behind virtually every rock, and all the appearances are that the enemy has no intention of giving up Monte Mataiur so easily. Although their strength is almost at an end after fifty-three hours of continual full-pack march and battle, Rommel’s Abteilung crawls in to close quarters. After a hail of machine gun fire, which has a murderous splinter effect among the rocks, the enemy tries to escape into a ravine.”

  Hesitantly, one Italian after another came out into the open and surrendered. At 11:30 A.M. the last 120 men on the actual summit surrendered to Rommel. Ten minutes later he stood there himself. He ordered one white and three green flares fired to announce his triumph. Rommel had reached the top first and victory was his—all the sweeter, too, for having cost the life of only one of his men.

  The victory soon turned sour. Next day General Erich von Ludendorff, chief of the General Staff, announced the capture of Monte Mataiur—by the gallant Lieutenant Walther Schnieber, a Silesian company commander. Schnieber accordingly carried off the prize promised by General von Below for the feat, the coveted Pour le Mérite.

  It was obvious to Rommel that Schnieber had captured the wrong summit. Choking with anger, he complained to his battalion commander, Major Sproesser. Sproesser advised him to forget the matter, but Sproesser did mention in his dispatch of November 1 that during the hour that Rommel’s Abteilung had rested on the Mataiur’s summit they never saw any signs of the Silesian regiment. Rommel was not satisfied, and—according to his own account many years later—he sent a formal complaint all the way up to the commander of the Alpine Corps, claiming that the medal belonged by rights to him. Silence was the only reply.

  This disappointment did not affect Rommel’s fighting zeal. He stayed hard on the heels of the retreating Italians. His Abteilung was at the head of Sproesser’s battalion of Swabians, and that battalion was the spearhead of the whole Fourteenth Army. On November 4 the river Tagliamento was reached. Now Rommel began a relentless pursuit of the demoralized Italians, using the same tactics of bluff, bravado, surprise attack and rapid pursuit that were to distinguish him later as a tank commander.

  He had found his métier. He had learned how to exploit sudden situations—even when it meant disobeying orders from superiors. He led his troops to the limits of human endurance so as to take the enemy by surprise—climbing through fresh snowfalls that were murder to the heavily laden men, scaling sheer rock faces that would give pause even to skilled mountaineers, risking everything to work his handful of intrepid riflemen and machine gunners around behind the unsuspecting Italian defenders. He suddenly attacked the enemy—however greatly he was himself outnumbered—from the rear with devastating machine gun fire on the assumption that this was bound to shatter the morale of even the finest troops.

  His little force’s victories were remarkable. On November 7, Rommel’s companies stormed a 4,700-foot mountain and captured a pass. Two days later he launched a frontal attack on some seemingly invincible Italian defenses and captured another pass. Then followed an action of the purest Wild West, one that wonderfully illustrates Rommel’s physical courage and endurance.

  He was following an extremely narrow and deep ravine toward the town of Longarone—the kingpin of the entire Italian mountain defensive system. What Rommel found ahead of him was a road blasted into the vertical rock face soaring 600 feet above. The road first clung to one side of the ravine, then crossed to the other side by a long bridge precariously suspended some 500 feet above the ravine floor.

  “Relentlessly the pursuit goes on toward Longarone,” Major Sproesser wrote. “Now the big bridge spanning the Vajont ravine lies ahead. Not a moment to lose! . . . Lieutenant Rommel and his men dash across, tearing out every demolition fuse they can see.”

  The Swabians took the next stretch of road at a trot. But when they emerged from the valley, they came under heavy rifle and machine gun fire from the direction of Longarone, about a half mile away. Between them and the town lay the river Piave. Almost at once a loud explosion signaled the demolition of the only bridge across the river. Through field glasses Rommel could see endless columns of Italians fleeing south on the far side of the river. The town itself was jam-packed with troops and war paraphernalia. He ordered one of his companies and a machine gun platoon to advance downstream. He himself went with them, then watched as eighteen of his men successfully braved the Piave’s fast-flowing waters un
der violent enemy machine gun fire. More men followed, and by four P.M. they had established a position on the other shore, a short distance south of Longarone. From there they could block the road and railway line leading out of town. Over the next two hours this small force disarmed 800 Italian soldiers who ran into their trap.

  As dusk fell, Rommel himself forded the river, followed by five companies of troops. Taking a small party, he began to advance on Longarone. Stumbling into a street barricade manned by Italian machine gunners, Rommel ordered a temporary retreat, and now the Italians began running after him. It was a tricky situation: there were some 10,000 Italian troops in Longarone, so Rommel was vastly outnumbered. In fact, he had only twenty-five men with him at that moment, and when the Italian officers saw how puny Rommel’s force was, they confidently ordered their men to open fire. All Rommel’s force here was wounded or captured, but he himself managed to slip away into the shadows.

  He reassembled his Abteilung just south of Longarone in the darkness. Six more times the Italian mob tried to overrun him, but six times Rommel’s machine gunners sent them running for cover back into the town. To prevent the enemy from outflanking him in the darkness, Rommel set fire to the houses along the road, illuminating the battlefield. By midnight, reinforcements began arriving from Major Sproesser and from an Austrian division.

  Rommel decided to renew the attack at dawn. His official account concludes: “There is, however, no more fighting to be done. South of Rivalta, Rommel’s Abteilung meets Lieutenant Schoeffel, who was taken prisoner during the night’s skirmish, coming toward them. Behind him follow hundreds of Italians, waving all manner of flags. Lieutenant Schoeffel brings the glad tidings of the surrender of all enemy forces around Longarone, written by the Italian commander. An entire enemy division has been captured! . . . Exhausted and soaking wet, the warriors . . . fall into well-earned beds in fine billets and sleep the sleep of dead men.”